by Bina Shah
The gamble worked; within five years, no woman voiced opposition when she was directed to marry once, twice, thrice, as many times as the Bureau told her to.
Just when it seemed that women had no choices left, Fairuza and I decided to speak with our feet and escape. But the borders were sealed and there was nowhere to go.
Except down.
Thanks to my notes, Lin knows how we hid here in those early days, terrified of discovery and denunciation. We need to record our own history and tell our stories, if only to each other. We need to know that we can survive, even if we are outcasts and criminals. And I am the keeper of the Panah’s history, the guardian of its secrets, as Lin will be after me.
Sometimes I curse all the legal, legitimate citizens of Green City who spend their lives in the prison of their so-called peace and security. If they knew of our existence, they’d revile us as Rebels. And it’s the Wives who would shout for our execution the loudest. We pay for their complacency, for the complicity of both men and women in a system that is as unjust as it is unnatural.
But even in our own imprisonment, we gain something that a woman of Green City can never have. It’s different for each woman, but I see all of them as stars in the same constellation—of choice, of autonomy, of freedom.
Happiness, though. Is happiness part of that constellation, too? If Lin asks me that question, I won’t know how to answer her.
Lin
Lin arrived at Reuben Faro’s villa past midnight, as usual. The clouds hung low over the sky, the air a stifling, humid soup that pressed down on her chest and made it hard to draw breath easily.
She shivered as she heard the far-off keening of some animal, a feral dog like the ones that used to roam the streets during the Emergency days, when buildings had burned and corpses lay on the street for days. The dogs had run wild then, feeding on the bodies, until order had been reestablished. Then extermination crews patrolled the streets, gathering the bodies to be sent to the incinerators, and shooting the dogs.
Lin varied the times that she came to the gated enclave far away from Reuben’s official residence, where he’d been allocated a house like all the other Agency heads. He wasn’t technically supposed to own another property, but all of them did in one way or another. Reuben’s villa was in the name of his mother, claimed by the outbreak of the Virus that had killed so many of the women in Green City. He never spoke to Lin about her, or of his sister, who had died a few days later.
The muscles in Lin’s arms and shoulders unclenched the moment she got out of the car. She felt a whispered blessing of benevolence as she passed through the villa gates, open all day and night in the tradition of hospitality customary to the richer, safer neighborhoods of Green City. A riot of bougainvillea graced the walls, jasmine flowers perfumed the air, a mosaic fountain in the corner of the entrance trickled a small amount of water between its columns.
Reuben Faro, one of the most important men in Green City, was waiting for her in the doorway. He took her veil, hung it up on the stand by the door, and pulled her into his arms, embracing her tight.
She leaned into his body. She was fascinated by his deep chest, strong shoulders, the white hair at his temples, his thick legs, the steady pulse at his wrists and the backs of his knees. He had a peculiar scent she liked, leather, cloves, and old-fashioned cigarette smoke. It had been thirty years since the last cigarette had been manufactured in Green City—where did he get his cigarettes from? There was still rough tobacco around that could be hand-rolled into a cigarette but his were beautifully made, thin and elegant, tipped with fine filters. Reuben had only smiled silently when she quizzed him, spotting the cartons on his bureau, but then he allowed her to smoke one, and the exquisite aroma made her feel giddy.
And his beard, trimmed close to the skin—she’d thought it would scratch the first night she’d spent with him, but it was soft, unexpectedly silken on her skin. He was rubbing it on her shoulder now, raising goose bumps on her arms.
“You’re very relaxed about security for someone in your position,” said Lin.
“I can afford to be confident.” Reuben led her by the hand to his bedroom, turning off the lights as he went. Lin saw the half-empty glass of whiskey on the table by the window in the living room, four or five displays scattered all around his chair. He was always working, working, even when he came home at night after working in his office all day. Lin had often been woken in the middle of the night by an important message chiming on his device; he’d never once refused to see what it said. Security plans for Green City’s national day celebrations, a new policy directive for handling illegal migrants, the overseeing of border guards: his responsibilities were vast and varied. He’d proven his capability and loyalty to Green City over and over again, rising quickly in the hierarchy of leadership. His reputation for being a man willing to do anything to preserve security in Green City had not gone unrewarded by its guardians.
Lin kicked off her shoes in the hallway as she followed him. “Confidence is dangerous.” As the head of the Panah, she could never refuse the heavy weight of responsibility strapped to her back, day and night. She had that in common with Reuben, at least.
“It’s also lonely,” said Reuben, reaching for her. “Come here. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
“It’s not safe,” said Lin, her face serious.
Reuben raised an eyebrow.
“You say you know my body … Haven’t you been keeping track of the days?”
Lin enjoyed the games they played; increasing the tension between restraint and capitulation heightened their mutual desire. They were both masters at teasing and taunting, at threatening to take away what they offered to one another, lest too easy a conquest make either of them complacent. Neither of them was young enough—Lin was forty-two, Reuben fourteen years older—to be excited by the illicitness of their relationship; there had always been an inevitability in their coming together. The dangers the outside world presented paled compared to the endless dangers they could invent for each other.
Reuben’s mouth twisted in a smile, and he held her hand tighter, stroking her palm with his fingers until shivers ran up and down her arms and legs. “I can smell it.”
She trembled in anticipation and stepped towards him. He was already loosening the tie from his neck, undoing the buttons at his wrists and collar. She reached him in time to help him pull his shirt off. His shirts were always crisp and white, even at the end of the day—she suspected he kept three or four in his office and changed them whenever one became wrinkled or stained.
She leaned over him and ran her hands over the smooth muscles of his back, feeling the knots and tension underneath his skin. She removed his shoes and socks, while he groaned softly. When she slid her hands around his waist, he looked up at her, feigning surprise. “Oh, hello. I thought you said it wasn’t safe.”
“It is,” she said, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. Something told her that she was not meant to be a mother; her body would not provide fertile ground for a child to take hold and disrupt her life. Still, she’d taken her precautions, thanks to the herbs in the Panah garden: steeped neem leaves, wild carrot seed, gingerroot. Maybe she should feed them to the others, to be safe. It was ridiculous that with the most advanced medical science available, she should have to rely on the old methods, but she had no choice.
Reuben took her in his arms, and turned out the light. He could be a tender lover, but tonight was not a night for tenderness.
Afterward, as the feral dog keened again outside, long and low, Lin lay there in Reuben’s tight embrace, drowsy and relaxed, but not wanting to sleep. Finally she slipped away and went to the bathroom to wash herself. In the mirror, she saw her reddened skin, her disheveled hair. She smiled ruefully. She’d taken pleasure in the encounter, too. When she’d been younger, it was hard to focus on her own body, easier to concentrate on the man insistent on slaking his
thirst in it. Now she knew what to ask for, and how to receive it. If that made her a hypocrite, she didn’t care. She deserved some leeway in return for the risks she took for all of them.
Reuben was already asleep when she returned to the bed. She slithered under the covers, fitted herself against his body, her back to his chest. He moved and murmured, put his arm around her. They slept.
At 3 a.m., Lin opened her eyes. Reuben was sitting up in bed, staring out the window at the moon. It filled the entire room with a cool pale light, illuminating Reuben’s face like a painting under a spotlight. Lin could see his eyes settle on her with a strange gleam. He watched her without speaking.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Lin, do you love me?”
“No,” she mumbled, sleepily. His shoulders slumped, and for a moment, dark shadows cratered his face, making him look as though he was closer to death than life.
“Probably for the best. It isn’t in our contract.” His tone was jaunty, yet touched with an unfamiliar remorse. Lin opened her eyes, reached out to touch his back. He tensed, half moved away from the touch, then leaned back into it and sighed. Her fingernails raked his skin, enough to stimulate, not enough to hurt.
“We don’t have a contract,” she said softly.
“Never put anything in writing,” said Reuben. “It’s safer that way.” He caught her hand in his and turned it over to kiss her palm, then put it down and moved out of her reach.
He continued to stare out the window, leaving Lin the privacy to puzzle over his sudden melancholy. She shouldn’t have given an uncensored answer to his unexpected question. She knew he loved her. That love was the hidden currency that kept the Panah going. Skilled as Lin was in the art of making herself indispensable to Reuben, or any man, she had forbidden herself the emotion. And yet the need for it still existed in her, too. It was hard to admit, but she felt flickerings of it within herself.
He was her lover, but should she think of him also as her friend? She had known him for ten years now; she did not fear him. She had calculated the risks of being with him the first day they’d met, and accepted them unflinchingly. Their relationship had been transactional at first; she’d told herself she was giving him her body in return for safety and security for the Panah.
But over the years she’d been able to calculate what kind of man he was. Reuben was the only person who understood what it was like to be the solitary figure at the top. How isolation could cut like a blade into your soul, how lonely it was to pass the long hours working and being up late into the night. Reuben knew the pride she felt at being who she was. Even though officially she represented everything he had sworn to root out and eliminate from Green City, she liked to think he respected her, the way two equally strong enemies could form a firm friendship off the battlefield. This bed was their armistice. In it, she offered Reuben a different pleasure, one more satisfying than the chaste kisses and caresses offered by the rest of the women at the Panah.
But Reuben was no ordinary Client, and she was no ordinary woman. The usual trade of secret for secret, the mutual agreement to maintain the subterfuge, didn’t apply to him. He was too powerful, too big to worry if he was caught with an ordinary woman of the Panah. Nor was he a type of man like the rest of the Panah’s clients: wondrous and grateful at finding a temporary illusion of fidelity.
As a head of the Agency, Reuben took a huge risk by consorting with Lin. After all, his job was to catch people like her and run them to ground, eliminate from society the malignancy they represented, so that Green City could thrive in the coming generations. Caught with her, he’d be stripped of his rank and titles, disgraced, and executed publicly to serve as a lesson to the rest of society.
Lin knew she was the hook for him: in being with her, he was defying the authority of the Agency and the Bureau. And in her moments of deepest honesty with herself, Lin knew that she, too, was hooked on the power of being with him. Running the risk was the thing that made him feel most like a man, and she was the only woman in the world with whom he could test the limits of his inviolability. Defying the rules was the ultimate turn-on for them both.
At five in the morning, before dawn broke, Lin got out of bed and dressed quickly. The space in the bed next to her was empty, a pocket of cold air in its place. No matter how early she woke, Reuben was always up before her. A remnant of military training? No, he’d never mentioned serving in the army. If not, then it was the natural wakefulness of a man who found it hard to relinquish his grip on the world he controlled for more than a few hours’ sleep at a time.
She knew she would find him in the garden, in the company of his beloved roses. He was sitting on a small wooden bench among the flowers, wrapped in a robe, sipping a cup of tea and examining a rose in his hand. She saw him holding the rose in front of him incredulously, as if barely able to believe its beauty.
He spoke without turning around. “Leaving so soon?”
“How did you know I was there?”
“Your perfume gave you away.”
She smiled. “That’s the rose, not me.”
“Exquisite as you both are, it’s not the same. And my sense of smell is the finest of all my abilities. Come and sit down next to me before the car comes. You look beautiful in this garden. How long do we have?”
“I can’t tell you that.” She sat down next to him, the veil thrown back on her head, not yet obscuring her face.
“I could get you out of there, you know,” he said to her, still looking at the rose. “It wouldn’t be hard for me to get you in the system. Assign you exclusively to me.” A searching glance at her. “Would you do it if I asked you?”
“How would you do it?” she said, disbelievingly.
“I might have to kill a few people.” Again the elusive smile appeared. His warmth reached out to her like a caress.
“And what about the rest of them? My women?”
“Ah …” Reuben’s voice trailed off. He touched his nose delicately to the flower and inhaled deeply. “I could make arrangements for them, too. They’d have to go through a mock confession and trial, but I’d make sure nothing happened to them. They’d be taken care of afterward.”
“To be Wives for six Husbands apiece?”
“What more can I do?”
Lin turned away from Reuben. “Why are you talking like this, Reuben? Why now? Don’t you think we have a perfect arrangement? Do you really want to complicate things?” She softened her eyes and tilted her head to look up at him, keeping the bitterness out of her voice. Wearing her tone lightly, jokingly, like a loose set of clothes.
“I suppose you’re right,” said Reuben, closing his eyes and inhaling the scent of the rose once more. “Oh. Before you go. I have something for you.” He took her hand in his and pressed a small vial into her palm.
The moment was over, the tension snapped like a wire breaking underneath too much weight. Lin didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed. “What’s this?”
“For all those nuits blanches. You looked so tired last time. I thought this might help.”
“Taxes,” said Lin, shaking her head. “You know how it is. I deal on the black market to avoid paying them, but instead I have to pay four times the normal prices. I’m up late, working out the accounts. Why didn’t you tell me being a criminal was so costly?”
Reuben laughed. “I’m sorry. We’re shutting down the cryptocurrency channels. Makes your life harder, I know. Try this.”
“I sleep well, most nights.”
“Doing what you do? I don’t think so. Look, it’s harmless, nonaddictive; they’ve just developed it in the lab and the initial trials were promising. Why don’t you see for yourself?”
Lin remembered just then that there was someone else in the Panah who suffered from sleepless nights. “No side effects? Are you sure?”
“No morning-after drowsiness, no ha
ngover. I don’t pay all the best scientists in the territories for nothing. Just one thing: don’t mix it with alcohol.”
“That’s hard enough to come by.”
“Just in case. The volunteers in the trials were fine, but they were men. Your body might react differently.”
“What’s it called?”
“They were going to call it something fancy—Ebrietas, I think. Who knows what it means …”
She put the vial in her pocket and kissed him lightly goodbye, knowing, as she walked away, that she would always need him. Reuben was security, but he might be her undoing one day.
The car ride home was usually where Lin emptied her mind of everything she had undergone in the last ten hours, steeling herself for life back in the Panah. Lin realized she was shaken by Reuben’s offer to take her out of that life. He’d never talked like this before. Did he really mean it? What if she said yes, abandoned the Panah and the women inside it, for a life of real power by Reuben’s side?
Lin touched the vial in her pocket, thinking absently. Some of the women had more of a problem with the adjustment between life above and under ground: they struggled with erratic sleep cycles, erratic appetites, and depression for six months to a year after entering the Panah. Lin remained unaffected, practically born into this twilight life. But it just might help Sabine. Lin could slip a small amount of the drug into the tea she prepared for Sabine to drink on her way home from her assignations, so that she would be at least more relaxed, if not fully asleep, when she went to bed. Otherwise she’d be restless all night, the adrenaline and cortisol coursing through her body, robbing her of the downtime her body needed to restore itself. There was no need to worry about alcohol with Sabine; she hated the stuff, said it smelled like gasoline. If it worked, then Lin would tell her about the drug. Sabine’s gratitude would outweigh her annoyance at being helped without knowing. And surely the drug was safe; Reuben was a man of his word.