Suad woke her up by being loud.
This was not unusual. He had never in his life entered a room quietly when he could enter it otherwise, and searching through someone's bag — which was what he was doing when she opened her eyes — was apparently no exception. She watched him from the pillow for a moment, still half-submerged in sleep, and decided that if he was after the funds she did not have the energy to fight about it right now.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Why are you still asleep? You missed breakfast," he said, not looking up. He pulled out a small tube of clear liquid, examined it, and looked marginally relieved.
She looked at him properly. He didn't appear injured. The medicine he was holding was the kind that worked on headaches — the deep, grinding kind that came after a night of drinking, or after other things.
"Did you bottom?" she asked.
He winced at her volume.
"No. And my private life is private, Saad. I love you, but cut the mother act."
He was in a bad mood. She filed this away and said nothing, because she was tired and because she recognized, distantly, that she had been acting like his mother again, which she had promised herself to stop doing and never quite managed.
"Five minutes," she said, and put her face back in the pillow.
She was almost asleep again when it hit her.
"Wait — I missed breakfast. What time is it? Did we miss the appointment?"
She sat up. The anxiety arrived fully formed, the way it always did when she had been careless about something that mattered.
"No and yes," said Suad, sitting on the edge of his bed, pressing two fingers against his temple.
"How so?"
"They canceled all appointments at the governor's office. People arrived from the capital — strategy meetings for the war. Everything else was pushed."
She pulled the covers up. The morning air was thin and cool against her arms, but the chill she felt had nothing to do with temperature.
"Some are already calling it that? The war?"
"We should call things what they are," he said.
She looked at the wall. The war. Not the conflict, not the tension, not the upcoming situation — the war. Already a fact in people's mouths, the way facts became facts before they happened, through the repetition of them.
It was not the war itself that sat badly in her chest. It was the way it had been assembled — lie by lie, performance by performance, a woman on a stage crying on cue while a crowd leaned forward and believed.
"How long until the next appointment?" she asked.
"Four days."
"This is not good."
"No," he agreed.
She got up. She needed the toilet, badly — her stomach had been knotted since she woke and it had only gotten worse.
"We have nothing to do with this situation," Suad said.
She turned and looked at him. The Catreena wound was still there, unhealed, and his name was attached to it. She had not forgiven him and she had not said so, and the unsaid thing sat between them most mornings like furniture they had both learned to walk around.
"We can't let this happen," she said. "It's insane."
"It's not our business. You're the general here — why do you have to push into everything?"
"Oh, I'm the general now. Convenient. I'm only the general when it suits you."
That was not what she had meant to say. She never knew, in these moments, why she couldn't stop herself. The words came out wrong and sharp and she couldn't pull them back.
"You know I follow your orders," he said. His voice was controlled, which meant he was closer to angry than he looked. "But when it goes against the mission I have the right to object."
"So I'm the one acting against the mission and you're the reasonable one — is that it?"
Her stomach lurched. Her fists were clenched. She was about to say something worse and she could feel it coming and she had no way to stop it —
Suad raised both hands.
"Let's not fight," he said. Quiet. The way he went quiet when he had decided something. "We'll do it your way."
She stared at him.
"What?"
"I told you my opinion. You disagreed. I'm your lieutenant on this pilgrimage, so I'll follow the captain's orders."
"You're just — you're agreeing? Just like that?"
"Let's not fight," he said again. He looked at her with his blue eyes — the eyes she never got to see properly because of the blindfold, visible now in the morning light of their room — and she saw, for a moment, the small brother she had spent her childhood looking after. Stubborn in the specific way that looked like surrender but wasn't.
She turned her head.
"Fine," she said. "We won't fight."
She sat next to him on the bed. They were quiet together for a moment — not comfortable exactly, but honest. She wondered why they fought so much on this journey. At home they disagreed constantly but it had never felt like this — probably because at home there were other people, other rooms, other things to look at. Here they were all each other had, and that was a lot of pressure to put on two people who had never fully figured out how to be together without an audience.
Her stomach growled.
"The toilet," said Suad.
She ran.
She could hear him laughing behind her — low and a little shy, the laugh she remembered from when he was small. When she came back out he was still smiling and she gave him a look and he gave her a smile back, and it was stupid, but something in the room had shifted.
They needed to work together. That was the fact of it.
* * *
Getting out of the toilet, she gave him a look and he smiled, she emptied her bowel, and felt better, her anger was subdued, and she smiled then at him, it was stupid, but if they wanted to succeed on this journey, they would have to work together.
"So, if we are going to do as I say, then we should do something to stop this crazy war, or at least tell the people the truth, we might no be able to stop it, but we can at least tell them the truth, and make them decide for themselves" she said as she began to wear her clothes
"Yes, but we have to do this in four days only" he said
"What do you mean?" she asked, wearing her armor
"In four days our appointment will come, and as soon as we get our pass certified, we will be asked to leave or join them in their war" he said also changing, he began to take off his armor, then his under clothes, and wearing the set he had washed, only to put his armor over the clothes.
"Okay, that is our general plan, now we need a plan to do what we need to do" she felt exhausted, a part of her was glad to have only four days, even after fighting to do what's right, a part of her, wanted to forget all about it, and just stay in her comfort zone. Speaking of ideals was easy, but to actually go through with it, it was too exhausting to just think about all the stuff they need to do, and the will to go through this, was like trying to think a storm into existence. It was a huge burden, and she hoped it would be worth it.
"We start with Isla," Suad said.
"I was thinking the same."
They looked at each other. Both raised their hoods.
They went out into the city in different directions, moving away from the eyes of the patrolling soldiers, and the morning swallowed them separately.
* * *
After their morning, both siblings decided to go in different directions. They scaled the houses, moving away from the eyes of the soldiers that were patrolling.
Saad descended next to a clothes store. Her idea was to blend in and gather information. They had no time — four days was too short for what they were trying to do.
"Hello, may I get a dress? I want to remember this beautiful town after I leave," she said, lowering her mouth guard.
The store owner looked at her and smiled.
"You are so fit — I have very pretty dresses that would suit you," said the shopkeeper, excited.
"No, I wanted a local one. As I said, I want to remember this town and its feeling."
She put on her best smile.
"Oh, in that case I have very colorful ones that capture the town's spirit."
"No no, I want one like those pretty ladies," she said, pointing at some of the passers-by outside the window.
The shopkeeper frowned but nodded. She took out some dresses, and most of them were plain and not Saad's style at all, but she chose the one that stood out the least.
"Ah, I see. You are out of money," said the old lady.
Saad wanted to protest. But she had to play the role. Just think of it as another mission, she told herself.
"Actually, yes, we are quite out of money," she said, laughing an embarrassed laugh. It was true that she was embarrassed — just not for the reason the shopkeeper thought.
She bought the dress and left.
She hoped that Suad was going about collecting information and investigating in a smart way. She could trust him with work — he might be lazy and annoying, but he always did his best when it was a mission. She hoped against all hopes that he would not screw this up. Now it was time to search for Isla. Not to worry about Suad.
She paid for the dress and left.
On the rooftop she put it on over her uniform, took off her mouth cover, let her hair down, pinched her cheeks. Then she descended and took the language drug — not to learn the language, which she already knew, but to let it settle into her accent, smooth out the edges of her speech until she sounded like someone who had grown up here. The drug didn't teach. It simulated. She had always thought they should call it the dialect drug rather than the language drug, but no one had asked her.
She moved through the shopping district for the next several hours, a woman on a leisurely afternoon stroll, listening.
What she heard made her blood simmer quietly beneath her skin.
Isla's name was everywhere — in the mouths of women at market stalls, at the tables of tea houses, in the low urgent voices of men outside newspaper offices. Her story had spread the way stories spread in watchful cities: faster than news, slower than rumor, taking root in the specific way that things take root when people want them to be true. The Dawi were barbarians. Everyone said so now. Isla had confirmed it. A woman who had lived it, who had stood before them trembling and told them what she had seen — who could doubt that?
Saad held it in. She joined conversations at the edges, listened, smiled when she was supposed to smile, shook her head when she was supposed to shake it. Several times she nearly said something. She didn't.
She heard, in passing, that Isla was being kept at the governor's office. Protected, the women said, admiringly. Kept safe after her courage.
Saad doubted this. Isla was not being protected. Isla was being managed.
But she couldn't find her. She checked the restaurants, the bars, the quieter streets near the government buildings. A group of men tried to flirt with her outside one of the establishments and she gave them a look that communicated the precise degree to which she was not interested, and they left her alone. By the time the sun began to drop toward the rooftops she had found nothing — no trace of Isla, no confirmation, only the thick residue of a story that had already done most of its work.
She went to the fountain to wait.
* * *
After a few minutes of standing next to the city's fountain, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned and he was there, still in uniform.
"It smells bad here, let's go to a restaurant, I need to eat something," he said, and they both went to a restaurant. After finding a good one they sat and ordered their food. The people were giving them weird looks, and she guessed it was because she looked like one of them and he looked like an outsider. She felt sorry to have put him in that position.
"So what did you find?" she asked. Suad gave her a look that said he was tired and wanted to relax a bit, to lay off and then get down to business.
"Let me eat first?" he asked with sarcasm. She noted how tired he sounded. Wasn't he aware of how little time they had? Or was he trying to sabotage their mission?
"Fine," she said. She had to agree, to not start another argument. She didn't want to go into another fight. It was draining.
The waiter brought their food. The whole bar was busy with talk about the upcoming war. Saad played with her food, not mustering the appetite to eat. She listened to the people around her talking about Isla's conference and how the Dawi were a bunch of barbarians and they needed to move to free people like her. It was depressing. And what made it worse was that she knew that what Isla had said was all wrong — but she couldn't tell them. Not if they were going to bring Isla to tell the truth themselves. Talking about it first would lessen the shock they wanted to create. The waiting was killing her.
"I found her," Suad suddenly said.
She turned to him, shocked. She had thought he was not going to talk until they reached the hotel, but it seemed her little brother was more thoughtful than she had thought. And wait — what had he just said? He found her? As in Isla? He hadn't mentioned the name, so she supposed he was trying to be discreet. But then why had he talked at all, if he didn't want anyone to listen?
"Where?" she asked, sending him a grateful look. He seemed to be thinking about how to answer without giving away their actual conversation, in case someone was listening.
"Where they said she would be," he said, and took a bite of the meat.
Where they said. He was talking about the rumors — which meant she was in the government office. How predictable.
"That was easy. You're sure about this? And what did you do afterwards?" She knew she was edging into interrogation territory, but she was excited, and she wanted to know — what had he done in all that time, if he had just followed the rumors? Had he gotten them compromised? Had he acted irrationally? The doubts resurfaced in her head. She wondered if he had done anything to sabotage her. Then she cleared her head. He was her brother. If she couldn't trust him, who could she trust? But that was the biggest issue — she never fully trusted him, and that was why they fought so often. Her lack of trust was something she had to work on. But not now. Right now she couldn't get away from the thought that he was trying to bring her plan down just to prove a point. She didn't believe he wanted her best interest. That he wouldn't hurt her just to satisfy his own ego. After all, he was selfish. He always acted in his own best interest.
"I watched her from the roof, took a clear picture of her activities to study her," he said, sounding detached.
She raised an eyebrow, asking if that was all. He didn't answer, so she asked.
"That's all?" She really hoped it was. She was not ready to hear anything else.
"Yes. I'll fill you in at the hotel," he said, and went back to eating.
She looked at him, but he wasn't looking at her. He was avoiding her gaze. She wondered if he was lying. And was he always this melancholy? She didn't know. She realized she hadn't really looked at him in a long time — when he had joined the army she had stopped seeing him as a brother and had started viewing him as a sore thorn in her side. So she was no longer sure what his expressions meant. And that damn eye cover was always in the way. She wanted to reach across and pull it off. But she composed herself. She began to eat. She needed the energy. It seemed he had a lot of information, and they only had three days left to use it.