Excerpt from Flash House by Aimee E. Liu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He spoke the words, but Kamla frowned. Her head wiggled in an Indian shrug, at once accepting and dismissing the assurance. Joanna leaned forward--they were seated across a low brass table from each other--and stroked the back of the girl's right hand. The blue eyes lifted as Joanna's fingers closed around the delicate wrist. She could feel the throb of Kamla's pulse lining up with her own. "I will keep you safe," she promised. Kamla smiled and nodded.

Joanna let her go. She felt Vijay watching, but turned away. She 'd been warned not to get personally invested in people who were down and out, and not just here at Salamat Jannat. Over and over again, this lesson had been pounded into her by her teachers back in graduate school, by supervisors on her first jobs, at an adoption agency in Oakland, and later working with war refugees. "We 're like doctors," one of her co-workers had observed. "A certain number of losses are inevitable, and it's not possible to predict which they'll be. If we identify too closely with the people we lose, then we risk losing ourselves."

"One step removed," Aidan called it. In his profession this was considered journalistic objectivity. A margin of safety that divided rescuers from rescuees, observers from combatants. Aidan himself, of course, routinely crossed that line. This was, in fact, precisely what had gotten them into their current political fix. Yet even though Joanna sometimes despaired over her husband's stubbornness in taking such risks, she wouldn't have him any other way. Well, this blue-eyed child was a risk she was willing--no, determined--to take.

She summoned the ayah to help, but attended personally as Kamla was bathed and deloused. Her body was emaciated, her back and arms covered with bruises and sores, and even though the girl did not make a sound, Joanna grimaced as she gently soaped the raw flesh. Afterward, Kamla lay rigid on the charpoy that served as an examining table while a public health nurse from the neighborhood clinic assessed the damage.

"Easy, child," soothed the nurse, a Christian Dravidian with skin the color of bittersweet chocolate. Joanna held Kamla's hand. The tightness of her grip was the only sign the girl gave of fear, but the nurse gently coaxed even that to gradually relax. The smell of alcohol seemed sharper than her wince of pain at the slide of the needle into her flesh. "Penicillin," the nurse apologized, as if Kamla could have known what this meant.

What it meant was inscribed on her chart. Rectal fissure, lacerated vaginal wall, ruptured perineum. Infection of reproductive and urinary tracts may compromise future fertility. Joanna closed her eyes and swallowed hard. If she'd rescued Kamla that first day at the brothel, this never would have happened. "Such injuries are not uncommon," the nurse said as Joanna helped Kamla into a fresh green cotton tunic and pants. "But ordinarily, a child in this condition would be doubled over in pain." Joanna looked down at the small, insistent fingers threading through her own. She met those blue-green eyes. "I do not think our Kamla is any ordinary child."

Yet when she showed her to a quiet corner of the communal sleeping room, the girl would not release her arm. Joanna tried to reassure her, "No harm will come to you here." Her voice was strong and sure, but she remembered nights when Simon, aged three, would clutch her in just this way and demand that she console him about death. One of his cats had died, and for weeks he would ask when he, too, would die, and she and Daddy, and who would die first, and then would she promise not to die, or let Daddy die, or him. And she 'd promised, though she felt like a liar, for Aidan was still in China then, and what control, anyway, did one have over such things? Now, again, she was making a promise she could not guarantee. She 'd already failed this child once.

Copyright © 2003 by Aimee E. Liu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.