“I will go myself then,” she said, half-daring him to argue.
“It’s better that way. Meet up with your friends from work. I know you always have plenty to talk about.”
Inaya turned away so he could not see her anger. She packed her things and left for work without speaking another word.
The day was cool but clear, so she decided to take the long walk into town. All the houses along the street were built much like hers: two- and three-storied houses of mud-brick and bug secretions painted in brilliant colors, no windows on the first floor, surrounded by eight-foot-high polished stone fences wound in green ivy, clematis, stranglethorn, and the peculiar orange flowers they called ladylilies. Tirhanis loved their private spaces, but she knew that if she tried any of the gates along the way, they would be unlocked. No intercoms, no padlocks. It would not occur to any Tirhani to enter uninvited. Not in this neighborhood.
As she got closer to the sea, the air became cooler and wetter. The men she passed along the way often touched their fingers to their foreheads as she passed, a polite gesture of respect paid to most women—so long as they were modestly dressed.
She arrived at the gates of the Ras Tiegan embassy at the city center an hour later and checked in with the records administrator, who gave her the files for the day. In the hubbub of the embassy, she was just another records clerk. Efficient, neat, always on time. The sorting and filing did not bother her. It made her less noticeable. It was not her real work.
Inaya wound in and out of the records office, collecting sensitive files from the ambassador’s offices. Top secret files weren’t sent via slide or radio or any other kind of organic transmission. Information traversed through the office via clerk courier.
Her husband was a Mhorian shifter. It was why she was permitted to reside in Tirhan. He’d gotten residency as easily as breathing. Hers, as a standard Ras Tiegan refugee, had been nearly impossible. Until she married.
In Tirhan she was Inaya Khadija. She was not registered as a shifter. When she applied for the job at the embassy, it was a simple matter to alter her own blood code so it did not match that of Inaya il Parait, mutant shifter and member of the underground shifter-rights group of Ras Tieg, the Maquis, daughter to violent activists and sister to a rogue com specialist.
If Ras Tieg or Tirhan or any of the rest ever realized how easy it was for a… thing like her to do what she did, she would spend the rest of her days having pieces cut and bottled and measured in some magician’s operating theater in Ras Tieg. And it would be done with a far greater efficiency than was already being done in Ras Tieg with terror squads in their smoked-glass bakkies.
But until then, she was in the heart of the Ras Tiegan embassy, hair covered, head bowed, shuttling top secret correspondence. Her brother Taite would have appreciated the irony.
The records she was tasked with today were three months old, ready to be input into the central database for storage. That usually meant the information was old enough to pose no security risk if the database was infected.
She found a quiet corner in the transcription hall and sat down at a com unit. Com specialists were hard to come by in any country. That skill, at least, had helped her make her own way in Tirhan.
Inaya paged through the folders first. When asked why, she told her supervisors she was verifying that all of the pages listed in the index were included. In fact, it was a cursory scan to see if it was anything she could use.
She fed the pages into the com. Beetles chittered and stirred. She adjusted the chemical composition of the plate accordingly. The best types of com specialists were shifters. Magicians didn’t need the inorganic components of a com to speak to one another, and regular deadtech specialists and tissue mechanics—though useful for repair work for inorganic components—often didn’t have the gut feel for what the bugs needed. It was about sound, smell, impressions, just as much as intuition. You learned when and how to physically alter the environment of the bugs to get the results you desired. She did with chemical potions what magicians did with will alone.
The com spit out a transparent casing with a cocooned beetle inside, wrapped in delicate white strands of organic com code imprinted with the folder’s contents.
She labeled the casing and filled out the deposit receipt. One copy for the com records here, one for her superiors, and one that would go with the casing to the archives.
The com recorded the date and time the receipt was printed in the backup module buried under the floor of the embassy, row upon row of living beetles wrapped in filament. She had glimpsed the room once from the archives. A filtered, iron-banded door had opened briefly, and inside she saw a dark room, heard the low purr of some kind of dehumidifier. Then the door closed, a second filter came down, and there was nothing.
Afternoon prayer signaled the end of her workday. Inaya packed her things and left quietly with half a dozen other clerks; a buffer of anonymity.
Most days, Inaya picked up her son Tatie from the madrassa and spent the evening helping him with his studies while the housekeeper looked after her daughter Isfahan. But today was different.
From the public call box outside the embassy, she called the housekeeper and said she would be delayed. No explanation. Most lines were bugged in Tirhan. The housekeeper agreed to pick up Tatie, and Inaya stepped onto an elevated train headed toward the Ras Tiegan district. The train smelled of peppermint and ammonia, and the floors were covered in a clear organic mesh that kept them clean.
When the train arrived, she waited half an hour more to board another train. This one smelled of smoke, cheap curry, and unwashed bodies. The men on this train did not touch their foreheads as she passed, and most of the women had their hair uncovered. The company was much more mixed. She heard Ras Tiegan, Drucian, a few snatches of Mhorian. As the train slowed she heard a deep woman’s voice speaking Nasheenian, and that made her turn.
Two women dressed in long trousers and tattered tunics sat at the back of the car, smoking. They were older women, their hair shot through with white, faces deeply lined and weathered. One of them was missing three fingers on her left hand, and she turned mid-laugh to look over at Inaya. A jagged cavern of scar tissue stared out at Inaya from the place where the woman’s opposite eye should have been.
Inaya shuddered as the train slowed. She pushed the door release and stepped onto the platform—the only one to alight from the train. She hurried down the steps to the street below. Above her, the train moved on.
She waited a full five minutes more to make certain no one had followed her from the train. The train had taken her far south of Shirhazi to a little workers’ settlement called Goli that circled the weapons plants. Some of the better towns were owned by the weapons manufacturers and had their own stores, churches, mosques, and entertainment halls, but not this one. Goli was just a squatter town built upon the remnants of an old Ras Tiegan city called Nouveau Nanci that the Tirhanis had obliterated during their colonization of this part of Ras Tieg more than a hundred years before.
The city had never recovered. Inaya had a special place in her heart for the crumbling buildings and empty fountains here. Nanci—the city Nouveau Nanci had been named for—was the city of her birth in Ras Tieg.
The sidewalks were clotted with filth, so she stayed to the edge of the street and picked her way to the pawn shop on the other side of the rail platform. She did not always meet her contact here, of course. They rotated locations according to their schedules. Her contact specialized in selling antiquated books and recordings, and Inaya’s husband worked in archaeology and translation. Their meetings were not entirely clandestine, as their purported purpose was entirely within reason.
What they spoke of, however, was not at all reasonable.
Elodie, her contact, waited for her behind the counter. She was a short, pot-bellied Ras Tiegan woman with a pinched little face that reminded Inaya of a stag beetle. Elodie’s brother owned the specialized pawn shop, but Elodie ran it.
Elodi
e greeted her with a warm smile. “I have some things for you in the back,” Elodie said.
They walked into the cluttered back room. Her tall, fine-boned brother took her place behind the counter.
Elodie closed the door and made room for her at a battered, stone-topped table stacked with empty take-out containers and bug carapaces.
“Do you have anything for me?” Elodie asked.
Inaya passed her a transparent casing. “Has business been well?”
“Tolerable. I’m hearing some interesting buzz. I wondered what you had.”
“Everything I see is three months old.”
Elodie sat across from her. Above, a derelict room fan juddered irregularly, emitting a soft whomp-whomp-whir.
“Any odd visitors at the embassy?”
“The ambassador scheduled a dinner party with the Mhorians, but it’s a public party. No one special.”
“Could it be covering another meeting? Do you have the guest list?”
Inaya nodded at the recording. “It’s on there. I will be at the party as well. I was worried more about what they’re doing funneling money to some magistrate in Beh Ayin.”
Elodie picked up the canister and slipped it into the front pocket of her vest. “Beh Ayin? I’ve heard of revolutionary activity there. A few isolated cases. I assumed it wasn’t approved by the government.”
“They’d prefer it wasn’t. They’ll probably blame it on us. Whatever it is, Ras Tieg is paying a magistrate in Beh Ayin a lot of money to stay quiet about it.”
“Or house and supply them. I’ll look into it. Have you heard anything of Nasheenians?”
“Nasheenians?” Inaya’s own surprise as she said it, out loud, startled even her. “At the embassy? No. No more than usual. Nasheenians are notoriously poor negotiators. I don’t see many in Tirhan.”
“There have been reports from… others that Nasheenians have been more friendly than usual with members of the Ras Tiegan government.”
“Their Queen is half Ras Tiegan. They’ve always been friendly.”
“These aren’t the Queen’s people.”
Inaya drew a sharp breath. “They’ve been approached by bel dames, then.”
Elodie nodded.
“I haven’t heard or seen anything of bel dames in Tirhan. Much of what I’ve brought is business as usual at the embassy.”
“Do you think you’re compromised?”
Inaya was quiet a long moment. Was she under suspicion at the embassy? No one had followed her. Her duties and hours had not changed. All the same women still spoke to her. The men remained polite but distant. There had been no changes to her station in years.
“No,” she said. “Perhaps your other contact is mistaken?”
“Perhaps,” Elodie said. “But it’s more than one reporting on bel dames in Tirhan. We’re trying to put together a full picture with only a few ragged pieces. We need more women like you at home, Inaya. I know it’s safer for your children here, but a woman like you… should never have been able to infiltrate an embassy, let alone remain undiscovered so long. I’ve lost three women to that embassy. You have some gifts.”
“I am merely lucky,” Inaya said, and knew it was time to go. When the conversation turned to how she accomplished what she did, it was always best to end it.
Elodie passed over a large box made of pounded beetle carapaces. It was tied closed with muslin. Inside, there would be three or four ancient metal and amber casings, transmissions created hundreds of years ago. Her gift to Khos—some old work on Mhorian or Tirhani history, architecture, archaeology. Her cover story for coming out to this poor shanty town at the edge of Shirhazi.
Elodie walked her out. Inaya waited twenty minutes for the next train. By the time she arrived home, the world had gone the blue-violet wash of dusk.
The housekeeper had dinner waiting. Tatie and Isfahan were hungry and fussy. She longed for the day when she could send them out to bring home curry. Khos was not home.
Inaya ate and asked Tatie about his day at the madrassa. He stopped often to wipe at his runny nose and leaking eyes. She pretended to listen to him as he answered her questions, but in her heart, she was telling herself, it’s just allergies. Just another sneezing fit, runny nose, itchy eyes. Most children had allergies. They grew out of it.
Not all of them became shifters.
After the children were in bed, she sent the housekeeper home. Inaya sat at her desk for some time, admiring the old casings. What had those people thought the world would become, so long ago? Did they foresee any of this? A world locked in perpetual strife, persecuted shifters, endless contamination, a centuries-long world war….
She heard Tatie snuffling and sneezing from his room down the long hall. After a time, she went to him.
Inaya sat up with her son most of the night. She turned him onto his stomach and told him to tilt his head to keep the mucus draining from his nose instead of down his throat. She kept antibiotics on hand for his throat infections, and her own, but the more of them she could avoid, the better. Resistance to stronger strains of antibiotics happened fast. Soon, he would need a magician to treat all his ills. She’d had sinus infections all through her childhood. Allergies this severe were often the first sign of a shifter’s abilities coming to the fore.
She brought him juice, and more tissues, and lay with him after he’d gone to sleep, holding him close, stroking his hair.
It was a risk. She’d always known it was a risk, to have a child with another shifter. But she had expected this from Isfahan, her legitimate child, not Tatie, not her little lizard’s child. It would have been easier with Isfahan. Girls were expected to be covered and closeted. Hiding her away during the worst of it, when her shifting came into maturity, would have resulted in very little talk. But Tatie? Pulling a boy from a well-off family out of school? Unthinkable.
Unless we tell them he’s sickly, she thought, the way her brother Taite was sick in Ras Tieg. Her brother had barely survived childhood. He’d been allergic to everything. He’d borne the spotty, pale face and skinny frame of a perpetually sick child his entire life.
Please, God, she thought—not my children too.
At dawn, when Inaya finally slept, Khos had still not returned.
Inaya surprised herself when she realized she missed him. When the world looked grim, she found she longed for even the most stifling routine. There was comfort in the waiting, the smoldering—being always on the edge of bursting out, bursting free.
7.
At night, when the moons were in progression, the desert did not look black but dusky violet, the color of a new bruise after a hard fight. The moons wouldn’t reach their full size in the night sky for another four years; they were on a twenty-year rotation that took them so close to Umayma that they would make up a quarter of the sky at the height of their progression, and be no bigger than a thumbnail at the end of their decline.
On the night train ride across the desert, heading toward the front from Mushtallah, leaning out the window in the conductor’s car, Nyx wondered if life here was better than what it had been up there. There was nothing up there on those hulking disks anymore but abandoned ore mines and shattered spires marking the pressurized gateways of subsurface cities—just ground up bone and bug secretions. The Firsts had waited it out up there for a thousand years while magicians made the world half-habitable. Now the moons were just bloody dust. Some days Nyx wasn’t so sure the world down here was any better than what was up there.
The train conductor was an old acquaintance of Nyx’s from her days back in primary school. Nyx hadn’t gotten through school much past the threes on a schooling tier that went to five. By the time she was eleven she was already spending most of her time cleaning guns with her brothers and teaching her sister how to box.
The conductor slowed the train just before dawn so Nyx and Eshe could get off within view of the highway. From there, they followed the ribbon of shiny organic pavement and turned off onto the Majd exit where th
e dunes ate at the road. As the day got hot, they walked down into the flatland sprawl of the broken little city of Basra.
Basra wasn’t much of a city, more like a watering hole on the way to grander places like Mushtallah or more strategically important ones like Punjai. Most of the people living there worked at the textile and munitions plant on the southern side of the city, a government-subsidized operation that blew yellow smoke over the city all day and orange haze all night. There was a little cantina on the edge of town called the Boxing Matron. It was one of six cantinas on the main drag. Basra also had four brothels, two laundries, one grocery store, and no mosque. During most prayer times, the woman who owned the tallest building in the city—a fight club—sent a servant up to the roof to call out prayer.
Nyx pushed into the dusty interior of the Boxing Matron, and stumbled over the sandals left at the entrance by other women. She didn’t take off her own. She didn’t trust anybody in Basra with her sandals, not after what had happened to a pair of hers the last time she tried to act the part of a polite guest in a dried up mining town in the interior.
They were both thirsty. Eshe had the glazed look of a kid left too long in the sun. He stumbled in after her, oblivious to the shoes. Nyx went up to the sticky bar where a leathery, wind-bitten old bar matron with a right hand like a corpse tended the whiskey. She was missing her left arm. She wore a pistol on her skinny left hip.
Nyx asked the bar matron where she could find Suha, but got only a snide little leer in return. Half a buck got her to talk.
“Second floor. Third room on the left,” the bar matron said.
Nyx climbed the stairs and banged on Suha’s door. Suha met them with a pistol in her hand, and lowered it when she saw who they were.
“I need you to find me a secure line,” Nyx said, pushing past her into the grimy room.
Suha holstered her pistol “In Basra? You must be joking.”
“I need to make a secure call.”
“To who?” Eshe asked.
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