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over the fire to smother it. He hopped down from the vehicle’s roof and went into his own house, where, for all Sanford knew, he had plenty more strips of meat and crates of contraband for Sanford to risk his life over.
    He gave the meat to T’aki.
    “I’m not mottled,” the boy said, eating it.
    “I know you’re not.”
    “Just dusty.”
    “I know.”
    Crawling on the Heaps all day no doubt made them both look like they were on their last hour before molting…or dying. And yes, it still made Sanford sick to look out over the valley of garbage and see his small son digging merrily through human waste for one scrap of metal casing, one cache of wire, one uncorrupted circuit board, all so he could fit it together and trade it in for the soft, greasy meat the humans made for bugs. His son, who was not starving, perhaps, but who was always hungry. His son, who played in dirt with rusted hunks of metal while Sanford rebuilt the human machines that brought in that unappetizing nourishment. His son, who did not know how wrong this all was.
    They went home.
    All thirteen cans were gone, of course, and some of his tools, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced. They hadn’t broken anything out of spite and, more importantly, they hadn’t found the trapdoor and ransacked the chamber it hid. They must have been very young; older children knew how to search.
    Sanford set down his sack of parts and picked T’aki up. They shared breath briefly, and then he carried the boy outside and over to the aqueduct wall, to the crack where water was always trickling out. He kicked away some broken glass and heavy coils of wire, set the boy down, and helped him out of his clothes.
    A naked child outside, bathing in the street. His heart hurt. He caught palmfuls of water and passed them over his son’s head, thinking of the house where he’d been born, of the tall spitting fountain in the bath-house, of splashing up to his chest in warm, clean water and swinging from the spout until his father threatened to bind him up in a sack and wash him in the laundry vat. The tall fountain, with soap and sponge-cloths and a sprayer arm and blue stones pressed all around it and his father afterwards with hot oil to rub into his chitin, all the while swearing that he was dirty already and who could do that, who could come out of a bath dirtier than when he went in?
    “Father?”
    “Yes?”
    “You’re chirring.”
    “Was I? It’s been a long day.” Sanford wet his son’s clothes and rinsed them out as best he could. The breeches were thinning over the hips already and he’d found nothing in the Heaps to replace them with. In another year, they would be rags held on with tape, as his own were.
    They walked back to the house, stopping at the ditch so that his naked son could piss outside in the garbage and then run on in and get into bed. Not a true bed, just a pile of sheets too torn and stained for human use, but all that the boy had ever known.
    “How many moons does our world have?” T’aki asked, pulling it all over his head in happy swaths.
    “Three.”
    “One of them is blue.”
    “Yes.”
    “And two are white like this moon!”
    “Yes. Go to sleep.” He lifted a fold of the bedding to expose T’aki’s small face and bent close to share breath. “Go to sleep,” he said again, tucking him in.
    He should not have had a son, he thought, watching the boy thrash and kick and grumble and finally curl for sleep. For many reasons, and surely the best of them was simply not to bring a new prisoner into this human hell, an innocent and happy life to grow crushed under human boots. He should not have done it, could remember feeling the pangs of shock and bitter fury whenever he saw a child jumping about some stranger’s knees, wanting to run and grab that selfish it’gaz and scream, “Why? Why, when you know it is as good as murder?”
    But time erodes one. Time cuts and bleeds. And shuffled for years and years and empty years, from