Kine had, however, tailored the house to admit blood kin. Nyx was the only blood kin Kine had left. Their mother had borne the five of them—three boys, two girls—in one pregnancy at the breeding compounds. She hadn’t been interested in having any more. That was before women had quotas.
The door slid open. Automatic doors creeped Nyx out.
The first thing Nyx saw was one of Kine’s long coats and a crumpled hijab on the floor. Kine didn’t leave her clothes on the floor. Her place was always immaculate.
Nyx didn’t call out for Kine. She unshouldered the scattergun. She tended to be a better shot with fluid at short range. She stalked into the flat.
I’m a bloody fucking fool, she thought. Of course the council wouldn’t have authorized killing Nyx in so short a period of time. But they would have happily authorized the slaughter of everyone around her. Her chest hurt. She needed to find Kine and call the keg.
There was a broken lamp in the main room. Dead glow worms littered the floor. Nyx nudged one of them with the toe of her sandal. They were still soft. It had been an hour, maybe two. She had missed them by an hour.
Nyx poked around the kitchen, found a couple of drawers open. Had Kine been looking for a weapon? Had she known there was someone in the flat?
Nyx checked behind all the doors as she moved, cleared each room. Kine had put up blank-faced portraits of the prophet in the living area, and hung some gaudy inscriptions from the Kitab alongside them. In her bedroom, though, Kine kept pictures of the five of them, her kin, embedded in the walls—glowing, partially animated portraits of better days. If you got too close, you could see that what made the images move were multi-colored layers of rug lice. The faces of their brothers laughed back at Nyx: Amir, the oldest by an hour; brilliant Fouad; and skinny little Ghazi, the runt.
By seventeen, all the boys were dead.
Nyx pushed open the bathroom door.
Kine lay in the tub, mouth open, one arm flung over the edge. The water was rusty and full of shit. The room stank. Congealed blood blackened the floor.
Nyx got close enough to see that most of the blood had come from a long tear in Kine’s gut. Her bowels had let loose—before or after she expired, Nyx didn’t care to know. Kine’s eyes were black holes of blood and eye pulp. They’d finished her off with two shots to the head.
There was blood in the bowl of the sink. They’d washed their hands, after.
Under the sink was a single white feather.
Nyx looked at her sister’s body for a long minute. Nyx’s palms were wet. The flat was cool.
She dared not make any calls from inside the flat. They’d likely bugged it.
Nyx did a pass through the last room, Kine’s study. They’d gone through the desk, opened up jars and boxes of bugs. The dead and dying insects littered the floor or clung to the ceiling. Smears of velvet black—blue, violet—ran across the floor. Torn organic papers, bleeding those same colors, were crumpled and scattered around the window.
What did Kine have that they’d wanted? If the only reason they killed her was to get to Nyx, why go through the—
We’re all trying to cure the war.
Nyx turned abruptly and ran back to the bedroom. She felt along the edges of one of the animated photos of her, Kine, and their brothers until she found the catch. The depiction was not soldered to the wall. It popped free and swung out.
For a conservative like Kine, images of living things of any kind were vulgar, obscene. An affront to God. If she had them around, it was to tell somebody something. Or remind herself of something.
Inside the hidden cabinet were Kine’s real records: papers and bug recordings of her work in the compounds. Nyx found a satchel and stuffed the lot of them into it without looking. Rhys would help her sort them out. She put the picture back in place. Her siblings grinned at her. Kine winked. Nyx wiped down the frame.
On her way out, she cleaned the faceplate as well. She walked quickly but didn’t dare run.
Back at the mechanic’s, she found a call box. She flipped the switch that agitated the bugs and plugged in the pattern for the keg.
The bugs chattered for a long time. She heard someone on the other side of the building and ducked behind the box.
“Pickup, you fuckers,” she muttered. She saw a sudden clear image of Anneke with her head blasted in, Taite with a sword through his gut, Rhys’s hands—
“Peace be unto you,” Rhys’s voice carried to her from the desert.
“You listen to me,” she said. Her voice shook. She stilled it. “You tell Taite to get his sister to a safe place and cut free his boy. Tell Khos to get his whores to another house, and if Anneke gives a shit about anybody, you tell her to get them a train ticket. Anybody we care about, get them out of the city or out of their places. And start packing up our stuff. You know the regrouping point. You put a filter up and get out of there. You hear me?”
“Are you all right?”
“Kine’s dead.”
He inhaled sharply. “Nyx—”
“You go get anybody you care about, Rhys. Tell them to clear out.”
“Everyone I care about is on this team,” Rhys said.
“Then they need to move,” Nyx said, and hung up.
15
Burst sirens wailed out over Punjai; brilliant green burst tails lit up the black sky. Taite and Khos walked quickly, side by side, through the Mhorian district, one of the few parts of Punjai where neither of them stood out much. The faces were paler, the noses flatter, the shoulders broader, and most of the women on the street covered their hair with white scarves. A pity, really. The Mhorian district was the one place Taite ever saw hair that wasn’t black.
“How are we for time?” Khos asked.
Taite shook his head. He knew they were running a little late, and he knew he should have gone to his sister’s first, but he had set up this night with Mahdesh three days before. Mahdesh had been unreachable since then, out poking around some fallen space debris in the desert. Taite needed to speak to him in person. Inaya would have to wait.
Taite stepped over the threshold and into the Lunes Dansantes, a Ras Tiegan café that served Mhorian honeyed tea and kosher food for Khos in addition to saucy, spicy Ras Tiegan cuisine.
They both took off their sandals and piled them at the door with the others. Inside, the light was low, fresh glow worms in glass, and a woman sat with a small string band on a raised platform at the back of the café, singing a Ras Tiegan love song in a high, clear voice.
Taite looked out over the heads of the cigar-smoking crowd, a mixed group of men and women, mostly expatriates like him and Khos. He saw Mahdesh’s familiar shaggy head and slim profile and felt a surge of relief. Of course he would be here. Of course everything was all right.
“I’ll get us some drinks,” Khos said.
Taite nodded, and picked his way among the tables to Mahdesh’s side.
Mahdesh caught sight of him and grinned. He had the sort of grin that could fill a room. A smile that made Taite feel as if he were the only man in Nasheen.
They touched lips to cheeks, twice. Mahdesh kept hold of his elbow, still grinning. He was a little taller than Taite, broader in the shoulders, and had the clear, pale skin and even teeth of a half-breed inoculated Mhorian. Mhorians had no qualms about inoculating their half-breeds.
“Dangerous night?” Mahdesh asked, nodding toward Khos as they sat.
Taite sat close enough so their knees touched. It was as much prolonged public contact as they dared, even in the Mhorian district. Some Nasheenian women took violent offense to overly friendly men, no matter where they sat.
“Yes, I have to be quick tonight,” Taite said.
Mahdesh leaned back in his chair, winked. “I’m getting used to that.”
“We’re having some trouble with a note.”
“You mean Nyx is having some trouble with a note.”
Taite swallowed. “Yes.”
Khos arrived with drinks. Clear liquor for Tait
e and Mahdesh, amber honeyed tea for himself.
“How are you, stargazer?” Khos asked. He held out a hand to Mahdesh. They clasped elbows, and Khos leaned in and kissed his cheeks.
“I’ve been better. The city’s too hot for me.”
“It’s a good time to get out, then,” Khos said, and sat. “You told him yet?” he asked Taite.
“Nyx’s note is in trouble,” Taite said. “You and Inaya should leave the city tonight. Nyx’s sister was killed. She thinks whoever did it may be coming after our kin next.”
“Are you going to hold my hand, Taitie?” Mahdesh asked.
Taite felt himself redden. “I—”
Mahdesh reached under the table, squeezed his knee, and sobered. “I know. I’ll be all right. What does your sister think about it?”
“We’re going there after,” Taite said.
Mahdesh raised a brow. “Hope Khos is staying in the bakkie”
Khos snorted. “I’m doing it for Taite.”
“She doesn’t hate you, Khos. You just make her nervous,” Taite said.
“She hates me. She hates herself.”
“Don’t say that,” Taite said. God, his sister. “She needs to be looked after, all right? Khos, don’t fuck with me on this. Anything happens to me, look after her, will you?”
Mahdesh shook his shaggy head. “When will you let her grow up, Taitie? She’s nearly a decade your senior.”
“Take care of her,” Taite repeated, still looking at Khos.
Khos shook his head. “Come on, you’ll be fine. It’s why I’m out tonight.” He pulled down his tea in one swallow. “You two catch up. I’ll meet you outside. That singer’s voice grates.”
He stood, and moved back through the crowd.
Taite looked back at Mahdesh. Their eyes met. Mahdesh’s were steely gray, large and liquid. Taite wanted to stay there forever.
“This note… Inaya…”
“I understand,” Mahdesh said. “I have some work to do in Faleen at the docks, muddling over some repairs and doing some translation. I can bide my time until things here cool down. The border’s been a little warm anyway.”
Taite nodded. He reached for his drink and realized his hand was shaking. Why was he always such a coward when it came to these things? Why not say it all out loud?
Because they could kill us for it, Taite thought.
Mahdesh put his hand over Taite’s. “Go on. She needs you more than I do. I’ll be all right.”
Taite nodded. He stood. “We’ll be at a safe house. I’m not sure for how long.”
“Contact me when you can.”
“I will.”
Taite wanted to kiss him. The singer’s voice trailed off. The café patrons began to clap. Taite turned away and pulled up his burnous, even though it was dark and too warm. He didn’t want Mahdesh to see his face.
Taite left Khos with the bakkie and walked the two blocks over from the Mhorian district into the Ras Tiegan district. The change was subtle: a narrowing of the lanes, brighter colors out on the balconies, and the smell of curry that slowly came to dominate the stench of the streets as he walked.
A gang of women sat outside a bar and jeered at him as he passed. Most women didn’t bother him, even in the Ras Tiegan quarter, but he’d had some bad nights since he arrived in Nasheen a decade before: fourteen years old and starving, his only talent a predisposition for mucking around effectively inside the mechanical and organic bits of a com unit.
There were more men in this part of the city, but the crime rate was about the same as anywhere else in Nasheen. In Nasheen, Chenja, and most parts of Tirhan, stealing got you a limb chopped off, and a second offence barred you from replacing it. Blinding was popular for black market offenses, and he had gone just once to a public execution where a woman had her head cut off for killing a local magistrate who’d come to register her son for the draft. There had been a crowd at the execution, but they had not jeered or clapped or reveled in their bloodlust the way he thought they would. No, it was a sober occasion, somber, like a funeral. After, they had wrapped the woman in white and set her on fire.
Fewer people stayed for that part.
He found his sister’s tenement building—a squat brick-and-tile construction that must have dated back a century. Most of the tile had been stolen, leaving wounds of brick and mortar behind. The only renovations going on in Punjai were on the gun towers in the mosques and the military headquarters to the south.
Taite walked past the building on his first pass. He hung around the corner and waited to see if anyone had followed him. His parents had taught him a good deal before they’d managed to smuggle him out of Ras Tieg just ahead of the military police. He remembered how black the night was; remembered the protestors on the streets, the pictures of mutilated babies, the men on their podiums shouting, telling the crowd that the women of Ras Tieg were murderers and adulterers. He remembered the children—boys and girls—handing out pamphlets of crushed fetuses and mangled children, remembered their innocent smiles, as if they were handing out hard candy.
When he decided there was no one following, Taite buzzed his sister’s place and waited some more.
Inaya was slow coming down the stairs. He had managed to get her passage into Nasheen eight months before by calling in a lot of favors and relying on some of Nyx’s friends in customs. Inaya had been roughed up at the border crossing but said she would never be able to recognize her attackers. There’d been too many. Whether her pregnancy was her former husband’s or some border tough’s, she never said. He had not asked. She was a woman of a hundred secrets—a Ras Tiegan woman—and he let her keep them. The last time they’d seen each other, they were ten years younger, and she, eight years his senior, was rushing through a hasty marriage of necessity while their friends’ houses burned.
They both knew she could have made an easier crossing into Nasheen, but she would have rather killed herself than given in to shifting. For any reason. No matter their parents’ politics, Inaya thought shifters were dirty and diseased. She thought their miscarriages of nonshifting children were murder. She thought her mother was a murderer for not getting Taite and her inoculated, for not somehow saving the five bloody fetuses that their mother had lost and mourned for five bloody years.
Taite hadn’t blamed their mother for shifting at night, going out to copulate with dogs, living some other life in some other form. He understood something of it, that need to escape one’s body.
He had never been able to shift, and a lack of shifting ability for many Ras Tiegans resulted in poor health. Nyx liked to tell him he was allergic to air, and she was only half joking. Much of his memory of Ras Tieg was of a dark room, breathlessness, and the smell of stale urine in a pot.
When Inaya had started to get sick, she told them all it was just allergies, like Taite’s. The headaches, the skin rashes, the nausea. She had nearly killed herself the day she realized her asthma was not from a lack of inoculants but one of the initial symptoms of a maturing shifter about to come into her ability. Taite had never seen her shift. The day she first shifted, he had been young and remembered only screaming, the smell of saffron. He learned later that magicians used saffron to discourage shifters from changing. It mangled their senses, the way the smell of oranges confused transmissions between bugs and magicians.
Inaya opened the door. The swell of her belly made it difficult to maneuver the narrow stairwell. In the dim light from the street, he saw how pale she was.
She’d gotten factory work in neighboring Basmah, but couldn’t afford to live there. She rode a bus an hour there and an hour back. She worked two split eight-hour shifts—eight hours, three hours off, then another eight hours—which meant she didn’t get much time to sleep during a twenty-seven hour day.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
He hadn’t been to see her in a week. “We’ll talk upstairs,” he said.
She nodded, a woman used to secrecy and discretion. Her black curls were tied up
with a vermilion scarf, keeping her hair out of her face. Her enormous belly looked far too large for her little frame. He and Inaya were both built like their Ras Tiegan father—narrow in the hips and shoulders, fine-featured. Inaya, by all counts, was prettier and had been darker before she started the factory work that kept her out of the suns.
Inaya started back up the sandy stairs. She wore a long skirt and loose blouse and went barefoot. The building manager was usually gone for months at a time. Taite preferred it that way. She meddled less often.
“Things with Nyx are all right?” Inaya asked as they climbed. Three flights.
“I still have a job, but some things have come up.” Inaya always asked about Nyx first, the job second. Over the months Inaya had picked up Taite’s employer’s first rule: If Nyx was happy, everyone was happy.
Inaya pulled open the door of the little three-room flat. Kitchen, greeting area, bedroom. The toilet was down the hall. A palace, for most refugees. Nyx had found the place through a network of old bel dame contacts and offered it to Taite at a rate he could not refuse. The walls were hung in tapestries and bright bits of fabric Inaya had secreted home from the textile factory. She loved color. Her loom took up one corner of the greeting room. She made some extra money selling her brilliant woven tapestries of Ras Tiegan jungles to rich merchants in Basmah.
There were cushions on the floor and a pressboard box covered over in a sheet, which served as a table.
Inaya moved over to the radio and turned it off. She was breathing hard, and sweat beaded her upper lip. The windows were open, but the room was still too warm. Summer had breached the city a month before. Taite heard the steady whir of the bugs in the icebox.
“When will the results of the vote be in?” Taite asked.
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