Null States

by Malka Older

  CHAPTER 29

  Roz avoids the melting of the plastic guns. She’s been to a few of those in her time, and they’re both smelly and boring. Back in the office, she finds Maria working alone and recruits her to help run down the lead on the assassins. (“Leave my mess of depressing statistics to catch a murderer? Sure!”) Roz cross-refs for the possibility that the same group participated in the other suspicious deaths Mishima highlighted, but looking for IntelliStream doesn’t garner any hits, so she goes through the other sites more carefully, looking for instances of “nonprofit” consultants that weren’t paid or approved. In the meantime, Maria is checking vids to get visual identification of these guys.

  “When did you say they arrived?” Maria asks, scanning. “I don’t see anything at the landing ground that day.”

  “Check Information—look, here are the dates.” Roz pauses, pulls up the cross-reference. “It’s the same day the tsubame was in the garage!”

  “Very suspicious,” Maria agrees.

  They pore over the vid from that day together. “Maybe they landed somewhere else, the way we do,” Roz suggests. “Check the meeting with the governor at the centenal hall instead.” She goes back to her lists of foreign organizations while Maria speeds through feeds of the centenal hall entrance.

  “There’s nothing,” Maria says at last, between frustrated and mystified. “Did these guys even show up?”

  “Let me see.” Roz leans over and they run through the footage again. “Is it possible they met with the governor elsewhere?”

  Maria checks. “No, he was definitely in the building. But according to his schedule, he left for a constituent visit at two P.M.”

  “Could that meeting be with them?”

  “Maybe … but look, I’m not seeing him leaving, either.” They run through the vids again.

  “There must be another exit,” Roz says.

  “Without a feed on it?”

  “Such outrage from the woman whose home has no feeds,” Roz jabs. She’s relieved, actually; the elusiveness of these consultants was starting to get creepy. No feeds is a preferable explanation to ninjas. “Where else can we look? Check the garage.”

  “I thought the garage didn’t have a feed?”

  “No, but we can check the feeds around it. Otherwise, we go through every feed in town over these days.” Not as daunting a prospect as it should be; there just aren’t that many feeds to go through.

  Roz goes back to her list of consultants. The other suspicious death locations must have better Information coverage than Kas; maybe she can find some visuals there. She keeps glancing over Maria’s shoulder at the vids she’s scanning, but she’s deep in an explanation of improving service provision in the Sri Lankan highlands when Maria nudges her. “Look at this.”

  Roz leans over to watch as Maria replays the segment, showing an intersection in the market. Roz can make out tinwares on one side, a clothing shop on the other. “Where are we?”

  “The garage is half a block down this way. Look here.”

  Roz follows Maria’s finger: blue cloth, the side of a sleeve from elbow to mid-forearm, passing along the corner of the feed. “Okay…”

  “No, look at this.” Maria replays it again, directing Roz’s attention higher, and she sees it: a flash of brown hair.

  Roz reaches in to pause it, replays it again. “A foreigner.”

  Maria nods. “I just checked. There’s no mention of any other non-African foreigners in town during this period.”

  “As we’ve learned, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.” Roz is thinking, arms folded. “And we don’t know they were headed to the garage. The tsubame could have been sabotaged at any time. Whoever this is could have been going for lunch or shopping.”

  “No, this is him. Or them,” Maria says. “Look at the map. He had to walk all the way over here to be out of the feed. He’s probably tripping over pots outside this shop.”

  “They’re avoiding the feeds. That’s why we don’t see them at the centenal hall.”

  “That’s why they don’t land at the airfield.”

  “Shit.”

  “Do you think the governor was complicit somehow?” Maria asks.

  “In his own assassination?”

  “Or … someone else in his office?”

  Roz thinks of Suleyman and wishes she hadn’t. “I talked to the governor—Sheikh Suleyman, I mean—and the finance person today. Both told me, convincingly, that they’d never met these people.” She pauses. “Someone must have met them. They’re not ghosts. We’ll have to do further interviews tomorrow.” She checks the time: past eight.

  “I want to know,” Maria says.

  They spend most of the night looking through every feed in town, trying to catch a glimpse of the consultant-assassins.

  * * *

  For once, Roz does not wake up at dawn. Maybe her schedule has been thrown off by the night spent at the barracks and the late night of research, but she senses some other change in the air. Her hut is hot, yes, glowing with absorbed energy from the sun, but not quite as hot as it was yesterday. She stretches, gets up, and steps outside. Yes, something is definitely different. A stork squawks from the tree, and Roz looks up.

  The sky is clouded over.

  She finds another difference after she uses the latrine: there’s a security officer stationed by the gate. It’s not surprising, and Roz nods to him before going around back to the breakfast table. Amran is there with Yagoub and Mohammed, the stringers, already deep in discussion this early in the morning. Simone Dumitrache is there too, and Roz sits next to her with her coffee and oatmeal.

  The metal door to the compound flies open and Suleyman bursts in with such energy that a small sub-flock of storks takes off and then resettles. The security guy, no slouch, puts his palm out to Suleyman’s chest, but the governor brushes it away like a fly and keeps walking. Simone is up, but Roz has a hand on her arm and gestures with the other to the guard at the door, who reluctantly puts away his baton. The sheikh is burning with anger, his white robe whipping around his ankles as he crackles across the courtyard. Roz strides out to head him off, heart pounding with urgency and a flash of fear: what if it’s about her? About them? Someone saw them at the café, read her face—that’s all it takes in a place like this; the secret is out. She wrestles down her shame, because the only way to fight this is with dignity and statuesque blankness.

  But that’s not what it is.

  “We’ve been attacked by 888,” he snaps out, voice like metal. “Men have died on the border. Did you make this happen?”

  Dignity and blankness will serve for this too, although Roz lets a little anger creep into her too. She’s going to need it not to wilt in the face of his fury. “I didn’t even know it happened until now.”

  “Don’t give me that!” His eyes burn into her. “You are Information; you know everything!”

  “It wouldn’t be the first battle here that Information didn’t know about.” Out of the corner of her eye, Roz can see Amran blinking quickly, hopefully getting the update from Khadija.

  He dismisses this with a flick of his wrist. “Now you know. They have attacked our people, our home, our land, our … our centenal, if that’s what you care about! 888, these people who don’t even belong here! What are you doing about it?”

  “What do you want us to do about it? We aren’t your army.”

  “You’ve got security right there!”

  “They’re here because you have arrested one of our people!”

  “We arrested him because he broke our laws!”

  She can feel the heat coming off of him; his eyes are bright, wide.

  “We have no evidence that it is anything but a trumped-up charge.”

  “So, you have your allies attack us?”

  “Information has no governmental allies.”

  “No? No? You don’t play favorites? You don’t coddle the powerful and the wealthy?” He throws up his hands. “You melted down our guns! You
melted down our guns so we could not defend ourselves, and that very night, they attack us. This is a coincidence?” He is hoarse with frustration.

  “Did 888 use guns to attack you?” He can’t answer that, his lips pressing together to avoid letting out either truth or lie. “No. Because they don’t have any. Because they are illegal. So, removing your illegal guns did not give them an advantage.”

  “No?” Suleyman is back on the attack, stepping closer. “A government with a highly trained army funded and resourced from thousands of centenals worldwide, against our tiny militia? And they don’t have an advantage?”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “They attack us when we are without a head of state, in the midst of an election, and you say that is fair?”

  “I didn’t say that it was fair, nor that they don’t have an advantage. I said we didn’t give them one by melting your illegal, dangerous, provocative guns.”

  “Provocative? Are you saying this was our fault?”

  “Are you requesting our assistance?”

  He stops. Roz feels like she’s standing on a precipice, at the height of some arc of stone. She presses forward, building her walkway as she goes. “It’s not our job to police your borders,” she says, putting her own steel into it. “Use your militia properly or send in a request for military training and support.” She snaps her fingers, and the appropriate form appears, projected into the air between them before she disintegrates it into sparks, fast and angry.

  “It is your job to judge infractions and illegality by sovereign governments.” Suleyman is still angry, but he’s starting to cool down.

  “After the fact. And this will be judged.” She pauses the appropriate amount of time. “I suggest you pursue that judgment with more deliberation than you are showing now.” Roz wonders if she overdid it, if that’s going to set him fuming again, but instead, the tension loosens. She sees him inhale deeply.

  “I will pursue that judgment,” he says, in something approximating his normal tone. “And in the meantime…” This is harder. “… I can’t let my centenal be so exposed. We will be calling in assistance from other DarFur centenals, but in the meantime, I would like some … some support from any source possible.”

  Roz nods. She realizes Simone is standing behind her right shoulder, and wonders when that happened.

  Suleyman lowers his voice, speaking for her now. “Whoever did this should understand: it makes it much more difficult for me to release the man accused of spying.”

  “I don’t see why the use of physical force should have any bearing on the justice of the case,” Roz answers. She turns her head slightly without taking her eyes off him. “Simone, can you do anything for this centenal’s security?”

  “I’ll be happy to take a look,” Simone answers smartly, and gestures toward the gate. “Lead on, sir.”

  Suleyman holds Roz’s eyes for a long moment, and then sweeps away in a swirl of white, and they are gone.

  The security guard on duty lets his breath out and then repositions himself outside the gate.

  Roz walks back to the breakfast table. “What did you find out?”

  Amran’s eyes are wide, and she keeps them on Roz while she answers, not double-checking her notes for once. “According to Khadija, there was a battle last night. Far from town, on the southern border.” In the direction of Nyala. “At least one casualty, possibly more. But she can’t confirm the aggressor.”

  Roz drops into a seat. “Ugh,” she says, all her energy draining away. She probes gently at the residual discomfort: did the fragile attraction shatter? Did he say something she can’t forgive? Did she?

  “Nice graphics,” Yagoub says next to her.

  Roz feels compelled to give him a grin. “SVAT work includes a lot of flash. For persuasive purposes only, of course.” Hooked, she can see it in his eyes. Another ready recruit. She’s going to have to remember to talk him out of it.

  * * *

  Appetite drowned out by the adrenaline, Roz goes into the office. Maria is already in there, working on some tangle in the polling data. It’s only five days until the election, and it occurs to Roz that she should ask the InfoSecs if they’re willing to stay until then. She wonders how Simone is doing with the governor, whether he mentioned taking part in the fighting, what she thinks of him.

  She confirms DarFur’s story about the emergency fund: there was indeed a food shortage and distributions of rations bought from Nyala and Khartoum. Roz finds it hard to focus, though. The population of the compound has doubled in the last twenty-four hours, and people keep walking in and out, throwing up projections, talking about guns and punitive fines and sampling errors. Roz turns on her music and even considers projecting up some walls, but she doesn’t want to seem antisocial, or for people to think she’s upset about what happened earlier.

  Roz gets up and edges her way through the team of stringers—swollen to five now in preparation for the vote—who are meeting with Amran and Maria. Outside, she stands in the narrow triangle of shade that falls from the building, and flexes her fingers. She needs some space. She needs to walk back and forth, and she doesn’t want to do that in front of everyone. She wants to go for a walk—to the market, to the barracks, anywhere—but the morning’s clouds are gone and the heat is more intense than ever. She makes it three steps out of the shadow and then gives up, scurries around to the shaded kitchen area, and makes some tea before going back inside the heat-shielded office.

  She’s not used to being on SVAT missions long enough to feel like she’s running in place.

  That reminds her that they’re going to leave at some point.

  Before she worries too much about how dismal that makes her feel, Amran is standing in front of her, twisting her hands in her skirt. She looks so young. “Yes?”

  “You had asked, about the fighting,” Amran says.

  Roz has no idea what she’s talking about.

  “About why we don’t know about it,” Amran prompts. “About not just the feeds but the other intel…”

  “Oh, yes.” Roz remembers, and takes a sip of her tea to cover her confusion, scalding her tongue. “You found something?” Amran is again exceeding her expectations, especially considering all the disruption over the past few days.

  “Just, I mean, not so much, but”—Amran passes a file into Roz’s workspace—“mainly, some blanks in what people are reporting. Not many lies.”

  Roz opens the file, starts flipping through it. She has no desire to report doctors for marking cause of death unknown for bodies with bullets in them, especially understanding the context here. Still, if someone had said something earlier, maybe DarFur would have gotten the help it needed with security and there would have been fewer bodies. She remembers that soldiers died last night, and frowns, her headache worsening.

  “It takes time,” she mutters.

  “What?” Amran asks. “What takes time?”

  “Nothing,” Roz says. “Thank you for this; great job.” She wonders if it will be very noticeable if she goes back to her hut and takes a nap. Although it’s probably too hot to sleep in there.

  “It does seem like…” Amran hesitates.

  “You noticed something else?” Roz asks reluctantly. Working alone with quiet music is the next best thing to sleeping.

  “I don’t know; maybe I’m just being dramatic.” That clicks something in Roz’s aching head, and she remembers that it might be a good idea to listen when Amran is feeling dramatic. “But it’s almost like … some of the intel isn’t coming to us?” Amran sounds as puzzled saying that as Roz is hearing it.

  “What do you mean?”

  Amran’s hands grip each other in the folds of her skirt. “Some things that … it seems they should have been recorded but … I haven’t seen them; I haven’t been able to find them. We don’t have them.”

  “Seems they should have been recorded?”

  “Remember the oil barrel explosion? You asked me to check if Al-Jabali was there? I re
member when it happened. I heard it. I went running. I didn’t get into the building—there was a crowd—but I saw it, you know? I reported on it, and I examined the data. At the time, I mean. Then when you asked me, I went back and checked again. I saw his schedule, with a gap there. I asked Amal, and she told me he was there. But there was no data.”

  Roz thinks about this. Information always misses some data, and here, for reasons that she’s getting very tired of listing, it misses more. “I mean, I can see why people wouldn’t want to publicize that the governor was visiting his mistress in the reports on the explosion. What should have been recorded?”

  “At a minimum, the governor’s handheld should have recorded the noise and the high temperature. And there are feeds he should have passed on the way there. None of that was in the data I got; none of it is in Information now. I checked.”

  There’s a stir outside, voices, something going on. “Can you keep looking into that?” Roz remembers to add “good work” as she gets up and hurries toward the door.

  Malakal comes in before she gets there, closing the door behind him. “It’s okay,” he tells the room. “Minzhe’s back.”

  “He’s here?” Roz asks, walking with Malakal to an unoccupied corner. “Not at the clinic?”

  “We took him there first to get cleaned up, but the injuries aren’t serious. He’s resting in his hut. Better not to bother him for now.” Malakal looks exhausted. “DarFur has dropped the arrest.”

  “What?” Roz had assumed he was out on some kind of bail. “He’s free to leave the centenal, and he’s here?”

  Malakal rubs his huge hands over his face. “He refused to go. Said his mother agrees. I don’t know; some blabla about wanting to finish what he started.” He removes his hands, meets Roz’s eyes. “I did everything short of ordering him to go. Told him we’ve gotten reinforcements, we don’t need him, it won’t affect his career…” He shrugs.

  “He wants to show that he’s not a spy,” Roz says.

  “Or…” He doesn’t have to finish the thought. Or he is a spy.

  Roz shakes her head. “Even if he was…” She doesn’t want to say it either. “How did he get the intel out?” There are ways of transmitting illicit data, of course. But when a potential spy has been identified, finding the transmission usually isn’t difficult.