Rapture (32 page)

Ahmed watched the Chenjan go. She walked past the bar, which he only now realized was made of the undulating carapace of a massive arthropod. He shivered.

“Well, that’s something,” Nyx said.

“Sounds like a dead end,” Ahmed said.

“Why, because she’s Chenjan?”

“I wouldn’t trust an open hand from a Chenjan.”

“Because you’d never offer one to a Chenjan yourself?”

“It’s just suspicious, that’s all. Why’s she here? What kind of Chenjan woman hangs out at the end of the world?”

“We have our reasons for being here, and she has hers. We could use the work, especially if we’re stuck here for a while.”

“I already have a job, Nyx. I’m working for you. If we’re stuck, I don’t want to go on. I’d bet a lot of the others are done, too. You think Kage’s going to stick around after what we just went through? It sounds like she was already looking for a way out. And Eshe and Isabet, well, it’s just a matter of time before he fucks off with her. Then what?”

Nyx shrugged. “I recruit a new team. Plenty of people here looking for work.”

Ahmed sat back on his heels, anxious to call her bluff. “That’s catshit.”

“If you want to go, go. I’m not keeping you here.”

“You promised payment.”

“I promised food and a roof over your head. You’ve had that. And any payment I might have implied was for the end of the job. Not just getting to the job.”

“We’ll see how the others feel, then,” Ahmed said.

“Indeed we will.”

They walked together from the tea house, but in a few strides, Nyx was leading again, striding confidently back to their rented room as if he had not threatened to disband her entire team. He thought her supremely arrogant.

Eshe was at the ladder leading up to their residence with Kage. They were speaking to a woman who turned as they approached.

Her appearance caught Ahmed up short. He stopped breathing.

The woman raised a gun and pointed it at Ahmed. “So good of you to finally make it, Ahmed al Kaidan,” she said.

Ahmed heard the shot.

I
naya expected Michel to come for her. Or even one of their minor operatives working out of Inoublie. She did not actually expect her estranged husband. She had left Khos Khadija nearly seven years before in Tirhan, and had not spoken to him since. He raised their children with his second wife while Inaya led a revolution. She had regretted that decision many times. But what mother consigns her children to live in a world that hates them, when she could transform it into something different?

Her captors brought her into a tiny windowless room divided by an organic filter so tight that it made her skin crawl the moment she walked in. The closer she got to it, the more her skin itched. She began to wring her hands as she waited. Stopped. Then paced. Three steps right. Turn. Three steps left. The light was haunted; a ghastly, dying orange light produced by worms in glass. When the door began to open on the other side of the filter, she was hopeful. She and her operatives could speak in code, at least. They may even be able to slip her something on another occasion to neutralize the saffron. If she could shift and avoid the filters, she could escape. Fourré operatives knew what she needed. She had organized escapes from prisons before. None this secure, it was true, but the basics were the same.

The door on the other side of the filter opened. A large man filled the doorway. She knew him instantly.

It really was her husband, Khos Khadija.

She was suddenly unsteady on her feet, yet buoyant with emotion. The fear, longing, hurt, and sense of betrayal that swamped her was overwhelming.

He entered the room, and someone shut the door behind him. They were alone, but Inaya knew better than to believe they were unwatched.

Khos approached the filter. The expression on his face nearly took the breath from her. She had not seen a man look at her with so much love in a long time. He had grown out his hair again, and it hung in long yellow dreadlocks, knotted at the nape of his neck with an amber cord. He was thick in the shoulders and chest, and tall; her head barely reached his shoulder. The blue tattoos that crisscrossed his body were mostly covered. He wore long dark trousers, boots, and a pale coat that fell to mid-thigh. Compared to Tirhan, Ras Tieg could be a chilly country, and the clothing appeared new.

They stood a long moment on either side of the filter, neither saying a word, for some time.

“When did they send for you?” she asked, finally.

“Nine, ten days ago. It was the soonest I could get here.”

“And what did they tell you?”

“They said I’m to sign for you, and bring you home.”

“Home?”

“Tirhan,” he said.

“Exile, then?”

“It’s better than losing your head, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be dramatic. They don’t put women to death here. They would send me to a work camp.”

“To die.”

“Eventually, yes.”

She watched him, trying to decide if there was anything else he was trying to tell her. Their marriage had not been a close one, or a happy one. None of that was his fault. She could not help what she was. But it meant she was not as close to him as she needed to be in this moment, to understand if he had come to her with some kind of salvation, a plan, or if this was all there was.

“There must be a price for exile instead of the work camp,” she said. “What do they think I can give them?”

He frowned. Yes, there it was. The furrowed brow. The unwillingness to meet her eyes. “They need to know the names of the people you work with. That’s all. Then you’ll be free.”

“Free to go home with you.”

“Is that worse than prison? Worse than a work camp? To come home with your husband? Go home to your children?” Even after all this time, she heard the strain in his voice, the hurt.

“How are the children?” she asked softly.

“They still ask about you.”

“And what do you tell them?”

His eyes filled. She caught it just as he lowered his gaze. “Come home, Inaya. You have done all you could here.”

“Have I?” She wanted to touch him, but not because she longed for him. No, it was because she wanted to comfort him. He had come all this way, after all this time, and she still could not bring herself to love him the way she should.

He raised his head. His eyes were clear again. Crying among Mhorian men was considered proper, he once told her. It showed that you cared for something greater than yourself. But her Ras Tiegan upbringing always saw it as weakness, and he had started hiding his tears a few years into their marriage. “I can’t go back without you. I can’t leave you here, Inaya. The things they’ll do to you…”

“Did they tell you what they would do?”

He nodded.

“It’s no worse than anything you saw in Nasheen, then.”

“I loved nothing of what I did, or saw, in Nasheen. We left that place to have a better life. I thought I had given it to you. But you chose… this.”

“You know why.”

“Do I? Looking at you here, I’m not so sure.” He lowered his voice, moved within a breath of the filter. “Inaya, they will kill you. They will get what they want from you one way or another. I have seen what people do when they want information. I’ve been the one who did those things. It isn’t romantic or honorable. And it always ends in death. Yours and whoever you’re working with. Please. Just tell them what they want and let me take you home. You know they won’t offer again. They never do.”

She shook her head. Stepped back from the filter. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “They should let me go on that account.”

“You know that isn’t how this will go,” he said.

Inaya turned away.

“Did I ever tell you how I got these tattoos?” he said.

Inaya faced him again. She had asked once, the night they arrived in Tirhan, the first time he asked her to marry him. He said he would tell her if she told him why she had fled Ras Tieg the way she had, alone, in the dead of night. She had refused, of course. They had eventually built their marriage around this mutual silence.

“It was before the brit malah,” he said, “When I turned twelve. Mhorian kids die as often as they do in Ras Tieg. No inoculations, unless you’re rich. Not like the Nasheenians and Chenjans. That’s why they wait so long for the brit malah, and give us proper names.”

“But yours isn’t a proper Mhorian name,” Inaya said.

“No, it’s a Nasheenian one. Because I left before I had a name. I refused the brit malah. They give you that choice.”

“Why would you do that?”

“We reach the age of majority at thirteen. You can decide to exile yourself from the community, or to join it. If you refuse, it means giving up everything. Your fathers. Your friends. The hope of having children with a Mhorian woman. Your whole life. I gave that up because I could not love a woman who belonged to everyone else. Couldn’t see my children raised communally. I was a selfish man then, and a selfish one now. I know that. But it doesn’t make me want you any less.” He began to unbutton his coat.

“Khos—”

“Let me finish,” he said, and began to speak to her in Nasheenian instead of Tirhani. “They gave me the tattoos before I left. They are the record of my family, from the time we fell until the time I left them. Inaya—” He opened his coat and revealed a tunic with a long, scooped neck that bared most of his torso. She saw the familiar tattoos there, spidery lines that she had come to learn were Mhorian text. “Look to what you devour. Soon it will give you the power to transform all this. And when it does, all that my family is or has ever been will be at your disposal. We’ll wait for you.”

It was such an unexpected thing to say that she found herself speechless. Khos buttoned back up his coat. He walked to the door, knocked. Looked back.

For a long minute, they gazed at one another. His face was hard now, completely unreadable, the love and compassion neatly erased.

Had he come straight here after being summoned? Or had he met with her people first? Would he have been smart enough to do that? Or was this a message regarding some plan he had cooked up on his own?

“Goodbye, Inaya,” he said, in Nasheenian. It was the first language they ever spoke to one another. And the tone this time was not the forlorn, lovesick one he had used when speaking of bringing her home, but the resigned, hard-edged one he had used the day she told him she was leaving him.

“Goodbye, Khos,” she said.

The woman in the hall escorted him out.

They came for Inaya sometime later, and returned her to her cell. She sat down at the center of the ghastly space and wept.

The door opened. It was her unpleasant female jailer again. She carried something with her.

“Hush now,” the woman said, strangely compassionate after all this time. She passed Inaya two slips of regular paper and a long stylus. “At your husband’s request, you’ve been permitted to write letters home to your children. I advise you to make them quite eloquent. It may be the last your children hear from you.”

Inaya took the paper with trembling fingers. She wished she could think of some way out. Some opening they or Khos had given her that she could use to her advantage. But all Khos had to offer was what she already knew—“Look to what you devour”—yes, the food was toxic to her. It kept her from shifting. Was that all he really had for her? Why he had come all this way?

She cried as she wrote the letters. Just the act of writing such private correspondence to her children when she knew her captors would comb over them felt obscene. But Khos had been her last chance out. There would be no more offers. No more bargains.

Inaya completed the letters and folded them neatly. She held them in her lap until dinner came, and with it, her female jailer. The woman took away her letters.

Inaya stared at the plate of curried saffron rice and flat bread. Hunger gnawed at her. What did it matter now what she ate? If she tried to starve herself, they would see. Everything in these cells was watched and recorded.

She gave in and scooped up a bit of rice and curry with the flat bread. The smell of saffron was usually so overpowering that it made her nauseous. But this time, the food went down more easily. Perhaps she was getting used to it.

She stared at her empty plate. Look to what you devour, Khos had said. She turned over the plate. It was a simple platter, made of fired clay. Unmarked. She set it back down. Drank her water. Examined the cup. Nothing.

That night, as she lay awake staring at the filtered light of the moons coming through the skylight, thinking about her children, she remembered Khos baring his tattoos, and wondered if he had added her name there, and the children’s. Was that all she was, now, a footnote in someone else’s story? There was a time when that would have been enough. Wanting something more still felt sinful. She was prepared now to meet God as a terrible wife and mother, but to have given up so much and gain nothing for it would destroy her.

In the morning, she was stiff and sore. She had lost weight, and when she sat up now, there was no proper cushioning between her vertebrae and the hard floor.

She was surprised when, several hours later, the woman jailer came for her again. She was shepherded back into the twisting corridors and installed in one of the organic, windowless cells. This one had a large round table at the center. She walked around it, wondering if it was some new trick. Garish light swam beneath the skein of the ceiling.

The Angel entered. It was the same one who questioned her before.

“Will you release me now?” Inaya said. “Surely you realize I’ve done nothing wrong.”

The Angel carried a slim portfolio. From it he pulled a single sheet of creased paper. He set it on the table before her. She peered at it. It was one of the letters she had written to her daughter, Isfahan.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

He pulled out a second sheet of paper. It was a different color; soft green, organic. The edges were browned, as if it had begun to rot before being saved from its fate by some skilled magician. He set it next to her daughter’s letter.

She had signed her daughter’s letter “Maman.” The letter beside it, in the same neat, controlled hand she had learned in school, was signed “Madame de Fourré.”