by Somaiya Daud
The blood never dies. The blood never forgets.
It was a phrase from the Book of Dihya—most people believed it was a testament to our endurance and survival. But there were some who believed it meant Massinia might return—that her blood would call her back to the world in one form or another. Whichever meaning you took, rebels had been using it as a rallying cry, now more than ever.
Now the small village of shacks and houses on its outskirts, along with the gatehouses, were rubble. The people who’d lived there, those who’d survived, huddled together around a fire. I felt a pang of guilt looking at them—my family didn’t have much, but our home was still intact, and we wouldn’t go hungry as they would.
I reached into my bag, my hand settling on the bread I’d made that morning for the majority night celebrations. My mother and I had spent hours at the village oven, along with all the other girls celebrating their majority night, making enough bread for the whole village. We had so much—I could afford to spare a few loaves.
Aziz laid a hand on my shoulder and shook his head, as if he knew what I’d planned.
“They’re being watched,” he said, voice low. “The Garda believe the rebels hide among them.”
I swallowed down my anger and looked away.
“It’s difficult,” he said and squeezed my shoulder. “But think of our parents, Amani. What would they do if you were dragged off for giving bread to a rebel?”
I glared at the ground. I knew he was right. He, more than I, knew the cost of being thought one of the rebels. At last, I drew my hand from my bag and let him guide me away, leaving the fields and the refugees behind.
* * *
Eventually we reached the old kasbah far beyond the limits of the village. The kasbah was an old building, now one rundown mansion among many rundown houses, overgrown with palm and fig trees. Once it might have belonged to a prosperous family, but was now the refuge of farmers and villagers on nights like this. Lights shined out of broken windows, and threads of music rose into the air, mixing with the sound of wind and wildlife. Suspended over the kasbah in the night sky was our mother planet, Andala, hanging like an overripe orange fruit. With such a sight it was easy to forget everything: our poverty, the rule of the Vath, the specter of loss that hovered over our parents every day.
We arrived with enough time to set up the courtyard and get dressed. All the girls who were coming of age tonight had private rooms in the kasbah for them to make use of before the festivities. The chatter of friends rose and fell as my mother helped me into the qaftan and jewelry.
I felt a frisson of nerves when I looked at myself in the mirror. My mother and I looked eerily alike. She was taller, but we had the same brown skin, the same sharp cheekbones and sharper chin. Her hair was as thick and curling as mine, and seemed to sprout from a too high point on her forehead just like me.
But there the similarities ended. My mother had survived too many horrors to count, and never spoke of them. But her strength was obvious to anyone who bothered to look. She was unshakeable, and I— I wasn’t like my mother. I liked to think I was brave and filled with conviction, but I was untested. I’d suffered none of what she had, and to think of it made me shudder inside. How could I face adulthood, how could I expect to be a woman, when I couldn’t even bring myself to imagine my mother’s trials? How would I face my own?
“Becoming an adult is frightening,” my mother said, as if she’d read my mind. “You are smart to be wary. It means you will approach things slowly, and hopefully with wisdom.”
She urged me down into a seat in front of the mirror and got to work. There was not an abundance of jewelry to thread through my hair—we didn’t have the money for that. But my parents’ families had been botanists before the occupation, and my mother had managed to hold on to some of her own jewelry. Her sisters’ jewelry, too, had passed to my mother after they were all killed.
This was all I had of our past—my mother’s jewelry, and traditions like tonight. Soon, I would have my daan—a small inheritance, but a powerful one.
There was a chained circlet I had loved since I was a child, old and made of iron pieces shaped like doors, each hung with deep red stones. The majority night qaftan was my mother’s, white with red embroidery all along the bodice and down the center.
My mother smiled at me again in the mirror as she secured a pair of earrings studded with red stones. “There,” she said, and took hold of my chin to tilt my head a little. “You could be queen.”
* * *
The courtyard where the festivities were being held had been strung with lights. It was an old building on the very outskirts of the moon’s capital city. My spirit rose with the sound of music. The date palms were wound with bright, golden light, and caught on gold jewelry and embroidery on women’s qaftans, and bent off metal teapots and tea glasses. There were low tables and cushions spread through the length of the courtyard, and the entire village had made it to the celebration tonight. At the north end was a small stage where a band played, their lead singer crooning an old Kushaila song.
The trees were full of lights, and there were lanterns bobbing merrily in the fountain in the center of the courtyard. It babbled, undercutting the chatter of the many families celebrating in the tight space. Eleven other girls and their mothers pressed into the entrance beside me, waiting. Eyes turned toward us until nearly all the room was staring. Husnain caught my eye and winked at me, and my nerves eased slightly. Next to me, my mother squeezed my hand.
All of a sudden, the drums stopped, and conversation tapered off. For a long minute, there was nothing but the sound of the water flowing in the fountain. Someone blew on a horn, a deep, sonorous note, and then the drums began again.
We stepped out, one by one, to the sound of our fathers calling our names.
“Amani, daughter of Moulouda and Tariq.”
The purpose of the majority night wasn’t celebration alone. Our true step into adulthood was receiving our daan. The thirteen of us sat on cushions in the middle of the courtyard and waited.
The tattoo artist was an elderly woman, her daan turned green with age and folded into the wrinkles of her face. But her hands were steady and I remained still, despite the sting of her needle. In the old days I would have bled and it would have taken weeks for the marks to heal—now I would only need a few hours before they settled permanently on my face.
A crown for Dihya and Massinia took shape, overlapping diamonds curving over my forehead. Sharp lines for my lineage—my grandfather had claimed descent from Massinia herself, and though neither I nor my mother believed him, her markings went on my left cheek. On my right were my parents’ hopes for me—happiness, health, a good soul, a long life. I don’t know how long I sat while the old woman worked, but at last she pulled back and smiled.
“Baraka,” she murmured. Blessings.
And just like that, I slipped from childhood into adulthood.
My mother came to stand beside me, her face as stoic as ever, and squeezed my shoulder. Our daan were similar, almost mirror images of one another, and in that moment I hoped I could live up to them, live up to her. I lay my hand over hers and squeezed. With these marks I could face anything in the future. I hoped they would guide me toward joy and love instead of sorrow.
I followed the string of other girls and their mothers through the courtyard, weaving through the families watching, laughing, ululating in congratulations, to the banquet table at the north end. Those of us being celebrated tonight were to sit in the front of the banquet table with the elder women of our village and our mothers. My heart eased as I listened to them chatter. There was nowhere else on our small moon like these gatherings. Most of us were Kushaila, the oldest tribe group on Andala; my family was not the only one whose ancestors stretched back to the terraforming of our moon. The air rang with the sound of our mother tongue instead of Vathekaar, and our music and our laughter. For a moment I could imagine this was decades before the shadow of the Vath fell over our moo
n and conquered our planet and its system.
It was hard not to get swept away in the merriment, and when the songstress stepped down and a band took her place the tempo of music picked up. I loved the girls on either side of me—Khadija and Farah were my closest friends in the world. I’d grown up alongside Khadija. Our parents’ farmed plots of land beside one another, our mothers had walked to the orchards to pick fruit before either of us were born, before the Vath had ever darkened our skies. We’d taken our first steps together, learned to read together, and gone to school together. When it came time to register under the Vathek census, we’d gone to the capital city on Cadiz together.
It took no time at all for them both to grab my hands and pull me to my feet, and then we were off, dancing and laughing, singing along with the music.
I don’t know how long we danced, eventually joined by friends, laughing and chatting. The air was thick with incense smoke, the sharp sweet scent of cooked plums over lamb. The world seemed to glitter and waver as torchlight caught on sequins and false jewels. I know what we all must have looked like, had been a girl too young to partake only a year earlier. I had yearned to be part of the group, and now I was one of them: happy, crying out, falling over one another while we giggled.
For a while, I forgot my worries. Rebels, famine, poverty—none of these things mattered tonight.
And then the doors to the kasbah slammed open and the music stopped.
3
It felt like long minutes, though it could not have been more than a few seconds, for my body to catch up. To notice the music gone, the laughter thinned, and joy replaced by fear.
When you are raised in a place like Cadiz, in a time like ours, you learned the signs. The absolute silence, followed by the soft, near imperceptible click of metal against stone. The soft whir of gears just loud enough to announce itself. The Vath rarely sent men to our homes. When they did—well. The cruelty of men knew few bounds. So there was some relief when the first body through the door was an Imperial droid, chrome and silver, its body etched in cruel, sharp designs.
Imperial droids weren’t built to look human. They were always at least a foot taller than average, their skeletons built out of excelsior and adamant, glowing silver wherever they were. Their faces were blank except for the white line of light that passed for eyes, and their heads were framed by a fan of solid metal. The original designer chose to shape their torsos so that they resembled ribcages, without any of the flesh within or without so that the droid went from monster-like to full monster. They weren’t shaped to be sent into war, but then you didn’t need much more than two hundred pounds of metal to cow and brutalize civilians.
And the droids were very effective at that.
The violence Vathek men did was easily counterbalanced by a droid’s calculations of life versus death. And to them, Andalaan life was always an acceptable loss.
The droids—there were eight altogether—had still not spoken. They gathered in the doorway, silent as death and just as unflinching.
I jumped when a hand wrapped around my arm, but it was only my brother, a grim look on his face.
“Aziz and our parents?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“In the back,” he said.
“All girls aged fourteen to twenty are to line up on the west wall,” one of the droids announced. Its voice echoed as if a person inside it were speaking through a metal tube.
Ice crawled up my spine, but I stepped forward.
“Don’t,” Husnain said, tightening his grip.
“Don’t be foolish,” I hissed. “What if they scan the group and find I’ve lied? Better I go now and get it over with.”
I understood Husnain’s fear. We’d all heard the stories—the Vath appeared without warning when too many of us gathered in one place. They feared rebellion, and where groups of people met, or so the wisdom went, rebellion quickly followed. My father limped now because he’d attended such a gathering in his youth, and there were people from our village—among them my father’s elder brother—who’d disappeared from such gatherings and never appeared again. I was too young to remember very much, but I knew the tightly wound fear that sat in your chest as the droids stormed a building. Knew the wail of a woman who knew she was about to become a widow.
Husnain looked ready to argue, his face screwed up in anger. “They can’t do this.”
The Vath never intruded on a majority night, something so clearly meant to celebrate the young in our villages when there were so few of us.
Or at least, they never had before.
“They are doing it,” I reminded him, and tapped his hand. “Let me go and it will be done soon enough. I promise.”
Husnain seemed to battle with himself for a moment, and then he released me. We were close because in so many ways we were alike. But here, we differed. I understood the world we lived in, the consequences of dissent. Husnain … he disliked bowing to anyone, and to the unjust most of all. He would risk his life in the name of an idea rather than live to fight another day.
The room divided silently, girls in the age range specified to the left, and everyone else to the right. The smoke had taken an oppressive turn, so that it was no longer the dream-like fog. Something thicker, like a funeral shroud.
Two of the droids came toward us and split us, one to the front of the line and another to the back. Khadija stood beside me, and we held hands, our fingers crushing each other’s.
Her newly inked daan glistened on her cheeks and forehead in the firelight—she looked, I thought, more beautiful than she ever had before. After sharing so much of our lives together, it was right that we’d had our majority night at the same time. She gave my hand another squeeze, her face as clear of emotion as mine was. There was no training for how to face Vathek droids, but we all knew. No fear, no emotion, nothing that would focus their gaze on you.
Every few seconds there was a louder whir from both droids, and then a sharp beep before they moved on to the next girl. It was only when they were a few girls away from us that I realized what they were doing—a wide, green beam scanned a girl’s face, and then the beep cleared her. They were trying to identify someone.
I heard Aziz’s voice, warning me about the search for rebels, about appearing to aid those suspected. There were no rebels here—just a farming village that would starve in the coming months with our livelihood now smoldering. My gaze scanned the room. There was Adil the perfume maker with his lame foot. Ibn Hazm, the last member of a family prosperous before the war. Khadija’s parents, farmers and fruit pickers. Everyone here knew the cost of sedition. No one here would risk it.
I remained still, my eyes fixed on a flickering torch as a droid stepped in front of me, leaned forward, and scanned my face.
The noise it made after was not the sharp beep, but a clang, like an alarm. It remained bent in front of me, frozen as if in confusion.
My heart raced—difference was never good. Different meant the Vath knocking down your door in the middle of the night.
I eyed the door they had come through, and then the back exit. I wouldn’t make it if I ran, and likely I would cost friends their lives as they came after me.
“Take her,” one of the droids said.
“No!” Husnain pushed his way through the crowd and came to stand beside me. “You can’t have her.”
Without warning, the droid raised a phaser from its hip and aimed it at his forehead. Droids never set their phasers to stun. It would have been easy to be frozen, to scream, to give in. But though Husnain was older than me, I had always taken care of him.
“Stop,” I said, my voice firm, and stepped in front of him. “There is no cause for violence.”
“You will come with us,” the droid said, not lowering the phaser.
I buried shaking hands in the folds of my skirt and shook my head. “Tell me what you want with me. I have rights.” Even as I spoke them, the words rang hollow. I didn’t have rights, of course. I was a poor girl, from an oft-f
orgotten moon. And I was young, without any of the marks on my record that would have signaled me as loyal to the Vath.
“You will come with us willingly or by force,” it said.
“I will not,” I repeated. Too late I realized my foolishness. You did not stand up to the Vath, and you certainly didn’t stand up to their droids, who would not be swayed by pleas or displays of emotion. I could feel the blood beat at the tips of my fingers, could almost hear the gears turning inside the droid as it turned its attention from me to Khadija.
There was no sound as the phaser went off, only the sudden weakening of Khadija’s grip around my hand. Her fingers slipped from mine, and her body fell forward. Her knees hit the ground, and then she fell sideways, eyes open in shock.
She’d worn a white gown embroidered in green to the ceremony. Red bloomed on her shoulder like a flower, staining the green lines crisscrossing her arms. Her arms splayed out, crooked and doll-like, in a pose I’d never seen before. Her black hair was loose tonight and it fanned around her head, dark as midnight, complete as a death shroud in hiding her from me.
Now, I could not breathe. Now, my heart pounded too fast and my lungs shrunk and my body went numb.
The blood from her arm pooled beneath her.
Her mother screamed first and then chaos broke. I couldn’t think, and I only moved because Husnain tugged me back and forced me into a run. He wasn’t fast enough—no one had ever outrun the Vath.
A metal hand wrapped around my left arm, and I came to a jarring stop.
“No!” I screamed, but it was too late. The droid took hold of my brother’s shoulder, and then threw him back nearly halfway across the courtyard. He landed against the fountain with a bloodcurdling sound, then fell to the floor, unmoving.
“Let me go!” I struggled against my captor, trying to make it to my brother as everyone else ran screaming, gathering children, trying to escape. I couldn’t see the rest of my family. Only Husnain, lying motionless on his front, ignored by everyone else.