facing away, his finger still running along the blade. Aether dinned her questions to me, awaiting my judgment on what to say to him and when, “He referred to ‘other kids.’ Perhaps you suspected this, but he is not the age he appears to be. I believe Luis has formed an addiction to DR at the cost of rejecting—” I cut off her contact, visibly annoying the ruthlessly-curious malvirai. I approached him, already knowing what I wanted to say.
“Why do you think your mother hates you, Luis?”
He stopped. “I told you, she doesn’t feed me. She hates me. She never stays at a job long enough. She never spends time with me.”
“Times are tough right now,” I said. “If she didn’t care about you, why would she try to work so hard?”
He continued as if he didn’t hear me, “I just run away and ascend. I can spend days here and she doesn’t even know I’m gone, and when she does catch me she just yells and tells me to stay out of the ascension booths, but she’s not around to stop me, so – I just – I don’t know what else to do.”
“How old are you, Luis?”
He hesitated. “Seven. Seven years old.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Any brothers or sis—”
“My father ran away! I am an only child!”
“Have you ever told your mother how you feel?”
“She already knows! She hates me!”
I felt like I was hitting a dead-end. I prayed for the words, to see if any would come.
If God did put us here to talk to Luis, I thought, he must know the right words.
“The food here is not real,” Aether said. “The more time you spend avoiding the pain of hunger, the worse it will be when you inevitably leave.”
“I know that!”
“What of your activities in Standard Reality? Do you participate in schooling?”
“School? It’s summer break, lady – Aether – whatever. I don’t like it, anyway. They all just yell at me because I’m always absent, then I don’t want to go there at all.”
“Don’t you see that there is a paradox?”
“What?”
“Your situation exemplifies a paradox.”
“He’s seven,” I told her, “don’t use the whole dictionary.”
Aether looked at me like she didn’t understand what I meant. Luis took it as an insult, “I’m not so stupid! I know what exemplify means!”
A thought occurred to me. “No, you’re not stupid, are you?”
“You bet I’m not!”