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  Sylvie wished she could be brave like Papa, but instead she locked all the bad memories away deep down inside and tried to ignore them. That was what Olivier did, too, and Mama—she was sure of it. But the weight of those memories tugged at them anyway, pulling each of them down. Keeping them prisoners of the past.

  “I like school,” said Pascal, pulling Sylvie back to the present. He was scuffing through the red dust in bare feet. Pascal was only four when the Mai-Mai attacked and didn’t seem to remember. For this, at least, Sylvie was grateful.

  “Good. What do you like best?” Sylvie asked.

  “Playing football!”

  Sylvie clucked her tongue. “There’s more to school than playing!”

  But Pascal lived for the game. And all that he remembered about Papa was kicking the ball around the yard. No wonder, thought Sylvie, that he loves the game so much. Glancing to Olivier as they neared the school, Sylvie wondered what good memories he had about Papa. But there was no point in asking him. If Pascal was an open book, then Olivier was a closed one.

  Sylvie saw that Olivier was turning something shiny over and over in his hand. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” He slipped the object into his pocket.

  “Show me,” she said.

  “It’s none of your business!”

  She grabbed at his pocket, but he dodged away.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Throwing up his arms in anger, he turned and headed away toward the empty dustbowl that used to be the Nyarugusu market.

  “Olivier!” Sylvie called after him, angry that he was wasting the precious shillings it cost to go to school.

  He disappeared behind a collection of makeshift food stalls that refugees had put up in defiance of the Tanzanians.

  “I’ll bet he’s going to see Mr. Kayembe,” remarked Pascal.

  Sylvie’s eyes narrowed with concern. Hervé Kayembe came from North Kivu, too. In the fighting over coltan, the Mai-Mai accused him of working with the Rwandan rebels. They killed his wife and sons, but he escaped by fleeing the country. In Nyarugusu, he set up a business selling radios and mobile phones and calling cards, which was shut down with the rest of the shops. But everybody knew his business was much bigger than that. He ran the black market, supplying drugs and guns—and doing anything that would line his pockets with money.

  “How do you know that?” Sylvie asked Pascal.

  “Because Jean-Yves and I followed him.” Sylvie disapproved of Pascal’s friend Jean-Yves, an orphan who came to Nyarugusu with his older brothers, who let him run wild. “Olivier sold the rest of the bushmeat to Kayembe,” reported Pascal.

  Hearing this, Sylvie knew she had reason to worry. Kayembe was well known for the small army of thugs and criminals he employed. Was Olivier becoming one of them?

  “I told you to stay away from Jean-Yves,” Sylvie scolded Pascal.

  “He’s my friend!” he protested.

  Before she could argue with him further, he ran over to join some boys kicking a ball around outside the school. If we stay in Nyarugusu, thought Sylvie, how long before Pascal is swallowed up by Kayembe, along with Olivier? A familiar wave of panic rippled through her, making her heart race and her stomach twist with nausea. Sylvie felt certain that, if Papa was with them, he would have found a way to get their family out of this camp, where there was no life and no future—only day after day of waiting. The Tanzanian officials liked to tell the Congolese that it was safe to go home, but every day more refugees arrived with horror stories of death and maiming and rape. They couldn’t go back, and with vultures like Kayembe about, they couldn’t stay in Nyarugusu, either.

  If Papa was here, they would have been in Europe or America by now. But Papa wasn’t here, and many days Mama was only half with them. If they were going to leave this place, Sylvie knew it was up to her to find the way.

  AFTER SCHOOL, Sylvie went to the Zone 3 medical clinic, where she earned a little money three days a week helping the nurses and doctors with basic chores like cleaning and stocking shelves. Sometimes she held the tray of gauze and instruments while the medical staff attended to patients with cuts or broken bones. She liked this job the best, because she could imagine herself in their place one day, as a doctor or a nurse.

  “Bonjour, Sylvie!” chimed Doctor Marie as Sylvie entered the clinic.

  “Bonjour!” replied Sylvie.

  Marie was in an examining area, where she was giving an injection to a small child being held firmly by his mother. The baby wailed as the needle penetrated his arm, but Marie was quick, cooing to him, “I know, it’s not nice, is it? There! All done!”

  The nurses at the clinic were mostly African, but many of the doctors came from Europe or North or South America, working with one aid organization or another. They took turns rotating between the Nyarugusu hospital and the outpatient clinics. The head doctor was Bernard Van de Velde, a scowling white man from Belgium. Doctor Marie came from Canada. Her skin was as dark as Sylvie’s and she spoke French, Sylvie’s second language next to Swahili.

  “Is it polio vaccine?” Sylvie asked Marie, about the injection.

  “Something new, to prevent malaria.”

  The word triggered a distant memory of Sylvie’s cousin, Josue, who died of malaria when he was five. If only we had this medicine, she thought. Maybe he would still be alive.

  “Are you okay?” asked Marie. She had a look on her face that Sylvie had come to recognize—still smiling, but also assessing, probing, wondering what horror she had stirred from Sylvie’s past.

  “Fine,” she replied.

  The baby had stopped crying now. His mother thanked Marie in Swahili.

  “His arm will be sore for a couple of days,” Marie said in French, turning to Sylvie, who translated her words into Swahili.

  “She says she understands,” Sylvie translated back into French from the mother to Marie.

  “Doctor Marie,” Sylvie asked as she disposed of the syringe in the sharps bin, after the mother and child had gone, “does everyone in Canada speak French?”

  “Not everyone,” she replied. “In Quebec, where I come from, French is the official language. That’s why my parents decided to immigrate there from Haiti, which is also French-speaking.” She got a quizzical smile. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering,” said Sylvie with a shrug.

  “Have you thought more about what we talked about?”

  “No,” she replied, lying. The truth was she had thought of little else.

  “The best thing you can do for your family is go to Canada and get an education. Once you’re settled, you’ll be in a better position to help them join you there.”

  When, months ago, Sylvie first confided in Marie her dream of becoming a doctor, Marie immediately began pushing the idea that Sylvie must go to Canada to finish her education. Sylvie had always insisted that leaving her family behind would be impossible. Mama would never forgive her. But today, when she was feeling so desperate to escape, she said nothing—which Doctor Marie seemed to take as agreement.

  “Stay right here,” she said with a grin.

  She headed into the doctors’ private office, returning a moment later with her mobile phone.

  “Come out into the light,” she told Sylvie, leading her outside through the open doorway of the clinic. “Now smile!”

  Before Sylvie had time to stop her, Marie took her photo with the phone. Sylvie burned with embarrassment

  —she hated having her picture taken, just as she hated looking in mirrors.

  “It’s nice,” said Marie, examining the photo on the mobile’s screen. “Look.”

  “I don’t want to look!” protested Sylvie, temper flashing.

  But Marie was too busy fidgeting with her mobile to notice Sylvie’s shift in mood. “With your permission,” she said, “I want to send this to a friend of mine back home.”

  “No!”

  Marie looked up with surprise. “Sylvie, you’re so beautiful,” she told her
, pitying and patronizing, which Sylvie hated most of all.

  She held the mobile up. All Sylvie could see was the hideous scar across her face, and, without warning, a memory burst from its hiding place. Her heart was racing. Anxiety twisted her stomach. She was ten years old again, trapped under the soldier’s sweating body. Suffocating. Weak, helpless.

  Marie touched her arm. “Sylvie?”

  Sylvie recoiled at her touch. Panic turned to anger.

  “I didn’t say you could take my picture!”

  “Please, just listen. My friend’s name is Alain. We’ve been talking. He thinks he might be able to raise sponsorship money. He has a plan.”

  “No! Don’t send it,” Sylvie told her. Why wouldn’t she listen?

  “Sylvie, the Canadian government won’t accept you as a refugee as long as you’re living in a safe country like Tanzania—unless somebody in Canada is willing to sponsor you.”

  “No!” she repeated, and started walking away.

  “Sylvie, just think about it!” Doctor Marie called after her.

  Sylvie didn’t look back. A black rage had seized her. She was helpless against a flood of living memories—the soldier groping, hurting, pushing his thing inside her. Then his machete raised over her face. And through it all, one thought: Why is this happening to me?

  She stared without seeing as she walked, lost in the horrors of the past. But all at once the sight of Olivier brought her crashing into the present. He was standing by one of the food stalls in the former marketplace, sipping a Fanta—purchased, no doubt, with the money Kayembe gave him for the bushmeat—and he was turning the shiny object he had hidden from her that morning over and over in his hand. It was a mobile phone, Sylvie now realized, like the one that Papa used to have. That phone had been a prized possession—nobody but her father was allowed to touch it. “But it’s a blessing and a curse,” Papa told her. “People in America and Europe and China are willing to pay a lot of money for the coltan mined here, so they can use it to make phones and computers. That is the reason rebels and soldiers attack our village and so many others—so they can get hold of the coltan and get rich.”

  Where did Olivier find the money for a mobile phone? Sylvie wondered. Suddenly it rang. He opened it and held it to his ear. Whoever was calling him must have been important, because he quickly lost his lazy slouch. He closed the phone and headed briskly away into what used to be the market street, as though following orders. Kayembe’s orders, thought Sylvie. So what Pascal said was true: Olivier was becoming one of Kayembe’s brutes. They were all the same—the Rwandans, the Mai-Mai, Kayembe. She would never forget the swagger of those soldiers entering their house, like they owned everything, even people. It sickened Sylvie to see it now, in her own brother.

  Papa, she prayed silently to the spirit world, tell me how to save him from becoming one of them!

  LAIPING LAY AWAKE most of her first night in Shenzhen, squished on the narrow mattress between Min and the wall, listening to her cousin’s gentle snores. Her mind buzzed between the dual frequencies of excitement and anxiety. All night, she was aware of restless sleepers tossing, of girls padding along the narrow pathway between the rows of bunks, of the toilet flushing in the tiny cubicle. It seemed to her that she had just nodded off when Min sat up, jostling the mattress as she crawled to the ladder.

  “Wake up, lazy!” Min whispered when Laiping lifted her head.

  “Is it morning?” she asked.

  “It’s seven o’clock.”

  “I hardly slept.”

  “I know! You kept me awake all night,” retorted Min. Laiping thought this was rich, considering Min’s snoring. “My shift starts at eight,” Min told her, keeping her voice low. “I won’t be able to take you to the employment office. Just ask somebody where the main building is—everyone knows it. Here, take this with you.” She reached into a plastic bag hanging from a hook on the wall and handed Laiping a sheet of paper. “It’s a new birth certificate for you.”

  Laiping stared with surprise at her name on the certificate. “But the date is wrong.”

  “Of course it’s wrong, dummy! It’s a fake—because you’re underage. When you get paid, you owe me ten yuan for that.”

  As Min disappeared down the ladder, Laiping stretched out her cramped limbs. She must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing she knew she was startled awake by the sound of a shrill whistle coming from some distance—loud enough to wake the ancestors. She was disoriented for a moment, unsure where she was or what she was doing here. Then she found the fake birth certificate beside her and everything came back to her. She’d come to Shenzhen to find a good job in a factory, like Min’s. Unless Laiping wanted to spend her life like her parents, knee deep in muck in the rice paddies back home, it was time for her to get up and apply for that job.

  At the elevator, she asked a girl how to find the factory’s employment office. When the girl heard Laiping’s country accent, she was a little snooty, but she gave Laiping the directions she needed. Laiping waited for the girl to press the button on the elevator, not yet trusting herself to push the right one. Inside the elevator car, girls chattered about which cafeteria they would go to for breakfast, which reminded Laiping that she was hungry. She was tempted to follow them and try to get something to eat, but she was afraid of being caught and somehow spoiling her chances of being hired.

  The morning sun was baking hot as Laiping retraced her steps, making her way back to the broad boulevard where the busses stopped. There were even more people on the sidewalk now, lining up for busses. There were more girls than boys, many of them with neatly styled hair, makeup, and frilly tops. Min had mentioned that the really good jobs weren’t in the factory, but in the office. She wondered if that’s where these girls worked. There were a few couples holding hands as they strolled down the sidewalk—a public display that wasn’t done back in the village. But here, stylish girls seemed to show off their boyfriends the same way they did their pretty blouses and new shoes.

  Laiping followed the wide boulevard past one of the giant white factory buildings, the sun gleaming off its large square tiles. She saw a sign for the employment office, just as the girl in the dorm said she would, and followed it down a street flanked by more blockish white-tile buildings, all of which looked the same. But she could tell she had reached the employment office by the long line of job-seekers outside. Laiping followed the line around the corner of the building. Most of the people looking for jobs appeared to be a little older than Laiping, but a few looked younger. She took her place at the end and waited for her turn to be called inside the building.

  “How long have you been waiting?” she asked a tiny girl in front of her who looked like she belonged in middle school.

  “Not that long,” she replied. “But they’re only taking a few people at a time. I hope we’re not here all day.”

  The girl looked anxiously up the line, craning her neck. From her plain and worn clothing, Laiping guessed that she, too, had come out from a village to find work in the city. Laiping could tell from her accent that she was from Guangdong Province, just like her.

  “My name is Laiping,” she said.

  “Yiyin,” replied the girl.

  “Are you here alone?” Yiyin gave a quick nod. “I’m staying with my cousin,” Laiping told her. “If they won’t give me a job, I’ll have to go home to my parents near Heyuan.”

  “My mother told me not to come home unless I send money ahead of me,” confided Yiyin. “All she cares about is paying for my brother to go to school. I was better in school than he is, but she made me leave after grade seven.”

  Laiping remembered how her own mother cried at the train station, and thought, Yiyin’s mother must be mean. But then, Laiping’s parents didn’t have a son to favor. She was their only child.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Dongzhou, a village near Shanwei,” Yiyin replied. Laiping had heard Min talk about girls she’d met from Shanwei—it was one
of a dozen manufacturing cities, like Shenzhen, in the broad Pearl River Delta. According to Min, though, the factories there were lower quality and didn’t pay as well as Shenzhen. “My father was a fisherman,” said Yiyin. “Then they started filling in the bay to build more factories, and the fish disappeared.”

  In front of them, a girl of about twenty was fanning herself in the growing heat of the sun. She gave Yiyin a sharp look. “I’d keep quiet about being from Dongzhou, if I were you. They don’t hire protesters and troublemakers.”

  Yiyin was suddenly fierce. “Mind your own business,” she fired back. “I’m not a troublemaker.”

  The older girl made a face and turned away, still fanning herself. Laiping didn’t understand why she was calling Yiyin and her father troublemakers just because they were from Dongzhou, but she admired the way Yiyin stood up for herself and her family.

  “What does your father do, if he can no longer fish?” she asked.

  For a moment, Yiyin turned the same fierce look on Laiping, but when she saw that Laiping meant no offense, she dropped her eyes. “He went away,” she said, then she fell silent. Laiping wondered what she’d said wrong.

  “What’s taking so long?” grumbled Yiyin after another half hour went by, the hot sun beating down on them. “I have to pee.”

  “Go. I’ll save your place,” replied Laiping.

  Yiyin gave Laiping a distrusting look, but her bladder seemed to decide for her.

  “Don’t go in without me,” she said, then darted away.

  The line suddenly lurched forward and rounded the corner of the building. Now Laiping could see the entrance to the employment office, where several people were being ushered inside. She was starting to feel anxious. What if her turn came and Yiyin had not come back? She didn’t want to risk her chances by letting others go ahead of her, but she had promised to save Yiyin’s spot. Laiping shifted from foot to foot, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds for Yiyin.