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.
“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.”