Kameron Hurley - God's War

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.