“Don’t be dramatic. They don’t put women to death here. They would send me to a work camp.”
“To die.”
“Eventually, yes.”
She watched him, trying to decide if there was anything else he was trying to tell her. Their marriage had not been a close one, or a happy one. None of that was his fault. She could not help what she was. But it meant she was not as close to him as she needed to be in this moment, to understand if he had come to her with some kind of salvation, a plan, or if this was all there was.
“There must be a price for exile instead of the work camp,” she said. “What do they think I can give them?”
He frowned. Yes, there it was. The furrowed brow. The unwillingness to meet her eyes. “They need to know the names of the people you work with. That’s all. Then you’ll be free.”
“Free to go home with you.”
“Is that worse than prison? Worse than a work camp? To come home with your husband? Go home to your children?” Even after all this time, she heard the strain in his voice, the hurt.
“How are the children?” she asked softly.
“They still ask about you.”
“And what do you tell them?”
His eyes filled. She caught it just as he lowered his gaze. “Come home, Inaya. You have done all you could here.”
“Have I?” She wanted to touch him, but not because she longed for him. No, it was because she wanted to comfort him. He had come all this way, after all this time, and she still could not bring herself to love him the way she should.
He raised his head. His eyes were clear again. Crying among Mhorian men was considered proper, he once told her. It showed that you cared for something greater than yourself. But her Ras Tiegan upbringing always saw it as weakness, and he had started hiding his tears a few years into their marriage. “I can’t go back without you. I can’t leave you here, Inaya. The things they’ll do to you…”
“Did they tell you what they would do?”
He nodded.
“It’s no worse than anything you saw in Nasheen, then.”
“I loved nothing of what I did, or saw, in Nasheen. We left that place to have a better life. I thought I had given it to you. But you chose… this.”
“You know why.”
“Do I? Looking at you here, I’m not so sure.” He lowered his voice, moved within a breath of the filter. “Inaya, they will kill you. They will get what they want from you one way or another. I have seen what people do when they want information. I’ve been the one who did those things. It isn’t romantic or honorable. And it always ends in death. Yours and whoever you’re working with. Please. Just tell them what they want and let me take you home. You know they won’t offer again. They never do.”
She shook her head. Stepped back from the filter. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “They should let me go on that account.”
“You know that isn’t how this will go,” he said.
Inaya turned away.
“Did I ever tell you how I got these tattoos?” he said.
Inaya faced him again. She had asked once, the night they arrived in Tirhan, the first time he asked her to marry him. He said he would tell her if she told him why she had fled Ras Tieg the way she had, alone, in the dead of night. She had refused, of course. They had eventually built their marriage around this mutual silence.
“It was before the brit malah,” he said, “When I turned twelve. Mhorian kids die as often as they do in Ras Tieg. No inoculations, unless you’re rich. Not like the Nasheenians and Chenjans. That’s why they wait so long for the brit malah, and give us proper names.”
“But yours isn’t a proper Mhorian name,” Inaya said.
“No, it’s a Nasheenian one. Because I left before I had a name. I refused the brit malah. They give you that choice.”
“Why would you do that?”
“We reach the age of majority at thirteen. You can decide to exile yourself from the community, or to join it. If you refuse, it means giving up everything. Your fathers. Your friends. The hope of having children with a Mhorian woman. Your whole life. I gave that up because I could not love a woman who belonged to everyone else. Couldn’t see my children raised communally. I was a selfish man then, and a selfish one now. I know that. But it doesn’t make me want you any less.” He began to unbutton his coat.
“Khos—”
“Let me finish,” he said, and began to speak to her in Nasheenian instead of Tirhani. “They gave me the tattoos before I left. They are the record of my family, from the time we fell until the time I left them. Inaya—” He opened his coat and revealed a tunic with a long, scooped neck that bared most of his torso. She saw the familiar tattoos there, spidery lines that she had come to learn were Mhorian text. “Look to what you devour. Soon it will give you the power to transform all this. And when it does, all that my family is or has ever been will be at your disposal. We’ll wait for you.”
It was such an unexpected thing to say that she found herself speechless. Khos buttoned back up his coat. He walked to the door, knocked. Looked back.
For a long minute, they gazed at one another. His face was hard now, completely unreadable, the love and compassion neatly erased.
Had he come straight here after being summoned? Or had he met with her people first? Would he have been smart enough to do that? Or was this a message regarding some plan he had cooked up on his own?
“Goodbye, Inaya,” he said, in Nasheenian. It was the first language they ever spoke to one another. And the tone this time was not the forlorn, lovesick one he had used when speaking of bringing her home, but the resigned, hard-edged one he had used the day she told him she was leaving him.
“Goodbye, Khos,” she said.
The woman in the hall escorted him out.
They came for Inaya sometime later, and returned her to her cell. She sat down at the center of the ghastly space and wept.
The door opened. It was her unpleasant female jailer again. She carried something with her.
“Hush now,” the woman said, strangely compassionate after all this time. She passed Inaya two slips of regular paper and a long stylus. “At your husband’s request, you’ve been permitted to write letters home to your children. I advise you to make them quite eloquent. It may be the last your children hear from you.”
Inaya took the paper with trembling fingers. She wished she could think of some way out. Some opening they or Khos had given her that she could use to her advantage. But all Khos had to offer was what she already knew—“Look to what you devour”—yes, the food was toxic to her. It kept her from shifting. Was that all he really had for her? Why he had come all this way?
She cried as she wrote the letters. Just the act of writing such private correspondence to her children when she knew her captors would comb over them felt obscene. But Khos had been her last chance out. There would be no more offers. No more bargains.
Inaya completed the letters and folded them neatly. She held them in her lap until dinner came, and with it, her female jailer. The woman took away her letters.
Inaya stared at the plate of curried saffron rice and flat bread. Hunger gnawed at her. What did it matter now what she ate? If she tried to starve herself, they would see. Everything in these cells was watched and recorded.
She gave in and scooped up a bit of rice and curry with the flat bread. The smell of saffron was usually so overpowering that it made her nauseous. But this time, the food went down more easily. Perhaps she was getting used to it.
She stared at her empty plate. Look to what you devour, Khos had said. She turned over the plate. It was a simple platter, made of fired clay. Unmarked. She set it back down. Drank her water. Examined the cup. Nothing.
That night, as she lay awake staring at the filtered light of the moons coming through the skylight, thinking about her children, she remembered Khos baring his tattoos, and wondered if he had added her name there, and the children’s. Was that all she was, now, a
footnote in someone else’s story? There was a time when that would have been enough. Wanting something more still felt sinful. She was prepared now to meet God as a terrible wife and mother, but to have given up so much and gain nothing for it would destroy her.
In the morning, she was stiff and sore. She had lost weight, and when she sat up now, there was no proper cushioning between her vertebrae and the hard floor.
She was surprised when, several hours later, the woman jailer came for her again. She was shepherded back into the twisting corridors and installed in one of the organic, windowless cells. This one had a large round table at the center. She walked around it, wondering if it was some new trick. Garish light swam beneath the skein of the ceiling.
The Angel entered. It was the same one who questioned her before.
“Will you release me now?” Inaya said. “Surely you realize I’ve done nothing wrong.”
The Angel carried a slim portfolio. From it he pulled a single sheet of creased paper. He set it on the table before her. She peered at it. It was one of the letters she had written to her daughter, Isfahan.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
He pulled out a second sheet of paper. It was a different color; soft green, organic. The edges were browned, as if it had begun to rot before being saved from its fate by some skilled magician. He set it next to her daughter’s letter.
She had signed her daughter’s letter “Maman.” The letter beside it, in the same neat, controlled hand she had learned in school, was signed “Madame de Fourré.”
It was the letter Michel had asked her to write to the Savoie family to help ease their fears and loosen their purse strings. The handwriting on both letters, of course, was identical.
Inaya went numb. She was aware of herself as if from some great height.
“We have you out, Madame de Fourré,” the Angel said. “Is there anything more you wish to say before we separate your head from your body and end this petty insurgency once and for all?”
30.
Nyx tagged the woman as a bel dame almost immediately. It meant Nyx already had her scattergun half-drawn when the bel dame went for hers. Young women always liked to shoot off quips before their guns.
Older women knew better.
Nyx’s gun went off a breath before the bel dame’s. She stepped into the woman’s space as she shot, batting away her gun with one hand while continuing to shoot with the other. Four shots to the chest put her down.
It was one of the quickest fights Nyx had ever been in.
Nyx let off her last shot into the woman’s hand, ensuring it was too mangled to work the gun that had fallen just out of her reach.
She pressed a knee onto the bel dame’s stomach to hold her still and leaned over her. The woman was coughing blood. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty.
“Who sent you?” Nyx said. She pressed the gun to the woman’s face. Not that it mattered much. She was out of rounds, and the woman was dead anyway.
Just coughing. More blood. And fear. It was strange to see fear in a bel dame’s face, but death was different at twenty than forty. She watched the bel dame bleed out, right up until her eyes went dead and the bleeding stopped as the bug in her head kicked in.
Nyx glanced up at the others. Kage had pulled out her gun and circled back around Ahmed, looking for more shooters. Ahmed still stood exactly where he had when the bel dame pulled her gun, a dumb expression on his face.
“You want to cut off her head?” Nyx said. “She was after you, not me.”
Ahmed shook his head.
“Well, I’d recommend you do it, or somebody’s going to bring her back,” Nyx said. “Then you and I need to talk.”
The room was surprisingly cool, a blessing after so many days in the desert. Eshe sat in the doorway watching Isabet sleeping in the far corner of the room. Kage was below, washing up at the communal well. They all needed it, but the water was costly. Kage had traded something of hers for it, but Eshe wasn’t sure what. Nyx was off with Ahmed speaking to the local authorities about shooting the bel dame, and Khatijah had gone with them. He was content to be alone with Isabet for the first time in many days.
Her tangled, dirty hair was knotted back from her blemished face. The salve had soothed much of her inflamed skin overnight, but she had gone too long without it. She wouldn’t have the lovely complexion of her rich parents anymore.
He knew what he needed to do back when they came to in the organic pods and he had seen her lying beside him, skin enflamed, face slack. He imagined she was dead, and the fear and loss that cut through him was so painful he thought his chest might burst. He was angry at himself for it, but it didn’t change how he felt.
Isabet opened her eyes.
“I’d like to take you back to Ras Tieg,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears again, but she did not shed them.
“We’ll get on with a caravan. A proper one. It won’t take nearly as long to get back if we’re with someone who knows where they’re going. Let me take you home. I can’t watch you die out here.”
Isabet sat up, wincing. “I told you I can’t go back.”
“Because you’re pregnant? What does that matter? Inaya won’t care about that, or anybody else. It’s not like Inaya’s kids were all born with fathers around. We can… we can say it’s mine.”
He had been thinking and praying a lot about it, and what it meant to offer her a way to return to Ras Tieg with some semblance of honor intact. It meant marrying her, he knew, or at least telling people they were married.
“You think that’s better?”
“Better than going back to Ras Tieg a whore, and getting stoned for it? Yes.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Tell me what I don’t understand. You just ran off here because you fucked some guy? I don’t understand why you all don’t have hexes on you like Nasheenians. I couldn’t get a woman pregnant without a lot of effort.”
“Nasheenians tamper too much with God’s will.”
“So it was God who got you pregnant, now?”
Isabet touched the unguent on her face, absently. “The voices were supposed to go away,” she said. “That’s why I did it. I wasn’t coerced or anything. You’re not supposed to get pregnant the first time. Everyone knows that.”
Eshe threw up his hands. God save him from ignorant Ras Tiegans. “That worked out well, didn’t it?”
“I wasn’t supposed to be able to channel God through my mother if I wasn’t a virgin. But… I still hear Him.”
“And what does He say?”
“I don’t know. Nothing you could understand.”
“Because I’m a half-breed heretic?”
“It was my choice to come here.”
“Just as it was your choice to fuck Michel, I’m sure.” Eshe stood.
“I never said it was Michel!”
“Why else would you have come?” Eshe said. “Why would he have sent you here? It wasn’t Inaya, was it? It was Michel.” He was done. He wanted to leave her here, so she could understand what it would really be like, to make it on her own. But if he did that, how would he be any better than Michel?
“You’re a bastard,” Isabet said.
“Every Nasheenian is a bastard,” Eshe said. “That insult means nothing to us.” He stepped out into the corridor. “I’m going down to wash up. Would you like to do the same, or lob more insults?”
He could see Kage making her way back up the ladder, mostly clean, lugging her massive gun with her.
For a moment, he thought Isabet would refuse. He almost hoped she would. Then she said, “All right.” And the hope fluttered up again, the hope that maybe he could build some kind of life after this. That maybe they weren’t all going to die for Nasheen.
Kage met him on the balcony.
“You leave any water for the rest of us?” he asked.
Kage moved past him without a word. How did people like Inaya get others
to like them? Even love them? He seemed to fail at it, even when he said all the right things. Kage hadn’t spoken two words to him in more than a week.
“So what kind of work has Nyx found for us?” he asked Kage, hoping something that wasn’t rhetorical would get more of a response.
“We won’t need to hire ourselves out,” Kage said. “I found us a guide.”
“She’s a First Family,” Nyx said. “Is this supposed to make up for you fucking that giant?”
Kage sat with her on a cracked slab behind a string of temporary tents selling smoked cat meat and fried sand crawlers.
“I don’t know what that is,” Kage said.
“Families or fucking?”
“My business is my own. All you need know is that woman helped me find this one.”
“You’re all a slippery bag of trouble,” Nyx said.
The woman walking toward them was one of the most elegant Nasheenians Nyx had ever seen. Being pretty wasn’t an asset in Nasheen, but this woman wore it like it was one. She was strikingly beautiful, the sort of insidious beauty that knocked you flat in the street when you saw it. Her complexion was smooth as a child’s, brown as burnt butter. She had a face like a proud cat—large eyes, plump cheeks, generous mouth. She wore a pale yellow shalwar khameez stitched in red and orange geometric designs. Her hijab was purple, wound loosely around her head so her cascade of dark, wavy hair hung free to her waist.
“Is this your employer, then?” the woman asked as she approached.
“Yes,” Kage said. “Nyx, this is Safiyah.”
Nyx said, “Sorry. Been a misunderstanding. I don’t run with rogue First Family. Too much trouble. Too much paperwork.”
Safiyah laughed, a surprisingly ugly sound considering her pleasant exterior. She sounded like a rabid dog hacking up a bit of foam. “Oh, they won’t pay anything for me back home if you try and turn me in. So don’t bother working out how much I’ll go for.”
“Come on, Kage,” Nyx said, and started to move past Safiyah.
“You have another way over the Wall, then?” Safiyah said.
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