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ideologue. You always knew where she stood, which made her very easy to follow.
    I don’t imagine, even now, that I made my choice back then out of free will. I just had faith in Miach, who was always so clever, so well prepared. I knew she’d have the perfect way to strike back at the system. So when she brought her hand out in a clenched fist from her pocket and opened her fingers slowly, we knew with a cold clarity that it held our doom.
    “See this pill? You only need to take one a day and it’ll completely shut down your digestive tract from your stomach all the way to your large intestine. One of these and your body will completely refuse any and all nutrition.”
    “Where did you get it?”
    I had no misgivings whatsoever about taking the pill. I asked out of sheer curiosity as to the route by which she had obtained it. For a moment I imagined that she had, against all odds, managed to find one of those morally depraved adults—that anachronistic, extinct breed—living somewhere, and he had rented her body, and as luck would have it, he was a shady pharma dealer.
    “I made it. With a medcare unit,” Miach said, dashing my hopes. I knew she wasn’t lying, either. Why would she? Cian came up behind her, putting her hands on Miach’s shoulders, literally backing her up.
    “Of course she did,” Cian said. “Miach knows how to use medcare to make poison strong enough to kill an entire city. Making some pills was easy compared to that.”
    Without looking around, Miach reached up and gently laid one of her fingers on Cian’s left hand.
    In a lot of ways Cian was Miach’s shadow. Like me, she felt uncomfortable in our world, like she didn’t belong, but at the same time Cian was basically a coward who would do anything you said if you said it loud enough. She lived her life in fear.
    Miach cleared her throat. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m dying.” She looked at each of us in turn. “Cian? Tuan? What’ll it be?”
    I stared at the white pill in Miach’s outstretched hand.
    This little white jewel would cut my body off from every bit of nutrition it needed. I could eat my breakfast, lunch, and dinner with everyone watching, while that tiny forbidden fruit led me unerringly down the path of starvation. If we had been adults, the WatchMe inside us would send an emergency malnutrition alert to a health consultant’s server, where it would yell and shout until the admedistration sent a fleet of ambulances to save us from ourselves.
    So we had to do it before we became adults. In other words, right now.
    Now was our chance. Now that we had met this genius, our savior, Miach Mihie.
    If I passed up this opportunity, it would never come again, not for my whole life.
    “I’ll do it.”
    I don’t know how long I stood there looking at the pill before I answered. Cian looked a little reluctant herself, but she nodded too. The classroom was already empty except for us three. Taking the pills in our hands, we tossed them in our mouths and swallowed.
    Of course, I didn’t die.
    Thirteen years later, I was standing in the Sahara, blowing thick smoke from between pursed lips, waiting for Étienne and his gang to finish loading the crates into the rear compartment of our armored transport. The Tuareg—Kel Tamasheq—warrior was smoking one of the same cigars as the kind they had brought us. He was watching his men as they squatted on the ground a short distance away, opening a portable parabolic antenna.
    “I’ve been meaning to ask for a while now, but what’s with the dish?”
    I had seen them bring it every time they came to trade with us. It was an antique communication device, the kind that you needed to use mechanical headphones with to hear. An unusual sight for a member of modern society, who was used to listening to her playlist of tunes on an embedded jawbone receiver.
    “Huh? That? It is for sending ultra shortwave transmissions.”
    “Who listens to shortwave radio these