Mirage (Mirage #1)(6)

I jumped when a hand wrapped around my arm, but it was only my brother, a grim look on his face.

“Aziz and our parents?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“In the back,” he said.

“All girls aged fourteen to twenty are to line up on the west wall,” one of the droids announced. Its voice echoed as if a person inside it were speaking through a metal tube.

Ice crawled up my spine, but I stepped forward.

“Don’t,” Husnain said, tightening his grip.

“Don’t be foolish,” I hissed. “What if they scan the group and find I’ve lied? Better I go now and get it over with.”

I understood Husnain’s fear. We’d all heard the stories—the Vath appeared without warning when too many of us gathered in one place. They feared rebellion, and where groups of people met, or so the wisdom went, rebellion quickly followed. My father limped now because he’d attended such a gathering in his youth, and there were people from our village—among them my father’s elder brother—who’d disappeared from such gatherings and never appeared again. I was too young to remember very much, but I knew the tightly wound fear that sat in your chest as the droids stormed a building. Knew the wail of a woman who knew she was about to become a widow.

Husnain looked ready to argue, his face screwed up in anger. “They can’t do this.”

The Vath never intruded on a majority night, something so clearly meant to celebrate the young in our villages when there were so few of us.

Or at least, they never had before.

“They are doing it,” I reminded him, and tapped his hand. “Let me go and it will be done soon enough. I promise.”

Husnain seemed to battle with himself for a moment, and then he released me. We were close because in so many ways we were alike. But here, we differed. I understood the world we lived in, the consequences of dissent. Husnain … he disliked bowing to anyone, and to the unjust most of all. He would risk his life in the name of an idea rather than live to fight another day.

The room divided silently, girls in the age range specified to the left, and everyone else to the right. The smoke had taken an oppressive turn, so that it was no longer the dream-like fog. Something thicker, like a funeral shroud.

Two of the droids came toward us and split us, one to the front of the line and another to the back. Khadija stood beside me, and we held hands, our fingers crushing each other’s.

Her newly inked daan glistened on her cheeks and forehead in the firelight—she looked, I thought, more beautiful than she ever had before. After sharing so much of our lives together, it was right that we’d had our majority night at the same time. She gave my hand another squeeze, her face as clear of emotion as mine was. There was no training for how to face Vathek droids, but we all knew. No fear, no emotion, nothing that would focus their gaze on you.

Every few seconds there was a louder whir from both droids, and then a sharp beep before they moved on to the next girl. It was only when they were a few girls away from us that I realized what they were doing—a wide, green beam scanned a girl’s face, and then the beep cleared her. They were trying to identify someone.

I heard Aziz’s voice, warning me about the search for rebels, about appearing to aid those suspected. There were no rebels here—just a farming village that would starve in the coming months with our livelihood now smoldering. My gaze scanned the room. There was Adil the perfume maker with his lame foot. Ibn Hazm, the last member of a family prosperous before the war. Khadija’s parents, farmers and fruit pickers. Everyone here knew the cost of sedition. No one here would risk it.

I remained still, my eyes fixed on a flickering torch as a droid stepped in front of me, leaned forward, and scanned my face.

The noise it made after was not the sharp beep, but a clang, like an alarm. It remained bent in front of me, frozen as if in confusion.

My heart raced—difference was never good. Different meant the Vath knocking down your door in the middle of the night.

I eyed the door they had come through, and then the back exit. I wouldn’t make it if I ran, and likely I would cost friends their lives as they came after me.

“Take her,” one of the droids said.

“No!” Husnain pushed his way through the crowd and came to stand beside me. “You can’t have her.”

Without warning, the droid raised a phaser from its hip and aimed it at his forehead. Droids never set their phasers to stun. It would have been easy to be frozen, to scream, to give in. But though Husnain was older than me, I had always taken care of him.

“Stop,” I said, my voice firm, and stepped in front of him. “There is no cause for violence.”

“You will come with us,” the droid said, not lowering the phaser.

I buried shaking hands in the folds of my skirt and shook my head. “Tell me what you want with me. I have rights.” Even as I spoke them, the words rang hollow. I didn’t have rights, of course. I was a poor girl, from an oft-forgotten moon. And I was young, without any of the marks on my record that would have signaled me as loyal to the Vath.

“You will come with us willingly or by force,” it said.

“I will not,” I repeated. Too late I realized my foolishness. You did not stand up to the Vath, and you certainly didn’t stand up to their droids, who would not be swayed by pleas or displays of emotion. I could feel the blood beat at the tips of my fingers, could almost hear the gears turning inside the droid as it turned its attention from me to Khadija.