hat’s the D?” he demands.

Zelda has been menaced by men in power all her life. A steelworker following her to the playground to tell her that her daddy had stolen a white man’s job at Bethlehem and was going to hang. Teachers at Douglass High who thought educating black girls would only make them covet things they’d never have. A Fort McHenry tour guide who tallied the number of Union soldiers killed in the Civil War and then asked Zelda if she didn’t want to say thank you to her white classmates. At Occam, though, threats have only ever come from Fleming, and she’s learned how to handle those. Know your QCC front and back. Know how to look forlorn. Know how to flatter.

Mr. Strickland is different. Zelda doesn’t know him, and senses it wouldn’t matter if she did. He’s got lion eyes, like she saw once at the zoo, impossible to read to judge the degree of aggression. Forget divining any clues as to why she and Elisa have been called before this wall of security monitors, though it can’t be good.

“D, sir?” she ventures.

“Zelda D. Fuller.”

Here’s a question with an answer. She rushes for it, heedlessly.

“Delilah. You know, the Bible.”

“Delilah? The dead mother gave you that?”

She knows how to absorb a punch.

“That’s what my father told me, sir. She had it planned out for a girl.”

Strickland bites into his candy. He does this like a lion, too, jaws wide. Zelda knows cheap candy when she sees it, she practically grew up on it, but this is a new level of cheap. It cleaves badly; she sees splinters sliver into the man’s cheek and gums. She sees blood, diluted by saliva, and can almost taste it, cold and edgeless, as opposite to hard candy as the color red is to green.

“Interesting lady, this dead mother,” Strickland says. “You know what Delilah did, don’t you?”

Zelda enters Fleming’s scolding sessions prepared to deflect claims that janitors stole something that absentminded scientists only misplaced. Never before has she had to bone up on biblical characters.

“I … at church, they—”

“My wife’s a churchgoer, so I’m up on most of the stories. What I recall is God gave Samson a bunch of strength. Slew a whole army with a donkey’s jawbone, that kind of thing. Now Delilah, she was a temptress. Got old Samson to tell her his secret. So Delilah gets her servant to cut off Samson’s hair and calls in her friends the Philistines, who poke out Samson’s eyes and mutilate him till he’s hardly a man anymore. He’s just something they torture. That’s Delilah. Real credit to females. Odd name, is all I’m saying.”

The conversation shouldn’t go like this; it isn’t fair. Zelda knows the same Bible stories, but her body betrays her, turns her into the stooge Strickland expects—she can feel her eyes widen and her lips tremble. Strickland scans the file, and Zelda can hear his silent tsk, tsk. Zelda is ashamed to feel relief when Strickland shifts his gaze to Elisa. Zelda can still hear his thoughts, though. Laziness isn’t strictly a Negro problem, no sir. The lower class is the lower class because they can’t find their bootstraps. Take this white woman. All right face, nice enough figure. If she had an ounce of gumption, she’d be puttering about a tidy house taking care of kids, not working the graveyard shift like some sort of nocturnal beast.

Strickland crunches candy, picks up the second file.

“Elisa Esposito,” Strickland says. “Es-po-si-to. You part Mexican or something?”

Zelda glances at Elisa. Her friend’s face is taut with the particular anxiety she suffers when someone doesn’t yet know she’s mute. Zelda clears her throat and intercedes.

“It’s Italian, sir. It’s a name they give to orphans. She was found on the riverbank when she was a baby, and they gave her the name.”

Strickland frowns at Zelda. She knows the look. He’s getting sick of hearing her talk. Creating self-aggrandizing myths, he must believe, is yet another flaw of the common class. This girl here was found by the river. This boy here was birthed with a caul. Pathetic origin stories chanted as if proof of divinity.

“How long you two known each other?” he grunts.

“Whole time Elisa’s been here, sir. Fourteen years?”

“That’s good. Means both of you know how things run here. How things need to stay. I guess you’re the two who found my fingers?” He rubs his head. He’s sweating. He looks like he’s in agony. “That’s a question. You can reply.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to go ahead and thank you for that,” he says. “We thought they ended up—it doesn’t matter what we thought. Now I’m not real thrilled about the paper bag. Seems like there should have been something better than a bag. The doc says a wet rag would have been just as good as ice. He said they wasted a lot of time sterilizing the fingers before they could label the nerves and whatnot. I’m not trying to blame you here. But still. Right now, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like what Delilah here said about having children. The fingers will take or they won’t. Well, there you have it. That’s what I have to say about that.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Zelda says. “We did our best.”

An earnest apology delivered quick before you can feel bad about it—that’s Zelda’s method. Strickland nods, but then there’s trouble. He looks to Elisa, expecting the same, and impatience darkens his tired, pained face. Elisa’s silence comes off as rudeness. There’s no hope in dodging this. Zelda sends a prayer up and steps into the lion cage once more.

“Elisa doesn’t talk, sir.”