“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.
A
t 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 the 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.
“Since when do you ask questions?”
He frowned.
“You forget I used to be a bel dame.”
He rolled his eyes. “Like you’d let anybody forget.”
“I can still pound little boys’ heads in,” Nyx said, and gave Eshe’s head a soft shove.
Eshe rolled his eyes.
They went out for a drink and some food, and Suha got her a mostly secure line at a laundry across the street from the Boxing Matron. Nyx punched in a call pattern she’d learned by rote nearly two decades before. She wasn’t totally sure it would work, but it was worth the gamble.
The line hissed and buzzed in her ear before going flat. A familiar voice said, “Connecting to?”
“Fatima Kosan.”
“One moment.”
The operator on Bloodmount put her on hold. The line clicked and hissed again for a long time, then went silent.
“Identification, please,” the operator said.
“Nyxnissa so Dasheem.”
“One moment.”
More waiting. Suha leaned against one of the warm walls of the laundry and spit sen. Nyx leaned against the call box. She wasn’t sure if her voice was still on the identity reel the bel dames kept on file. She couldn’t imagine they’d purge it, but you never knew.
“Connecting,” the operator said.
The line clicked. Then Fatima’s voice. “Better be good,” Fatima said.
“Was it Chenjans or your girls?”
A long pause. Nyx heard the line hiss and pop again. Then silence. The sound of Fatima breathing, low.
Then, “What does it matter?”
“I want to bring them in. For myself. For Nasheen. Not you. I’m not yours.”
Fatima laughed. It started small, like a hiccup, then became a full-throated, repeating laugh that went on for a long time.
Nyx pulled the receiver away from her ear.
Fatima’s laughter abruptly stopped. “You know what’s coming now, don’t you?”
“What do you know about the rogues?”
“I know they’re operating out of Tirhan. Little more than that. Before they wanted you dead, they asked a very good source of mine if she thought you’d join them. She didn’t, but it’s good to know you’re worth more to all of us alive than dead. I’d use that to your advantage.”
Something clicked and hissed on the line.
“You there?” Nyx asked.
“That’s all I can say right now,” Fatima said, quickly. “Speak to Alharazad. She can get you inside.”
The line went dead.
Alharazad? The Alharazad who had cut up the council twenty years back? Where the fuck was she supposed to find Alharazad? Bel dames died on the mount or in the field.
Nyx stared at the call box for a long minute, then dialed in another pattern.
“Messages,” she told the operator.
“Identify yourself, please.”
“Nyxnissa so Dasheem.”
The connection went dead for half a breath, then opened again.
“One moment. I’m retrieving your message.”
The line spat again. Nyx took the receiver away from her ear until it quieted and the operator came back.
The voice said, “One message for Nyxnissa so Dasheem from Kasbah Parait. Message reads as follows: Meet at the Nasser Mosque in Mushirah at dawn prayer on the thirty-second. Possible job for you. Identity phrase: Nikodem. End message.
“Would you like me to repeat this message?”
“No,” Nyx said, and hung up.
She stared at the call box for a full ten seconds after she hung up. Kasbah was the name of the Queen’s chief security tech. Parait was the last name of one of Nyx’s dead partners—Taite il Parait—who was killed during the job she ran for the Queen six years before. Nikodem was the name of the bounty she’d brought in for the Queen.