Infidel by Kameron Hurley Page A

an embassy, let alone remain undiscovered so long. I’ve lost three women to that embassy. You have some gifts.”
    “I am merely lucky,” Inaya said, and knew it was time to go. When the conversation turned to how she accomplished what she did, it was always best to end it.  
    Elodie passed over a large box made of pounded beetle carapaces. It was tied closed with muslin. Inside, there would be three or four ancient metal and amber casings, transmissions created hundreds of years ago. Her gift to Khos—some old work on Mhorian or Tirhani history, architecture, archaeology. Her cover story for coming out to this poor shanty town at the edge of Shirhazi.  
    Elodie walked her out. Inaya waited twenty minutes for the next train. By the time she arrived home, the world had gone the blue-violet wash of dusk.  
    The housekeeper had dinner waiting. Tatie and Isfahan were hungry and fussy. She longed for the day when she could send them out to bring home curry. Khos was not home.  
    Inaya ate and asked Tatie about his day at the madrassa. He stopped often to wipe at his runny nose and leaking eyes. She pretended to listen to him as he answered her questions, but in her heart, she was telling herself, it’s just allergies. Just another sneezing fit, runny nose, itchy eyes. Most children had allergies. They grew out of it.  
    Not all of them became shifters.  
    After the children were in bed, she sent the housekeeper home. Inaya sat at her desk for some time, admiring the old casings. What had those people thought the world would become, so long ago? Did they foresee any of this? A world locked in perpetual strife, persecuted shifters, endless contamination, a centuries-long world war….
    She heard Tatie snuffling and sneezing from his room down the long hall. After a time, she went to him.  
    Inaya sat up with her son most of the night. She turned him onto his stomach and told him to tilt his head to keep the mucus draining from his nose instead of down his throat. She kept antibiotics on hand for his throat infections, and her own, but the more of them she could avoid, the better. Resistance to stronger strains of antibiotics happened fast. Soon, he would need a magician to treat all his ills. She’d had sinus infections all through her childhood. Allergies this severe were often the first sign of a shifter’s abilities coming to the fore.  
    She brought him juice, and more tissues, and lay with him after he’d gone to sleep, holding him close, stroking his hair.  
    It was a risk. She’d always known it was a risk, to have a child with another shifter. But she had expected this from Isfahan, her legitimate child, not Tatie, not her little lizard’s child. It would have been easier with Isfahan. Girls were expected to be covered and closeted. Hiding her away during the worst of it, when her shifting came into maturity, would have resulted in very little talk. But Tatie? Pulling a boy from a well-off family out of school? Unthinkable.  
    Unless we tell them he’s sickly, she thought, the way her brother Taite was sick in Ras Tieg. Her brother had barely survived childhood. He’d been allergic to everything. He’d borne the spotty, pale face and skinny frame of a perpetually sick child his entire life.
    Please, God, she thought—not my children too.  
    At dawn, when Inaya finally slept, Khos had still not returned.  
    Inaya surprised herself when she realized she missed him. When the world looked grim, she found she longed for even the most stifling routine. There was comfort in the waiting, the smoldering—being always on the edge of bursting out, bursting free.  

7.
    A t night, when the moons were in progression, the desert did not look black but dusky violet, the color of a new bruise after a hard fight. The moons wouldn’t reach their full size in the night sky for another four years; they were on a twenty-year rotation that took them so close to Umayma that they would make   up a quarter of the sky at