“I’ll get us some drinks,” Khos said.
Taite nodded, and picked his way among the tables to Mahdesh’s side.
Mahdesh caught sight of him and grinned. He had the sort of grin that could fill a room. A smile that made Taite feel as if he were the only man in Nasheen.
They touched lips to cheeks, twice. Mahdesh kept hold of his elbow, still grinning. He was a little taller than Taite, broader in the shoulders, and had the clear, pale skin and even teeth of a half-breed inoculated Mhorian. Mhorians had no qualms about inoculating their half-breeds.
“Dangerous night?” Mahdesh asked, nodding toward Khos as they sat.
Taite sat close enough so their knees touched. It was as much prolonged public contact as they dared, even in the Mhorian district. Some Nasheenian women took violent offense to overly friendly men, no matter where they sat.
“Yes, I have to be quick tonight,” Taite said.
Mahdesh leaned back in his chair, winked. “I’m getting used to that.”
“We’re having some trouble with a note.”
“You mean Nyx is having some trouble with a note.”
Taite swallowed. “Yes.”
Khos arrived with drinks. Clear liquor for Taite and Mahdesh, amber honeyed tea for himself.
“How are you, stargazer?” Khos asked. He held out a hand to Mahdesh. They clasped elbows, and Khos leaned in and kissed his cheeks.
“I’ve been better. The city’s too hot for me.”
“It’s a good time to get out, then,” Khos said, and sat. “You told him yet?” he asked Taite.
“Nyx’s note is in trouble,” Taite said. “You and Inaya should leave the city tonight. Nyx’s sister was killed. She thinks whoever did it may be coming after our kin next.”
“Are you going to hold my hand, Taitie?” Mahdesh asked.
Taite felt himself redden. “I—”
Mahdesh reached under the table, squeezed his knee, and sobered. “I know. I’ll be all right. What does your sister think about it?”
“We’re going there after,” Taite said.
Mahdesh raised a brow. “Hope Khos is staying in the bakkie”
Khos snorted. “I’m doing it for Taite.”
“She doesn’t hate you, Khos. You just make her nervous,” Taite said.
“She hates me. She hates herself.”
“Don’t say that,” Taite said. God, his sister. “She needs to be looked after, all right? Khos, don’t fuck with me on this. Anything happens to me, look after her, will you?”
Mahdesh shook his shaggy head. “When will you let her grow up, Taitie? She’s nearly a decade your senior.”
“Take care of her,” Taite repeated, still looking at Khos.
Khos shook his head. “Come on, you’ll be fine. It’s why I’m out tonight.” He pulled down his tea in one swallow. “You two catch up. I’ll meet you outside. That singer’s voice grates.”
He stood, and moved back through the crowd.
Taite looked back at Mahdesh. Their eyes met. Mahdesh’s were steely gray, large and liquid. Taite wanted to stay there forever.
“This note… Inaya…”
“I understand,” Mahdesh said. “I have some work to do in Faleen at the docks, muddling over some repairs and doing some translation. I can bide my time until things here cool down. The border’s been a little warm anyway.”
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.