The Child Goddess Read Online Free PDF

said. “Am I to be the girl’s guardian?”
    Boreson glanced sidelong at Markham, as if for help. “Yes, of course, but—”
    Isabel turned again to the guard. “If you please.”
    The guard pulled aside the flap of the quarantine bubble. Disposable sterile suits hung from a dowel, their plastic masks and empty feet drooping like corpses on a gibbet. The guard took one down and held it out.
    Isabel shook her head. “Maximum quarantine protocol is six months,” she murmured. “We’re well past that.” The guard’s lips curved and she spoke to the door hastily, before anyone else could intervene. It swung open.
    Isabel smiled her thanks. She stepped through the bubble and into the ward, leaving Boreson and Markham sputtering behind her. The door closed silently, and she and the child were alone.
    The girl turned from the false mirror to face her.
    Isabel smiled, and said simply, “Hello, Oa. Did I say your name right? Oh-uh? My name is Isabel. I’ve come to talk to you.”
    The girl neither shrank back nor came toward her. She stood, her full lips slightly apart, her eyes bright with—fear? Suspicion? Isabel opened her hands, showed her empty palms. “Will you talk with me?”
    The child’s thin hand lifted to her face to mime a mask over the nose and mouth.
    “Ah,” Isabel said. “Yes, I see.” She took a step closer. “No, I won’t be wearing a mask.”
    Now the girl’s fingers lifted to her head, where her abundant hair sprang from her scalp like a black fountain. Isabel chuckled, and she mimicked the child’s gesture, touching her own naked scalp. “No, it’s true. I have no hair at all. Perhaps I seem very strange to you.”
    Silence stretched in the room. The sounds beyond the walls seemed to grow louder, the fans, the ventilation, the hum of carts and trucks on the street outside. Isabel watched the girl, waiting. The child’s hair was a glory, a deep, shining black. Her skin glowed like chocolate satin. Her willowy limbs promised that she would be tall when she grew up. And how old must she be now? Ten, perhaps eleven, Isabel thought. Certainly no older. She still had the flat chest and narrow body of childhood. She was six or eight centimeters shorter than Isabel.
    “Oa,” Isabel said. “Can you understand me? Do you understand my words?”
    The child’s voice was high and sweet. “Oa understands,” she said.
    Isabel hardly breathed. The girl, walking as if her shoes didn’t quite fit, moved forward, stopping an arm’s length away. The length, Isabel thought instantly, of a blow. The child’s nostrils flared as if she were testing the air, and Isabel kept very still as the girl’s hand rose, reached, came slowly up to Isabel’s breast. She leaned forward, a movement full of caution, and she put her forefinger on the Magdalene cross.
    She looked up into Isabel’s face, and she said, with a wide flashing grin like the sun shining through winter clouds, “Oa likes it.”
    *
    OA HAD NEVER seen a person with no hair. The elders of the people sometimes had gray hair, and some of the crones had very thin hair like the moss that hung from the nuchi trees, which padded the anchens’ nest. But she had never seen anyone whose head was utterly naked.
    The woman in black had arching thin eyebrows as dark as Oa’s own, and delicate bones in her face. Her eyes were clear and light like a tidepool at dawn, and her bare head was a graceful shining curve, with slight shadows here and there. Oa was somehow pleased that she wore no mask. It seemed to mean something, yet it was as incomprehensible as being served a food she liked.
    When she went close to the woman called Isabel, there was no cloying scent to offend the nose, nothing to interfere with the fragrance of clean skin and sweet breath and good nature. When Oa opened her nostrils, the woman didn’t step back, or look at her with distaste. Her eyes glowed as if she understood.
    No one else seemed to understand. They didn’t like her doing