— for Ari
The alarm rang at six and immediately fell silent. His finger was still on the off button when he closed his eyes again, knowing fully that this was just a warning shot. The real one would go off at seven, and then there would be no going back to the black quietude of his slumber; he could not afford to be late again. He had conditioned himself this way, easing his mind with the knowledge that he still had another full hour of precious sleep before heading out, then forcing himself up when the second alarm rang. He would then sit up straight on the edge of the bed, feet barely grazing the floor, feeling ethereal as he slowly grew accustomed to his surroundings and began listing them to remind himself of one essential fact: he was still himself, and this was still his life. Life, he mouthed, and the word tasted stale.
He sank back into himself, trying not to think too much, lest he start dreaming. He hated dreams; they’d find him at peace and disturb him, drown him with visions of things he knew were not there, of impossible happenings and people who were long gone or had never existed, but he was not a lucid dreamer, so he had to play along until he woke up again. The words school, home, weak, dog, small, moon, warm and crying danced their way into his dream.
Then the nightmares would come, and he would struggle to remember that he was a dreamer and they were the dreamt, holding onto himself and trying to awaken before whatever lurked in the corner of his eye caught up to him. The words would now be strong, return, why, take, sorry, no, gone and together. He would wake up with his jaw clenched tight—he already knew it was bad for his teeth—and see through crusty eyelids that he still had fifteen minutes before the second alarm went off. What a waste of sleep.
Not this time, however. His sleep was empty, the dreams absent, and all he knew when he awoke for the second time to the familiar beeping was that he had made the best of it. He turned the second alarm off, stretched, sat, and began identifying the items in his room.
He started where he always did: a small bookshelf that stood across from his bed, empty save for the essential—the Institute’s revised operative handbook and a dictionary of basic Masii words and phrases. Sometimes he practiced them with whatever he had in sight. This time was as good as any, and so he continued listing in that language. Usir, a wooden closet, old but well conserved, built into the farthest wall, ima. A coffee table, dano, new and unused; he never had any guests, and he didn’t drink coffee, fen, either. A single window, sabba, as tall as he was and twice as wide, covered by a thick curtain to keep out the brightness of the unsleeping night, noccal; the gray light of dawn, dila, now crept in from its edges. Three doors—one leading to the kitchen, one to the bathroom, the other to the outside, onse.
He knew he should consider himself fortunate—privileged, even. Accommodation like his was almost impossible to get nowadays for less than half a month’s pay, and he got it for almost free; all he had to do was pay the bills for electricity and water and keep things as tidy as he could. The landlord—his uncle—would show up only once a month to inspect the place and ensure he hadn’t let it go to ruin; he’d made sure to give him little to complain about, if only because wished to have the old man out of there as fast as possible. Privileged. The word was harsh and ugly, and he swallowed hard to rinse its taste off his mouth.
One hot shower later, he was in the kitchen. No dirty dishes filled the sink when he came in—last night, he had felt the compulsion to clean them so he wouldn’t have to do it in the morning—but that changed almost immediately; he ate fast, without thinking in-between bites, and left the dishes submerged so the remains of his breakfast wouldn’t stick. Then he brushed his teeth, adjusted his tie, grabbed his hat and coat, and headed out into the street.
It had rained during the night, if only a little. The last puddles on the sidewalk were in the process of evaporating, but the sky overhead looked like it would weep by midday. He hoped that rain would come and go before his shift ended; otherwise, he’d be trapped at the Institute until it stopped, and then he’d have to deal with cramped public transportation, traffic grinding to a painfully slow halt as his night faded away amidst the equally tired, equally empty-eyed men and women who pullulated through the city in grey suits and hoped only for the comfort of a quick meal before drifting into a hopefully dreamless slumber. The word ghost made its way to the tip of his tongue as he thought about them.
It was a shame, he often thought, that no one, not even him, ever had the time to appreciate what little beauty the city possessed. On clear days, the four moons—Ala, Ahma, Amla and Atra—held court over the four corners of the sky, slowly sinking or rising beyond the surrounding mountains as their transit fulfilled another rotation. His favorite one was Ahma, the pink moon, who at the end of each month came so close to the city that it seemed to him that all it would take to be transported to her pockmarked surface was to reach out with his arms and jump. Yes, he liked Ahma, the one moon not yet colonized, her soil not yet coursed by a myriad of artificial lights like colossal spiderwebs, like silvery bonds that proclaimed conquest under humanity’s unending expansion. Yet today the sky was an impenetrable shroud, and neither Ahma nor any of her sisters could peer through.
Sometimes he wondered if this also happened on Earth, the clouds snuffing out the asters and hiding their light under an all-encompassing gray shroud. He had never been there, and he probably would never be; he was too far away, a stranger to even the memory of his people’s journey into the stars, and he could only imagine how things were like on that distant planet of green and blue. What a sad thing it must be, he thought still, to know only one moon and have it elude you, stolen away by the threat of rain.
He got lucky that morning; not many people were out yet, so he managed to find a seat and stretch his legs until he reached his stop. Then he took some fifty firm steps towards the building and flashed his ID card. On any other occasion, the guard at the Institute’s front door would have barely lifted his eyes to greet him, merely checking his identity and grunting something that vaguely sounded like “go ahead” before turning back to whatever kept him occupied during his long, silent shift. No small talk, no pleasantries, no acknowledgement beyond what was strictly necessary. It was a good system, efficient, and it had functioned perfectly for the three years he had worked there; this time, however, the words “have a nice day, sir” forced him to meet the new face that sat behind the bullet-proof glass.
The guard was young—a few years younger than him, in fact—his face brimming with cheerfulness that seemed unfit for someone who held a job this dull. Two deep, serrated scars crossed his left cheek, marring what would have otherwise been a perfect smile of straight, even teeth.
“Mr. Vargas,” the guard read the ID out loud. “Canek Vargas Sánchez.”
Caught off guard, he almost winced upon hearing his own name. Canek Vargas Sánchez. Sometimes he had to remind himself that it was his—that he was him. In the lips of another, he barely recognized it, and a good three seconds went by before he forced himself to smile, like his facial muscles had forgotten how to do it, and nod politely. Just give it back to me and let me go, he thought as the guard continued gawking at his identification.
“Canek Vargas Sánchez, Integration Caseworker,” the guard muttered. His voice betrayed something resembling awe. “Sounds like you get to see many interesting things, though you must have a lot on your plate with all the refugees coming in and whatnot.”
“Like you have no idea,” Canek replied, his face starting to ache from the unnatural act of grinning. Then, some newly-awakened impulse—nearly forgotten before the guard started speaking—made its way from the recesses of his brain, past his vocal cords and out his lips. “You’re new here, aren’t you? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
Obviously, you idiot, he thought to himself. New face, new guard, new and awful impulse to engage. Next, you’re going to ask him his name, and he did.
“I’m Samuel,” the guard replied. “Nice to meet you. It’s my first day here—I figured if I’m going to keep you all safe, I might just get to know you.”
The words keep you all safe felt to Canek like the wrong description for Samuel’s job. Institute guards did not carry weapons; in fact, nobody in the building did, and that had explicitly been the Institute’s policy for ten years. During the last election cycle, the Administration had at last figured out that trigger-happy guards did not constitute good optics; now, the exercise of violence was delegated exclusively to the Secretariat of Public Security, at least on paper. If Samuel ever saw action while on duty, it would be at most a couple of protests and a few vandals graffitiing obscenities on the building’s granite walls. If he got very lucky, he might even tussle a bit with the protestors before the police showed up to disperse them.
“Well, I hope they give you points for showing more initiative than most guards ever do,” Canek said. He didn’t want to deflate Samuel by telling him that he was simply a glorified greeter. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Samuel said. “You know, so far, you’ve been the only person who’s stopped to talk with me. The others simply muttered some vague hellos and skittered off. I know guards aren’t supposed to be too talkative, but…” He drifted off, unconsciously brushing his scars with a gloved hand.
Canek did not know how to answer, nor did he want to. He took advantage of someone else arriving—a lean woman in a dark red coat, wearing gold-rimmed glasses—and took his leave. Samuel waved him goodbye before turning to the woman, who promptly handed him her ID card and withdrew it before the young man could speak. Then she strode past Canek without so much as glancing at him; the galloping of her high heels lingered in his ears long after she was gone from sight.
Canek made his way to the eleventh floor of the Institute of Integration headquarters, waving half-hearted salutations to whomever seemed to recognize him; he had never bothered to learn their names, and he was not planning on starting now. El Yunque—the nickname long given to the building itself—was as broad as it was tall, twenty stories worth of Integration Agents, xenoanthropologists, guards and miscellaneous bureaucrats; they all scuttled about, dodging each other, mumbling to themselves as they rushed to their workstations. The word marabunta resonated in Canek’s head, and for a moment, he saw them not as men and women in gray suits, but as dull ants within a mound of titanic proportions.
The binders containing his casefiles still piled up on his desk when he got there; he tasted the word still with bitterness, almost as if he had hoped that someone or something would sort them out for him and now found himself sorely disappointed. He began parsing through them, setting them back down in order of importance, from least to most. This one was too long ago; they must have already sent her back. Never heard back from him; probably left on his own. Family of five, formerly six; no charges brought up against the Institute. Application denied. Granted temporary stay; missing. Assisted return granted.
By the time his supervisor arrived, Canek was fully immersed in his work. He ought to be. He envisioned Damián’s glare from across the scarce three meters that separated their workstations, lips pursed as he decided whether Canek was groveling enough for his approval, thinking of what words he would use when he reported on his performance to their higherups. Yes, he was overcompensating, but having one’s job on the line was as good as any motivation, and the Institute was not about to waste a suddenly well-performing employee. He just had to keep it up until they stopped breathing down his neck. The word coward bit him somewhere he could not scratch it, and he felt an irksome heat rising from his chest and up his face and ears.
He knew he could quit anytime. He knew he could simply walk out and not look back, leaving the Institute to struggle with his unfinished caseload. He had enough money saved to keep himself fed while drifting between jobs, and enough dignity left to stand up and grin with false cordiality while announcing his resignation. In the worst-case scenario, he could call his parents and ask to stay home for a while, replenish himself and head out again.
Yet Canek did none of that. Instead, he lowered his head so they would not chop it off, a gesture of submission to the people who stood a single step above him in the Institute’s rigid hierarchy. He did not like to think about why he did it. Something about his childhood, the way he had been taught to obey, that authority is by its sole existence worthy of respect, bubbled up every time he was confronted about his lackluster performance. Whatever complaints he might have, no matter how well founded, promptly faded from his mouth as Damián babbled on about professionalism and institutional image, hinting at the looming threat of the Institute terminating his contract and leaving him back on square one, when he was nothing but a freshly-graduated nobody with no prospects in life.
Canek had grown to detest Damián. The word detest was heavy, its tang metallic, like licking a pool of coagulated blood. The machine that was Canek’s brain had produced it after three years of unyielding dissatisfaction, his every moment at the office spent pushing it through his system in the form of gritted teeth and clenched fists. Damián did not notice or did not care enough to report him; he simply sat with a contented expression while assigning to Canek all the cases he considered to be beneath him. Then he could reap the benefits of whatever good job his subordinate did, and shift to him the full brunt of blame for anything either of them did wrong.
Canek knew there was a term for a job like his, a term that encapsulated the experience of serving the Institute as a career bureaucrat: dead end. There was no future for him here, no real opportunity for change or improvement; he would stay at his station for as long as he worked at the Institute, watching life slip by while dreaming of being brave enough to stand up and leave, of risking the prolonged malaise that came with unemployment. Then his payment would come, and its poisoned whispers would soothe him into sitting still and repeating the same lie over and over—just one more payday, just one more month. Perhaps it was not Damián or the Institute that he detested, after all. The heat on his face was unbearable.
“Canek,” Damián called, and Canek no longer felt like the name belonged to someone else. His heart sank to his stomach as it always did when someone in a position of authority spoke his name, and the blood flushed from his face. He stood, inhaled deeply, and walked the long three meters that separated him from his supervisor, bracing for whatever new constructive feedback Damián may have for him.
“Sit,” Damián said, and Canek felt his knuckles turn white. “How’s your caseload looking? You’ve been coming in early, so I wonder how much of your backlog you’ve cleared.”
Damián knew exactly what Canek’s caseload looked like—he had access to all his files. This was a trick question, a polite way of making him squirm with discomfort by upkeeping the illusion of him having a degree of control over the truth. Canek could not lie or try to cover for his own irresponsibility; all he could do was find an equally courteous way of admitting he was behind on his work and promise for the millionth time that he would try to do better. This time, however, that promise seemed on its way to fulfillment.
“It’s looking good. I’ll have updated all my cases by lunchtime, if you want to check for yourself.”
Damián said nothing. He simply nodded and drummed his fingers on his desk, and Canek felt his hopes for an untroubled day at work dissipating at each thump. Something was amiss. When Damián spoke again, his voice was almost apologetical.
“Listen, Canek. There is someone here to see you. I don’t know what they want, but it seems serious.”
“Serious?” Canek mouthed, only half-speaking—the rest of the word died before he had uttered it. His mind raced past a thousand different things he could have done or omitted to draw unwanted attention to his person, recalling every report he had failed to deliver and the ever-growing pile of paperwork that littered his workstation. He thought of every frown he had directed at his superiors, of all the words he had ever spoken in a less than friendly tone, of every possible snub that could have branded him a disruptive element within the Institute. An instant of the most absolute terror went by, and then he recomposed himself, trying to keep his expression as neutral as possible.
“I’m telling you this now so that you will not be surprised when they call for you in an hour,” Damián said. “Finish whatever you can before then, and when you return from meeting them, we’ll talk.”
Now it was Canek’s turn to say nothing and nod. For a moment, he pondered if it would be the right thing to thank Damián for letting him know, but his mouth was too dry to speak, so he merely gave him a hollow look before returning to his place. He spent the next hour pretending to work, jaw clenched and hands clumsy, almost trembling.
A woman was waiting for him in the floor’s main conference room—the same lean woman in the dark red coat he had seen at the Institute’s door. Her gold-rimmed glasses rested on the table next to a grey folder, glinting into Canek’s eyes as he closed the door behind him.
“Hello, Mr. Vargas. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she stood and offered her hand in salutation. Canek shook it with firmness, a practiced trick to keep her from immediately noticing his discomfort. “My name is Sarai Núñez. I represent the Department of Immigration.”
Canek did his best not to wince. Pleasure to meet you floated in his ears, a well-practiced lie meant to uphold cordiality through whatever discomfort they were both about to experience because of the words Department of Immigration. He sat down before Sarai and kept his gaze on hers, arching his eyebrows inquisitively.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you as well, Miss Núñez,” Canek replied to her lie with one of his own. “Although I am surprised; we don’t get many visits from the DOI. This must be very urgent if they sent you all the way here.” That was also a lie; the Institute of Integration and the Department of Immigration were nothing if not conjoined twins. By we, he meant I, and by we don’t get many visits from the DOI, he meant I do not know why you’re here to see me, but I wish it wasn’t me. It was also a good way of forcing the conversation straight to the point—he hated the sensation of uncertainty that reigned in the instants before they dropped the hammer on him.
Sarai smiled and chuckled politely at the irony that dripped off his words.
“You’re not wrong,” she replied. “The matter that brings me here is very urgent and very delicate. So delicate, in fact, that it requires we collaborate closely with the Institute.”
“And you selected me for this task?” Canek hoped he had sounded genuinely rather than unsure. Blood pumped loudly through his temples, but he felt relief upon understanding that this meeting would not involve him getting an earful about his job performance.
“I asked around, and I believe that you have the qualifications we need,” Sarai replied. “But before I tell you more, I must make it clear that this job requires discretion; it will do you good to keep as quiet as you can about it.”
Canek nodded, and Sarai handed him the folder. Within were three dossiers, each bearing a picture on their front page. Canek’s eyes narrowed as he read, and each word was heavy on his brow. Name unknown. Unaccompanied. Detained aboard cargo freighter. Relation unknown. Uncooperative. Signs of violence. He could feel the minutes slip by as he continued reading, absorbing as many details as he could before he inevitably felt the need to stop. He looked up from the papers and looked not at Sarai, but past her.
“They are children,” Canek voiced to no one but himself. “Unaccompanied Masii children.”
“Which is precisely what makes this matter so delicate,” Sarai nodded. “Three Masii children traveling together with no adults in sight. This has never happened before.”
Canek looked again at the dossiers and pondered the implications. He pointed at one of the photographs.
“These burns and bruises, the documents do not specify how they got them. Were they not interviewed?”
“We conducted an interview as is protocol,” Sarai responded. She almost sounded offended. “They refused to answer any of our questions. All we know is in the dossiers; now that you’ve read them, we’re on the exact same page.”
Which means next to nothing, Canek thought. Indeed, unaccompanied Masii minors were unheard of. Even in cases when their parents were absent—dead or otherwise—someone from the clan always took care of children; it was ingrained in their culture, a communal bond that transcended immediate blood relation. Something must have happened, something serious, if these children were on their own.
“What will happen to them?”
“We do not know yet,” Sarai replied. “If this were any other case, the DOI would have already asked you to deport them back to wherever they came from.”
“But we do not even know where that is,” Canek said. “Nor why they are alone to begin with.”
“And if the press got word of it…”
Optics were important, of course. Deporting three unaccompanied Masii infants without first conducting a thorough investigation into their well-being was not in line with the Administration’s discourse. The Institute and the Department of Immigration would get a shakeup just to satiate the calls for accountability, and heads would roll.
“All that has been made public so far is that we found them and are keeping them safe,” Sarai continued. “Tonight, there will be a news broadcast about the situation so we may appease the press and the activists; to them, they are nothing but poor victims, and we must maintain that we are their rescuers. From there, we need to move fast. We need motives, Mr. Vargas, solid motives to not allow these children to stay. That is where you come in.”
He groaned inaudibly. Of course. If they needed a justification to deport anyone, an official report from the Institute declaring them unfit for integration would be more than enough.
“You want me to find out what happened to them and tell you that they would be better off somewhere else than here,” he said.
“We want you to give us anything that we can use to justify their assisted return,” she retorted. “All we need is that you make it sound credible.”
Yes, heads will roll, Canek thought. Mine among them.
The trap had been sprung, and he was square in the middle of it. I asked around, and I believe that you have the qualifications we need, Sarai had said. Of course. Someone with his job performance, with his obvious inconformity, was the perfect scapegoat for an inevitable loss of face. They did not expect things to go smoothly, he realized—they expected him to take the blame.
Again, he knew he could say no. He could refuse to be an expendable stooge, walk out and go on with his workday as if none of this had happened, simply shrugging when asked what the woman in the red coat had wanted. What could they do to him? His job was on the line, yes, but the DOI wanted to keep things quiet, so they could not risk firing him for refusing to take the case; that would stir too many questions from within the Institute, and he might even feel like talking to the press about what he had just been told, driving them to the Institute’s doors in ravenous droves.
Instead, he folded and said:
“When would you like me to start?”
“Tomorrow,” Sarai smiled. “Be here at the usual time. Someone from the Department will come pick you up. We’ll inform your supervisor that you’re now on a special assignment. Your absences will not be listed in your monthly report. And Mr. Vargas… thank you for your cooperation.”
He said nothing when he returned to his workstation. He simply shrugged at Damián’s questions, feigned a polite smile and lazily waved with his hand to let him know that it was not important. And it wasn’t. He wasn’t. All that mattered were those children, those three Masii kids who also said nothing, nothing at all.
To dream of war was strange for him—strange but not terrifying. He had lived it yes, but he had only ever seen its surface; his parents’ efforts to shield him from it had been, for the most part, successful. Yet not even they, with all their love and care, could never have kept from Canek the things that filtered through the cracks, the pervading state of terror and violence that boiled right outside the door, unseen to him, but always searching, always finding a way inside. In the future, if he ever had children of his own, they would ask which war he had lived through. He would answer the only war, the one that goes on forever—a play in infinite acts.
He had seen them hanging from bridges and traffic signs like rigid pendulums, oscillating under their own inertia and the push of wind, crimson trickles bridging dangling feet and arid ground. He did not see their faces then, but they had none to show him—eyeless, flayed, tongueless, faceless, nameless things they were, no longer people, but warnings. Sometimes they came in pieces, hacked and packed like birthday gifts, bow and all. Humorous, someone must have thought when preparing the surprise, but he did not remember ever laughing.
He did remember the soldiers, however. First came the noise in the early morning, what little light came from beyond the horizon silhouetting fifteen men at the door. His father let them in to save himself a beating for resisting and an open door. His mother held the dog close to keep her from barking, from doing something that might provoke worse instincts to surface amongst the men. They thought that he might not hear them, that he would not awaken to the sound of boots coming up the stairs—loving parents do foolish things when they fear for their children.
He was ten and still believed that pretending to sleep could fool the monsters away. But the light was unyielding, cold and sharp through his eyelids, and the voice would not stop ordering him to get up. So he faced the light and, below it, the hollow barrel aimed between his eyes. “They are soldiers,” his father told him during breakfast, after the men had found a letter addressed to him from the governor and left the house without protest, thinking they might get in trouble. “They were searching for bad people; that is why they came in.”
“But we are not bad people,” Canek muttered in his dream. “They are soldiers,” his father responded as he always did. “They do not ask questions—they obey.”
“They keep us safe,” his mother added as she always did. “And now that I know who you are, it will be easier for me to keep you safe,” Samuel said, and his grin was so large that his scars bled into it like a second mouth full of broken teeth.
He could not sleep again after that. The clock marked five hours to kill before he had to go to work, so he gazed at the ceiling and tried to envision what he would do. Uncooperative, the children’s dossiers said, and the word meant nothing except that they had refused to speak to the Immigration agents. Canek could hardly blame them. He knew from experience that Masii were amongst the most mistrustful peoples in the universe; there was no way some wayward children—alone and afraid—would answer the questions of the strangers who had thrown them in a cell.
“It’s for their own good,” Canek mouthed the mantra all Integration Caseworkers and Immigration Agents told themselves. He thought about the signs of violence registered in the attached images—burns, cuts and bruises that were in the process of healing, but still raw enough for him to tell that they were a recent occurrence, probably the same one that separated them from their clan and their parents. Something like that was bound to raise a lot of questions, force the Administration to assuage the public and the press with promises they had instructed Canek not to fulfill.
“Children are vulnerable,” an Administration spokesperson had addressed the issue on tonight’s news, her straight-toothed smile brimming with beatitude. “They are under constant risk of being harmed, so we have done the humanitarian thing. We have given them a place to stay. We will look after their needs. We will keep them safe.”
Safe, yes, at least until the public eye turned away, and then it was a matter of who to keep safe—the children or the public. Looked after, but only during working hours; out of sight is out of mind. A place to stay, but one they could not leave until the Institute has decided where to, often back the way they came. Hard beds and bare walls, locked doors and barbed wire to let them know that, for now, this is home. For the Masii, more than for any other people, it was hell.
Canek remembered what he had learned about the Masii during his college years. Nomads who soared the ocean of stars aboard clan ships, they never remained in a single place for longer than a few months, staying only long enough to trade and resupply. Untethered, some of his fellow students called them with veiled awe, almost as if dreaming of leaving everything behind to join them in their unending pilgrimage to the Immortal Empire and beyond. Vagrants, others referred to them with contempt, and wondered why they refused to settle and instead leeched off other planets’ goodwill. Wanderers, a wide-eyed Canek had thought when he first learned their history and language, the same one he now spoke when telling them they had been designated as unfit for integration.
Most of his casework assignees ended up having their refugee applications denied. Masii had a hard time assimilating into sedentary societies, unable to adapt from their nomadic lifestyle into one that required them to hold a permanent job, send their children to state-run schools and remain in a single place for as long as the Department of Immigration demanded. Culture shock like this meant that they often ended up drifting aimlessly through the streets, some of them turning to panhandling and petty theft just to feed themselves and their children, not to mention worse things they might fall victims to. For the public, the Masii were odd-mannered interlopers, a strange and increasingly unwelcomed sight. For the Administration, they were a resource drain, a burden upon their already overloaded infrastructure. For the Department of Immigration and the Institute of Integration, they were a nuisance that must be quickly and quietly disposed of, stamped from the start with return to sender.
It was better to expedite things and not keep them long, Canek had learned. After three years at the Institute, he had seen enough Masii applicants suffer the ravages of prolonged confinement while they waited for their cases to be reviewed—first by Canek and his fellow Caseworkers, and then by the Department of Immigration, who had the final word. In the weeks to months that passed, Masii became hollow-eyed and gaunt, losing weight as they stopped eating, scratching themselves bloody and beating their heads against the walls of their cells until they had to be restrained. The risk of suicide was ever-present for those Masii who were alone without a clan or family, and it was only thanks to the current Administration’s dedication to maintaining the coherence of their own narrative that these loners had been allowed to interact with other refugees.
Masii children were a different matter altogether. “They are the lifeblood of Masii communities,” he once heard a xenoanthropologist call them, “their most cherished treasure and their promise for the future.” Whatever that future might be, children were meant to claim it. Masii did not abandon their young; they did not leave them behind nor sent them out alone into the darkness. For that reason, Canek knew, three unaccompanied Masii children could only mean tragedy, and their assisted return would require more than just the usual reasons and euphemisms.
Assisted return. Two words that seemed harmless enough, deliberately humanitarian, compassionate. It was brilliant, really, to subvert the mechanical, dispassionate process of denying refugee applications and frame it as an act of mercy. Optics were important, a narrative carefully established to ensure the credibility of the Administration as champions of peace and harmony amongst the peoples of the universe.
Selling, sold. The narrative was fragile, yes; dependent on people like Canek pretending their best to embody the virtue of compassion, but it was acceptable enough, comfortable enough to be held as truth. It allowed for the burying of certain thoughts—of certain concerns—and of their implications. “We are not bad people,” Canek said again as he had done fifteen years ago; this time, it was not him staring up the barrel of the gun.