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real person. She supposed that was because they were only anchens and didn’t know any better. They buried Micho’s body beneath the kburi, near Raimu-ke.
    Oa cried for days afterward. She remembered how her throat hurt from sobbing and her eyelids burned with her salt tears. It was no comfort to her that Micho was not a person. Even though he was an anchen, he was brave and sweet and kind. It hurt more to lose Micho than it hurt when the men used her body.
    “Do you understand my question?” Isabel pressed gently.
    Oa whispered, “Yes. Oa understands.”
    “But you don’t like to talk about it?”
    Oa tugged at the ends of her hair.
    “Suppose we start with something easy,” Isabel said. “Can you tell me how old you are?”
    Oa trembled. Doctor hadn’t understood. Would Isabel understand? Oa wished she would not. But Isabel was a person, and Oa was an anchen. It was the way things were, the way the ancestors had made them both.
    She shrugged out of the pink sweater and held up her arms.
    *
    ADETTI’S INITIAL EXAM notes mentioned tattoos on both subjects’ arms, the living child and the dead, but his chill description had not prepared Isabel. Oa’s slender arms, trembling as if with cold, were littered with tattoos, row upon ragged row. Columns of black symbols marched up her forearms, over her wiry biceps, her thin shoulders. They stretched beneath her cascade of curly hair, and down the other side, right to the wrist. There looked rather like the markings on playing cards, like the suit of diamonds. Some were evenly drawn, but some, Isabel saw, were crude, as if the materials were inferior, or the hand that drew them unskilled. And so many! Dozens, at least.
    “Oa!” Isabel breathed. “What do they mean?”
    Tears flooded the child’s eyes. She dropped her arms, and hung her head in a posture of humiliation. Of submission.
    “Oa, what’s wrong? How have I upset you?”
    But Oa couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer.
    *
    IT WAS AFTER she had reached the end of the reports that Isabel disabled the medicator.
    The information changed very little from one scan to another, even less than one might expect from any single patient. She double-checked on her computer to be certain the medicators were estimating normal ranges correctly. She dug through her resource files for any hint of illness, of allergic reaction, of adrenal or other insufficiency, of low organic functions. Only two details of Oa’s medicator reports seemed curious. There was a bit of wear on her teeth, which Isabel supposed could be put down to the foods the Sikassa consumed on Virimund. The other was stranger, the charts of her hormone levels. Body chemistry was beyond Isabel’s scope, but it seemed to her that some fluctuation would be natural. If the medicator reports were correct, Oa’s hormone levels never varied, not from the very first scan to the most recent. Isabel had no idea what that might mean. There were other things, too, that she simply didn’t have the knowledge to puzzle out. Finally, frustrated. she went to the wavephone on the wall. She would have to call Simon. He could tell her what it all meant.
    She discovered the wavephone’s rhodium antenna had been snapped in two. Sabotaged. She was cut off.
    She stared at it for a long moment, shocked. Then she turned on her heel and marched straight into the surgery. She ripped the connections out of the medicator, broke the scan mechanism, pulled the connecting cord between the syrinxes and the screen. When she was done, she glared up into the ceiling camera.
    And now, she couldn’t persuade Oa to explain the tattoos, and she couldn’t bear to see her hanging her head, tears slipping down her cheeks.
    The girl’s passivity was part of the puzzle. The child had lived alone on an island with only a flock of other children for company. Would she not demonstrate more independence? That she had initiative was clear, since she had taught herself to read. That she had a good mind was