“I’m not saying the Shuos are infallible,” Feiyed said, “because we’re clearly not, but as one of them, I have to ask. Where’d you pick up that trick for vanishing into crowds? Your school records looked completely unremarkable. Perfect attendance, glowing conduct reports, all of that.”
Nija flushed and stared out the hoverer’s window. Below, the city with its streets appeared to be calm and orderly, with flashes of silver or gold as other hoverers swooped by. No sign that an entire people had been scrubbed out of it. The parks were patches of cloudy green. Sunlight glinted faintly off the snaking river. “Iusedtoshoplift,” Nija mumbled.
“What?”
“I said, I used to shoplift,” Nija repeated, blushing. The shopkeepers hadn’t caught her, mainly because she had been too smart to go after the pricier items and, like any number of her classmates, she knew the tricks by which you could fool the more common security systems. She had only stopped when her grandmother took sick and she felt irrationally guilty, as though purloined baubles attracted germs.
Nija’s mortification grew when Feiyed started making alarming wheezing sounds. “Oh, that’s priceless,” Feiyed said when she was done. “Like my aunt’s always telling me, never underestimate teenagers.”
Nija glowered at Feiyed in spite of herself.
“You’re very stupid for being so clever,” Feiyed said without any trace of kindness. “Headed straight back to your hometown, of all places, instead of some quiet city where they don’t know your face. Do you want to end up in a detention camp? The only reason your people aren’t already extinct is that the Vidona get slowed up by petty paperwork almost as much as the Rahal do.”
“I’ve been watching the news reports,” Nija said, trying to hide her renewed terror. Mostly she’d had useless fantasies of sneaking onto Shuos Jedao’s command moth and kicking him naked into vacuum for what he’d done to her people. “I—I watched some of the executions.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I caught up to you,” Feiyed said. “As I said, it’s a pity I can’t recruit you. Knock some of the dumb ideas out of your head and you might be good for something, but it’d be a pain to arrange on such short notice. We’re headed to a nice, boring, remote campground where we’ll get you to the shuttle that will take you to a nice, boring moth to get you out of the system.”
Nija crossed her arms and glowered some more. This had no effect on Feiyed. Finally, Nija burst out, “You’re a fox, what could any of this matter to you? What are you getting out of this?” Especially since the measure was supposed to punish Jedao, or pressure him, for all its blatant ineffectiveness. There was a Shuos game going on, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.
She had the dangerous tickling thought that the Shuos weren’t supposed to be rescuing randomly selected Mwennin. Unfortunately, she couldn’t leverage this knowledge. What was she going to do, turn Feiyed in to the Vidona? That was supposing Feiyed hadn’t selected her for some extra-gruesome form of execution.
Feiyed’s answer didn’t reassure Nija. “We’ve been holding a betting pool asking that very question ourselves,” she said. “Not like your lot have much to offer us. But our hexarch, well, he’s whimsical. He gets these notions in his head, so we carry them out.”
Nija could have done without the reminder of the assassinated Shuos cadets.
“Anyway,” Feiyed said, her eyes canny, “are you registering a complaint?”
Nija was aware that she’d slipped up on the formality level of her speech. She resolved to speak more carefully. “The Vidona took away Boherem Roni’s family,” she said. “I went to school with the son.” The Boherem boy had had the annoying tendency to drone on and on about his collection of inkstones, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to wish him dead. “Why me and not one of them?”
There had to be others, lots of others, but the initial evacuation, the one she had slipped free of, had been hushed and hurried and full of rumors. When she thought of it, it came back in snatches: the brusque Shuos agents, the carefully regulated lines, the transports. It had been pure chance that she had heard about the Boherem family from two adults whispering to each other before they were separated. Most of the Mwennin had been convinced that the Shuos were taking them to face firing squads. The general sentiment had been that Shuos bullets beat Vidona torture any day.
“You want to know the truth, Nija?” Feiyed smiled. “I can’t speak for my hexarch, but I don’t care about your people one way or the other. It’s just orders, as arbitrary as”—her smile turned cutting—“fashion. If I wanted to be in the business of rescuing people, I’d be a firefighter.”
The Shuos’s frank callousness reassured Nija. She didn’t have to pretend to like her.
“Logistically speaking, my superiors picked people based first on ease of extraction, then ran a lottery because we couldn’t get more of you out without attracting attention.”
“You shouldn’t have bothered,” Nija said, too upset to be careful about formality levels all over again. “The Mwen-denerra”—she stopped, rephrased. “There won’t be enough of us left. Our traditions will die. Considering that we’re supposed to be tidy piles of ash, it’s not as if we can teach them to anyone else.”
Nija considered herself to be an indifferent Mwennin, as Mwennin went. She had memorized the list of Mwennin calendar-saints not out of any great faith but because her family had always looked so happy whenever she faked interest in the old ways, the forbidden ways. She only mouthed the prayers with their invocations of raven prophets and heron oracles, the queen of birds in the wood-with-no-boundaries. Admittedly she liked traditional food, especially lamb with yogurt sauce, but that was a low bar.
She was certain that the Shuos would profess indifference to this matter as well. But Feiyed said, “You would have to be careful, it’s true. However, I don’t think it’s impossible. The question is, how much are you willing to compromise? I mean, it’s not like anyone in the hexarchate knows or cares about your customs. They wouldn’t recognize them, and that works in your favor. You could lie low for a dozen years—forever at your age, I realize—and start introducing your customs to the receptive. You do accept adoptive Mwennin, don’t you?”
Nija stared at her. She hadn’t expected Feiyed to know about that point of Mwennin practice. It was the only reason the Mwennin hadn’t died out entirely, according to—she clamped down on the thought. Her grandfather was dead.
Feiyed chuckled softly. “I was adopted myself, so I keep track of these things. Besides, I have an ulterior motive. You’d make an entertaining Shuos if you put your mind to it. Fight from within and all that.”
Nija’s first instinct was to say something her father would have chided her for. After all, the destruction of the Mwennin was that bitch Cheris’s fault for being stupid enough to enter faction service in the first place. But Cheris had already paid for her mistake, and Feiyed was making a disturbing amount of sense. “I’ll think about it,” Nija said.
Feiyed leaned back and smiled.
AJEWEN DZERA WISHED she could lose track of how long she had been sitting in the cell, under spider restraints that tightened painfully whenever she moved too suddenly. The walls were a white just gray enough to look oppressive. The door, only four paces away, might have been on another planet. Whenever she approached it, she was wracked by a burning sensation that started at her skin and needled inward. Incongruously, the cell smelled of a persistent, pleasant fragrance, with notes of lilac and starbloom. One of her Vidona handlers liked perfume.