The night was cool and bright, illuminated by a silvery half moon. Behind him, the penance room seemed so little, insignificant really, he couldn’t understand how some of the children feared it so much.

Across the patio he saw the place the women called school, where children like him were taught the women’s tongue and their ways but not how to grow food or heal the ill. Behind the school, the women’s dwellings stood, and just to their right, were the rooms for the children, a small set of square, windowless buildings made of mud.

The boy walked to the rooms, each of their four doors latched by the outside. With steady hands, and silent as a cat trying to steal a piece of fish from the cook’s table, he slid the latches open one by one. Cuacari had died to save h...

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