God's War (22 page)

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.

“Soon,” Inaya said.

Taite sat on one of the cushions.
Inaya waddled into the kitchen to make tea. She preferred that they keep their
roles fixed. Her house, her kitchen. He was a guest.

“We’re working a pretty good
bounty,” Taite said.

“But something’s wrong?”

“It has a lot of interested parties
after it. Nyx thinks it’s safer if we move our families away from the city for
a while.”

Inaya said nothing. She pulled a
plate of something out of the icebox. Half a dozen ice flies fluttered out on
gauzy wings, hit the warm air, and fell, dead, to the floor. They died more
quickly in the summer.

“I was thinking it might be good for
you to leave,” he said.

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“I’m asking a friend if you can rent
out a room at a place he knows.”

Inaya made fists with her hands and
turned to him. Her expression was grim. “Don’t you dare. I’m not staying
anywhere you and Khos, that filthy—”

“It’s not like you’re working
there,” Taite said hastily. “Where else was I supposed to find a cheap room?
I—”

“I’m not staying in a brothel.
Especially not one of
his
brothels.”

“It’s temporary.” He dared not tell
her that it wasn’t Khos who recommended the room. Mahdesh had told him about
the cheap rooms some months before when the rent on Inaya’s flat had gone up
and Taite was looking for places to move her to. Mahdesh, with the warm eyes
and rough hands and passion for astronomy…

He had never told Inaya about
Mahdesh.

Inaya hated queer men nearly as much
as she hated shifters.

Nearly as much as she hated herself.

“You know what they do to women in
brothels?”

He shook his head. “This isn’t Ras
Tieg.”

“It’s the same everywhere.”

She was deliberately wrong about
that. How many men stood on the street here throwing rocks and broken bottles
at her for being the daughter of shifter sympathizers? How many times had she
been accused of being a murderer? “I’ve put some money away so you don’t have
to work for a while. And your board is paid up for the next two months.”

“The baby will come.”

“What better place to be than a
brothel? They’ll get you to the best midwife, maybe even a magician. They won’t
care if you’re a half-breed… or anything else.”

She delivered a half-eaten tray of
fried bread and grasshoppers to him and went back to the kitchen.

“No, of course not,” Inaya said,
frowning. “I am worth very little.”

“You sound like Mother when you say
that.”

She brought over the tea and
hesitated. He half expected her to throw it at him and winced. Some days he
felt he should have turned out more like his father, but his father’s arrogance
and loud voice hadn’t saved their mother, or Inaya, or Taite. It hadn’t
protected any of them.

Inaya firmed up her mouth and set
the tray down neatly. She spent a good deal of time trying to sit comfortably.
He had the urge to help her, but every time he had tried, she told him, “I’m
not a whining Nasheenian woman.” The longer they lived in Nasheen, the more Ras
Tiegan she had tried to become. The sister he had known back in Ras Tieg would
have asked for his help when she was tired, helped him fix the com, and told
dirty jokes after dark. The woman who had crossed into Nasheen a decade after
they parted felt like a different person entirely.

He had been in Nasheen far longer
than Inaya had, and, unlike her, he had made his way alone and never regretted
it. He held no love for Ras Tieg. Nasheen did not care much for half-breeds
either, but Nasheen didn’t call its women murderers and hold up bloody pictures
of dead babies in the street. Nasheenians would not have killed his mother for
being a shifter. They would not have called his family perpetrators of
genocide.

When she was settled, Taite said,
“I’d like you to leave tonight, if possible.”

Inaya looked into her tea. “We have
no help. I cannot move all of my things.”

“You can leave them—”

“When I return, I will have nothing.
My neighbors will steal it.”

“I can replace it. All of it. I
can—”

“Unless you’re drafted.” She looked
at him. Her eyes were nearly gray.

“I have enough saved. And when this
bounty comes in—”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve
said our circumstances would change when you received a bounty of Nyx’s. We
both know how that has turned out.”

“You don’t understand the business.”

“I understand it very well.” She
still drank her tea cupped in both hands, like they did in Ras Tieg. “I would
rather stay here.”

“You have to go, Inaya. Please.”

“Just as I had to come here?”

“Why do you say things like that?
You could have crossed that border without any trouble. You chose to do it the
hard way.”

Her face reddened. Taite flinched
but pushed on. “When was the last time you saw a midwife?” he said.

“With what money?”

Taite pulled out the notes Nyx had
given him before she left and another buck besides, which he’d meant to deliver
sometime earlier. “That’s for the midwife. I can move you tonight and get the
rest of the money to you tomorrow before we leave.”

“Leave?”

“We have a safe house in Aludra with
Nyx’s friend Husayn. It’s an old boxing gym on Shalome, a couple blocks down
from Portage,” he said.

“Aludra? Are you mad? That city is
even closer to the border than Punjai. You’ll be overrun or killed by some
burst.”

“And in Ras Tieg we could have been
killed on the street for being shifter sympathizers.”

“I sympathized with no one,” she
said.

The self-hate was so strong, so
deliberate, that Taite felt as if she had slapped them both. He said nothing,
only stared back.

She let her gaze drop suddenly, and
he saw her face redden again. Humility this time. She looked at a tapestry on
the far wall—a bright, detailed portrayal of a courtyard garden in Ras Tieg.
There was more water in Ras Tieg. More green things, deadlier things. Nasheen
and Chenja had only prospered once they’d blighted the world and rebuilt it.
Ras Tieg was still wild, water-rich, and dangerous. But she would never forgive
him for bringing her to the desert.

“We need to go,” he said. “Khos has
the bakkie parked a couple blocks away. He’s waiting. Just bring what you
need.”

“I’m not going anywhere with that…
man,” Inaya said, “and I will not share rooms with whores.”

“I’m sure you won’t.” Taite stood
and held out his hand to help her up. What would his father have said? “We need
to go.”

She struggled up without taking his
hand, using the makeshift table for leverage.

Taite waited at the window while she
packed her things. The light inside was dim, and there was some light on the
street, so he had a view. He saw no one outside.

He heard Inaya bumbling around in
the kitchen. “Can you hurry? Do you need help?”

“I don’t need your help,” she said.

She had never needed his help. When
his parents smuggled him into Nasheen, she was in the middle of getting
married, her own attempted escape into anonymity as attacks on shifters and
sympathizers grew worse. But when her husband died, an old man already when
they married, Inaya lost her protection. She was a widow, and in Ras Tieg it
meant she belonged, once again, to her shifter-sympathizing father. It made her
a fair target.

“I did everything correctly,” she
yelled at him from the kitchen. He stayed at the window, did not reply. “I
don’t need anyone’s help! I was a patriot. I was safe there, Taitie. I was a
good woman, a proper woman. I covered my hair. I did not talk to other men. I
went to church four times a week. I prayed for him. I was a good wife.”

He heard her continue to bang
around, now in the bedroom. She gave a strangled sob, and the sound cut at his
gut, but he did not dare go to her. Let her alone, he thought. She will push
you away.

“You need to hurry,” he said.

She stepped out of the bedroom
wearing her housecoat over her skirt and blouse, and had put on a hijab. She
had carpet bags in both hands. Her face was red, but she had wiped her tears
away. She stopped at the little figure of Mhari, saint of women scorned, that
sat in the niche outside the kitchen. After going through the prayer rote, she
bagged the statue of the saint as well.

Taite took one of the bags from her
before she could protest, and headed down the stairs. He listened to her plod
behind him.

Outside, they walked quickly. Inaya
was stubborn and kept pace with him. She was breathing hard, and he slowed
down. A couple of women hung out under the awnings of their buildings. A
solitary dog trotted across the street.

Khos was still waiting in the
bakkie. He’d slid down into his seat and pulled his burnous over his head.

“Hello, Inaya,” he said.

“I’d prefer a quiet drive,” she said
without looking at him. “Where’s your regular bakkie?”

“I’m borrowing a friend’s,” Khos
said. He opened up the door from the inside and then started the bakkie. “Get
in. There’s too many dogs out tonight.”

Inaya got into the back. Taite put
the second bag in next to her, and sat in the front.

“Let’s go,” Taite said.

Khos turned into the street. A swarm
of red beetles pooled across their path. A dog barked.

Taite looked back at Inaya, but in
the dim light of the street, her face was unreadable.

An hour out of Punjai, Nyx hit a
hastily erected security checkpoint. She slowed the bakkie and rolled down the
window. The bakkie hiccupped and belched, and she caught the rabid stink of
coagulant. There was another leak somewhere.

A couple of women carrying acid
rifles stood in front of the barricade across the road. There were half a dozen
military vehicles on the other side of the barricade, and as Nyx got closer,
she saw that they were directing traffic away from Punjai. Nyx was a little
drunk and sen-numb, so the whole convoy had the fuzzy half reality of a dream.
She’d bought whiskey and sen at the mechanic’s in Jameela before she got on the
road again, and she hadn’t been sober since.

She stopped, and one of the women
leaned toward the bakkie. Nyx looked out past her, to the stir of figures
around the military vehicles. They were men. Nasheenian men. Not old men or
boys, but men in their prime, dressed in organic field gear and carrying
standard-issue rifles and flame throwers on their backs. She had a jarring
flash of memory—men all coming apart, bubbling flesh, melted field gear.

“We’re redirecting through Basra,
matron,” the woman soldier said.