Someday.
Not today.
She dressed and walked downstairs. The floor was made of soft organic matting that clung gently to the bottoms of her sandals as she walked. She stepped across the courtyard at the center of the house and through the airy archway into the amber-colored kitchen. The soft susurrus of the water moving through the walls to cool the house comforted her. There are worse fates, she thought, than being the first wife of a shifter… in Tirhan, at least.
The housekeeper had already taken the children to school, and left out breakfast for her and Khos at the stone table. Khos stood at the radio table at the center of the room, pulling information from the radio onto his personal slide. She watched him scroll through old recordings of council meetings and mullahs’ speeches.
“Something in there you miss?” Inaya asked lightly.
“Possibly. They’ve started a dig on the north shore. It’s looking like a Mhorian settlement that predates the one along the coast. I needed something on the geography of the region, but there’s nothing here in the archives.” He wiped his hand over the counter, and the bugs inside ceased their glow and transmission. The counter went blank.
“I haven’t been able to find lizard eggs in a week,” Inaya said, hovering over the toast and fried grub spread the housekeeper had laid out.
“I’m not hungry.”
She rolled that idea around for a long moment before answering. “I’ll be late tonight.”
“I will too. I need to stop by the archives.”
He did not, in fact, need to stop by the archives. Inaya had learned years ago what that shorthand meant. She knew he kept his other wife in the Mhorian district, a buxom woman with hair the color of dark honey. So far as Inaya knew, there was only the one Other. Tirhan permitted him four, but he had never spoken to Inaya about the other marriage. She had deduced that on her own when the local magistrate had come by for his signature. He’d signed the paperwork and said nothing to her. In fact, it was not the idea of another wife that bothered her. It was his assumption that she did not and would never know, as if she were a stupid child, a gross appendage. What bothered her was her continued complicity in pretending she did not know.
But then, there was much about her that he did not know. Perhaps there was some fairness to that.
A house built on lies. It was all very Tirhani.
“You’ll be at the embassy?” Khos asked.
“I’m running errands for the Minister. There’s a dinner with the Mhorian ambassador and his delegation in a few days. She’d like us both to come.”
Khos made a face. “I have no interest in making nice among Mhorians. You know how they are.”
You can’t make nice for Mhorians and the Ras Tiegan ambassador, but you have no trouble fucking your fat Mhorian wife on the other side of the district whenever it pleases you, she thought. She held her tongue. Old hurts. Dwelling on them didn’t change anything.
“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.
Elodie 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.”