Undone

Ma

Freaking out, I realized, meant “losing control.” I frowned at him. “I will not freak out.”

“Yeah, great. I still think I’d rather drive,” he said.

I looked again at the map. “How many minutes is this drive?” I was still struggling with the concepts of artificial time, but from the look on Ma

“Days,” he said. “That’s a couple of days, lady.”

Days. Trapped in a clanking, stinking metal monster. No. “Is there no other way?”

“Like I said, we could fly, but—”

Flying. I was most comfortable in the air. “Fine.”

“You have to understand, there are rules—”

Everything had rules in the human world. A

As Ma

So many rules. I had no baggage, except for a leather bag to carry the identification the Wardens had given me, and a handful of currency that Ma

“Credit card,” Ma

“Then why did I receive one?”

“Because my bosses are crazy?”

I held up the next card.

“Yeah, that’s an ATM card. Somewhere in there, you should have information about your PIN number. That’s like a code you put into the machine. If you have the right code and the right card, you get money. Money comes to you from the Wardens. It’s compensation for the work you do for them.” Did my ears deceive me, or did Ma

That seemed straightforward enough. I put the ATM card, credit card, and driver’s license back into my purse, and pulled out a small dark blue booklet with pale blue pages. The inside front cover once again held my image. I stared at it for some time, but the image did not move.

“Passport,” Ma

All around me, people were waiting. Some stood patiently, some fidgeted, some seethed. Traveling seemed to be a tremendous effort. I began to see why Ma

I watched the security process with great interest, but despite my study, when it came time for me to copy the actions of those who had gone before me, I found it clumsy and humiliating. I placed my bag in the plastic bin, which rumbled away through the machine—X-ray machine, according to Ma

But when I walked through the portal, alarms sounded. I froze, frowning, as two large men in matching clothes came toward me.

“Back up,” one ordered. “Got any metal on you?”

Metal. I looked down at my clothing. I had a belt, yes, with a metal buckle. I removed it.

Alarms again. I felt an unfamiliar pressure in my chest. Anxiety? It was infuriating. These rules were infuriating. I had held power since before the ancestors of these humans had learned to scratch pictographs in rocks, and they were making me feel . . . afraid.

I gritted my teeth and removed my jacket when they ordered it. In my shirtsleeves, with bare feet, I walked through the portal, and no alarms sounded.

The relief was even more humiliating than the anxiety.

Ma

I almost had. “I did not.”

“Yeah. Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

I had been powerful once. Powerful enough to reduce this building to smoking ash. Instead of comforting me, that thought made me feel heavy in my skin, and helpless. Again.

I put on my shoes, belt, and jacket; grabbed my single bag; and followed Ma

There were Dji

I don’t know why that came as a surprise to me; it shouldn’t have, but I had not thought there were so many of us walking the earth, much less lingering in this transient place. I waited for Ma

“Dji

Ah. So it was true; even the Wardens could not identify a Dji

No. I was nothing but a tall, awkward, pale woman with untidy white hair. No longer a Dji

I shifted uncomfortably in the hard seat, and tried not to breathe too deeply. Public spaces were filthy with odors, soaked with emotions. It put me on edge.

I pointed to the first Dji

Then he disappeared into the crowd.

Ma

There was no point in trying. He wouldn’t recognize a Dji

The thought that I would be trapped inside of a small metal box, surrounded by humans and all their odors and noises and emotions, made me feel a little sick. Perhaps we should have driven. I could have opened a window. I understood—Ma

“We got you an apartment,” he was saying. “It’s your home. You’ll stay there when you’re not working. It’s not far from my place, a couple of blocks. Got you a phone, too. You’re on your own for furniture. I’ll give you some catalogs; we get a ton of them.”

He said we. He had said that before. “You don’t live alone.”

Ma

“Angela,” I repeated. “Isabel. Ibby.”

“They’ve got nothing to do with you.” He said it aggressively, as if I had trespassed on something private. “They’re not Wardens. They’re my family.”

Merely humans, then. I would have no interaction with them. “I have no interest in them,” I said, which I meant to be reassuring. Ma

“I think I need to send you to school or something. You always this unpleasant?”

I gazed at him for a long moment without blinking. “You don’t enjoy flying.”

I had surprised him. “What makes you say—”