Page 71 of The Art of Exiley

“No. I have overactive Ha’i and a tendency to burn people when I get emotional. He’s very small, so you’re safer.”

My heart pounding, I take him in my arms. He seems so frail.

“Here, make shiin on his chest,” she encourages. I do so, my hand trembling. I feel the child’s erratic heartbeat beneath my fingers. “Just a light pulse.”

“I can’t do it.” I’m too scared, too riled up; I have no control.

“Yes, you can,” Hilde instructs calmly. “I saw you make chickweed bloom in a desert; you can help this child. Tell me what you’re thinking, how you’re trying to access your Ha’i.” She speaks so calmly while at the same time inserting an IV into the boy’s tiny hand.

“I… I’m trying to pull it up from the well within me.” Like Master Liu had taught me. I taste salt on my lips and realize that I’m crying.

“Okay. The problem is that a well draws water from a preexisting source, so if your source is dry, you are left with nothing. As a Sire, youarethe source. You’re making something from nothing. Don’t think of yourself as pulling the Ha’i. Imagine bringing it into being.”

Holding my breath, I close my eyes and imagine my belly as a black void, and then I envision a mini burst of light exploding into golden rays. I pull those rays through my hands and feel the warmth of Ha’i spread into the baby’s body.

“There you go,” Hilde encourages. “Now one more time.”

I conduct, and with the pulse of Ha’i, I feel the boy’s heartbeat stop, then start again in a more natural rhythm.

Only then do I breathe.

As soon as the baby is stable, Hilde has me pass him back to his mother, who can’t stop crying and kissing me.

And then we move on because there’s more to be done and no time for rest.

I help Hilde for hours. Crushing plants into mixtures. Distributing food. Purifying water. Administering medicine.

Digging graves.

I’m working on autopilot, like a golem, overcome by feeling so much that I can’t feel anything at all.

“You’re holding up well,” Hilde says to me at one point. “I’m impressed. I thought you’d run crying after an hour.”

“If this is their daily life, what right do I have to run from one day?”

Hilde nods approvingly.

I say, “I just don’t understand how the world allows this to happen… how they can neglect all these people.” There’s plenty of wealth in the world, plenty of food, water, medicine going to waste daily.

“This is not just a result of neglect,” Hilde explains. “The people responsible for this? For so many other humanitarian crises? They’re allied with the leaders of powerful countries and multinational corporations. You’re from the United States? They fund the corrupt governments who should be taking care of these people, and they don’t demand this treatment stops. It’s too easy to let tragedy happen far away when you’re not the one suffering and when interference would directly affect the affordability of the resources and products you rely on for daily life.”

There’s a part of me that wants to close my eyes and stop seeing, that wishes I could go back to not knowing. “Why would anyone at Genesis think that showing me this would make me understand why they don’t do more to help?”

“They want you to see that your world can’t be helped by easy fixes. The solutions that these people need—access to clean water, minimal food rations, humane living conditions, basic health care? Your world has all those things already, and yet these people still suffer. There are a small few that can be helped by people like you and me and the aid workers, but there will always be more.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I can’tnotbe,” she says simply. “But I know that not everyone can be here. Genesis is solving new problems, and that’s needed too.”

“But you think they should do things differently?”

“Some things.” She shrugs. “No society and no individual is perfect.”

When I lived in New York, this horrifying reality was so foreign. Whyworry about catastrophes so far away when there were homeless people on my own doorstep—sometimes literally. But now that I’ve been living among the Makers on Arcadia, coming here feels like coming back to my people. They may not speak my language or look anything like me, but this ismyworld crumbling to ruins.

Perhaps coming here has made me realize no solution is simple, but it has not convinced me that the Makers couldn’t make things better if they shared their knowledge. Not just of medicine and technology, but of philosophy and structures of government that could lead to widespread change.

Hilde has me sanitize before I leave, but I feel like I’ll never wash away the smell of death. The reek of a whole world’s apathy.

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