“She’s not your mother,” the pale-eyed uncle in the suit tells him.

“Yes,” he says, pointing through the chain link at Marisol. “That one.”

“No.” The uncle places himself in Carl’s line-of-sight, leaning back against the fence so that it sags, makes a springy, shivery sound as it takes his weight. There’s a careless, hard-buffet wind coming in off the sea, and the uncle pitches his voice to beat it. “None of them is a mother, Carl. They just work here, looking after you. They’re just aunts.”

Carl looks up at him angrily. “I don’t believe you.”

“I know you don’t,” the uncle says, and there seems to be something in his face, as if he’s not feeling very well. “But you will. This is a big day for you, Carl. Climbing that mountain was just the start of it.”

“Have we got to go up there again?” He tries to ask the question casually, but there’s a tremor in his voice. The mountain was scary in a way none of the uncles’ games so far has been. It wasn’t just that there were parts where you could easily fall and kill yourself, and that this time they had no ropes; it was the feeling he had that the uncles were watching him closely when it came to those parts, and that they weren’t watching to see if he was okay, that they didn’t really care if he was okay, they only wanted to know if he was scared or not. And that was even scarier because he didn’t know whether he should be scared or not, didn’t know if they’d want him to be scared or not (though he didn’t think that was likely). And besides, now it’s getting late and while Carl’s pretty confident he can do the climb again, he doesn’t think he could do it in the dark.

The uncle forces a smile. “No. Not today. But there are some other things we have to do. So you’ve got to come back inside with the others now.”

On the other side of the chain link and the multiple razor-wire coils beyond, Marisol has moved across the helicopter landing apron so he can see her past the uncle’s obstructing bulk. She’s staring at him, but she doesn’t raise her hand or call out. She stood and kissed him that morning, he recalls, before the uncles came to collect him, held his head between her hands and looked into his face intently, the way she sometimes did when he’d gotten cuts and scrapes from fighting. Then, hurriedly, she let him go and turned away. She made a soft sound in her throat, reached up and fiddled with the way she’d fixed her hair, as if it were coming loose, and then of course it was coming loose because she’d fiddled with it and now she really did have to fix it again the way she always…

He recognized the signals. But he just couldn’t see how he’d made her cry this time. He hadn’t been in a fight with any of the other kids for at least a week. He hadn’t mouthed off to an uncle for even longer. His room was tidy, his schoolwork was gold-starred in everything except math and blade weapons, and both Uncle David and Mr. Sessions said he was improving even in those. He’d helped in the kitchen most evenings that week, and when he burned himself on the edge of a pan the day before, he’d shrugged it off with one of the control techniques they were working through in Aunt Chitra’s pain-management class, and he could see in Marisol’s eyes how proud she was of that.

So why?

He racked his brains on the way out to the mountain, but couldn’t find an answer. Marisol didn’t cry often, and she didn’t cry without reason at all, except that once, he would have been about five or six, he came home from school with a raft of questions about money, how did some people end up with more than others, did uncles get more than aunts, did you have to have it, and would you ever do something you really, really didn’t like to get some. That time she cried out of nowhere, suddenly, still talking to him at first as the tears rushed up out of her, before she could turn away and hide them.

He knows, knew then as well, that the other mothers cried like this sometimes, for reasons no one could work out, and of course Rod Gordon’s mother had to go away in the end because she kept doing it. But he’d always been vaguely sure that Marisol wasn’t like that, that she was different, the same way he was absently proud of how dark her skin was, how her teeth glowed white in her face when she smiled, the way she sang in Spanish about the house. Marisol is something special, he knows. Discovers it, in fact, for the first time now, wisps of knowledge, taken for granted, taken on trust, coalescing suddenly into a solid chunk of understanding that sits in his chest like damage. She jumps into sudden focus in his mind. He sees her across the chain link and razor wire, as if for the first time.

She raises her hand, slowly, as if she’s in a class and not sure whether she really knows the answer or not. Waves to him.

“I want to talk to her,” he says to the uncle.

“I’m afraid you can’t, Carl.”

“I want to.”

The uncle straightens up off the fence, frowning. The chain link rebounds with another metallic shiver. “You already know not to talk like that. Your wishes are very small things in this world, Carl. You are valuable because of what you can do, not because of what you want.”

“Where are you taking her?”

“She’s going away.” The uncle stands over him. “They all are. She’s done her job now, so she’s going home.”

It’s what he already knew, somehow, but still the words are like the slap of the wind in his face, buffeting, robbing him of breath. He feels the strength in his legs drain out, his stance shift fractionally on the worn concrete beneath his feet. He wants to fall down, or at least sit down somewhere, but knows better than to show it. He stares out across the huddled structures of the Osprey Eighteen settlement, the cottages in tidy rows, the schoolhouse and dining hall, lights just starting to come on here and there as the afternoon tips toward evening. The bleak undulations of coastal moorland under a darkening pewter sky, the distant rise of mountains worn smooth and low with age. The cold Atlantic behind it all to the north.

“This is her home,” he tries to convince himself.

“Not anymore.”

Carl looks suddenly up into the man’s face. At eleven, he’s already tall for his age; the uncle tops him by barely half a head.

“If you take her, I’m going to kill you,” he says, this time with conviction as deep as all his sudden knowledge about Marisol.

The uncle punches him flat.

It’s a short, swift blow, into the face—later he’ll find it’s split the skin across his cheekbone—and the surprise alone puts him on the ground. But when he bounces to his feet, the way he’s been taught, comes back with his rage fully unleashed, the uncle blocks him and hits him again, right fist deep in under the base of his ribs so he can’t breathe. He staggers back and the uncle follows, chops left-handed into the side of his neck with a callused palm edge and puts him down a second time.

He hits the ground, whooping for air he can’t find. He’s fallen facing away from the helicopter apron and Marisol. His body hinges convulsively on the asphalt, trying to turn over, trying to breathe. But the uncle knows his pressure points and has found them with effortless accuracy. Carl can barely twitch, let alone move. Behind him, he thinks Marisol must be rushing toward him, but there’s the razor wire, the chain link, the other aunts and uncles…

The uncle crouches down in his field of vision and scrutinizes the damage he’s done. He seems satisfied.

“You don’t talk to any of us like that, ever again,” he says calmly. “First of all because everything you have ever had, including the woman you think is your mother, was provided by us. You just remember that, Carl, and you show a little gratitude, a little respect. Everything you are, everything you’ve become, and everything you will become, you owe to us. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that if you ever do speak to one of us like that again, I personally will see to it that you get a punishment beating that’ll make what we had to do to Rod Gordon look like a game of knuckles. Do you understand that?”