Livestock

The table was laid for three. The blood had been taken hours ago, at a bunker, as everyone in the district took it every day, and what lay on the plates was the rest of the meal: sausage black with it, a dish of liver and onions, bread to push through the gravy.

It had been weeks since the girl, and he had spent them being as ordinary as he knew how: tutors, walks, one dreadful concert. It had not worked. He had gone back to the same bunker three nights running, and each night the chair held someone else. Donors came by lot, and no one had told him so, because no one had imagined he would want to know.

“A Fisniket does not drift,” his father said. Progon set his knife down between sentences, one at a time. “Your tutors tell me the third volume is still unopened. You will open it. And it is time you took on Retainers. Two, three, from the lesser clans. They will learn our ways, and you will learn to answer for someone besides yourself.”

Ordinarily Dritan said something clever about the third volume, that he was saving it for a rainy century, say, and his mother tried not to smile. Tonight he turned his glass a quarter turn and watched the candle go copper in the brandy. He had been watching it for some time. Under his father’s voice, one two seven two went round, and had for weeks.

Kamona was not smiling. She lowered her fork. “Progon,” she said, and that was all, and his father looked at her and stopped.

“What is going on, Dritan?” she asked, pleasantly. “You seem distracted.”

“What do they do all day?” he said. “The humans.”

Nobody moved. The candle leaned and righted itself.

“We do not talk about livestock in this house,” Progon said, and picked up his knife. “You will apply yourself to your tutors, and when you come of age you will enter public service, or politics, as a Fisniket does. That is the end of it.”

Kamona looked at her son a moment longer than the question deserved. Then she ate.

***

In the car he told the driver to take him to the library.

“You’re expected at Master Grigor’s, sir,” the driver said. “The social gathering. Half past ten.”

“I’ve sent word ahead that I’ll be late.” Before he knew what it was for, he had done it from the hall.

The driver glanced at him in the mirror and said nothing, and drove.

The library was open all night. The catalog took his reader number before it would hear him. Every question was somebody’s. HUMANS gave him a pamphlet on washing a donor’s hands, a census of blood types, and a column, Why We Live Apart: after the wars some of their kind had kept favorites, the way one keeps pets, until separate settlements and the no-attachment policy ended the quarrels. He read it twice. It said nothing about anyone’s eyes. His father rang and he silenced the phone. Every other word returned the same three things, and he supposed each try was logged. He caught himself enjoying a table of blood types, and when the windows were graying he took the pamphlet. The desk stamped it out to his number.

***

The driver had waited at the curb all night. “Master Grigor’s, sir?” he said. Dritan said yes.

The gathering was breaking up when they arrived. Grigor, glass in hand, had already told his parents Dritan was there. Progon was telling the whole family. Dritan had asked a question, Grigor said, and had been there all night, remember. Dritan stayed five minutes.

In the car he sat with the pamphlet on his knee, title out, and at the first corner the driver glanced back at it.

“Donor hygiene, sir?” he said.

“It was what they had.”

“It’s good, sir. That you take an interest in something.” The driver kept his eyes on the road. “Your father’s been worried.”

“My father is angry.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said, and let that stand.

Dritan looked at the back of the man’s head, at the gray in his hair and the collar worn pale where the cap sat. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Sir?”

“Your name. I should know it.”

“Fatmir, sir.”

“How long have you driven me, Fatmir?”

“Since you were small, sir.” He turned the wheel with the flat of his hand.

“You drive the donor runs as well.”

“Other nights, sir. For the Blood Service, from the pickup point to the bunker and back.”

“What are they like?”

“Quiet, mostly. The van has no windows. They ask me what the weather’s doing.”

“And?”

“Clear, I say, sir. Or rain.” He let a corner go by. “They like to know. I take them from the pickup point and no farther. Past the fence it’s the Blood Guard.”

They drove on. When the house was three streets away, Dritan said, “Fatmir. Do you know anyone in the Blood Guard?”

The hands on the wheel did not move. “Nobody asks about the Guard, sir,” Fatmir said. “Not anyone of your clan or bloodline.”

After that neither of them spoke.

The car stopped at the foot of the steps. Dritan did not get out. In the mirror he saw Fatmir take the mileage log from the dash and sit with it a long moment. Then he tore a corner from the blank last page and wrote on it with a stub of pencil, his hand curled around the paper.

Fatmir came round and opened the door. Dritan stepped out, and a small folded square was pressed into his palm. Fatmir did not look at him.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, loudly, to nobody.

Dritan put the paper in the pocket with the phone and climbed the steps with his hand flat over it.