CONCESSIONS

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

 

 

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali (khaalidah.com) lives in Houston, Texas, with her family. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse, but at all other times, she juggles, none too successfully, the multiple other facets of her very busy life.

Khaalidah has been published at or has publications upcoming in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Magazine, Diabolical Plots and others. You can hear her narrations at any of the four Escape Artists podcasts, Far Fetched Fables, and Strange Horizons. As co-editor of PodCastle audio magazine, Khaalidah is on a mission to encourage more women and POC to submit fantasy stories.

Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality.

 

 

I KNELT WITH my bucket and set about the task of watering each wilted seedling by hand. This was a wasteful task, at best. This year’s harvest would be worse than the last, if there was a harvest at all. And we needed every drop of water.

Desperate hope kept us going anyway.

My mind raced circles around alternatives and I could think of none that would be of benefit. The hinterland desert grew each year, not by inches, but by feet. The sand bleached whiter over time from lack of moisture. Water-hungry insects clung to the undersides of the seedling’s leaves desperate to leech any bit of moisture they could. The insects were desperate. No different than us.

I heard Sule before I saw him. My name floated to me on a gust of dry wind. He always called to me within sight of our settlement as a way to announce his arrival, and love. I caught sight of him, his long angular shape an upright dagger against the swirl of red dust that whipped about him. Gone since the previous night, he returned from the hunt followed by Isa and our fur and bones dog, Flea.

My heart squeezed in my chest, just as it did the first time I saw him, a sweet dull ache I wished I didn’t feel. Love has a way of obscuring truth and good sense.

“I hope they were successful.” Neenah, my apprentice and friend, squatted a few feet away on the next row. She poured the last drops of water over a seedling. “I’m tired of eating dust and spit for every meal.”

“They cannot conjure what this cursed desert does not contain.”

“I know someone who can,” she said, dropping her voice so that I could barely hear her.

“Do you really believe that?” I said looking over my shoulder at her.

Neenah stood and licked the last traces of water from her fingers. “Had you asked me this even a week ago, I would have said no, but hunger and thirst have a way of rearranging a situation in one’s brain.”

“Better to call on Allah.”

Neenah sucked her teeth, a sharp derisive sound. “That hasn’t stopped you from associating with her.”

I shrugged. “The risks of exiling me do not outweigh the benefits, yet, if there are any.”

“Aren’t you afraid of that witch?”

“No more than I am afraid of dying of hunger.”

Neenah wasn’t the only person desperate for fresh food. I glanced back again. Sule was almost to the gates of our settlement. His hands were empty and the pack on his left hip looked flat.

When Sule first arrived eight years ago, shoulders perfect right angles, he carried a seed-laden pack. He had enough seed to grow, enough to trade and sell. Much has changed since then. The land is no longer receptive to our ministrations. And Sule’s shoulders aren’t so perfect, less proud angles than curved defeat.

I handed my bucket to Neenah and headed back to the pod cabin I shared with Sule.

I was about to start the evening meal when he ducked through the door smelling of sun and sweat and sand.

“Peace.” His smile was weary.

“And to you,” I said over my shoulder as I reached into the lower pantry. “I’ve got a bit of rabbit jerky and a few wild yams. How does stew sound?”

“Sounds good,” he said with a half-smile on his face. He reached into his pack. “Maybe you can use this. Found some wild garlic.”

“This is exactly what I need to make it perfect,” I told him. I took his face in my hands, kissed his mouth, the dusty sun-cured lines of his forehead, his chin, the valleys of his cheeks.

It wasn’t his fault that meat was scarce. Everything was scarce. The sky was stingy with her rain. The rivers were less robust than a stream of tears. Lake Bounty, where we used to fish, was now a muddy crater.

Even accepting, Sule still went out on fruitless hunts to buoy the morale of our settlement. And in the darkest part of the night, when he thought none but Allah could hear him, he begged for our relief. In the stillness I would watch his silhouette prostrate and rise in the shadows. Though my faith that Allah heard my prayers had faltered, my faith that He would hear Sule’s never waned.

Sule sat and filled a cup with water from a pitcher on the table, then poured half of it back.

“Almost ran into a catcher caravan last night.” Sule finished his water and placed the cup on the table. “Camped not far from us.”

“You must be careful,” I said glancing back at him. “They would like nothing better than to find two strong men alone without the strength of their settlement to protect them.”

Sule nodded. “Isa wanted to sneak up on them in the night and…”

“Please tell me you didn’t let him do that.”

Catchers were a plague to the hinterlands. If they caught you, you’d pray it was only your organs they wanted.

Sule waved off the suggestion. “I have no love for the catchers, but I’m not about to let him get us both killed.”

Sule grunted as he tugged off his boots, shaking loose a gray veil of sand.

“I should make you undress outside,” I said smiling.

“Where the entire settlement can see me?” He dropped the second boot then crossed our tiny kitchen to where I stood chopping the yams. Sule slipped in behind me, his arms around my waist, his palms against the slight curve of my belly. I loved the warmth and stink of him. He kissed my neck before pulling away.

“Look what I found at the crossroads.” He pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket and handed it to me.

The neon filaments still had some juice and gave off a faint bluish glow against the yellow paper, making the fine print easier to read. It was an appeal from the great metros for the immigration of hinterland dwellers.

I thought of the metro of my birth, Ajutine, with its glittering glass spires, the urbane architecture of old Haq University, the museums, the corner bodegas and tea shops. My life there had been good.

“We were never good enough for them before, treating our belief like a plague. Now they want us?”

I shrugged, handed the flyer back to Sule, and turned back to the yams I’d been chopping.

“Ajutine needs people,” I said.

The Creed War had done more than devastate the landscape of our once-thriving country. It had made enemies of friends and families. Proselytes and their sympathizers were cast to the desert to eke out an existence the best way they could, which was damned near impossible. Two generations of scholars and scientists were lost, even before the declining birth rate.

“It says here that they’re looking for healthy individuals… educated parties… people who have valuable skills.” I felt his gaze, warm pressure on the back of my head. “Only two requisites. No convicts, and qualified parties must take the Creed Oath.”

“Ah, they want so much,” I said, thinking of my mother. After the Creed War, she swallowed her faith, but was unwilling to renounce it. She was equally unwilling to renounce her home. “Some people are willing to trade their faith for electricity and running water,” I said.

Sule settled in behind me again. “Would you? Is there anything that would ever make you go back to that Ajutine?” he murmured into my hair.

“Allah never promised comfort to the worthy, just the afterlife.”

 

 

MY DREAM PROPELLED me from sleep. My heart hammered in my chest and my face was slick with sweat. Sule’s arms were twined around me, reminding me of the solidity of this world, of its goodness.

Since this pregnancy, my dreams had become more frequent, beautiful yet frightening. I saw always a son, willful and hale, unlike the other sons and daughters who had spoiled in my womb.

I slid from beneath Sule and made ablutions. Then I went to stand on the masala facing east, hoping salat would shed the anxiety of my dreams. When I finished, I remained on the masala, fingering the tasbeh Sule had strung for me from pearls he’d scavenged from one of the old metros.

Just before dawn lightened the horizon I heard the crackling static of the receiver on my old radio.

“This is Bilqis. What is the emergency?”

It was Manuel from settlement #54. “Doctor, please come as quickly as you can. Something is wrong with Soraya.”

I left in the pale orange light of the new morning. My jeep jostled in the ruts and potholes of crumbling asphalt. I drove thirty miles north to settlement #54. The gate was marked by a six-meter-tall crucifix fashioned from salvaged steel beams, the Jesus of wire and scrap metal.

A tall lean woman opened the gate and I drove through. She greeted me with a nod, although her eyes snagged on the tasbeh dangling from my jeep’s rear view mirror and then on the scarf that bound my hair.

My status as a physician afforded me safe passage into almost any settlement regardless of how I worshipped. Out here, pragmatism erased old grudges about the Creed War. And my competence made it easier for many to accept that my knowledge was supplemented with a touch of the ether.

Manuel, Soraya’s man, met me outside of the cabin they shared. “I’m glad you made it.” He grabbed my bag from the passenger seat.

“What’s wrong,” I asked, already listing the possible pregnancy-related complications and solutions in my head. In all the years I’d been living in the hinterlands I’d seen fewer than twenty children born healthy. I’d delivered them all, and the sick ones as well. That has been my lot, my imperfect penance, although there is no way to atone for causing the near extinction of one’s own people.

At twenty-seven years old, Soraya had given birth to five children, all healthy and strong, and she was pregnant yet again. She was much revered by the people of her settlement and those of the hinterlands. Soraya was believed by all to be exceptionally blessed.

Soraya’s eldest burst out of the door followed by four stair-step siblings, all girls, each as different and lovely as their fathers had been. They crowded around me, arms locked around my waist and thighs.

“My mama is crying. She has blood too,” said Bilqis. She was my namesake, in honor of doctoring Soraya through her first frightened pregnancy.

“Don’t you worry. That’s why I’ve come.” I shooed all but my namesake back inside. “Bring fresh water so I can wash my hands, okay?” The girl nodded, jet curls bouncing around her shoulders.

Soraya lay sprawled on her narrow bed, covers thrown off and hanging halfway onto the floor. Her wide face was oily with sweat, and her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. She managed a smile and a breathy greeting, “Thank God you made it. I prayed you would come.” She reached out a hand for me and I took it in mine. Manuel stood back and watched in silence.

I gave Soraya a cursory assessment. Her amber cheeks were flushed. Her belly was a perfect mound beneath the faded yellow of her gown. Her legs and feet were swollen and the skin around her ankles had begun to fissure.

“Tell me what ails you.” I sat on the stool next to her bed.

“I saw blood this morning when I went to the bathroom.”

“Any pain?” I said.

“No.” She shifted slightly. “Except my ankles.”

Little Bilqis returned carrying a large bowl of water.

“How much blood?” I said as I pressed my fingers into the tender flesh of her edematous ankles.

Soraya shrugged. ”Just a little. But my stomach has been sour. I cannot keep my meals down.”

“Odd this far along in your pregnancy. This one is almost cooked,” I said, laying the back of my hand across her brow.

Soraya fingered a silver crucifix around her neck. “I have asked His mercy, but I can’t help being afraid.”

I checked her blood pressure and pulse, pinched the tender skin above her collarbone to check for dehydration. Her breaths came a little quickly but I attributed this to her obvious distress and her burden.

I washed my hands in the bowl and lifted her gown, exposing her thighs and belly. I lay my palms on her taut brown belly and closed my eyes. What I did next, I learned at the feet of an exiled woman.

I visualized my energy, a yellow vibrating ball of light. I tugged it, channeling it from my toes straight through my center until I felt a line like hot electricity run through me. I sent it arching around Soraya’s belly, around the child cradled in those precious waters.

I felt the child, her warmth, her peace, her health. I couldn’t see much more than her outline, a dark silhouette against the red of Soraya’s womb. This was enough to assure me that her sixth daughter was well.

My energy surged a bit and Soraya shifted beneath my hands and let out a breathy moan. I pulled back until the pained creases on her brow smoothed again.

“What do you see?” she panted. “Is my baby okay?”

I nodded as I passed my splayed fingers across the wide expanse of her belly and down toward her groin. There was the problem. A dark throbbing that sat low and hot in her uterus. It bled in scant trickles.

Perhaps an abruption? I was uncertain as Soraya did not present with all the usual symptoms and I had not yet learned to trust the ether as well as I trusted my science.

“I can tell by your face,” she said, her voice rising in panic. “Tell me what it is.”

I moved my hands up higher, pressing with my fingers until I was able to palpate the curve of her daughter’s rump, the soft line of her back, her sweet head. I searched for her heartbeat, listened for the quick sharp rhythm. I found it, strong, so strong.

As I shifted my hands I heard another heartbeat, a strident rhythm, not quite as loud but just as insistent. This one belonged to my child, I knew right away. The hope that would likely never come to fruition. Then the roar of my own heartbeat, galloping even as I attempted to push back my own pain and fear, drowned out the rest. I pulled away.

“Your baby is strong,” I said.

“You sure?”

I nodded and turned my face into the shadows so she wouldn’t see the pain and fear etched on my face, or the tears. I’d been pregnant as many times as Soraya and not one child had lived. I wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve and grabbed my bag.

But who was I to complain? I’d created this.

Manuel followed me to my jeep.

“Soraya needs bedrest,” I said. “I don’t want her to get up for more than the bathroom for the next week.”

Manuel nodded. “What is it? What do you think is wrong?”

The dawn chill had already burned away. To the east, I could see the broken spires of Oberon, like needles stabbing at the sky. No longer a great metro, Oberon is now just the bare bones of its memory. I’d been there before on a scavenge run. So much of its treasures still lay untouched. People were afraid to go to Oberon. Rumor was that a catcher hideout was located near the city.

“I’m not quite willing to commit to a diagnosis yet, Manuel.” I spread my arms out in front of me. “My resources are as dry as this desert. I’m so ill-equipped.”

“But you’re a doctor. The best we’ve got.”

I wondered if this was how Sule felt, desperate to provide for our settlement, for me, yet being helpless to do so. Manuel was asking more than I was capable of, but if I was in his place, or Soraya’s, I’d do anything to see this child born into the light. I’d make any concession to give this child the best world.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

 

 

I STOOD ON Miriama’s porch, her old cabin little more than a lean-to, and stared west along the unobstructed sun-cured plains in the direction of settlement #8, my home.

The first time I saw Sule, he’d walked out of a dust storm to the gates of our settlement. He had been wandering the hinterlands alone after his release from the Vymar labor camp. We never asked his crime. When so many are unjustly imprisoned and cast to the desert for crimes no more significant than belief, his crimes could hardly matter.

I found him of great interest. He had navigated the hinterlands for months without becoming prey to hunger or catchers. They would have robbed him of the small wealth in seeds he carried in his pack, just as quickly as they would have robbed him of his life.

I was quick to welcome Sule into our settlement, despite the dissent of the others. I sensed goodness in him. The ether veil about him shimmered like starlight. Miriama had taught me how to read people, to suss their surface intentions. This is why she’d always welcomed me into her home, though it was my people who had first exiled her.

I unlaced my boots and lined them up by the door and entered without knocking. She would be waiting for me, would’ve known that I was coming even before I’d made up my mind to do so.

The remnants of a fire smoldered in the hearth. A few candles placed intermittently around the room offered just enough light to cast long shadows along the walls and ceiling. The air was heavy with a mix of sharp spicy scents from the herbs hung to dry from the rafters and along the walls.

Her baritone voice rose out of the darkness before my eyes adjusted to the gloom of the windowless cabin.

“Bilqis, my beloved. This not your usual day,” she said.

“No, it isn’t.”

I visited Miriama on Monday mornings to learn the special prayers and the adab of devotion, lessons I would have learned sub rosa as a youth in Ajutine had I conceded to my mother’s wishes and been disobedient of the Creed Laws.

There was a certain irony in the fact that a witch was the keeper of a faith that outlawed the use of sorcery, but most of our imams have been imprisoned, have been frightened into silence and obscurity, or are just plain dead.

“I’ve come to replenish my supply of herbs. I need more brehsome root and more of your ginger tea.”

“Brehsome?”

“The brehsome will help my people forget their hunger.” I stepped further into the cabin.

“I know this. Taught you, remember?”

“Yes, Miriama.”

She sighed, “You never come just to visit.”

Miriama knew why I did not visit more often. I never spoke to Sule of my visits here, though he knew as well as others. Even Miriama’s long years aren’t enough to inspire the sympathy she truly deserves from her detractors. Where people were willing, in such times, to forgive her use of magic, they could not surpass their fear that she had once taken as many lives using it as she preserved. As long as I was careful, they pretended not to notice I was allied with her. As long as I did good.

Miriama waved me over. “Grab that pouch there on the hearth,” she said. The leather was worn and soft. I made to give it to her, but she shook her head and urged me to sit on the floor at her feet.

“That is for you, little sister. Brehsome, ginger tea, and some hrery powder for your man.”

I looked up into her face, not shocked that she’d had the supplies already prepared, but I didn’t quite understand. “Hrery powder?”

She nodded. “It will calm him. Also I packed some of those good pain pills. You are going to need those.”

I had learned never to ask her how she knew these things. The strangeness of knowing impressed a sour disquiet into my very spirit.

“I’ve been to see Soraya today.”

“That one is a miracle, considering what plagues us.”

“Yes,” was all I could manage around a throat full of guilt.

Miriama held me beneath her gaze, pressing her will against mine. I lowered my head, reached for her tough brown hand, and kissed it. Before I pulled away Miriama cupped my chin in her hand and coaxed my face into a patch of candlelight. I felt the tendrils of her consciousness lap at me and then slide away.

“You well, little sister?”

“Quite,” I said without meeting her gaze. I felt a pinprick sensation, like biting ants, down my spine. Miriama probed me with her will, more persistently this time, and as she’d taught me, I imagined a wall and erected a barrier against her.

Miriama smiled. “How be your dreams these days?”

“Full of a future I’m afraid to believe in.”

Miriama nodded. “Is that good or bad?”

“I don’t know.”

His face flashed in my mind, the son I felt wax and wane in the ocean of my belly. My dreams had been of him in the future, sand-colored and rangy like his father, taciturn and driven by an anger much like mine. I clenched my jaw and swallowed the fear and sorrow these dreams stirred.

Miriama released my chin, then ran her calloused fingers along the line of my cheek and forehead. I could never really keep her out of my head if she made up her mind to be in it.

“You’re different,” she said frowning. “Like something in you is burning.” She sighed and sat back in her chair. “What do you hold in your belly, on your mind? What really brings you to me?”

I shook my head. “Just the herbs, Miriama.”

Her laughter was like a building quake. “Since when do you lie, little sister? Do you not trust me?”

“I do,” I said dropping my chin again.

It was difficult to conceal truths from this woman. Even the truths one has yet to uncover are laid bare before her. When I first came to her, she warned me, “Do not come to me if you wish that I not see you.” And I had accepted this, but how could I explain that I’d pinned my hopes on a dream child?

“Something happened today, when I reached for Soraya’s baby.”

Miriama leaned forward, her eyes as keen as lights in the gloom. “Like what?”

I looked down at my hands, turning them over, and then stretched them out for her to see. “I heard the heartbeat of my child as I probed for the heartbeat of hers.” I looked up into her narrowed eyes.

“Remember what I taught you? If you are not certain about your intentions and desires, you cannot expect the ether to be.”

I said nothing to this because she was right. Thoughts of my own child were always just below the surface.

“Have faith, little sister,” she said as if she’d plucked the thought from my head. “Maybe not all of your fruit are broken.”

“The life out here in the hinterlands is not fit for the good fruit.”

Miriama fumbled with the tall water pipe next to her chair. She nodded for me to retrieve an ember from the fire while she added sweet-smelling herb.

Finally she shrugged saying only, “There’s no reason the good fruit must stay put. This a wide world.”

“That’s what scares me.” I rose to leave.

“Remember, little sister, that the ether is merely a tool.” Miriama grabbed my hand and pressed it against her cheek. “It is not more or less powerful than your science. If you want to do the best thing for that girl and yourself, you use all the tools you can find.”

Just then I felt the flutter of bird’s wings in my belly.

 

 

WHEN I RETURNED home I found Sule sprawled across our bed. A shaft of cold moonlight set his brown face aglow. He snored lightly with his face against my pillow. His feet hung over the end of our bed.

His legs had always been too long for our bed, our chairs, the door frames, the entire throwaway prefabricated pod home that was never intended to be in use for so long.

Before Sule, I had been comfortable in my solitude, I had thought, until the night he met me at the door of my quarters. I’d come home from hunting and found Sule standing in the shadows awaiting my arrival. As tradition demanded he came chaperoned by the traveling Imam.

Of course I accepted him.

I slid onto the bed next to him. Eyes still closed, Sule shifted to face me. He brought up a hand to the nape of my neck and untied the small knot. When the filmy fabric fell away, he tangled his fingers in my hive of hair.

“Like a volcanic sunset,” he whispered of my henna-dyed hair, before pulling me against his chest.

I clung to him, and accepted a sleep sweet kiss from him that made me almost forget everything else.

“You’ll never leave me?” he asked through a sleep haze, oddly, as if he sensed finality in my caresses.

I knew I never wanted to. When I took too long to answer, his eyes fluttered open, half-lidded glistening pools. I found myself lost in them.

“No. Never,” I breathed against his mouth.

 

 

I PARKED BENEATH the ledge of a hoodoo and sipped tepid ginger tea from a copper flacon. The sky hung low, a pitch sheet shot through with pinprick lights, the primordial moon halved. These were the hours I loved most, between midnight and dawn, when if I opened my senses, I could feel waves of the ether pound against the shores of the perceivable world.

Isa met me here, dressed in black with a gun strapped to his hip and a rifle slung across his broad back. I pushed open the door for him.

Isa was the first person I met when I entered the hinterlands, self-exiled from Ajutine, fueled by ignorance, idealistic purpose, and shame. I quickly learned that one cannot eat dreams nor shelter beneath idealism.

Hungry and tired, I considered returning to Ajutine to continue my work. I had a duty to be among the leaders in the search for a cure to our people’s increasing infertility, I had reasoned. Shame as much as pride sent me to the hinterlands despite the fact that our increasing infertility was very much my fault.

When I met Isa wandering across the plains he was only twelve or thirteen. In those days he didn’t speak and was adrift of any settlement. But Isa was quick and smart. He knew how to find food, water, and shelter in caves and in the nooks and crevices of hoodoos. He called me Ummi, and I mothered him, as much as he would allow.

“I asked you to come because I do not want to do this alone and because I trust you with my life,” I started. Isa speaks now, but I saw the questioning in his eyes.

“I don’t want Sule to know.” I started the engine and shifted into first gear.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a clinic in Oberon, a large one. It was still pretty much intact, last time I was there.”

“How long ago was that?”

I shrugged. “Five, maybe six years.”

Isa’s teeth flashed as he laughed. “You expect there to be anything left after all this time, except vermin?”

“There’s a good chance. Few people out here would even know what to do with what I am after.”

I glanced in my rearview mirror. A peacock’s tail of red dust rose, up behind my jeep. For a moment I thought I spotted the points of yellow headlights in the distance.

“Look back there,” I said to Isa, pointing over my shoulder with my thumb. “Do you see someone? We being followed?”

Isa twisted around in his seat. “I don’t see anyone.”

“Good.” I let out a breath and glanced in Isa’s direction. His dark lean face glowed, even in the pitch of the desert, green-gray eyes ethereal lamplights. A sudden sad longing came over me for the child this man used to be.

“I went to see Soraya today. She’s big with another child but something is wrong. We’re going to that clinic in Oberon for a piece of equipment called an ultrasound.”

“What does it do?”

“It will help me see the baby in her belly.”

“Can’t you already, like old Miriama?”

“Some, yes, but this is science.”

 

 

ISA TOOK THE lead, handgun unholstered and hanging ready at his side. I followed him in the gloom. The blue light of my torch highlighted his shoulder and neck muscles. I guided his direction by tapping his right or left shoulder when it was time for us to turn down the next corridor. The building was quiet but for the high-pitched chirrup of rats in the walls and the sound of toms mewling in the distance.

I found the ultrasound machine in one of the smaller diagnostic rooms. An exam table stood in the center of the room, its stirrups extended as if waiting for a patient. It was covered in dust and rubble. Isa helped me liberate the portable unit from beneath a pile of bricks and plaster, creating a fog of grime in the process.

“If there was electricity, I could test it, see if it still works.”

Isa went to stand by the door.

“Isa?” My voice sounded muffled and weighted in the thick dark.

“We should leave,” he said, waving me over. “We can test it when we get back to the settlement.”

“Give me a sec,” I said as I rummaged through the cabinets.

“Ummi,” whispered Isa, his voice edged with anxiety.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “Yeah?”

Even in the dark, I could see his wide eyes glisten, and his forehead wrinkle above his nose.

“You hear that?”

I hadn’t heard anything. I shook my head. In fact, I could no longer hear the mewling toms from the alley.

“Ummi, I don’t like it here. Let’s go. Now.”

I took the case containing the ultrasound and followed him into the hall. I felt a sharp burning stab on my right shoulder.

Then I saw nothing.

 

 

“DR. BILQIS JIHADA Haq. I never thought in a million years that I would see you again.” The voice was vaguely familiar.

I regained consciousness in a catcher trailer, cold and naked on a rusty necropsy table. It was slick with someone else’s jellied blood. My head, weighted with drugs, throbbed in nauseating waves. My mouth was dry and leathery and tasted like I’d been sucking on coins. I could not move.

I felt probing fingers along my neck, my shoulders, kneading my breasts and my abdomen, my thighs, between my thighs, my calves, my feet, between my toes. My eyes flew open and they stung and watered as I was momentarily blinded by a white light above me. Everything appeared fuzzy around the edges, as if I was looking through a periscope.

“There are those lovely eyes I remember so well.” The voice was male, soft, and lilting.

Gloved fingers pushed past my lips, pried open my jaw and ran along my gums and teeth.

“Not often I get someone as healthy as you out here in the hinterlands. Or as bountiful.” He winked. “If I could find twenty women like you, I could be a very wealthy man.”

The edges started to clear and my limbs tingled, like a million hot tiny needles pricking me.

Damp brown curls sprouted from the edges of his blue surgical cap. His brown eyes were flecked with yellow and green. He tugged down his mask.

Dorian Lin had changed much since I’d last seen him. His cheeks were gaunt and pockmarked and the bags beneath his eyes were bruise-purple. His mouth, a tight cyanotic gash in his face, told the tale of his unfortunate vice. He was dying. He was once a very beautiful man.

Horror must’ve shown in my eyes. He chuckled lightly and patted my shoulder. “No worries, love. I hold no grudges.”

Dorian Lin had been expelled from medical for abusing pain medications. He was known not only for using, but for creating his own very dangerous anesthetic concoctions and selling them in the fifth ward. I was the one who reported him. He was ejected into the hinterlands, made an exile.

“Besides, how could I be angry with the only person whose fall from glory rivals my own?” His eyes traveled slowly down the length of my body and then back to my eyes. “You killed all the babies, you and your vaccine.”

He unbound my plait and fingered my curls. “You’re better than I expected.”

He turned away then I heard the electric hum of machinery. When he turned back he held an ultrasound probe in his hand.

“This ultrasound will be useful as will your healthy liver, kidneys, lungs...” He ticked off my body parts on the fingers of his other hand. “I have so much to thank you for, Dr. Haq.”

We were both startled by banging on the side of the metal trailer. “You finished yet?” called a husky female voice from outside the trailer.

“This is a very delicate procedure. It takes time.”

“You can pretend you’re a mighty metro surgeon as much as you want, as long as you’re ready to meet the grocer in two hours.” Her voice was closer this time, perhaps at the mouth of the trailer.

A shudder coursed through me, from my toes up to my shoulders. The wind blew just then, carrying in the salty musk of the desert. I felt the tiny hairs on my arms stiffen. I breathed deeply. My fingertips twitched.

“I think he won’t mind a little delay.”

Dorian pressed the ultrasound probe to my belly and rolled it back and forth until he found what he was looking for. A sound like galloping hooves and the messy swish of fast moving air filled the trailer, echoing off the metal walls.

His catcher partner came into view, her face a sun-cured tapestry of lines and divots framed by a tangle of silver hair. Her blue eyes and lips formed perfect ohs.

“A real live baby,” she said breathily. “Well, damn.”

He held up two fingers. “Two for the price of one.”

 

 

THE KATO-HAQ CANCER vaccine was celebrated as a medical marvel. I wasn’t the leading researcher, but with Professor Kato, my mentor, suffering from worsening vascular dementia, most of the work and calculations were my own. And of course, my name was on it.

The premise was simple. The vaccine was infused with nanites to seek out cells in the process of over-proliferating, cells that would cause tumors. Within the first year the diagnosis of all cancers dropped by 53%. The vaccine was a success.

Dorian stared at the monitor. “About eighteen weeks. Looks like a strong healthy boy.” He smiled at me.

The feeling in my arms and legs had returned and they twitched involuntarily.

“Shall I assume that you weren’t vaccinated?”

“Of course I was. I believed in my work.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

Dorian raised an eyebrow. “So do I.

“A bit long in the tooth to be having a baby, aren’t you?” Dorian chuckled. “What are you? Forty-three, forty-four?”

I stared at the frozen image of my child on the monitor. There had been other pregnancies. Once my belly had grown large only to give birth to a lump of flesh and hair in place of a child. A clot of blood imbued only with the hope of life. Once I had a daughter. I held her tiny limbless body against me and put her to my breast where she suckled weakly, her eyes locked onto mine. She went to sleep at my breast and never woke again.

But I knew from the start that this child was different, stronger, real. Yet part of me still wished he would die in my womb. That I would pass him out of me like all the others, as so much dead tissue.

Dorian’s partner came into view grinning broadly enough that I could see the dark rotten teeth in the back of her mouth. “I talked to the grocer.” She glanced down at me and her smile faltered. She looked away.

“And?”

“He says he has a potential buyer. He just needs to negotiate the price.” The catcher looked down at me again, her eyes focused on my belly instead of my eyes.

“Looks like that tranq is wearing off. You’ll either need to dose her or tie her down,” said the catcher as she retreated.

“Where are you going?”

“Keep guard. What else? We’ve got some precious cargo here.”

Dorian looped a rope across my body and beneath the table and knotted it at my knees.

I tried to remember what Miriama had taught me, to pin prey with my eyes and use the coil of strength in my gut to draw out their consciousness. Most of my lessons had been for the purposes of healing and diagnostics. But I wanted to live. And if my child was going to die, I didn’t want it to be at the hands of a catcher.

“Dorian?”

“Hmm.” He glanced up and I managed somehow to hold him there.

The twine of power I pulled on was not yellow, like the one I’d used to view Soraya’s baby. This one was the blue-black of the midnight sky, the cold of the lowest levels of the ocean.

Dorian’s shiver mirrored my own.

Miriama had once explained, “All hearts begin clean and shiny like polished gold. It is sin and rancor that darkens them. Leaves spots sticky black like tar and rust.” It is this corruption that I tapped into, that I pushed out through my pores, creating a translucent black cloud in the trailer.

The miasma coalesced around Dorian. He coughed, and then he was doubled over choking. He was easy, already weakened by the drugs and his own corruption. All I had to do was call on my own darkness. There was so much more than I realized.

“To work the ether, you need intention. If you wish to see, it will give you sight. If you wish to heal, that is what you will do. And if it is destruction you wish, you will have that too,” Miriama had once advised. “Know what you wish. Know your own truth.”

“What truth?” I had asked.

“The truth about you, little sister. Not one of us is as good as we wish to believe.”

My truth was that I wanted to live and I wanted my boy to live. So I poured that desire into the black cloud around Dorian. I imbued it with the bitter pride that made me an exile, regret for not standing firm in belief, my anger for up to this moment not being honest with myself and with Sule.

I imagined Dorian lifting the blood-encrusted scalpel from the table and slicing the thin brightly veined skin of his throat, creating a bloody bib. Dorian jabbing the scalpel into his abdomen over and over again. Me wearing his ribcage as armor, his metacarpals and phalanges as a crown.

When I heard my name, faded and far away, my black cloud wavered and thinned. I heard a plea, not the words, but the intent. I felt hands on my shoulders, my forehead, my cheeks. I felt tears fall upon my face like hail. My vision cleared.

I heard a loud crack, felt a hot spray on my face, smelled the acrid scent of gun smoke. Then I didn’t see the yellow-and green-flecked eyes anymore. Isa’s face hovered above mine, his mouth pulled back in a wail.

“Ummi, stop.” He scrabbled at the rope across my body and when he became frustrated with the knots he pulled a hunting knife from his boot and cut them.

“The catcher?” My throat was hoarse. I didn’t sound like myself.

“I’ve dealt with her.” He pulled me into a sitting position and into his arms.

“Dorian?” I said glancing back, but Isa held me tight to prevent me from seeing.

“I shot him and it was a mercy,” he said, avoiding my eyes. Isa helped me to my feet and wrapped a dirty blanket around my shoulders. “I need to get you home. Cleaned up.”

 

 

I AWOKE JUST before noon, tangled in sweat-dampened sheets, the sun slanting through the window onto my face. My head ached, and when I rolled onto my side it felt like an ocean had shifted within my skull. I managed to climb out of bed and get to the bathroom before heaving into the sink.

I heard voices, a heated conversation in low tones. Sule would be angry and would try to blame Isa. Isa would probably let him.

I washed my face and dressed, then joined them in the kitchen. Sule rose when he saw me, anger and adoration an alternating mask. My magnet did not reach for me, but he leaned forward, hands turned out as if he wished to. As much as he fought the urge, I felt his fire tugging at me, longing for me. I avoided his eyes.

Isa wore a bloodstained bandage on his left shoulder. I offered a half smile, a silent apology. He nodded back.

I retrieved three of the pain pills that Miriama had packed in the leather pouch and handed two to Isa. I swallowed the other dry and sat in the chair that Sule had vacated.

“Do you think you can rig a battery for this thing?” I said, nodding toward the ultrasound. It sat on the floor in a corner.

Isa nodded. “When do you need it?”

“Now.”

Isa rose and headed for the door. “Give me thirty minutes and it’ll be ready.” The door smacked in the frame when he left.

“Why?” Sule asked a million questions at once, his face fractured by warring emotions. What could I say to placate his fear and anger, when I couldn’t placate my own? There were no lies that would sound like truth.

I went to where Sule stood against the counter. I wrapped my arms around him. He curved around me like a cocoon, my magnet. “I was so worried about Soraya’s baby, and Manuel was afraid,” I said.

He stiffened, even as he wrapped his arms around me.

“But that can’t be the only reason.” He placed his hands on either side of my face and gazed down at me. For a long time I did not speak, but he waited.

“I wanted to use the machine to see our son,” I said. Sule closed his eyes, let out a long breath. “I’ve been dreaming about him since I conceived. I already know his face, his voice, the smell of him. I wanted to know that he was real.”

I felt Sule’s anger ebb, the tension in his muscles ease. Then I told him about the future I saw in my dreams of our son, the future that did not include him.

“Forgive me,” I said against his chest.

He nodded, his chin against the top of my head.

“Forgive me,” I said again.

 

 

“WILL MY DAUGHTER live?” is all that Soraya wanted to know.

“I don’t see why not.” I sat on a small stool next to the bed. I handed the ultrasound probe to Neenah and nodded for her to turn the machine off.

“But this is dangerous, yes?”

I nodded, “It can be, but it’s a small separation. Your job is to rest until she is ready to meet the world.” I patted Soraya’s hand.

Soraya frowned and turned her face away from me.

“I just gave you good news. What’s wrong?”

“Who will deliver my baby when you leave?”

“I will,” said Neenah. “I’ll do my very best for you, Soraya. Try not to worry.”

Soraya smiled and wiped away tears with the back of her hand.

 

 

I MADE SALAT in the dark hour before dawn beneath an outcropping of rock. The only sounds were the thump of my heart. The journey to Ajutine had been long and heavy with guilt, but I had no regrets and no desire to go back.

I slipped off my hijab, my favorite, made of sheer copper fabric. I wore it the day that Sule and I wed. I used it to secure the holy book written in ancient curling script, the tasbeh of pearls on which I counted and expiated my sins, and the rectangle of carpet on which I knelt to recite my prayers. These had been my wedding gift from Sule, and now, I would leave them behind.

I filled the hole with sand and marked the spot with a large black stone shaped like a fan. None of the artifacts could pass entry inspection.

I pulled the yellow flier from my pocket to read one last time. The paper was now worn and faded, folded and refolded. My heart hitched as I turned toward the city of my birth, the home to which I never thought I would return.

The familiar angles of the skyscrapers rose above the wall surrounding the city, like fingers grasping for the clouds. Lighted looping train tracks hovered in midair, twisting around the skyscrapers like ribbons on the wind. From this distance I even caught the scent of Ajutine, exhaust and filth mixed with spice and humanity. Something in me shuddered. Until that moment I didn’t realize how much I had hungered for home.

“I don’t want you to go,” said Isa as I held his head against my chest. He had been my first friend in the hinterlands, my first child.

I watched the jeep until it disappeared in a cloud of dust on the horizon then set off to cover the remaining distance to Ajutine on foot.

Sule managed to make my last days with him the happiest and the most hateful of my life. He couldn’t get enough of my flowering form, hands always resting on the curved plane of my hip, the sensitive small of my back, telling me and showing me in countless ways how much he loved me. I joined him one night when he took to the plains to hunt.

I will never forget the way the stars look through a veil of tears, brighter and smeared across the sky, or the sound of Sule crying when he thought I was asleep.

I never had to tell him that I was leaving. He always knew.

On our last night together we ate cactus fruit and rabbit. I drank ginger tea and he drank water in which I’d sprinkled a bit of hrery powder. He slept dreamlessly, fitted around me like a shell.

No amount of time was long enough to be with a man like him.

I took my place at the end of a long line of the hungry and hopeful. Several hours passed before it was my turn, the sun giving way to a yellow crescent and stars. The guard searched my bag, removed then replaced the outdated medical texts, the certificates and licenses proving my education and training. He held the faded hospital picture identification up to shoulder height.

I self-consciously smoothed my hair, knowing that I scarcely resembled my younger self smiling in the photo. He appraised me, his gaze lingering on the scar on my chin, the streak of henna-reddened silver hair near my right temple.

His eyes settled on mine. “A doctor like you would be an asset here in Ajutine. Are you willing to make the required concessions?”

I thought of Allah, of the symbols of my religion buried in the sands of the hinterlands. I thought of my mother whose love of Allah was unimpeachable but who resolutely refused to leave Ajutine, the city of her forefathers.

“You only fail if you walk away,” she had once said, and those words looped in my head like a mantra. I was returning to right wrongs and to give my son a better life, but in doing so I was walking away again, from Sule, from certain love and hardship.

I looked up toward the sky through the glass of my tears.

“I am willing to make concessions,” I told him. I met his gaze so he would know and see it in my eyes.

It wasn’t until he nodded me through the gates that I realized that I’d been holding my breath.