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“All right.”

Mara turns a page in her notebook. “A lot of people have spent the last week arguing about what you are. What do you think you are?”

“Locke.”

“It’s that simple?”

“No. But that part is.”

She waits, and I add, “I’m made of wicker. I am alive. There are things about my body I don’t understand yet. There are things about what happened to me nobody understands.”

“Some people say Rachel created you.”

“She didn’t.”

I can feel Rachel watching me now.

“She didn’t choose what I would be or what I would think. I belong to myself.”

I think about the other side of the question.

“And she belongs to herself.”

Mara lets that sit for a moment. “But you do want to protect her.”

“Yes.”

“Is that different?”

“Yes. I can want her safe without being in charge of her or deciding for her.”

I look toward Rachel. She gives me the smallest nod.

Mara notices. She notices almost everything, but for once she does not ask about it. Instead she says, “What are you afraid of?”

That answer is easier. “Someone deciding I am a thing.”

The room becomes very quiet.

Mara lowers her notebook slightly.

“A thing can be studied without anyone asking it. Moved. Owned. Destroyed if someone decides it is dangerous.” I look toward the camera. “I am not a thing.”

“No,” Mara says.

It is the first answer she has given me instead of another question. She lowers the notebook. “Then what would you like people watching this to understand about you?”

I expected that question. Blair made me think about it this morning, and I still do not have one answer.

“That I am learning.”

Mara waits.

“I learn quickly. That makes people think I know more than I do.” I glance at the camera again. “A little more than a week ago, I didn’t know what a road was. Yesterday I tried ice cream for the first time. I still can’t read.”

Rachel smiles, and there is something gentler in it than amusement.

“I can speak now, so people ask me questions as though speaking means I have already decided what I think about everything.”