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She was a little shortsighted in that eye. A pity, she thought, that the Jana’ata who’d half-blinded her hadn’t been right-handed—he’d have taken the bad eye instead.
    "We gave you this one for Dee, and this is for Ha’an," Kanchay told her, lifting the ribbons, one by one, his breath perfumed with the heathery scent of the njotao greens that formed the bulk of their diet this week. "These, for Djordj and for Djimi. These, for Meelo and Marc."
    Her throat closed as she listened to the names, but she was done with crying. It came back to her then that Askama had tried to tie two ribbons on Emilio after D.W. and Anne were killed, but he had been so sick. "Not for beauty, then," Sofia asked, "but to remember the ones who are gone?"
    Kanchay chuffed, the breathy laughter kindly. "Not to remember! To fool them! If ghosts come back, they’ll follow the scent, back into the air where they belong. Sipaj, Fia, if you dream of those ones again, you should tell someone," he warned her, for Kanchay VaKashan was a prudent man. Then he added, "Sometimes ribbons are just pretty. The djanada think they’re only decoration. Sometimes that’s true." He laughed again and confided, "The djanada are like ghosts. They can be fooled."
    Anne would have followed up with questions about why ghosts come back, and when and how; Emilio and the other priests would have been delighted by the ideas of scent and spirit and congress with an unseen world. Sofia picked up the ribbons, running the satiny smoothness through her fingers. Anne’s ribbon was silvery white. Like her hair, perhaps? But no—George’s hair was also white, and his ribbon was bright red. Emilio’s was green, and she wondered why. Her husband Jimmy’s was a clear and lucent blue; she thought of his eyes and raised it to her face to breathe in its fragrance. It was like hay, grassy and astringent. Her breath caught, and she put the ribbon down. No, she thought. He’s gone. I will not cry again.
    "Why, Kanchay?" she demanded then, finding anger preferable to pain. "Why did the djanada patrol burn the gardens and kill the babies?"
    "Someone thinks the gardens were wrong. The people are meant to walk to their food. It was wrong to bring the food home. The djanada know when it’s the right time for us to have babies. Someone thinks the people were confused and had the babies at the wrong time."
    It was rude to argue, but she was hot and tired, and irritated by the way he talked down to her because she was the size of a Runa eight-year-old. "Sipaj, Kanchay—what gives the Jana’ata the right to say who can have babies and when?"
    "The law," he said, as though that answered her question. Then, warming to his topic, he told her, "Sometimes the wrong baby can get into a woman. Sometimes the baby should have been a cranil, for example. In the old times, the people would take that kind of little one to the river and call out to the cranils, Here is one of your children born to us by mistake. We’d hold the baby under the water, where the cranils live. It was hard." He was silent for a long time, concentrating on a knot in her hair, gently teasing it apart, strand by strand. "Now when the wrong child comes to us by mistake, the djanada do the hard things. And when the djanada say, This is a good child, then we know all will be well with it. A mother can travel again. A father’s heart can be quiet."
    "Sipaj, Kanchay, what do you tell your children? About giving themselves up to the Jana’ata to be eaten?"
    His hands paused in their work and he gently brought her head to rest against his chest, his voice falling into the soft murmur of lullaby. "We tell them, In the old times, the people were alone in all the world. We traveled anywhere we liked without any danger, but we were lonely. When the djanada came, we were glad to see them and asked them, Have you eaten? They said, We’re starving! So, we offered them food—you must always feed travelers, you know. But the djanada