I look up from the manifests.
“In the family,” she explains. “I mean, Lia and Zora and Rux and Argyl and Vela and Bay and Dax, they’re all half. They’re going to be enormous, Cayzor. Have you seen Rux? He’s two and he’s the size of a four-year-old human and he’s got the little ridges coming in on his forehead already. And mine’s going to be going to be small in comparison. I keep thinking about him being ten and Rux being ten…what that’s going to feel like.”
I set the tablet down. “My father was the smallest male in his crew. By a considerable amount. Yes, because he was Xylan he was large by human standards, but among his own he was small, a hand shorter than his own brothers and half the width of my mother’s father, who never let him forget it. He couldn’t read properly because he came up in the bad rotations, before they’d put schooling in the outpost. My father could work a manifest and nothing else, and he was ashamed of it his whole life and hidit from everyone but us. And in forty rotations under this rock, not one being ever suggested to his face that he wasn’t the equal of anybody. Not one.”
She’s very quiet.
“The Illibrium doesn’t care how big you are. It cares whether you’re steady, and whether you’ll go in first. And your son is going to be raised in a house with eight Margol males who will teach him exactly one thing about himself, which is that he belongs there.”
“Okay,” she says in a small voice, and reaches over and takes my gloved hand in her gloved hand. “What are we calling him?”
She’s been at this for weeks. It’s become a whole business.
I chuckle. “You’ve refused four hundred names.”
“I have not refused four hundred names, I have considered and declined four hundred names.” She’s got her feet in my lap. “Let’s do another serious attempt. Human names first, because he’s human. My dad’s name was Tomas.”
“That’s an interesting name, Tomas.”
“Yeah.” She turns it over. “Tomas Wilson. It’s fine. I really should name him after my father.”
“You don’t want it?”
She frowns at the ceiling. “He was a good dad. He worked too much and he died before he could retire and he’d have been insufferable about this baby, in a good way. I just…say it out loud and it feels like naming him after somebody who’s gone, and I don’t want our son to be a memorial.”
“Then not Tomas.”
“No.” She’s quiet. “There was my older brother, too. Benjamin. He died when I was fifteen.”
I didn’t know that. No, Ididknow that, she said it once, months ago, at a table full of schematics, one sentence and then straight past it. I let it go by then because she wanted it let go. “Benjamin.”
“No, I can’t name him for one brother without thinking about the other one. He doesn’t get anything of this.”
“No,” I agree.
“So not Benjamin either.” She rubs her face. “Great. Two down, infinity to go. What about your side?”
“My side.”
“Xylan names. You’ve got, Cayzor, Bayzon, Zayzon, Ruxon, Saxon, Texon, Maxon, Gorzan, Daxon.” She ticks them off. “There’s clearly asystem.Nine sons and every single one rhymes. What’s the actual rule?”
“There isn’t a rule. My mother liked the sound.”
She laughs. “How does the naming actually work? Because it’s not just the name. Everybody’sofsomething. Cayzor of Eighteen. Ordek of Six. What’s the number?”
“It’s the line. The number is the House line, where your blood sits. It’s given at birth and it’s on every record you’ll ever have. A male without a number isn’t a male without a name. He’s a male without a place.”
“Oh no, our son won’t have one. Because he’s human, and I’m human, and he’s notofanything.”
“He’s yours. That’s not nothing.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” She looks at me, and her eyes are wet. “He’s going to grow up in that house, Cayzor. He’s going to be at that table for every meal of his life with seven cousins who all have a number and a line, and he’s going to be the one who doesn’t have a line.”
She stops.
Because we’ve both arrived at the same place at the same time, and neither of us is going to say it out loud.
A male can give a child his line. It’s not a favor and it’s not a kindness, it’s a legal act, and it changes a being’s name and his records and where he stands in the Four Sectors forever, and there is exactly one circumstance under which a Margol malemay do it. He must be that child’s father, or that child’s mother’s mate. And I am neither, and I never will be, because I scented her in that doorway and the answer was no.
