Free Cracking the Sky by Brenda Cooper Page B

behavior, and soon as it was sent I wished I’d removed the dorky lines about fear and feelings. He was going to give me a lecture and mark me down. Students called him the Good Doctor because you couldn’t get away with anything in his class. That made us like him and not like him all at once. He’d told us to be impartial observers, like scientists. Like junior scientists. No attachments.
    Outside, Kay leaned down and whispered at me. “You looked downright pissed.”
    I shook my head. “Just not what I expected. What was your ride like?”
    “I bet I can ride a camel now. We were part of a caravan, like fifty camels and fifty people, although some men and boys walked. Did you know camels fart? Bani has to ride veiled, but she barely notices it. I’d rip the damned thing off.”
    “You have her picture, right?”
    She nodded and peeled off her coat. “Thank god it warmed up. This morning was so cold, then the desert was so hot, and now it’s perfect.”
    “So she wasn’t veiled in her picture? You know what her face looks like?”
    “Yes. But she had on a turtleneck and a neck scarf in the desert.” She frowned. “She’s pretty. Almost thirty-five, and her skin’s like cream.”
    “What did she tell you about the caravan? Did she, like, narrate?”
    “Just the names of the camels and the people. I think she liked the camels better. Who’d have thought I’d be doing a camel fair in 2021?”
    “I think it’s cool the world is still different in some places. Did you feel like she was talking to—well, to you? Or was she narrating for a stranger?”
    Kay laughed. “I am a stranger. Look, I gotta meet my group from Online Finance. We get to see if we made money yet.”
    “Of course you did.”
    “Well, how much.”

    *

    My next class was Vertical Gardening, a bit of engineering daydream about feeding the world by planting green skyscrapers full of dirt and lights in major cities. I kept seeing Valeria walking around the buildings in my head, her strong dark face and slender body limping among the lush corn and beans and wheat on the fiftieth floor or striding through the rooftop flower garden, looking down at the sculptured beds as if they represented evil instead of beauty.
    Each student got to call their hosts at night. They required we do that from the diplo department offices. Our calls were by team for the first day, so Kay and I met again in Dr. Peter’s tiny office. There were only two real books, stacked horizontally on top of his desk. A copy of the Rubiyat , the big illustrated kind, and a slim, battered version of The Art of War . I couldn’t picture him reading the Rubiyat .
    He told us what to say (thanks, and to ask any questions we had about the day) and what not to say (anything that would make them think we saw ourselves as better than them, a lecture we got all the time, not to think we were better at all, ever. We knew that, but Dr. Peters told us every day anyway). Lecture delivered, he told me to wait and asked Kay to follow him to another office.
    When he came back into his office, he sat down more quietly than I expected and gave me a thoughtful look. It felt like he wanted me to say something, but I held out. I didn’t want to be the one who started the process of beating me up for feeling Valeria. Finally he said, “You are a rare one.”
    I waited.
    “Only one in a hundred people have your empathy with the hosts.”
    “What about Mathew?” I challenged him. “He was almost crying.”
    “Because of what he saw, and how that made him feel. Not because of how much he felt his host’s pain.”
    I wasn’t sure I understood. “You think I feel Valeria more than he felt . . .” I had to reach for the name of his host. “Jacob? Why?”
    “It’s almost never men.”
    “Oh.”
    “And you had so much feeling in your report.”
    Yeah. I felt my cheeks get hot. He must have read my uncertainty about his reaction on my face. “It’s okay. But I wanted a moment with you.