The man who handled their travel papers sat at a large empty desk in a large empty office, under a large bronze relief of a lion disemboweling an antelope. He worked in the dark, with only the fading daylight that filtered through the dust-caked windows. There was no power, he explained in tones of austere self-righteousness, because the Zionists had turned off the water that fed the hydroelectric turbines. He apologized with distant courtliness for the fact that the lack of electricity had inconvenienced them by making it so hard for him to read their travel papers. He suggested that they try to make future border crossings between 10:00 and 12:00 A.M. Weekday mornings were, as a general rule, the best time for electricity.
He seemed to be under the mistaken impression that they were off-planet journalists—an error that Osnat made no attempt to rectify.
“You understand,” he told them, “that it isn’t always possible to guarantee your safety once you enter Palestine. It isn’t us threatening you, naturally, but the Zionists…” He let his words trail off into suggestive silence.
“Are you going to stamp our goddamn visas,” Osnat asked, “or do we have to stand here all day talking to you?”
The man eyed her narrowly for a moment. Then he stamped their passes, tossed the customs declaration forms on top of them, and scraped the whole little pile of paper off his desk and handed it to Arkady.
“I’ll be taking those, thank you very much.” Osnat snatched the papers out of Arkady’s hands and secreted them in the same pocket they’d originally emerged from.
Three sentries guarded the crossing. They were all female, all young, and all pretty underneath their jilabs as far as Arkady could tell. Two of them stood before the crossing arm. The third stood on the little hillock above the road, her eyes glued to the high-resolution sight of a tripod-mounted machine gun.
One of the girls at the crossing arm had a first lieutenant’s bar sewn crookedly to her sleeve. She asked for the papers in Arabic, then in UN-standard Spanish, pored over their small print with exquisite deliberation, stuck her head into the car’s open window to stare at them, and then retreated into the makeshift guardhouse.
Two minutes passed, then five, then ten. Once Arkady made the mistake of looking up to meet the second girl’s unwavering stare. After that he kept his own eyes resolutely glued to the dashboard in front of him.
They heard the Enderbots long before they saw them. And when they finally saw them there was something monotonously anticlimactic about the massed block of soldiers. Until you saw the eyes. The eyes were terrifying.
“Those…things are fighting civilians?” Arkady said.
“Not fighting. Occupying. That’s why they did it in the first place. Armies aren’t good at police work. And training only helps so much. Frankly, anytime you hand a bunch of teenagers assault rifles and put them in charge of unarmed civilians you’re gonna find out that some of those teenagers aren’t very nice people. Also, even the nice ones are terrified. And fear can make you one heap big trigger-happy. EMET stopped all that. It’s not afraid. It’s not mean. It doesn’t play the bully. It doesn’t panic. It just does its job. The year EMET came on-line, IDF casualties on the Line dropped twenty percent, and reported civilian casualties in the Line were cut almost in half. EMET is a better, cleaner, more human way to fight an occupation. That’s the official line, anyway.”
“But not what you think.”
She shrugged. “I see the good points of it. But I also see that there’re plenty of officers—in the IDF at least, and I assume it’s the same this side of the Line—who like the idea of soldiers who don’t think for themselves and can’t argue with stupid orders or tell reporters when the generals fuck up.”
“So is EMET good or bad?”
Osnat twisted around in the cramped passenger compartment and fished on the floor behind her seat until she came up with a beach towel decorated with fluorescent pink cartoon fish schooling across blue-and-purple seas between strands of electric-green seaweed. She shook the towel out and leaned out the window to wipe the yellow khamsin dust off the driver’s side mirror.
“Both, Arkady. Everything’s both. That’s the way the world works. Anyone who tells you different is selling you something.”
Finally, the phone rang in the guardhouse, and the lieutenant exchanged a few curt words with her unknown interlocutor, came outside, returned their papers, and waved them on. As they accelerated away from the crossing, Arkady saw the girl on the hill straighten away from her gunsights, kneading at a sore back and throwing her hip out to one side like a woman carrying a child.
It took ninety minutes to reach the airstrip Shaikh Yassin had directed them to, but they picked up his security escort—two late-model, American-built sedans with impenetrable mirrored windows—within a kilometer of the border crossing. When they turned off the pavement and through the barb-wire-topped gate of the airstrip, they were stopped, searched, and bundled onto an unmarked helicopter. Osnat submitted to the whole process with an indifference that verged on boredom.
They were in the air for almost forty minutes. And with every moment that they flew through Palestinian airspace unchallenged, Arkady became incrementally more frightened of the man to whom Moshe had just entrusted him for a span of time and under conditions of treatment that had no limitations Arkady knew about.
The helicopter finally touched down on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of a weed-choked parking lot that looked big enough to accommodate every automobile still left on the planet.
“What is this place?” Arkady asked.
Osnat just pointed. Arkady followed her pointing finger and saw a rusted, dust-caked sign looming over the horizon like an artillery emplacement:
Arkady’s first thought when he saw the hotel itself was that it was a building that had been built in a more peaceful time. The near-transparent pavilion of glass and stucco had been replaced piecemeal by armored shutters and mirrored plexi-flex that reflected the world outside with that smeared, underwater quality that was a sure sign of bulletproofing.
Two vast beasts flanked the hotel’s main entrance. Winged hippocanths whose broad chests swept upward into enigmatic smiling faces framed by heavy stone ringlets that made them look, to Arkady, like the avenging angels of the Hasidim. One of the two statues was pitted with bullet and shrapnel scars. The other was in such pristine condition that Arkady wondered momentarily if it was a fake.
There was a sensor attached to the door. As Arkady stepped up to it the mirrored panel whispered sideways on hidden tracks and Arkady found himself face-to-face with Shaikh Yassin.
“You admire my sentries?” Yassin asked. “They come from Baghdad. Before people invented you, that’s what we used to think monsters looked like.”
The lobby was dominated by an immense fountain whose centerpiece was a massive limestone ziggurat rising from the middle of an eye-stingingly chlorinated reflecting pool. Water coursed from hidden spouts at the ziggurat’s summit. When the fountain was new the water must have run smoothly down the ziggurat’s steps, creating the illusion of a structure made entirely of water. But time had sloughed off the ziggurat’s limestone facing, exposing the rebar-reinforced concrete behind the luxurious veneer, and now the water rilled down the ruined, rust-streaked surface in a complex series of broken fractals.
Arkady looked at Osnat. She was transfixed by the water, staring at it with a slight curl to her lip that might have been disgust or incredulity or both.