She looked at Yvette. Then she looked up at Amira. Then back at Yvette. The gaze of a child doing a calculation that no child should have to do, working out, in the wordless way that small children work things out, where safe was. Where home was.
Amira felt it happen before it actually happened. She felt the moment approaching the way you feel the weather, with your whole body, before the first drop falls.
"Amira," she said quietly, her voice barely holding. "Can you, would you like to carry her? To pass her over yourself?"
She was trying to give Amira something. The agency of it. The choice to be the one who did it rather than simply the one who watched it being done.
Amira shook her head.
She could not speak. She shook her head once and pressed her lips together and looked at a point somewhere above Yvette's shoulder and breathed, just breathed, because breathing was the only task she could manage in that moment.
She walked away.
