Rhys put his things away and passed between cars. The stricken Nasheenian landscape rolled by. The world outside did not look so different from Chenja here: There were fewer minarets, and some of the older, mostly untouched villages were tiled in ceramic and still bore huge gold-gilt inscriptions from the Kitab above the lintels to all of their village gates, groceries, and the wealthier houses. He saw old contagion sensors sticking up from the desert, half buried, some of them with the red lights at their bulbous tips still blinking. There were fewer old cities in the Chenjan interior. The oldest relics, Rhys supposed, would be farther north, in the Khairian wasteland, where the first world had been created and abandoned. Out here, though, was the most he had seen of old-world Nasheen. He had never been to Mushtallah.
Rhys knocked at the compartment door. As Nyx pulled it open, a passing member of the Transit Authority paused in the hall at the sight of him and asked Nyx if Rhys was bothering her.
“It’s all right,” Nyx said. “He’s mine.” The Transit Authority agent gave them both a good long look before moving on again.
Rhys shut the door.
“Here, I kept the news for you,” Nyx said. She tossed him a newsroll. He pocketed it. She had the red letter in her hands again. He pretended not to notice. He had spent six years with her—five and a half longer than he’d expected. She was supposed to be his way out of the boxing gym and on to more lucrative contracts with universities and First Families. But even with an employer on his résumé, his middling talent was not great enough to make up for his ethnicity.
Rhys glanced out the window and decided it was almost thirteen in the afternoon, about time for noon prayer. He rolled out his prayer rug. Nyx went off to find the bathroom.
Despite—or because of—her prison record, Nyx had a good reputation with just about every border agent inside Nasheen. Rhys had crossed into enough cities with her to know. During his more cynical moments, Rhys wondered if she got through customs so easily because she’d slept with all of the agents. It had taken him some time to realize just how terrible Nasheen’s problem with same-sex relations had become. Though sex between two men was not only discouraged, but illegal, what passed for sex between women was actively celebrated, and Nyx used sex as freely and easily as any other tool on her baldric. What women found appealing about her, he could not say. She was coarse and foul-mouthed and godless. She was also the only woman who would employ him.
The customs agents slid the door open. They both stared hard at him and told him to raise his arms.
Rhys felt a gut-churning moment of terror.
Nyx appeared just behind them and leaned against the doorway. She smirked. The fear bled out of him.
“Go easy on him,” she said. “He’s mine.”
She said it like he was her bakkie or a prized sand cat.
The bigger woman asked for Nyx’s passbook.
“I’m already coded for Mushtallah,” Nyx said. “I’m Nyxnissa so Dasheem.”
The woman clucked at her. “Who’d you kill to get you back in Mushtallah, Nyxnissa?”
“All the same sorts of people,” Nyx said.
“I haven’t seen you here since you went to prison.”
“For good reason, then,” Nyx said.
The matron laughed. “It’s not the prettiest city, but it’s still our best. Good women in prison, too.” She pulled up a sleeve and revealed a badly drawn tattoo of a sword and scattergun on a round shield.
Nyx snorted. “Gunrunning?”
“Good money,” the woman said. “Tirhanis don’t mind selling so long as we do all the work lugging it through the pass—and the time if we get caught.”
“So I hear,” Nyx said.
She would know, Rhys thought. How many gunrunners had Nyx slept with?
Both agents went through Rhys’s pockets. They didn’t find the pockets that kept his bugs, which improved his confidence in his ability to conceal items by altering the composition of the air around them. The skill had not been one of his best back in Faleen. Not that he was going to be able to keep the bugs on his person much longer. Mushtallah would take care of that.
One of the women, an ugly matron with a face the color and texture of boot leather, paged through his passbook. “You a resident alien?” she asked.
“I’m employed,” he said. “Everything is in order.”
She looked him up and down and made a moue of her mouth, as if contemplating whether or not to spit on him. Nyx pushed farther into the crowded room, arms crossed, and grinned at her.
The customs agent closed her mouth. “No doubt you are,” she said to Rhys, and dropped her eyes back to his passbook.
The one patting him down found his Kitab and laughed as she looked through it. “It’s the same damn book as ours. Same language and everything. You a convert?”
“No,” he said. “Chenjans have always had the same book. Unlike Nasheenians, however, we follow its teachings.”
“You speak the dead language?” the ugly one asked, ignoring the jibe.
“Only as much as you do.”
“Huh,” she said.
The language of the Kitab had been the same since the First Families brought it down from the moons. Even godless Nasheenians should have known that. Who taught the schools here? Atheists like Nyx? They killed atheists in Chenja.
The other one gave back his Kitab. They didn’t always. He’d lost a number of Kitabs going through customs.
The ugly one turned to Nyx. “You vouch for him, my woman?”
“You think I’d bring a terrorist into Mushtallah?”
“Only if you’re cutting off his head,” the ugly one said, and laughed again.
The matron finally pressed a thumb to the organic paper at the back of Rhys’s passbook.
“You keep hold of that,” she told him, “or the filter will eat you. No permanent residency, no permanent bio-pass into Mushtallah.” She flashed her teeth and gave Nyx a nod. “Good luck, my woman.”
The customs agents went back out into the hall. The door rolled shut behind them.
Rhys tugged at his coat, and returned his Kitab and passbook to his breast pocket.
Nyx sat at the window and put her feet up. “They were just flirting,” she said. “You don’t see a lot of men this far inland. And sure not Chenjan ones.”
“That’s not flirting.”
“You’ve seen worse.”
He turned away from her. “It doesn’t excuse them.”
“Stop mewling.” She paused, then relented. “You know I’ll do what I can to make it easy.”
“I know,” he said.
Rhys liked to think she defended him out of some kind of loyalty or affection, but most days he felt she guarded him the same way she did everything in her possession: He’s mine. He was just another thing to be owned and retained. Just another thing she could lose.
Once the customs agents were off-loaded, the train chugged into the station just outside Mushtallah. Rhys and Nyx gathered their things and then stepped onto the sandy platform overlooking the city.
“The most boring city in Nasheen,” Nyx declared, and trudged down the steps and onto the paved road.
Rhys had read that before Nasheen’s revolution two hundred fifty years ago, the gutters were full of dead babies and the mullahs wore vials of virgins’ blood toward off the draft. They’d bred sand cats for fights in the train workers’ ward, and the stink and smog of the city sent the First Families who lived up in the hills to the countryside every year during high summer.
The wealthy still fled the city in the summer—it looked deserted from the platform—but there weren’t any dead babies that he could see, and the last of the male mullahs had been drafted two centuries ago, right after the queen decreed that God had no place for men in mosques unless they had served at the front.