Null States

by Malka Older

  “Two injuries … shit. Khaled’s gone. Damn it!” He turns and walks away from her, going to the other side of the roof, and after a moment, Roz hears his voice: he’s calling someone. She slides back down to her knees, looking out over the parapet to give him as much privacy as she can. A message comes up from the security team, asking whether she wants reinforcements tonight. Roz replies in the negative, then fiddles with her handheld, wondering if there’s anything else she can do right now. Start the incident report; that would be good. She realizes her underarms are dark with sweat. She’s auto-entered her name, position, and mission number when she gets the reply from security: Copy. Returning to Fasher Base. Debrief tomorrow 0800. Consider any possible security improvements. Roz snorts and goes back to her report. When she’s finished, she stands. Minzhe is still on the other side of the roof, but he’s not talking anymore. She goes over and touches his shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says.

  “Thanks,” he says. “I should have expected something like this after hearing about all the other battles.”

  “Expecting it wouldn’t make it any better,” Roz says. “Is there anything I can do?”

  He shakes his head, then hesitates. “Maybe. I’ll talk to them tomorrow, see if I can convince them to take some assistance from us. But I don’t know. They are … wary of outsiders.”

  Roz was expecting him to say proud. She remembers Commander Hamid’s apparent bafflement when she suggested he request help. “And for us? Anything we can do here?”

  Minzhe looks around the roof. “I don’t think they were after us. But yeah, keeping a crow here for evacuations would be a good idea. Just in case.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Roz doesn’t expect to see Suleyman at the café the morning after the battle, but she goes anyway, hoping, and drinks her coffee alone. She keeps remembering that Minzhe said there were two injuries as well as the man killed in action. He would have mentioned if one of them were the governor, wouldn’t he? There’s nothing about the attack on Information. It’s an eerie feeling, as if it didn’t happen and she only dreamed it. After her coffee, Roz walks the entire mural wall, possibly hoping to find Suleyman arriving late, and there’s no mention of the fighting there, either. She doesn’t understand how an event like that can disappear so completely. What about the death certificate? Medical records?

  Roz hasn’t had many direct dealings with Amran recently. The field lead rubs her the wrong way, and since Maria manages her so much better, she has let her deal with the kid. Today, though, she calls her over immediately after staff debrief. It was a difficult meeting anyway, since she had to tell them about the attack the night before. Minzhe was conspicuously absent, having gone in to the barracks early. Amran looked disturbed and Maria surprised (“I was watching crappy vids in my hut while this was going on?”), but they agree that she did the right thing by telling the security team not to come.

  “It was not an attack on us,” Amran says.

  “We don’t know that,” Roz points out.

  “If it was an attack on us, they would have gotten us,” Amran says, and Maria nods in agreement.

  So Amran is already looking a bit shaky when Roz sits down with her. “I don’t understand how it’s possible that these battles don’t make it onto Information,” Roz says. “Can you find out for me?”

  Amran twitches. “It’s—There aren’t many feeds outside of town, because nothing happens there, and—”

  “It’s not just the feeds,” Roz says, although it does remind her she needs to figure out what they’re using the feed money for. “What about death certificates? What about equipment loss? There should be some kind of record that something happened last night. Can you check into it? It’s not your fault,” she adds belatedly, and a little disingenuously. She does think Amran should have done something about this by now, but Amran brightens so obviously at the reassurance that Roz starts to hope it’s true. She sends the younger woman off with a smile and literal pat on the back, and then focuses on her lists of foreigners.

  * * *

  Mishima’s entry point is through 888. Someone there—or maybe the whole government, who knows?—owes Information a favor or has decided that this particular exploit is of mutual interest. It’s a useful angle. In its pre-governmental form, 888’s private sector leaders were commercial and economic threats to China’s political class. Now they are one of its best conduits to the outside world. Unlike 1China, 888 aren’t controlled by the sovereign nation of China, but their shared roots and shared interests mean the micro-democratic government and the null state are often aligned. This uneasy relationship is perfect for Mishima’s purposes: an 888 citizen has a relatively easy time getting into China and being accepted there, but is not expected to know much about the country. More important, 888 aren’t expected to hand over intel about her.

  Mishima’s cover identity, Chen Jun, is given citizenship in an 888 centenal in Singapore, a city Mishima knows well enough to describe as her hometown. She spends an intense three days there, brushing up on centenal specifics, 888 and Peranakan culture, and the details of her job at Moliner Productions. It’s a pretty sweet setup, actually. Moliner is one of those businesses that see extravagant success as a reason to keep bucking the status quo, in the cosseting of staff if nothing else. Their offices are in Tiong Bahru, in a repurposed water treatment plant. Despite the high quality of the working spaces and free treats in the break rooms, most of the staff spend their days keeping the surrounding cafés, bookstores, and bookstore cafés afloat, brainstorming over lattes and char siu bao.

  Moliner is known for breaking content taboos, and Mishima wonders why China would have selected them, out of all the production companies in the world, for a contract (unless it’s a trap). At least during these days before going off to her doom, Mishima gets to fangirl over all her favorite content producers. Since she’s pretending to work there—and most of the staff believe she does work there, brought in to headquarters after years of off-site consulting—she even gets to make suggestions. Before she leaves, she feels comfortable enough to pitch Poppy Chen, the visionary founder and CEO, her idea for a series about a character with narrative disorder, very meta-meta. The weather is good, her borrowed apartment is lovely, and the food is stellar. During those days, Mishima twice catches herself pretending this is her actual life.

  * * *

  Roz is still wrestling with the problem of the consultants. Even if she hasn’t found a link to the assassination yet, the industry that has grown up around ushering new governments into micro-democracy seems like an area ripe for corruption. The consultants arrived with a baffling array of specializations: Data Management in Fledgling Democracies; Capacity Building for Bureaucratic Staff; Highly Participatory Election Monitoring Techniques; Gender Equivalence in Micro-Democracy; Micro-Accountability. Her eyes start to glaze over before she gets halfway down the list, but her insight on the feeds question has given her an idea. She shifts her view of the database to something she understands: budgets.

  After reading for half an hour, Roz is convinced she understands budgets better than these consultants do. She has to stop herself from marking up the errors and inaccuracies: even if that were her job, these projects are already done and paid for. Paid for by Information, for the most part; accession to micro-democracy includes substantial assistance in areas that are believed to support successful integration. Highly participatory monitoring and gender equivalence, apparently. In another section of her workspace she flips open an Information budget cube and finds the line for technical support to the DarFur government, then sets up a cross-ref between that and the consultant proposals.

  And there it is, what she’s been looking for all this time: a discrepancy.

  Roz jumps, tingling with shock. Minzhe is calling her, on urgent. Roz blinks him through. “What—”

  He interrupts her, panting and desperate. “They’ve come for me, I’m not sure what—” In the background of his projection she ca
n see colors, people’s faces, someone shouting. He’s running. He’s running through the market.

  “Who?” she asks.

  “The militia, they’re trying to arrest me—” He can’t get more than a few words out. He’s leaping and dodging his way through crowds, and now Roz is sure the shouting is aimed at him. She’s on her feet already.

  “I’m coming,” she says.

  The heat outside the building is dazzling, but she doesn’t stop to get her hat. As she crosses the courtyard, Roz slips her hand into her satchel, finds the personal Lumper, presses it almost talismanically: the first thing you do, always, on your way into battle.

  “They’re saying—” The rest is unintelligible, blurred out by yelling and ambient noise and Minzhe’s panting breaths. Roz moves faster, barely hearing the splat of guano falling behind her as she runs through the compound entrance and swings herself toward the market in a full sprint. She blinks to call in help from Doha, to locate Minzhe on her map, when the call goes dead.

  “Maria, where are you?” Roz says as she plunges through the fringe of vendors around the market proper. She heads toward the hand pump; she thought she recognized the muddy clearing behind Minzhe. Doha comes back telling her there are too few feed cameras; they are analyzing vids from the last few minutes and have caught Minzhe on a few of them, but they can’t pinpoint his current location. Cursing, Roz tries to reconnect with him, but he’s not answering. She’s heading toward the militia barracks as she hears Maria’s voice.

  “I’m at the barbecue. Some militia just ran by, and there’s a crowd gathering.”

  “Careful!” Roz warns. “They may be—not acting rationally.” Otherwise, why would they be after Minzhe? Last she heard—she weaves around a trio of slow-swaying women with wide tin trays of potatoes and onions on their heads—he and the militiamen were best of buddies.

  She whips around a corner and sees the crowd, a thicket of twisting, shoving bodies all aiming to get closer or farther away. Roz strains her neck, blinking against the glare, and catches a glimpse of Maria’s light hair under that shiny translucent scarf. “Maria! I’m coming around from your right,” she yells, starting to work her way around. “Can you see anything?”

  “No,” Maria says, short of breath or maybe crying. “But I thought I heard shots.”

  The glimmer of light on metal or plastic.

  Roz blasts a message out to Malakal, Nejime, and Nougaz. “Any security backup in range of us, please direct to Kas immediately!”

  Malakal responds before she makes it to Maria’s side: “InfoSec en route from Abyei, ETA ninety-three minutes.”

  Roz grabs Maria’s arm, and Maria jumps around, a Zippo-sized flamethrower in her hand. “Easy,” Roz yells, trying to back into the jostling crowd. “Put that away and let’s get out of here.”

  “But—you think Minzhe’s in that?” Maria nods toward the densest part of the crowd.

  “I don’t know, but this is delicate and we don’t need to make it worse.” Or get ourselves killed, Roz thinks. “We can’t do anything for him from here.”

  Maria hesitates. Roz takes her arm again. “Come on, at least we can pull back out of the crowd.”

  They edge away, and Roz leads them down a mostly empty alley between padlocked warehouses. She keeps going straight, figuring to get out of the market and work back around the edges instead of trying to find their way through the midst of the shops and risk getting caught up in the mob again. She blasts out a security alert to all staff in Kas, including the stringers: Shelter in place at Information compound or home, avoid the market and maintain comms. She is speaking through a message to update Malakal when a call comes in from Amran. Annoyed that she didn’t just talk on the secure channel or send a message, Roz accepts it.

  “I’m at the militia station,” Amran says, and Roz can make out the pitted concrete building in the background. “They say they’ve arrested Minzhe and are bringing him back here.”

  Roz exhales with sudden relief. “They’ve arrested him,” she tells Maria. “So, presumably he’s alive.” Her imagination had Minzhe crushed in that mess or shot dead. Back to Amran: “Is he all right?”

  “No report on his condition,” Amran says. “From the way they are talking, I’m pretty sure they beat him up. Or they will.”

  “Stay there—I’m headed over,” Roz tells her. “Have they said what he’s charged with?”

  “You have to understand: they haven’t said anything formally,” Amran says. “But what I’m hearing is espionage.”

  There’s a curious combination of shock and confirmation. “Okay, I’ll be there in”—Roz glances at her map projection—“two and a half minutes. Stay there, and if you see Minzhe, try to keep eyes on him if at all possible.” She signs off and sends a new message for the Information higher-ups. Urgently requesting legal support conversant in laws of the DarFur government! She turns to Maria. “Go back, eat, sleep if you can. We’re going to need to have witnesses with him nonstop.”

  * * *

  Roz stays at the militia station all night. They won’t let her in to meet with Minzhe, but she can sit outside his door, which has a tiny barred window. It’s too dark to see inside, but when the night is very still, she can hear his breathing, and twice he whimpers in his sleep. Amran sits next to her, refusing to leave even though Roz tells her they’re going to need to do this in shifts. Except for one guard, who’s young and twitchy and won’t meet her eyes, the militiamen are all at the other end of the barracks. Roz is glad because she doesn’t think she can stand to look at them right now.

  At some point in the night, Amran tells her that one of the men has been locked in an office on the other side of the barracks.

  “Locked in an office? Why?” The urgency has faded and Roz feels bleary, ineffective, and old.

  “He tried to help Minzhe,” Amran says, not sounding too sprightly herself. “He told them the accusations weren’t true, but they didn’t believe him. They beat him too and locked him in the office because there’s only one cell.”

  Roz has nothing to say to that, although she would kiss this militiaman if it weren’t a totally inappropriate thing to do in this context.

  “I don’t think they will prosecute him, though,” Amran goes on. “I think most of them like Minzhe, and they understand someone doesn’t want to believe he’s—that he did something wrong. They locked him up to make sure he’s not—that he won’t help Minzhe escape or something.”

  Something finally sinks in. “How do you know all this?”

  Amran dithers. “I was asking, I was talking to them. Before you got here. A few of the—of the militia guys. I—I know them from our outreach efforts.”

  “That’s good,” Roz says, leaning her head back and closing her eyes, just for a moment. “That’s excellent work. You have informants.”

  Amran says nothing, and Roz wishes she could see her face, whether she’s happy, but she’s too tired to look.

  Later, she wonders if Minzhe might have overheard them.

  At dawn, they are relieved by Maria, who shows up, quiet and serious, with the first installment of legal support, a natty, petite young man from El Fasher. Roz sends Amran home—she appreciates her help today, but Roz is frayed to the point of exhaustion and can’t stand to be in her company any longer.

  Once she is sure no one is watching to see which way she goes, Roz heads over to the mural. She finds the wall before it intersects with the market, where it is still blank, and walks along it toward the café. The drawings begin with bits of sporadic graffiti, messages and doodles, sketches, then full, well-thought out panels. She was hoping to catch the children painting, but they must do it in the middle of the night, because she sees no one working on it. She gets to the café and keeps going, her feet heavy in the uneven sand, until the drawings peter out on the other side. Nothing on yesterday’s excitement in the market. Nothing about Minzhe. Nothing about a spy.

  CHAPTER 28

  From Singapore Mishima fli
es to an 888 centenal outside of Chengdu. The job will be in China’s capital, Xi’an, but according to her 888 liaisons, the immigration process is much stricter at the capital airport than at the land borders. Moliner informed the Chinese contractor that some time in the hinterlands would be helpful for narrative refinement purposes.

  It’s helpful for Mishima’s other purposes, too. Although Chengdu is still some two thousand kilometers from the K-stan war, they’re empty kilometers by Chinese standards. The city shows distinct signs of nervousness: soaring prices and supply gaps for basic items, going out of business signs, harried expressions. She soaks it in over a few hours of walking and one extremely spicy meal, then heads for the border.

  * * *

  When Roz gets back to the compound, Malakal is there, drinking coffee with Halima and three InfoSecs, newly arrived. There is a gleam of metal prosthetics from under the plastic table; Roz nods at Simone Dumitrache, who used to run security at the Doha Hub and lost her legs to an explosion outside Caracas a year ago. She doesn’t stop to chat on her way to the latrine, though. She didn’t even want to see the bathroom options at the militia station.

  While she’s in there, she sends Malakal a message, since it’s crowded in the courtyard and she’s too tired to do a dance to get him in private: Did you contact Minzhe’s mother?

  When she comes out of the latrine, he’s waiting for her by the entrance to her hut; tiredly, she gestures him in. “It’s not standard practice to inform family at the time of an arrest,” Malakal says without preamble. He’s standing just inside the doorway without moving; he has to hunch his tall frame against the curving roof.

  “I would call this more of a kidnapping than an arrest,” Roz says.

  “It’s an arrest under their laws.”

  “She’s only a couple of centenals away.”

  “Exactly!” Malakal pauses, calms himself. “You know perfectly well that if the governor of an 888 centenal finds out that her son is being held ‘only a couple of centenals away’ under suspicion of espionage—which is, by the way, a capital crime in this government—this will quickly escalate into a major intergovernmental incident.”