“Ayanda! Not this, Aya!”

My father’s voice booms down from the top of his Motor Unit. Name at the front, name at the back, his oldest trick. He’s done it since I was small: Ayanda, put that down, Ayanda. Ayanda, what did you do, Ayanda. Two soft walls with me trapped in between. And just like that I’m little again. Small. Caught.

My hand wants to find my hip. My eyes want to roll. That’s the old move, the one that says I don’t care what you say, which I only ever pull out when I care most. But my fists are still clenched from The Moment, and I can feel the pattern coming on the way you feel weather. Years of it. Self-protect, deflect, fold every issue into one big fight.

Not this time. Now that I can see the pattern, I don’t have to climb inside it.

Hands by my sides. Eyes level. Shoulders down.

I breathe.

I’m old enough now, and I don’t mean my age. I mean the long, unglamorous time I’ve spent getting to know myself, turning my own feelings over like stones to look underneath. It’s worked. The Red Mist doesn’t drop the way it used to. The bile doesn’t climb my throat. Somewhere in the middle of all this noise there’s a still lake, and I’ve learned I can put my attention on it and, this is the strange part, it grows. Whatever I look at grows. Honestly? It feels like magic.

A crowd is gathering to watch. Wonderful.

“Told you she’d crack,” someone murmurs behind a hand.

“She should be ashamed of herself.”

“Can we hurry this up? More Yummies could fall while we stand around…”

I don’t have to guess what they think. They’re not exactly whispering.

Panic climbs my throat. What if I’m sick? What if I faint? What if I just… stop breathing? This is how it always starts.

One small breath. I let the panic stay, but I don’t let it drive.

Another, deeper. What are you trying to tell me? That everyone’s watching, that they all think I’m cracked. Noted. Thanks, panic, hadn’t spotted the fifty pairs of eyes.

A deep one now, shaped like a wave. And there it is: the bigger the breath, the smaller the panic. They’re partners in a dance, each one setting the height of the other. The breath eases the nausea and walks the terror back down, out of my throat, through my chest, into my belly, where it spirals once and then scatters like a supernova finding gentler routes to rise. I tingle: spine, arms, neck, the crown of my head. My eyes sharpen. The fear that was about to floor me is lighting me up instead.

So this is the line between wetting yourself and having an edge. Wow. Physiology has a sense of humour.

I hold my attention on the centre-place, the one buried all these years under ritual and rule, under rage and rebellion. I trust it. I speak from it. Conditioning doesn’t run me now. Fear doesn’t fence me in. Anger doesn’t swallow me whole.

One more breath. Ready.

“What is this, Dad?” My hand traces a slow arc across everything, the Gates, the crowd, the whole waiting world. He opens his mouth, but I keep going; I’ve only just found the courage and I won’t be steered off it.

“Why are we so sure our bowing is the reason the Yummies come at all? Maybe they’d come anyway. Maybe they wouldn’t. We’ve never been offered a choice, we’ve never even talked about having one.”

A ripple runs through the crowd.

“Why is thinking about doing something different treated like doing it? Why aren’t we allowed to think freely, even if we can’t be free?” I look straight at him. “Why are you afraid of my thoughts?”

I’ve turned these questions over for what feels like my whole life, and hearing them out loud, in the open air, does something to me. It sets me loose. I’ve been waiting all this time for someone to grant me my freedom, and it was mine the whole time.

I watch him weigh it. For a second his face softens; he’d rather do this quietly, somewhere else, just us. Then he glances at the crowd, and I see him choose. He straightens. Whatever this costs me, he’s going to use it to hold the line, and I don’t think he could tell you why. He’s doing what he believes a father in his position has to do.

“Aya.” He plants his feet. “We are a Motor Unit!” His voice climbs to its Sunday height. “U-NIT! We move in U-nison. We believe the same, we do the same, so it has been, so it shall be. The Yummies bless us.” Now it’s his hands drawing the arcs. “We are more blessed than any people in the land, and it rests entirely on the quality of our devotion. Do not question. Believe, and receive. That is how the Yummies keep coming.”

It’s a sermon. Of course it’s a sermon, it’s his sermon, word for word, and it isn’t aimed at me. It’s aimed at them. I half expect the whole choir to swell into the old favourite:

Uuuuunity, Uuuuunity, Uuuuuunity of Beinnnnng!
We stand togetheeeer,
Praising The Yummiiiiiies!
May they never leeeeeave us,
May we never ceeeease,
We stand togeeeether,
In Unity of Beinnnnng!

I do love that one. It’s a classic.

And that’s when I let my gaze slide past him, to them. The Keratinocytes.

They live right alongside us here in the land of Big Toe, though you’d never guess we shared a country. My people, the Myocytes of Extensor Hallucis Longus, do one proud job: we lift the big toe. The Keratinocytes are the People of the Toenail, once thick, once tough, Tough as Nails, that’s their motto. (Ours, if we’re honest, is closer to Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.)

But lately something’s wrong with them. There’s a Keratinocyte child near the front, I’ve watched her all season, and where her plating should be smooth and hard it’s gone ridged and grey, flaking at one corner like old paint. She’s not the only one. Once you’ve seen it on her, you see it everywhere: the drawn faces, the gnarled little limbs, the dullness creeping through a people who used to gleam.

I’m not the first to notice. Last week, from this very spot, my father, High Priest, remember, held the Keratinocytes up as a lesson. See what becomes of a people who don’t revere the Yummies, he said. They reap what they sow. My eyes rolled back so far I gave myself a headache.

My mother found me afterward. I’m in the choir; everyone could see me.

She wasn’t hard on me. She never is about this, she felt the same at my age, still does on the bad days.

“Your father loves you,” she said quietly. “Deep down he’s as stuck as you are. But what can he do? He has to hold us all together. His place is a kind of prison too, you know, it only looks like being in charge. If you can see that, maybe it’ll be easier to take your own place, and to help him carry his.”

I get it. I do.

But my heart won’t fall in line, not with the Keratinocyte children looking like that, not with the rest of us pretending not to see. Falling in won’t heal those kids. Falling in won’t help my people grow past the next mouthful. So I take the old familiar irritation and, instead of swallowing it or hurling it, I breathe it up from my belly and aim it at my heart like fuel. That’s how I turned the panic. I’d already learned to turn the rage.

Staunch and open-hearted. I stretch my hand toward the toenail and speak from the fire.

“Listen. Can the Yummies be trusted, if this is what they let happen to children?” I let it land. “And if we let it happen without a word, can we?”

Nobody answers. A few follow my hand toward the Keratinocyte child, then look quickly away.

“Why do we tell ourselves it’s fine that we have so much and they have so little? Do the Yummies really taste that good, this close to so much hurting? Or is that the point,” the thought arrives as I say it, “do we need more and more of them precisely so we don’t have to feel it?”

“So what are we supposed to do?” someone calls, not angry, lost. Noma, I think.

“I don’t have the whole answer,” I admit. “But I know the feeling under the craving. When we look at them, we feel it, their pain is ours, we helped make it, and we’re terrified we’re next and can’t see how to help anyone, them or us. The Yummies smother that. And here’s the trick of it: while they smother the fear, they smother the part of us that could actually change things. They keep us just numb enough not to care, and just awake enough to keep working.”

The silence stretches. I’ve said the same thing about five ways. I only need one of them to reach one heart.

Then the real one comes up out of me before I can stop it.

“What if we don’t need as many Yummies as we think?” A breath. “What if we don’t need them at all?” And then the thought that shakes even me: “What if they need us more than we need them?”

The words move through the crowd like a shudder. This is blasphemy of the highest order and I know it. Nobody shouts me down, though, that’s the thing. A season ago they’d have laughed me out of the Kingdom. Today the question just hangs there, trembling, while a whole people stand very still and feel the ground shift half an inch beneath them.