Water is power, he remembered Korchow saying. On this planet water is the only power that matters.
Korchow had told Arkady that Yassin’s great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather had both attended Oxford University on Saudi oil revenues, at least according to Yassin’s version of the family history. But the myth of oil and Oxford was only kept alive to emphasize the family’s royal pedigree. The real Middle Eastern oil aristocracy had gone down in the general wreck of Earth’s industrial economy. The shaikh’s grandfather had made—or if the shaikh was to be believed, remade—the family fortune in a form of liquid gold more priceless and more fraught with political controversy than oil had ever been.
Arkady looked at the shaikh’s face, at the lines of cruelty carved into it beneath his smiling manner, at the subtle tics he was already learning to recognize as the signs of human privilege. He’d admired the man’s soft-spoken courtesy at the first bidding session, and had wondered several times since then if he ought to throw himself and Arkasha on Yassin’s mercy. But now he realized, with a certainty that went beyond reason or logic, that he could never entrust Arkasha’s safety to such a man.
“What are the limitations of this exercise?” Yassin asked Osnat, entirely innocent of the fact that he’d auditioned for, and failed to win, the role of Arkasha’s savior. “May I speak to Arkady alone, or are you required to provide some form of supervision?”
“Show him your wrist,” Osnat said.
Arkady lifted his left hand to display the biomonitor Osnat had strapped on before they left.
“You leave that on,” Osnat told him. “Other than that, you set the rules. And you have your privacy. I just go away and come back when you’re done with him.”
“That’s trusting of you.”
“Only if you mean that we trust you not to do something suicidally stupid.”
Yassin raised his carefully groomed eyebrows. “Yusuf,” he said, “would you mind showing the good captain to the kitchen? I’m sure we can find some sandwiches for her.”
He was speaking to a slim green-eyed boy dressed in civilian clothes. Arkady vaguely remembered the boy from the meeting at Abulafia Street, but he looked as unimpressive now as he had then. The young man hesitated as if he were about to argue with the order, but then slipped out of the room with Osnat behind him.
As soon as the pair was gone, Yassin gestured to one of the remaining guards, who stepped forward, seized Arkady’s sleeve, rolled it up above his elbow, jabbed a needle into him, and extracted a nauseatingly large quantity of blood into the same color-coded vials that littered half the Syndicate biotech labs Arkady had visited.
“Excuse our bad manners,” Yassin said, “but we wanted to get that over with. You understand, I’m sure. It won’t be necessary to mention it to anyone.”
“I feel dizzy. Can I sit down?”
“Oh, certainly.”
A chair was provided.
Arkady sat in it.
“Well,” Yassin said, “shall we begin?”
What followed was the strangest series of unconnected and apparently pointless questions Arkady had ever been asked in his life. No question was linked to any other in any logical way that Arkady could understand. And even when he grasped a question well enough to answer it sensibly, Yassin was as likely as not to cut him off in midanswer. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected that Yassin was deliberately trying to prevent him from relaying any useful or coherent information.
Yassin seemed to find the interrogation just as frustrating as Arkady did. The shaikh’s annoyance was reflected not in his own body, however, but in the increasingly threatening demeanor of his bodyguards. It was the first time Arkady had encountered this kind of complicated power by proxy. It was less impressive than Moshe’s personal ability to intimidate…but it was just as terrifying.
“My dear fellow,” Yassin said at last, interrupting Arkady’s fifth or sixth attempt to explain basic terraforming techniques, “do they have such things as schools where you come from?”
Arkady nodded.
“And do you happen to know where I went to school?”
Arkady shook his head. Yusuf, who had slipped back into the room, coughed.
“Al Ansar,” Yassin said. The name didn’t seem to have the anticipated effect on Arkady. “You’ve heard of it?” Yassin prompted. “Yes?”
“Uh…sorry.”
“It’s a prison camp. Run by the Zionists. I spent eight years there.” Yassin pinned Arkady under a stare intense enough to make him wonder what ants felt like when they were plucked up by entomologist’s pincers. “They tortured me. Can you tell?”
“No.”
“Of course you can’t. They’re a clever people, the Jews. They know how to extract the maximum information with the minimum damage. You would think that it wouldn’t work on a planet as violent as this one. You would think that people would become inured to anything less than the immediate threat of death or mutilation. But pain has its own power.”
The larger of Yassin’s two bodyguards shifted, intruding on Arkady’s space and making him move his feet away before he could repress the gesture.
“I’m not trying to hide anything from you.” Arkady screwed up his courage. “Why don’t you just ask me a question I can answer instead of threatening me for no reason?”
Yassin muttered something in Arabic and one of the bodyguards kicked Arkady’s chair out from under him, plucked him off the floor, and tossed him against the wall as offhandedly as if he were handling a piece of luggage.
At the other end of the room, Yusuf coughed again. Yassin turned toward him and snapped out a sentence in quick, angry Arabic. The young man shrugged.
“I was just clearing my throat,” he answered in UN-standard Spanish. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “I really couldn’t care less what you do to him as long as I get out of here in time to avoid the rush-hour traffic.”
“Someday,” Yassin said sourly, “your frivolity is going to get you into trouble that even your fancy friends can’t get you out of.”
“So you keep telling me.”
Yassin made an exasperated spitting noise and left, followed by the two bodyguards.
Yusuf stayed behind.
He and Arkady stared at each other.
Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, the young man crossed the room, righted Arkady’s chair, and sat down on it, resting his chin on the chair back. He treated Arkady to a smile so brilliantly friendly that it was impossible to believe it wasn’t at least a little sincere. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“For what it’s worth, Yassin actually went to Princeton. He’s never seen the inside of a public restroom, let alone a prison cell. He was just fucking with you.”
“Oh.” Arkady paused in confusion. “Um…thanks for telling me, I guess.”
“My pleasure, pussycat.”
“And what about you?” Arkady asked. He was probably doing something incredibly stupid, but after all the boy seemed so harmless.
“Where did you go to school?”
“I went to a severely fancy private boys’ school that you’ve never heard of. Then I went to LSE. Ringside, of course. Then I went through the PalSec officers’ training course.”
“And what subjects did you study?”
Yusuf laughed. “Let’s just say I have an advanced degree in kicking up trouble. I’m a spook, Arkady, in case you hadn’t guessed yet. And not an amateur like Yassin and his clowns. I’m just the poor unlucky bastard who was too junior to get out of the scut work of baby-sitting them.”
“Baby-sitting them for whom?”
“Oh, now that would be kissing and telling, wouldn’t it?” He flashed his let’s-be-friends grin again. “I will tell you something else, though. I might actually be the only human you’ll ever meet who’s been to the Syndicates. I spent four months on Knowles Station studying…well, you can probably guess what by now.”