After his conversation with his father, Siry went to the beach. Several of his friends—Loque, Twig, and some others—were already there, swimming in the surf.
“Hey!” Twig called. “Heard you’ve been over to see that girl we captured.”
Nellah, a blond girl about a year older than Siry, said, “They’re gonna execute her, you know. I don’t see why you’re wasting your time.”
“We’ll see,” Siry said.
Nellah’s eyes narrowed. “Those animals were here to kill us!” she shouted. “Last week May Lonati was gathering fruit outside the village. One of them hit her with a rock and stole all her fruit. If a guard hadn’t happened to show up, the Flighters would have killed her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Come on! Don’t be stupid.” She turned and looked at Siry’s friends. “I mean we all know what’s going on here, don’t we?”
Everyone nodded.
“Siry,” said Loque, “I know you mean well. But Flighters are not like us. They’d destroy our whole way of life just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And they wouldn’t even care.”
Siry’s jaw worked. “So you don’t even think we should defend them in front of the tribunal.”
Loque looked thoughtful.
Before he could speak, though, one of the other kids said, “Let’s be serious. The tribunal is a formality. We all know what has to be done here.”
Siry looked around the circle. “You’re saying if I go in there and defend her, no matter what I say…”
Everyone looked at him without speaking.
Finally Twig shrugged. “Forget her, Siry.” She kicked something that had just rolled in on a wave, a flash of something white in the sand. The white thing flew through the air and disappeared into the boiling surf. “Sea trash. It rolls in, it rolls out. You can’t be thinking about it all the time.”
Siry shook his head. “This isn’t right.”
Everybody looked at him for a minute. Then Twig splashed Nellah, and Nellah splashed Loque, and the next thing Siry knew, all of the kids were swimming around and laughing.
Siry watched them silently. Sometimes he got the feeling that this group could be more than just a bunch of kids goofing around. There was something they could do—together—that would be important and meaningful. But he just couldn’t get a handle on what it was.
He started to make an argument about why the Flighter girl should be saved. But as he watched his friends splashing aimlessly in the water, he knew it was pointless. Now wasn’t the right time for…whatever it was that was building in his mind.
As he thought about what he could do to save the Flighter girl, it struck him that these were his friends, people who actually listened to him (most of the time anyway!). If his friends were this quick to ignore him and to write off the girl, then he could just imagine what everybody else in Rayne would be like.
When Siry got home that night, his father stood in the front door, his face tight with anger.
“Did you do it?” he said. He didn’t raise his voice. Which was always a bad sign.
“Do what?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Jen Remudi had a piece of bright-colored cloth in his hand, which he shook in Siry’s face.
“I don’t!”
“I found this on the floor next to the box where your mother’s clothes are stored.”
Siry said nothing.
“You gave your mother’s clothes to that…that…that…” He couldn’t seem to find a word bad enough to call the Flighter girl.
“Rena,” Siry said. “Her name is Rena.”
“Her people killed your mother!” Jen said. “I’m ashamed of you.”
Siry faced his father. “Rena was a child when that happened. It’s not her fault!”
His father was literally trembling with anger. “I can’t even talk to you,” he said. “I’m afraid of what I might say.”
He stomped off into the house.
“Can I represent her tomorrow?” Siry shouted after him.
His father turned and looked at him. “Do whatever you want. Obviously, you won’t listen to reason.”
“Reason? What do you think this is all about? It’s all about reason!” He was going to add that he was tired of fairy stories and half-truths.
But his father walked away before he could finish saying all the words that felt as if they were ready to burst from his chest.
“The truth can’t hide forever!” Siry shouted. He noticed that now he was trembling with anger too. He wasn’t even sure what he was talking about though. Was he talking about the Flighter girl? Or something else?
That night Siry lay in his bed staring at the thatch ceiling of his room. For a long time he practiced what he was going to say. She was only a girl. She had a name. Look at her. She was clean. She could speak. How was she any different from any other kid in Rayne? He had a lot of arguments to make. He practiced simple phrases, fancy flights of rhetoric, sharp questions, hard-nosed demands…. But no matter how he phrased things in his head, he kept coming back to the expression on his father’s face.
They hated her. They all did. What were they so scared of?
FIVE
Almost the entire population of Rayne were present. Seated in the front of the space, behind a large table, were the members of the tribunal. Each of them wore a light green uniform with long sleeves and long pants. Their faces were all stern and expressionless. Siry tried not to look too long at Jen Remudi sitting among them.
Rena was ushered toward the front by two large guards. As she walked forward, people in the crowd shouted at her. Her hands were bound behind her. She muttered to herself and occasionally tried halfheartedly to free her hands. But she seemed oblivious to the crowd.
Finally she stopped and was forced to sit. She snarled at the guards, shook herself like a dog, then was still.
The head of the tribunal stood. “As chief minister I hereby convene this tribunal,” he said. “The purpose of this proceeding is to determine whether the accused has violated the laws of the village of Rayne. If, upon the determination of the tribunal, she has violated our laws, she will be punished in accordance with those laws. Lema, please rise and deliver the charges.”
A slim, middle-aged woman stood and read from a sheet of paper. “The accused, Rena No-Last-Name, has been accused with the following violations of law: Raiding. Theft. Aggravated assault. Attempted murder. Trespass. Resisting arrest. Escape…” She droned on for a while, reading off a litany of charges.
Siry felt his stomach turn. His father had agreed to let him speak for Rena. But he wouldn’t have his chance until after Lema delivered her evidence.
After reading the charges, Lema called a variety of witnesses to the stand, including Kemo and several other guards. There were no surprises in the testimony. They simply described how the handful of Flighters had emerged from the sea, run up into the village, turned over a cart full of fruit, and then fought everyone who got close to them. Rena herself had knocked one guard unconscious with a stick, and scratched another across the face so deeply that he had to be stitched up.
Each time a witness concluded his testimony, the chief minister turned to Siry and said, “Do you have questions for the witness?”
Each time Siry replied, “No.”
All told, the testimony took about an hour.
When they were done, the chief minister said, “Siry, you have been appointed to represent the accused. Do you have any witnesses?”
Siry stood up. His legs felt like water and his hands were shaking. He pointed. “I call—” His voice cracked. A couple of girls in the crowd giggled. He cleared his throat. “I call the Flighter girl to the stand.” He pointed to the witness chair.
There were snickers from the crowd. They obviously thought the idea of a dumb brute testifying was absurd.
“Would you, uh, go sit there please.”
After a moment the Flighter girl shuffled up to the seat, flopp
ed down sullenly, and stared up at the sky.
Siry took a deep breath. His heart was beating wildly. Every single person in the village was staring at him. He willed himself to calm down.
“Could you please say your name,” Siry said.
More laughter from the crowd.
“Your name. Please tell me your name.”
Their laughter died out. Rena surveyed the crowd, her eyes narrowed. Finally she said, “Rena. My name…Rena.”
Someone gasped. The crowd stirred. This was unexpected. Apparently no one had ever heard a Flighter talk. After a moment the noise died down.
“Where do you come from, Rena?”
She pointed at the forest. “There.”
“You are being charged with a crime under the laws of Rayne. Do you understand that?”
Rena looked at him but didn’t answer.
“Rena, please answer.”
“Why?” she said.
“Rena. I explained what laws are, right?”
“Laws nothing. Just talk. You want kill Rena? Nothing stop.” She looked at the crowd, then thumped her chest. “Do it. Kill Rena.”
The crowd murmured. “Good idea!” shouted someone. This provoked a great deal of laughter.
Siry looked furiously at the head of the tribunal. “Make them stop!”
The chief minister scowled, then thumped the table with his gavel. “We’ll have quiet!”
Siry turned back to Rena.
“Rena, why did you come here?”
She looked at him as though he were stupid. “Hungry.” She made a circle over her head with one finger. “Here, food.”
“Rena, how old are you?”
Rena shrugged.
“Do you know what a year is? Do you understand numbers?”
Rena said nothing.
“How many summers have you lived through? Five?” He held up five fingers.
Rena rolled her eyes.
“Ten?” He held up both hands, fingers extended.
Rena looked at him for a moment, then shook her head.
“Fifteen?” he said
She held up ten fingers, then four. “This many.”
There was a mutter from the crowd.
“Thank you. You can sit down.”
Jen Remudi said, “That’s it, Siry?”
“Yes,” Siry said.
Lema rose and said, “If I may, let me summarize the charges and the evidence propounded for each charge, such that—”
Siry raised his hand and interrupted. “Uh, is this necessary?”
“Of course it’s necessary,” his father said.
“Well, what I mean is this,” Siry said. “It’s all true.”
The crowd stirred and muttered.
Rena’s head whipped around. “Lie!” she shouted. “You lie! You say you help!”
“Wait, wait!” Siry held up his hands. “If you’ll bear with me—”
“Lie! Lie! Lie!”
“Have her restrained and gagged!” the chief minister shouted. He waited as the guards grabbed the struggling girl and shoved a piece of cloth into her mouth.
When she finally stopped wrestling with the guards, Siry said. “No one can say the facts here aren’t true. She and her friends swam here through rough surf, came up the beach, and knocked over a table. According to the testimony, they managed to steal one mango.” He held up his index finger. “One.”
The crowd stirred restlessly.
“Rena and her friends were immediately surrounded by a bunch of hostile guards. Who attacked whom? Hard to say. What it comes down to is, they started fighting. In the course of the fight, Rena and her friends beat up a couple of guys. In return, three of them were killed, five were driven into the ocean, and then we put Rena in prison, to be executed.”
The crowd was silent. No one moved. A soft wind rustled the trees.
Siry walked across the entire open area. He was starting to feel more confident now. He could feel the crowd hanging on his every word. This was actually kind of exciting, now that he’d captured everyone’s attention.
On the table where he’d been sitting was a beautiful ripe mango. He picked it up, held it in one hand, high in the air. Then he walked back in the direction he’d come, displaying the mango to the crowd.
“One mango. A fourteen-year-old girl treks through the jungle, swims through a riptide, and undergoes the risk of violent death at the hands of trained fighters like my friend Kemo, just to get one of these.”
The crowd was uncomfortably silent.
He shrugged. “Hey, I know what they say about Flighters. They’re not like us. Brutes. Animals. Monsters.” He pointed at Rena. “Does she really look like a monster to you? She even talks a little.” He paused. “I don’t know. I think maybe those Flighters over there are kind of like us.”
The crowd stirred.
“They’re like us…except they don’t have tools, or decent fields for growing food, or boats, or whatever is up there in that mountain that makes the lights work in our houses.” He pointed up at the mountain looming over the village. “I mean we’ve got all the good land over here. Anybody who’s ever been to the other side of the island knows it’s a rocky jungle with bad soil. Rena’s people have nothing.”
The crowd was utterly and completely silent. The only sound was the wind. That and Rena’s soft weeping. Siry walked over to her, pulled the gag out of her mouth. She was sobbing openly now.
“What do we know about these people?” He pointed at the sobbing girl. “Nothing. So how come we’re so sure that we’re better than they are?”
He pulled out his belt knife and cut the cords that held Rena’s hands. He set the mango in front of Rena. She stared at it morosely.
He took a deep breath. He could feel something rising inside of him. A feeling of triumph. He had them now. “I would say, people of Rayne, that if anything makes us better, it’s that we believe in justice, and compassion. We believe in forgiveness.”
Heads were nodding throughout the crowd. Even his father, the hard-bitten Jen Remudi, nodded once.
Siry pointed at the girl. “She’s fourteen years old. Fourteen! And we’re actually standing here talking about killing her? For this?” He picked up the mango. “Maybe if what we’re trying to do here is get justice, then we should take her in, feed her, give her clothes, treat her like one of us. Maybe she’ll never learn to talk properly or think like we do. But maybe we can show her that there is another way.”
Siry walked over, picked up the mango from in front of Rena, then set it on the table in front of his father. He walked over and sat down next to Rena.
The wind stirred the palm trees for a while. And then the people of Rayne began to applaud.
SIX
The chief minister found a family who was willing to take Rena in. But she didn’t seem to be settling in very well. She rarely spoke to anyone. In fact, she made no attempts to make friends. She couldn’t read or write, and showed no interest in school. Siry was the only person she spent any time with. And that was more because of his efforts.
Siry tried to take her aside and teach her the alphabet, teach her more words, but she just sighed and rolled her eyes. He wasn’t completely sure why he felt so drawn to her. She was sort of pretty. But he didn’t think about her the way he thought about other girls. It was more as if she were a puzzle, like something he needed to figure out. But the more time he spent with her, the more frustrated he became.
“Look,” he said finally one day after spending an hour unsuccessfully trying to teach her the alphabet. “If you’re going to stay here, you’re going to have to start trying to understand how we do things.”
“Why?” she said. She held up the book he’d been trying to teach her to read. “Can’t eat book.”
“Come with me,” Siry said.
He led her silently down the path from Rayne, up to the base of Tribunal Mountain, which loomed over the village. As they skirted the top of a small cliff above the sea, they reached a large s
teel door set into the face of rock.
“I can’t tell you everything that’s back there,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t even know. But I can tell you that the smartest people in Rayne all come up here every day and disappear into this mountain. They keep it locked up tight. I mean, let’s face it, you don’t lock up things that aren’t valuable, do you?”
Rena stared blankly at the door into the mountain.
“They’re not gathering fruit, Rena. They’re not fishing. They’re not doing anything like that. But those wires that come into our houses, the ones that make the light so we can see at night? It all comes out of here.”
She shrugged. He had tried to explain about the way lights worked. But she had just pointed at the lights and said, “Magic.” He tried to think of something that would make more sense to her. “Butter!” he said. “Cheese. All those good foods that you can’t just shake off a tree? They all come from behind that door.”
She cocked her head. But still she said nothing, asked no questions. As long as he could remember, Siry had been fascinated by the mountain. Things happened in there that nobody talked about. But the girl just didn’t seem to understand.
“Maybe it’s because you haven’t been here as long as I have,” he said. “Why do they not talk about what they do in there? Why do they pretend like it’s nothing?”
A large tree stood next to the door, a wild grapevine twining up the trunk. Littered on the grass were hundreds of wild grapes. Many lay spoiling on the ground and a heavy, winy smell hung over the place. As the wind stirred the tree, a few grapes fell down onto the ground. Rena walked over, picked up a grape, sniffed it, popped it in her mouth. She chewed it with her eyes closed and smiled. “Mmmmm!” she said.
Siry pursued her. “You’re really not interested?” he said. Sometimes he wasn’t sure how much she actually understood of what he was saying.
“The door’s locked. But I’ve been inside parts of it with my father. The tribunal meets in this huge room here. One time I saw a room that had thousands and thousands of books. I wasn’t supposed to go in there, but I did. I looked in one of the books and it described machines. Amazing machines. I couldn’t even figure out what they did. But they were like nothing I’ve ever seen here.”