by Bina Shah
Nobody had ever seen Reuben Faro cry.
Over the years, Reuben excelled in his studies and cultivated friendships with classmates who had powerful fathers. Reuben addressed those fathers as “uncle,” speaking to them respectfully but with confidence. They didn’t mind the familiarity; on the contrary, they seemed to relish it, found it surprising. Their own sons never exhibited any sort of interest in their work. Yet here was this new boy, tall and handsome, a star on the sports field, fascinated by every aspect of their professions. Over time they began to regard him as the son they wished they’d had instead of their own short, thin, socially awkward goslings. They described their jobs, hinting at official secrets they were privy to, which tantalized Reuben.
Reuben studied his uncles keenly, looking for blueprints of the man he wanted to be, not the father he had in his own life—quiet, subservient, the spirit and drive drained from him like an exsanguinated corpse. He openly admired those uncles’ lives as important and thrilling, their power such a contrast to his own father’s weakness.
Reuben’s uncles kept track of him when he went to university. They sent gifts and messages of congratulations when he completed his degrees. One of them, tipped to become a Leader of Green City, arranged an internship at the Agency under his direct tutelage—the one whose son dropped out of school and joined the Army the same year Reuben graduated with honors. That young man was killed in a small skirmish with a group of militants from the north, who still fought for control of the Levant decades after the wars had begun.
The uncle grieved for his son for an appropriate amount of time, then dedicated his life to lavishing on Reuben Faro whatever hopes and ambitions he had nurtured for his offspring. Through his uncle’s patronage Reuben joined the Agency the day after he graduated from university.
He racked up triumph after triumph. In his first few years he’d smashed a huge smuggling ring, stopped the trafficking of brides out of the territories, cracked a scam involving gold-backed digital tokens in which the principals didn’t have any gold to speak of. Within five years he was promoted, then made a division chief.
His success had become the Agency’s legend.
He used his new cachet to assemble a loyal circle: bureaucrats and junior Officers in the Agency or the Bureau. He gathered them in weekly councils and they came faithfully, week after week, hoping that his proximity would inflate them like balloons and they, too, would float up through the hierarchy. One day one of these small men might succeed him. Who would it be? Sulayman, with his habit of siphoning off crumbs from the Treasury? Behrani, whose military service and the loss of one eye in combat made him think he’d gained in intelligence what he’d lost in vision? Zimmer, whose Levantine connections bought him his place in the Agency? It was too far off in the future—probably after Reuben’s own death—for him to care much who among them would rise when his sun finally set.
Discovering the Panah had not been part of Reuben’s plan. Five years ago, his daily intelligence reports uncovered a woman who was using outlawed cryptocurrency to buy food from stockpiles meant for hospitals. Reuben investigated the companies that supplied food to Green City’s institutions and found that one of their delivery services was making random trips outside the City, miles away from any of its hospitals, universities, or prisons.
The owner of the delivery service was brought in for questioning. Simply mentioning the Agency was usually enough to frighten most Green City citizens into obedience; the man broke almost as soon as Reuben entered the interrogation room. He confessed that he was being paid a large amount of illegal currency to deliver pulses, rice, and dried vegetables twice a month at a warehouse in the desert north of Green City.
“Who are you dealing with? Who’s the buyer?” asked Reuben. He sat in a chair, gazing pleasantly at the merchant who stood before him in a sweat-stained vest and trousers. They hadn’t even begun to beat him—the oldest methods worked the best, surprisingly—yet the man was already squeezing out a jumbled-up stream of tears and words, pleading for forgiveness between hiccups of fear.
“I don’t know her name. I just drop the goods where she tells me to leave them. I’ve never met her.”
“A woman?” This made Reuben sit up straight.
The man swallowed his tears and lifted his head. ”I think she runs a brothel or something. What else would a woman be doing, buying so much food? Please, can I go now?”
Reuben examined him from head to toe. Anyone could fake a slumped posture and a tremulous voice in order to portray abject submission. But the man’s bare feet twisting nervously into the floor, the fleeting, imploring glances that met Reuben’s eyes and then quickly flicked away betrayed his honesty. Still, the merchant had to be embellishing his confession so he’d be released sooner.
“After you’ve given me the coordinates of the location. And your communication codes.”
The man complied, but Reuben threw him in jail for five years anyway, and forgot about him.
The location trace turned up one thing. Decades ago a pair of scientists had applied for a research permit to find out how much radiation the land just outside Green City had absorbed from the nuclear explosions of the Final War, twenty years after it had ended. The application bore two names: F. Dastani and I. Serfati. Ilona Serfati had worked for the Perpetuation Bureau; she was the original author of the Handbook for Female Citizens. And both of them had disappeared not long after the date mentioned on the permit.
Reuben made a note of the name Serfati and ran it through the Perpetuation Bureau records. It brought up an unsolved case of a girl who had been kidnapped from a quiet street in a well-to-do neighborhood, in the wake of her mother’s death. This couldn’t be Ilona: the years didn’t match. But the girl, Lin Serfati, would be around forty years old now.
Serfati … Reuben made a note of the name and wrote down next to it, disappearing women and disappearing girls …
He found a picture of the child and aged it digitally; within seconds the infant turned into a child, then a teenager, and then a woman. Was she the secret buyer, this woman on his display? There were no brothels of real women in Green City, but for whom was she buying so much food? Was she alone, or did she have accomplices? Was she working with the rebels active along the southern border of Green City?
As he studied her photograph, his eyes narrowed. This Lin Serfati was a woman with a composed face, and confident, cool eyes. Yet there was a warm femininity in her curved lips and cheeks. It occurred to him that she would be his first female capture. But first, he had to find her.
He used the merchant’s communication code to send out a signal to the mystery woman across the uncontrollable, unsurveilable Deep Web. Any citizen in Green City caught using it would be severely punished, but it came in handy for the Agency’s covert activities. Disguised as the incarcerated merchant, Reuben told her he wanted to change some of the terms and conditions of their agreement. Could they meet in person? He was careful to use the same language and phrases that the merchant employed in their communications so she wouldn’t grow suspicious.
“That isn’t possible,” she responded, a full twenty-four hours after his query. “Neither the changes nor the meeting. Our contract was binding for a full year. We’ll renegotiate when it’s time.”
Reuben couldn’t help scoffing aloud at her tone. An illegal acting like a queen. Queen of what, a band of insurgents? He had no proof of anything, he knew that. She was probably just a petty criminal, a black-marketeer. Or even more brazen than that. What if she and a group of others were providing unsanctioned sexual services to the men of Green City? Why hadn’t he known about this? If the woman was really a whore, he wanted to see what she had on offer.
He tried again a few weeks later, writing to her as the merchant that he’d imported some contraband hashish—the real thing, not the fake stuff that went into those useless e-spliffs—from the North African territories. Would she li
ke to try some? He couldn’t trust it with the usual couriers. When could he see her?
After that, Reuben was certain he’d offended her, or scared her off. Waiting for her response, he became as impatient as an addict craving the next hit. A full day passed, and Reuben wondered whether his plan had backfired. He’d have to arrange a security detail to find her quickly, before she could run. He was just about to give the orders when her message came through, agreeing to a meeting. No more circling around each other, just a businesslike note fixing the time of their meeting: 11 p.m. the next night, at a neutral place: “I only work at night.”
So she liked drugs; one more thing to trap her with when it came time to take her in. He wrote back to suggest a greenhouse in the eastern quadrant of the City Park, a popular spot for Green City marriages. At night nobody ever came there, and he could make sure the usual Security patrols left them undisturbed (he didn’t tell her that). They could meet there in anonymity, talk safely in the silence and the darkness.
She agreed, then cut the communication channel permanently.
He knew she would come, like a hawk returning to its master’s arm. Plotting out her arrest in his mind, he waited for the hours to roll around with feral, almost sexual anticipation. Would she fight him, try to get away, or acquiesce meekly to his authority? He felt the keen thrill of success in his grasp, the jolt of the moment between the first cut of a knife and the blood welling to the surface of the skin.
Reuben drove to the greenhouse at ten in the evening. He’d had the area cleared on the pretext that he was conducting a sweep for a visiting dignitary from Kolachi the next week. He would personally inspect the eastern part of the park, where a reception for the dignitary would take place at the end of the week. No, he didn’t want to take anyone with him. And he wanted to be alone while he was there. His subordinates obeyed; they were frightened of displeasing him.
When Reuben arrived at the park, there was nobody else there, not even the Security patrols or the maintenance workers. The far-off lights of the city glimmered in the distance, but darkness and a sad silence misted the park’s myriad wonders: the rainforest simulation, the massive food gardens, the xeriscaped terraces. They all thronged with crowds during the day but lay empty and barren now. Reuben strode past them all, toward the edge of a burbling stream. He waited anxiously for the bridge to unroll and flatten so he could cross over to the cooled conservatory on the island in the water.
He let himself in through the main door—all government-owned buildings and public spaces allowed him immediate access—and keyed in a code to keep the door unlocked. It took him a moment or two to orient himself to the greenhouse’s blanket of cool, humid air. Small phosphorescent bulbs illuminated curving pathways, and fireflies, glowworms, and bioluminescent millipedes moved and shimmered all around him in points of flickering light.
Reuben edged his way along a pool where oversized lily pads covered the water like lush dark teacups. He sat down by the side, breathing in the slightly mossy, moldy scent; he trailed his hand in the water and drew it back quickly, smiling, when a fish nibbled at the tips of his fingers, breaking through the furious concentration with which he was watching the doors, waiting for her to arrive. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him smile, especially before an arrest, when the teeth-chattering adrenaline coursed through him like this. But he found himself savoring this interlude punctuated by trickling water and the clicking of geckos hidden in the plants. All the pieces of his plan were in place, and he only had to wait for the queen to step into the square he’d marked out to checkmate her.
The woman appeared at the door of the greenhouse, spectral and shapeless in her full black veil. Reuben watched her from his hidden vantage point as she glanced around, then opened the door and stepped into the entranceway. She looked not quite real as yet, with the glass ceiling arching high above her head and the breezy mist from the humidifiers pushing the veil around her body in gentle undulations.
Reuben forced himself to get up and move calmly, approaching her as if she were standing on a ledge and might topple over if he came close too fast. When he stood face to face with her, he held his breath and waited to see if she’d stay, or flee. He would be behind her in two seconds if she tried to escape. But as she pushed her veil back from her face, it was he who felt his legs tremble, the immense kick of attraction at the pit of his stomach. Close to her, he could see now that it was Lin Serfati, but that his digitized photograph had lied. Her face radiated a type of beauty that no camera could capture: a perfect symmetry of features, translucent skin that held a shifting landscape of emotions—boldness, fear, certainty, doubt. Sharp hazel eyes that looked as though they knew melancholy well peered at him defiantly, fixing him in his place.
“Lin Serfati?” He tried to sound authoritative, but inside he felt as lost as a motherless boy. His heart beat fast, throbbing in his own ears. She must be wondering how he knew her identity, and who he was. She’d have to have been living underground for years to not know Reuben Faro, by name and deed.
She nodded. “How do you know who I am?” Her voice was low, with an accent he couldn’t place. Where had she grown up? “And you’re no merchant. Why have you called me here?”
“My name is Reuben Faro.”
“I know who you are.” She tilted her head, angling the lower part of her face up to peer down at him from the lower corners of her eyes, as if she were measuring him up. “Who doesn’t know Reuben Faro in this town?” Then, unexpectedly, she leaned close and whispered, her lips nearly touching his ear, “Are you here to arrest me?”
“That depends on your crime.” His whole body tingled at the sensation of her breath on his skin. She was so close to him, close enough that he could smell her scent. He leaned away, doing the exact opposite of what every cell in his body was urging him to do.
She smiled in the darkness; he couldn’t see it, but he knew that he was being mocked from the lightness in her voice. “And this is where you conduct your interrogations?”
How dare she sound so amused? Surely it was his place to toy with her, not the other way around. Every muscle in Reuben’s body strained with the effort to stand completely still. She should talk more, to truly incriminate herself. He’d always found it more satisfying when they trapped themselves in their own attempts to escape the reckoning, but he knew he was lying to himself. He only wanted to hear more of her voice.
“You have to admit, this is an unusual place to meet. There are eyes everywhere. But then, I suppose most of them belong to you.”
“I had to resort to unusual measures to bring you out from your hiding place. You weren’t exactly easy to find.” A moth flitted by, brushing its wings against Reuben’s cheek. He waved it away, irritated, snapping back into the reality of why they were both here: so he could arrest her. But the woman wasn’t reacting the way he’d expected her to, with tears or fright. He guessed she’d start to bargain now, or offer a clumsy attempt at seduction in order to sway him from his path.
“And yet you found me after all,” she said. “How clever you were.” She averted her body to move past him, cutting a path through the foliage as if she knew exactly where she was going. Reuben followed quickly, wanting to reach out and catch her by the arm, yank her back, and haul her to the Agency. She wouldn’t be so reckless in an interrogation room, stripped of all her pretensions. Clever? Nobody had ever used that word for him before. Brilliant. Genius. Powerful. But clever? That was praise for a monkey who performed tired tricks in front of a bored audience.
He allowed her to keep walking. At last she stopped abruptly in a clearing, a small grotto of bottle palms that grew only slightly taller than their heads. A few spotlights picked out the clearing, a circle of light in the surrounding gloom. The trailing fronds of the palm trees tapped like gentle fingers on Reuben’s chest.
She spoke again, an edge in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “Don’
t you already know my crimes? Reluctance, rebellion, revolt. I’ve committed them all.” She held up her slim fingers and counted them off, her hand in the air like a curse in front of his face. Here was the defiance that he’d been expecting, the show of anger. He suddenly imagined her palm on his cheek in a stinging slap. He could feel himself craving the blow.
“You’d better tell me everything,” Reuben said. “The outcome will be more favorable for you if you do.”
“Oh, I will tell you everything. Did you know, there’s one thing you left off your holy list of gender crimes. Can you guess what it is?”
“We left out nothing. It’s a perfect system.” He spoke with the certainty of someone who had worked his whole life to uphold it. Why she wasn’t begging him to let her go? He’d seen men drop to their knees, pleading for leniency, for their lives. She was hissing at him as if he were the criminal. Did this woman truly not know what was at stake for her?
“Perfect for you. Perfect for Green City. Reform, repopulate, redress the imbalance that we were left with after the War. But it all fell on us. We’re the ones you relied on to make the system work. You didn’t even ask us if we consented to your grand plan. And if we’d said no, would you have even listened? Understanding is better than blind compliance. You want us to choose our prisons willingly. Oh, I can see you already know that phrase. I know every word of that wretched Handbook. I ought to.”
Could she truly be this preternaturally calm, or was she terrified inside, he wondered. No man could have acted this well. “Because of Ilona Serfati?”
“My aunt.”
“Is she the one who took you?” The pieces were all coming together now. But why was his breath coming and going so heavily? His intellect was still working, despite the antagonistic, animalistic response of his body to her presence. “She worked for us, you know.” He watched her face carefully for her reaction, but found himself staring at her lips as she spoke.