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every hour she was available. We’d go for walks along the planting field perimeters, the canal, or she’d hang out with me in the chair and her on my bed asking me questions that I never asked at eight years of age.
    “Did the aliens kill your mom and dad?” she asked me one night.
    “Ellie!” Branda scolded her.
    “It’s okay,” I said, and Branda’s hand dropped to move a stray lock of hair out of her daughter’s eyes. For a second I thought Branda might slap her. Instead, she hugged Ellie tight and settled back on my bed with her. “My mom died three years before the bulls came. My dad died about a week after.”
    “Did the bulls get him?” the little girl asked. When her mother’s eyes went wide again, I gently shook my head to let her know it was all right. I’d held most of it in for twenty years or more.
    “No, a group of humans shot him because he argued with some men who wouldn’t let us into their city. They wouldn’t even take me and send my father on his way. Five men with guns killed him right in front of me,” I told Ellie, looking her in the eye to let her know this was serious stuff. Lesson stuff.
    “Evan…” Branda said, and I knew what she was about to say.
    “Branda, Ellie is growing up. The world out there is different than what we grew up in. It’s still the same in that men with guns want to control everything, especially other men. But she’s been to a vote. She saw what happened to Misha in the cage. She watched Steve stripped and banished. You can’t hide the real world from her when it is as close as the main wall.”
    I was getting angry. Part of it was my frustration with Branda. She loved me, but I didn’t love her. She knew it, but wouldn’t accept it. She knew I loved Ellie as if she were my own, and she used it against me whenever she could get away with it. Which was most of the time.
    “You don’t have to be so brutal about it. She’ll have nightmares!”
    “Ellie,” I asked, “Did you have nightmares about Misha?”
    “Yes,” the little girl replied, looking down at the blanket.
    “Did you have nightmares about Steve?”
    “I don’t remember,” she answered, still not looking at me.
    I wanted to rant on, to tell Branda that there was nothing she could do to make me love her, not even move in with me every time I was back from a scouting assignment. She had been doing that for the last few times I’d been home for a week. She’d pack a bag of clothes for her and Ellie and we’d be a family for a week. Then she’d go back to her unit for two weeks while I was away, since it was larger. She got extra space because of Ellie. She never once complained about how I never went to their place when I was home, and as long as she brought Ellie with her, I didn’t care if my place was too cramped for two adults and a child.
    Instead, I looked at Ellie and apologized. There was no reason to take out my frustrations about her mother on her. “I’m sorry El, it’s just bad memories for me. I get mad that men decided to kill each other instead of trying to kill the bulls or understanding that the world changed and everyone needed to stick together and be good to each other.”
    She smiled at me. “Do you miss him?”
    “My dad? Yeah. He was a good person. A bit naive at the end, but he did what he could to help me and my sister get ahead in life.”
    “You have a sister?” Branda asked me. I’d never told her any of this before.
    “Sandra,” I said under my breath, upset all over again.
    “Sandra and Branda,” Ellie chanted a few times.
    Her mother laughed, and I felt the sting of how easy it was for others to laugh when I’d spent fifteen years traveling the west coast looking for my sister. How I’d killed men, a few women, and one time a child of about seven or eight. I wasn’t prolific at it, and I didn’t enjoy it at all, which made it all the worse when I felt like I had been forced to do it to preserve my own life. How easily she could