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 three 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 hangover. 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.
Lin wondered if Sabine really wanted to give up her sleepless nights. She wore her insomnia like penitence; guilt over her mother’s suicide lingered like poison in her blood. Lin still remembered the impassioned plea that Sabine had sent, years before, her fear and terror at being trapped in a system that had made her mother kill herself. Sabine’s teenaged face in the photo, beautiful but painfully thin, the school uniform barely hiding the comeliness of her adolescent body, evoked a ferocious pang in Lin’s heart. She, who had never known her own mother, felt as though she were looking at her own ghost. She’d decided instantly to take in the motherless girl.
Sabine’s sorrow should have faded away over the years she’d spent in the Panah, and that hadn’t happened. You wouldn’t survive if you couldn’t accept where you were, if you kept clinging to the past like a life jacket. You had to somehow override the memories, otherwise they’d seep into your dreams and torture you in your sleep.
Maybe the drug would even help Sabine to overcome the remnants of her sorrowful past. “What harm could it possibly do?” Lin said to herself, out loud.
“Please buckle your seatbelt. Your safety is important to me,” replied the car.
Lin chuckled, then closed her eyes and let Green City shrink away as the Panah loomed larger and larger. The night lost its immediacy, becoming the memory of an oasis she had once visited in the middle of a long journey. She even let go of her fear of the future: her power over it did not lie in her hands; there was only the quickly fading near past and the approaching present, time running on the wheels of the car gliding beneath her through Green City’s quickening streets.
The car approached the abandoned warehouse. Reuben ensured that its location never appeared on any of the Green City maps—by what kind of technology, she didn’t know. Lin waited until the car had driven away and counted sixty seconds after the warehouse door slid shut behind her. Then she went to the old-fashioned elevator and put her thumb onto the button. A slight vibration informed her that her thumbprint had been accepted. The door slid open, revealing a long black well. The elevator car had been torn out of the shaft long ago; only a small steel pipe snaked along its back wall. It was to this that Lin clung and let herself down, inch by slow inch. Her feet found the small indentations that had been etched into the wall with painstaking deliberation by Fairuza Dastani. The escape shaft had served thirty years of Panah women. There had been other entrances, once upon a time, but they’d been blocked up to prevent infiltration or defection. This shaft was the only remaining way into and out of the Panah.
At the bottom of the shaft, in near-total darkness, she let go of the pipe and dropped the last two feet down to the ground, her veil billowing around her like a parachute. Only after she’d pressed her eyes into the iris scanner and the door opened to let her in did she dare remove the veil, roll it into a ball and stuff it into her pocket.
Everyone else was asleep, or about to return from their assignations. Soon it would be time for Sabine’s pickup. Lin padded to the kitchen to prepare the mixture of cardamom, honey, turmeric, fennel, black pepper, and cloves. She opened the vial Reuben had given her and slipped one tiny pill into the tea, then stirred it well. She’d send the flask out with the pickup car, then go to her room and wait until Sabine came home. They might share an e-spliff before going to bed, giggling like schoolgirls over silly things, sweet relief from the heaviness of their existence.
She walked along the hallway, but miscalculated a step, stumbled and dropped the flask. As she bent down to retrieve it, her fingers touched another scrap of something on the floor. She picked up the flask and the other object, holding it up in the dim light. A memory slip, small enough to hide under your fingernail. She didn’t use them much, but maybe it was one that had gone astray.
She took it back to her room and placed it under the infrared, throwing its pages onto the display in magnification. She started at a random page in the middle. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the words written by hand instead of typed text. She drew back in surprise, then bent in again for a closer look. If books were antiques, then handwriting was downright obsolete—voice-to-device and even thought-to-device had replaced pens and pencils long ago. But someone had filled the memory slip with pages and pages of painstaking notes in this cramped and urgent script. First, a list:
THE DANGERS
Virus
Pregnancy (how would we deal with childbirth if...
something went wrong?)
No doctors (dying is better than being discovered)
Agency will punish us for Revolt
Then, beneath it:
I know Lin’s got a secret. Maybe she’s got a man but she doesn’t want the rest of us to have one because she’s jealous of us for being younger, prettier.
None of the others are brave enough to defy her, but I did, and now I know. And I’m glad. He was so good to me. So kind and gentle. And when it was over, he kept touching my nose pin and telling me how beautiful it made me look. Like a Gedrosian princess.
As the fragments started to create an unwelcome picture, Lin had to hold on to the table to steady herself. She skipped ahead a few pages, steeled herself to read again:
Lin hates my nose pin. She thinks it makes me look cheap, like a prostitute. She makes me take it off outside the Panah, but I put it back on when I’m with a Client. Just because I can.
The erratic words, th
e jerky sentences almost hissed off the page. Lin was stunned by the repetition of her name, written darker and underlined to emphasize the writer’s resentment. She read the passages over and over again, until the tightening in her chest subsided into a dull, constricting ache, making it hard to breathe.
There was only one woman in the Panah who wore a nose pin. And Lin, who had never been afraid of her, now found herself stunned at what she had discovered.
Rupa
Ma told me once that there are two types of envy. The first is when someone has something that you want, and you wish you could have it too. The second is when they have something you want, and you wish they didn’t have it. But there is a third type of envy, a black feeling in your heart when you have something, and you actively work to take it away from anyone else who might get it. That’s the kind of envy Lin has for us. She makes sure the happiness she knows is something we can never have, because she keeps it from us deliberately.
The others exist in a perpetual state of gratitude towards Lin for saving us from the fate of being Wives. They’ve swallowed all the restrictions and the secrecy without question. The rules have become a part of their bodies, clinging as leeches do to their flesh.
What if I had wanted to live on the outside, like a normal woman? What if I wanted to be a Wife, to bear a Husband a child? My choice was robbed from me. Once I set foot inside the Panah, I became a criminal. I could never go back. They are not my rules. I never made them, I never agreed to them. I never got to say what I wanted.
The Panah holds hardly half a dozen of us, and there are as many as forty or fifty Clients who want us, so we often end up on assignations with the same men. Of course Sabine is Joseph’s favorite, but when she isn’t available, he asks for me instead.
I know how to be grateful when I go to Joseph’s house and enjoy his generosity. Sabine is wrong about Joseph; where she sees a tiresome, greedy man, I see a man I can admire, strong and confident, powerful and accomplished. He’s good to me, as he would be to anyone who understands and respects his place in the world. His wealth and power are secondary to his character, which Sabine isn’t wise enough to see.
Black Diamond Fall Page 36