Mirage (Mirage #1)(5)

All of a sudden, the drums stopped, and conversation tapered off. For a long minute, there was nothing but the sound of the water flowing in the fountain. Someone blew on a horn, a deep, sonorous note, and then the drums began again.

We stepped out, one by one, to the sound of our fathers calling our names.

“Amani, daughter of Moulouda and Tariq.”

The purpose of the majority night wasn’t celebration alone. Our true step into adulthood was receiving our daan. The thirteen of us sat on cushions in the middle of the courtyard and waited.

The tattoo artist was an elderly woman, her daan turned green with age and folded into the wrinkles of her face. But her hands were steady and I remained still, despite the sting of her needle. In the old days I would have bled and it would have taken weeks for the marks to heal—now I would only need a few hours before they settled permanently on my face.

A crown for Dihya and Massinia took shape, overlapping diamonds curving over my forehead. Sharp lines for my lineage—my grandfather had claimed descent from Massinia herself, and though neither I nor my mother believed him, her markings went on my left cheek. On my right were my parents’ hopes for me—happiness, health, a good soul, a long life. I don’t know how long I sat while the old woman worked, but at last she pulled back and smiled.

“Baraka,” she murmured. Blessings.

And just like that, I slipped from childhood into adulthood.

My mother came to stand beside me, her face as stoic as ever, and squeezed my shoulder. Our daan were similar, almost mir ror images of one another, and in that moment I hoped I could live up to them, live up to her. I lay my hand over hers and squeezed. With these marks I could face anything in the future. I hoped they would guide me toward joy and love instead of sorrow.

I followed the string of other girls and their mothers through the courtyard, weaving through the families watching, laughing, ululating in congratulations, to the banquet table at the north end. Those of us being celebrated tonight were to sit in the front of the banquet table with the elder women of our village and our mothers. My heart eased as I listened to them chatter. There was nowhere else on our small moon like these gatherings. Most of us were Kushaila, the oldest tribe group on Andala; my family was not the only one whose ancestors stretched back to the terraforming of our moon. The air rang with the sound of our mother tongue instead of Vathekaar, and our music and our laughter. For a moment I could imagine this was decades before the shadow of the Vath fell over our moon and conquered our planet and its system.

It was hard not to get swept away in the merriment, and when the songstress stepped down and a band took her place the tempo of music picked up. I loved the girls on either side of me—Khadija and Farah were my closest friends in the world. I’d grown up alongside Khadija. Our parents’ farmed plots of land beside one another, our mothers had walked to the orchards to pick fruit before either of us were born, before the Vath had ever darkened our skies. We’d taken our first steps together, learned to read together, and gone to school together. When it came time to register under the Vathek census, we’d gone to the capital city on Cadiz together.

It took no time at all for them both to grab my hands and pull me to my feet, and then we were off, dancing and laughing, singing along with the music.

I don’t know how long we danced, eventually joined by friends, laughing and chatting. The air was thick with incense smoke, the sharp sweet scent of cooked plums over lamb. The world seemed to glitter and waver as torchlight caught on sequins and false jewels. I know what we all must have looked like, had been a girl too young to partake only a year earlier. I had yearned to be part of the group, and now I was one of them: happy, crying out, falling over one another while we giggled.

For a while, I forgot my worries. Rebels, famine, poverty—none of these things mattered tonight.

And then the doors to the kasbah slammed open and the music stopped.





3

It felt like long minutes, though it could not have been more than a few seconds, for my body to catch up. To notice the music gone, the laughter thinned, and joy replaced by fear.

When you are raised in a place like Cadiz, in a time like ours, you learned the signs. The absolute silence, followed by the soft, near imperceptible click of metal against stone. The soft whir of gears just loud enough to announce itself. The Vath rarely sent men to our homes. When they did—well. The cruelty of men knew few bounds. So there was some relief when the first body through the door was an Imperial droid, chrome and silver, its body etched in cruel, sharp designs.

Imperial droids weren’t built to look human. They were always at least a foot taller than average, their skeletons built out of excelsior and adamant, glowing silver wherever they were. Their faces were blank except for the white line of light that passed for eyes, and their heads were framed by a fan of solid metal. The original designer chose to shape their torsos so that they resembled ribcages, without any of the flesh within or without so that the droid went from monster-like to full monster. They weren’t shaped to be sent into war, but then you didn’t need much more than two hundred pounds of metal to cow and brutalize civilians.

And the droids were very effective at that.

The violence Vathek men did was easily counterbalanced by a droid’s calculations of life versus death. And to them, Andalaan life was always an acceptable loss.

The droids—there were eight altogether—had still not spoken. They gathered in the doorway, silent as death and just as unflinching.