The filter was released on the sixth day. A woman entered. She wore a long black habit and blue wimple. Inaya paid special attention to the woman’s feet, because they were closest to her from where she sat on the bug-ridden floor. Some ant nest had spawned its queens overnight, and they tumbled into her cell from the narrow skylight. Their abandoned wings littered the floor, and made shimmering patterns across her own soiled habit. She had lost one of her shoes in the tussle with God’s Angels. What most interested her was not the woman’s sturdy, square-toed shoes, but the fact that she was not wearing any type of stocking. From far away, that fact may have been easy to miss, but from where Inaya sat, it was a glaring inconsistency in a Ras Tiegan woman whose hygiene and decorum had to be immaculate in order to gain a place as one of God’s Angels. It told her immediately that there was a chance she was still in Inoublie with lesser Angels. No woman in a major city would dress without stockings.
The woman wrinkled her nose, presumably at the stench of the cell, and said, “I’m to get you cleaned up. You’ll be meeting with one of the Arch Angels.”
Inaya’s eyes filled with tears. “Please, will someone tell me why I’m here? I went out to pray and these… men… I’m so frightened.”
“It’s not for me to say. The Arch Angel will see you. Stand up. Stand up or I will have you dragged out.”
Inaya stood. She let the tears continue. Her hands shook. She was suddenly self-conscious next to this clean, primly dressed matron. It took all the self-control she possessed to calm her nerves, and bite back her fear, shame, humiliation… This was a game. She must play her part consistently, or it would be her body getting cut up in some magician’s laboratory, dissected on a slab—possibly while she was still alive. And then the Fourré would break. Michel and Gabrielle could not tolerate each other at the best of times. Without Inaya as a go-between, it was quite possible the whole movement could become fragmented. In her mind’s eye, she saw all of her first-tier cadres devolve into violence and murder. She saw them give her away by demanding her release. What if they had already done it? What if that’s what the rioting was about? What if Michel had used her abduction as an excuse for going back to the tactics she explicitly wanted to move away from? She did not doubt for a moment that her abduction was a calculated one, but she did not yet know how or who. Michel, Adeliz, even Isabet could be suspect. And then there was Gabrielle. And the top tier of cadres. All eight of them had reason to doubt her new direction. To hate her for it.
The woman stripped Inaya bare and threw her under a cold sluice of water in a tiny room plastered in broken gray tile. The corners of the damp, slippery floor were teeming with cockroaches.
The water was cold. The woman threw a palm-sized washing cloth at Inaya and said, “Wash yourself.”
Inaya did what she could with the clean rag and no soap. When she stepped out of the water, hugging herself, shivering, the woman tossed a towel at her. It hit her in the face and fell onto the wet floor.
“Dry yourself.”
“I have a family,” Inaya said. “There has been some mistake.”
“Do not speak out of turn again. Follow instructions, and this will all go easier.”
Inaya picked up the damp towel.
She dressed in a shapeless gray habit and matching wimple. The woman carefully examined her head and face to ensure that not the barest hint of hair had escaped the severe, stiff wimple.
“You are acceptable,” the woman said.
Inaya wanted to ask why it was she had been detained again, but decided to wait to ask someone in authority. She knew better than to guess that this woman would be her interrogator. Anyone with any authority in Ras Tieg tended to be a man, generally a priest or a man with strong ties to the church. This woman may have influence, but she was not the one to plead her case.
She followed the woman through a low-pitched hallway. She heard muffled sounds from behind spongy doors that crawled with scarabs. The bugs kept the exact conversations muted, but the tone carried: pleading, sometimes frantic. She let herself wonder just how many people they kept here, and if all of them were shifters.
She noticed the woman glancing back at her as they walked. Watching for signs of distress? Discomfort? She was tired and hungry and slightly nauseous from all the saffron they were stuffing her with. She wanted to pretend she felt perfectly at ease, but would an innocent, non-shifter woman act that way? Or would she be trembling, terrified? Inaya had already picked her part. She needed to play it. So, though it pained her, she lowered her eyes and wrung her hands and began preparing herself for more weeping. One of her aunts had been a professional mourner, and she had always envied the way the woman could call up a sob on command. It got her what she wanted, and more. Men did not like to see women weep. It reminded them of their own failings.
The woman paused at one of the doors. This one was without scarabs. Inaya heard nothing on the other side of it. The woman knocked and entered.
Inaya was not certain what she expected. She had never been incarcerated before. She understood interrogation, but in her mind, interrogation meant fear, pain, torture. And those types of interrogations generally only happened if one was certain they had a person with information, didn’t they?
The room was without any kind of furniture. The floor was soft, spongy—some organic thing that ate whatever bodily fluids had been spilled here. It had the feel of any other type of cell, only cleaner because of the organics. The room’s only light came from glow worms set beneath a translucent band at the center of the ceiling. The worms inside were dying, so the light was orange instead of pale yellow. There was nothing else in the room.
“Go on,” the woman said.
Inaya walked into the room.
The woman shut the door. Inaya heard the soft chitter of the scarabs as they descended outside the door to muffle all sound. But the sound of what?
Inaya leaned against the door and pressed her ear to the soft interior surface. The walls were coated in the same organic matting as the floor. Her face came away sticky.
She moved away from the door, into the light. Was she to rot here, then? Brought into one cell after another? What was happening?
Inaya paced for a time, then finally settled into one of the corners furthest from the door to wait.
And wait.
It was many hours before they came for her. She had to squat in one of the empty corners to relieve herself. She expected a man, an interrogator, but it was another woman. This one said only, “Come,” and refused any and all questions.
They moved her four more times, to four identical rooms. After a while, she started to wonder if they were simply taking her around in a circle and plunking her down into the same exact room time after time. During one of the many moves, they fed her. Some curried meat and rice slathered in saffron. She had eaten so much saffron the last week, the smell of it made her gag. But hunger and boredom overcame her queasy stomach, and she kept it down.
Every time she thought she might sleep in one of the rooms, they moved her again. It was then that she realized they must be watching her, and purposely disrupting her sleep. The rooms were all windowless, and the lights were always on.
When the door opened for the fifth time, she was so tired and disoriented that she almost didn’t recognize the woman at the door as the one who had come for her the first time. As the woman moved into the room, a second figure came in behind her. The fear came, then, the fear she had been tamping down for days.
The man was dressed in the red robes and black cowl of a God’s Angel. He was young, younger than she expected, a few years her junior. He had a neatly trimmed beard and dark eyes set in a lean face with a sallow complexion. He carried nothing. His hands were folded neatly in front of him, hidden in the long sleeves of his crimson robe. His gaze met hers, and at once she felt filthy again, and somehow inadequate.
“Inaya il Parait?” He stopped a few paces from her, but she could see that he was a head and shoulders taller than her, nearly as tall as a Nasheenian.
It was startling to hear that name aloud, after all this time. But she still had the sense to shake her head. “No, that isn’t my name. Please, I think you have me confused with someone else. I just want to go home.”
The man nodded to the woman, and she shut the door.
“What time is it?” Inaya asked.
“That has little relevance here,” he said. “You say you are not Inaya il Parait. I have witnesses who say otherwise.”
“Then they too are mistaken. I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is. I just want to go home.”
“And where is home?”
“Tirhan. My family is there.”
“Is that so? You openly admit to marrying a Tirhani?”
“What? No. My husband is Mhorian.”
She had assumed they brought her in in connection with the Fourré. It had never occurred to her that they might think she was a Tirhani spy. Oh, God, she had not prepared to talk her way out of that.
“And what is his name?”
Inaya hesitated. Knew he saw her hesitate. It was that, his knowledge of her deception, that made her finally burst into tears. “Please,” she said. “Please, I just want to go home.”
“I have a list of names for you,” the man said. “Tell me which are familiar to you, and you may go home. It is quite simple.”
“Please, I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Because you are Inaya il Parait, a well-known shifter sympathizer. And much more, aren’t you? Shall I tell you what I know, or will you allow me to dispense with this pretense and get straight to the matter? Just a few confirmations of known associates, and I will send you straight home to your husband and children.”
“I don’t know the il Parait family,” she said. “My husband is Khos Khadija. I am Inaya Khadija, and before that I was Inaya il Tierre. Ask anyone. I don’t know this woman you’re talking about.”
“Let me tell you about your life, Inaya il Parait,” he said. The Angel still did not approach her. His voice was deceptively warm, and his gaze, very soft, as if he felt he were speaking to a particularly adorable child. “Your father was a shopkeeper in Nanci, selling mostly tea and spices. He was not a wealthy man, and married just once. A woman from a family of known terrorists. Your mother was a shifter, well-known for it in your neighborhood, and often caught fornicating with dogs in the street. She bore two children before the state sterilized her. You, and your brother Taite. Should I go on?”
“I do not understand why I’m here. I have never heard of this family.”
The Angel gestured to the woman. She opened the door and stepped outside. For a moment, Inaya was tempted by the open doorway. Could she find her way out? What was security like? All she had seen of this place were the hallways and the cells.
A moment later, the woman returned, ushering a young man ahead of her.
Inaya recognized Hynri almost immediately. Hynri, the leader of cell number seven. He had been scrubbed clean and dressed in a gray habit like hers. A snarl of fear gripped her. Oh, God, how much had Hynri told them?
“Do you know this man?” the Angel asked Inaya.
The words were easy. But she could not look at Hynri. “I’m sorry, no,” Inaya said. “Perhaps I have seen him around the city, but it’s difficult to say. Should I know him?”
“I told you,” Hynri said. When Inaya glanced up, she saw Hynri, triumphant.
“You are certain?” the Angel said.
“Of course,” Inaya said.
“Because if you cannot vouch for him, I’m afraid he has been sentenced to beheading.”
“For what crime?”
“Conspiring to overthrow the government.”
“This child?” Inaya watched Hynri’s face. His expression was coolly blank, but his eyes were glassy.
Hynri said nothing.
The Angel watched them both.
Finally, the Angel raised his hand, and the woman escorted Hynri out.
Inaya stared at her hands. She expected God to strike her dead.
The Angel moved toward her. She stiffened. He leaned into her. She felt his warm breath on her neck. “I don’t have to touch you. I don’t have to torture you. You have already given yourself away.”
And then he left her.
Inaya cried.
The woman came back for her and escorted her away, back through the winding hallways to the drab, dirty holding cell where she had originally been housed. But the woman who had been with her was gone.
Inaya curled up on the floor and sobbed. She was exhausted and hungry, and the world was completely out of her control. The logical part of her knew it was all a trick, just a trick, but fear and hunger crowded out that small, still, voice. It took a great deal of sobbing before she found peace again.
Later, one of the guards came by and pushed in a tin of food. Inaya shouted after him. “The girl. The girl who was here earlier? What’s happened to her?”
“She’s hung herself,” the guard said. “Two days ago.”
Inaya let her head sink. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
The guard bent over, peered at her from a safe distance. “You see how it is here, animal? We don’t have to do anything at all to you. You all do in yourselves. Wonder how long it’ll be before I cut you down?”
Inaya stared at the filter. He put his hand to the plate outside the entrance and the filter went opaque. He had not explained what the girl could have possibly hung herself with. Certainly not anything she had in the cell with her… not unless they gave it to her.
Inaya knelt, clasped her hands, and began to pray. “Martyr Mhari, full of grace….”
It was another eight days before the door opened again.
An unfamiliar guard stood there, outfitted all in crimson.
“Your husband is here to see you,” he said.
N
yx stumbled into a soft valley on the other side of the first few humps of the hills that bordered the playa and into town without knowing it was a town, only that there seemed to be people walking about on the humped ground. She was babbling like crazy Eskander, talking to dead people. Above the settlement, the stir of ravens coalesced, some murderous cloud. She was covered from head to foot in terrible gouges, savage bits of her taken out by the marauding ravens. Her chest was slathered in Eskander’s dried blood from the burst water bulbs.