Nisa said nothing.

  “Welcome back to the desert,” Hoshana said, her voice louder than the rest. “We live by desert rules again. There is no space within our number for ladies we can’t sell.”

  “Edibe died to get us those ladies!” Kanika said.

  “That’s the price we paid the sand then. This is the price we pay now,” Hoshana said. “Not enough food and water to keep them. You want to kill them instead? No, we have given the sand too much since we arrived back into the desert. They’ll walk.”

  Nisa imagined little ladies sprawled across the sand. She saw the desert eat them alive and drink their blood.

  And she saw her babies, curled around one another at the bottom of a silty pit.

  “How many do you want to throw out?” Nisa said.

  The women all turned. They looked at her as if a ghost had spoken, not a woman.

  “We need to leave three of them,” Hoshana said.

  “You want to bury them here?” Nisa said.

  “We’re not going to bury trading goods,” Kanika said. “Someone else might find them. Someone else might—”

  “You buried my babies,” Nisa said. “Why not these pale things, too?”

  “I told you, we have given too much,” Hoshana said. “The sand will come to expect too much from us.

  “Save this for another time, Nisa.”

  “This is the best time,” Nisa said. She gazed long at Hoshana’s face, the narrow, desert-weary face that told Nisa to bury her mother and her babies and pick up her blade and keep walking.

  “I’m walking,” Nisa said. “Those pale things will die out there. If I walk with them, I can call on the sand. I can make it feed them.”

  The women stirred. “Not Nisa,” Fahra said.

  “Not a woman,” Kadife said, she a woman among women, broad and tall and strong, mother of four. She had a voice even Hoshana listened to.

  “If I go with them,” Nisa said, “you only have to throw out two of those ladies. Not three. I’ll take those two with me.”

  Hoshana shook her head. “Fighter-mine, sacrifice does not bring back dead. Only makes more of them. Understand that?”

  “I’m not leaving any more children alone for the sand,” Nisa said.

  Nisa strode from the main tent, back to the fire ring where she had left her things. She unwrapped the sword her mother had put in her hands at her death; a thin length of steel worn smooth by blood and sand.

  “The blade is what makes you a woman,” her mother once told her. “Not birthing babies. Babies make crones. Blades make you free.”

  Does killing make us free? Nisa thought. Does killing make Hoshana free? But she took the blade.

  She untied two ladies, two children not yet old enough to be called ladies. One girl was just past ten, the other half that. Yet they wore their hair long and unbound, and they dressed in the long red dresses of ladies.

  Nisa did not wait for dawn.

  She was done with Hoshana’s circles.

  Hoshana and the rest of the women’s circle waited outside the tent, but she did not go to them. She strode out through the camp, ignoring the women. Hoshana walked after her, as far as the edge of the circle of fires.

  “Nisa!” she called.

  Nisa looked back. “I don’t want your desert ritual,” she said. The girls huddled behind her, their liquid dark eyes brilliant in the glow of the firelight. The elder girl gripped the sleeve of Nisa’s long robe. The younger clung to the red dress of the elder.

  “You’re going to die out there!” Hoshana shouted. “They’ll be no one to bury you. You understand that, woman? You understand?”

  Nisa saw the sharp lines of Hoshana’s face drawn down in a dark frown. Her black hair was braided back against her scalp. She had taken off her robe and stood out in the chill night wearing only her short tunic and throat wrap. Her feet were bare.

  “Are you a woman or not, Nisa!” Hoshana shouted. “Should we put you in a red dress and call you lady? That’s what your mother wanted. Was she right, Nisa? Should we have buried you with your babies?”

  “I’m done giving to the desert,” Nisa said.

  “You swore a desert oath to me!”

  Nisa saw Hoshana take a step back and cower in the safety of the circle.

  “I swore that oath over my mother’s body,” Nisa said, “and fulfilled that oath over the bodies of my children.”

  “The desert will drink your blood,” Hoshana said. “Your mother wanted us sold off into those cities as ladies. She bred you to one of those soft city men, and he told us he owned you. Like a thing. Like a lady. Is that the life you wanted for your sisters? You cannot change what you are, Nisa.”

  “You’re wrong, Hoshana. I can defeat the sand, bury the past, and become something else. You will see me do it.”

  Nisa pulled her blade from the twisted leather loop at her hip. She drew a line in the sand in front of her, between her body and the fires, darkness and light, cold and warmth. But she did not cut her palm. She did not bleed into the line in the sand.

  She sheathed her blade without blooding it.

  Hoshana shouted at her, “Nisa, you fool! Fill that line in the sand now, or you’ll be feeding it blood until you die. Do you hear me, Nisa?” And then, pleading, “You belong to me, Nisa. Taking the life of your mother gives what was hers to me. You, this clan, all of it. You can’t leave me, Nisa. We follow desert practice!”

  “I am done with desert practice,” Nisa said. She reached down and took the younger girl by the hand, held the moist palm tight.

  “It’s time to walk,” Nisa murmured.

  “Where?” the girl said.

  “To another circle.”

  “There’s only sand out there,” the girl said.

  Nisa gazed out at the darkness, the low rise of the sand dunes, the darker shadows of the pillars.

  “Yes,” Nisa said. “I know.”

  The Skulls of Our Fathers

  My father came home from the war with the skull of a northerner, polished smooth as silk. The lower jaw was missing, but the rest of the teeth were intact, and I asked him if he had removed their fangs and he laughed and patted my head.

  The skull sat on our mantle. When friends visited, he would take the skull down and cradle it under his arm like a beloved pet and tell the tale of how he acquired it. The story changed depending on his audience. When it was dark and dreary, the rain streaming outside, the roll of thunder like the distant sounds of bombing, he said he came upon the northerner while on beach patrol. She popped her head out of a dug-out and fired three lavender-kissed bullets in his direction. They ricocheted off his fellow soldier’s helmet and one grazed his arm.

  “A ricochet usually isn’t deadly,” he said, “but it sure feels that way.” And he would roll up his sleeve and display his scarred arm and beam triumphantly at his audience.

  During some stories, the woman was very tall. Other times, she was short and muscular, with red-stained teeth sharpened into points, and she was eating the heart of one of his comrades. This was the first detail that made me doubt my father’s story, I admit. I was young. The skull itself was nearly white, including the teeth. And the white teeth were worn, not sharp.

  I was never supposed to touch the skull, but one night when my parents were out at a rally, I dragged an old milk crate up to the fireplace and touched the rim of one eye. The bone burned me; icy cold. I gasped and sucked my finger.

  “How did you really die?” I asked. “I hope you died terribly.”

  The skull only leered at me.

  When my father was drunk and on his own, decompressing after a long week at the patent office, he would tell a different story, railing on in the living room, stomping past the mantle, talking to ghosts in the skull.

  “You deserve to be here, you know! After what you did to us. To all of us. To me. I should have crushed your skull in and burned it up with the rest of you, but I wanted you to see us. To see what you will never have. My life. My family. This house. Our world! Our world will never be yours now. You understand that?” He put both hands on the mantle and shouted at the skull, his spittle splattering across its forehead.

  I asked my mother one night, “Does father love the skull more than me?”

  And she looked very sad and brushed the hair from my eyes and said, “No. It is not love that he feels, it is anger at things left undone.”

  “But we defeated them all,” I said. “The northerners. It’s done, isn’t it?”

  “Not for him.”

  When I was older and allowed to visit the homes of others, I expected them all to have skulls on their mantles. But when I asked about it, everyone peered at me as if I were odd, all but one girl, Mirisha, whose expression became somber, and she gestured for me to follow her, and we went quietly down into her cellar where it smelled of old wine and crushed mortar dust, and she carefully opened a battered trunk with great curled writing along the top. Inside, resting next to a battered old scattergun, a tri-pointed silver medal, and surrounded in soft violet silk, polished white skull. This one bore a great crack in its forehead.

  “My mother calls it Fuck-Face,” Mirisha said. “She says if we’re naughty we have to stay down here with Fuck-Face.”

  I shivered. “My father keeps ours on the mantle.”

  “When I’m old enough, I’m going to burn it up,” Mirisha said. “We should burn them up together.”

  “I don’t know. Who would my father talk to, then?”

  Mirisha did not look at me, but at the skull, and she nodded. “Yes. My mother, too. I think she would be very lonely without Fuck-Face.”

  “What do you think really happened, in the war?”

  “They killed people. Collected their skulls.”

  “Have you touched it? Does it burn?”

  Mirisha’s lips trembled. She nodded.

  “Let’s put it away,” I said. “It’s easier to forget about, down here.”

  “My mother doesn’t forget.”

  I knew even then that she was right, not just about her mother, but about my father. They would never forget.

  As I got older and the war became further away in time, visitors reacted differently to my father’s stories as he strutted around our living room with his skull. They no longer looked at him in admiration and wonder. When he lifted the polished skull from the mantle, ten years after the war, and began to talk about stalking the enemy woman into the deepest part of a tangled forest, one of my university friends said, “That’s horrific. And obscene. To desecrate a corpse like that.”

  The room grew silent. My father froze. Then he began to shake with rage. “You little fiend!” he said. “You spoiled, mewling brat of a child! What do you know about how your freedoms were won! About how they are kept! You are free to sit here and insult me because I kept murderers like this one from slaughtering you in your beds.”

  “So instead, you brought her body into your home?” my friend said, and my father yelled at her to get out, and she did, and she was never allowed to come back.

  I lost a few friends this way.

  I left home after university and traveled the world, or what parts of the world I could. The northernmost reaches of the world were still off-limits, their shores shrouded in green miasmas and red electrical storms leftover from the war. I met many old people still clinging to those days, to that war, and I found another woman with a skull, an old matriarch in the village of one of our allied countries, and when I asked her about it, she spits at me and made a ward against evil.

  “Why do you keep the skulls?” I asked, and that made her laugh.

  “Why do you wear a hat and trousers? Because it is expected! It’s a story! It’s a lie we tell ourselves, a lie that makes us who we are, a lie that says we are civilized people doing what’s expected of us.”

  I thought about that on my travels, but after that period, life carried on, and like everyone else, I became mired in the trappings of adulthood and responsibilities. I married, I had children, I danced and went to rallies. I cheered when they finally opened the northern coast to sea traffic. I mourned the death of our leader.

  One day, as my children played in the gullies behind my home, their shrieking voices filled with delight at some discovery or other, my mother called and told me I had to come home. My father was dying.

  I took a long, winding train ride back to my village, and I went to his side and found that he had the skull with him, tucked tightly under his arm.

  I said, softly, “Who was she really, Papa? The skull?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. There were so many. So many.”

  “What do you mean? So many attacking you?” Surely that would have made it into one of his stories …

  “So many skulls.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He began to weep. “A field of skulls. So many skulls. No buildings. No grass. Just dust and skulls and glass, from all the heat. It incinerated everything but their bones. Their cold, cold bones. Those northerners. So cold.”

  “You’re saying she was already dead?”

  “All of them were dead. An army? A village? I don’t know. We stumbled upon them. Thought they were ours, at first, some atrocity committed by the northerners. But you can tell from the skulls. Their skulls are icy cold.”

  “But you and your squad … you said all the time … you fought dozens of people. Killed dozens of the enemy, you had those marks on your scattergun—”

  “I thought war could be just and honorable. I was wrong. We were all wrong.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa.”

  When he died and we buried his ashes, I put on a thick pair of gloves and I buried the skull with him. I saw Mirisha at her own mother’s funeral, many years later, and asked about the skull in her cellar.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mirisha said, and she wrung her hands, and she would not look at me. “My mother was a hero. She would not go around carrying skulls like trophies.”

  But I was no better. Because as the years passed, I, too, forgot about the skulls. It was easier that way. And when my granddaughter came home from a rally and told me she was joining the military because her grandfather had been a hero, I nodded and told her I understood. I told her I was so happy for her.

  “The world needs brave young people,” I said, and how I wished I could have given her that skull and explained, but I had buried it, as we had buried our stories and memories with our dead, so that each generation, again and again, had to pay the same price, had to learn the same lesson, had to fight the same war.

  When she comes home, I hope she brings a skull. I hope we can keep it on the mantle this time, yes, but tell the truth of it. I hope we can tell the truth.

  Body Politic

  Interrogation: Narsis

  When my Suits bring the wayward agents in, Lisha strips them naked, bare, except for a blinder of organic mesh—try to rip it off and you’ll rip off your own face. You put the agent inside a filter you tell them is set to disintegrate them. Make them squat on their haunches until the muscles of their bodies shudder and they make those little mewling sounds, those hiccupping sobs of pre-language.

  This is interrogation, body politic. This is my job.

  I get names. Who took them off their meds, who turned them against Defense. Are you Opposition? Against organics? Who gave your orders?

  It’s always the same name.

  Keli.

  Keli is afraid of three things, they tell me:

  Needles, women, and knives.

  But no one can find him.

  When I get back to my room in the barracks, step through my own filter, it cleans me of agents’ blood.

  Then I vomit into the sink.

  I vomit every time.

  I have more metal promotion loops in my ears than any of the other Suits. I’ve been on oral meds and injections for years. Helps with the job, Defense tells me. They bred me to do what I do, they say, and the meds are perfecting me for it, they say, but I don’t feel perfected to it. I feel obligated to it. There’s a difference.

  Then one day we start losing our systems. Me, Flire, Mesta, and three of the other Suits. All of our case files come up empty.

  Somebody calls in a click/agent pair to jack in and fix it. The click/agent pair—the agent dark and tall like a Suit, the click small and pale and too-thin—work for an hour. The agent jacks the click into my system and inserts his jack-in knife into one of the fleshy openings on the click’s wrist so he can translate for me. My system has crashed, he tells me; like a bird.

  The next day, all the interrogation systems are down too.

  Keli is having a laugh at us, I bet.

  I go back to the click/agent pair. The agent trembles when I override the filter over his doorway. He starts screaming even before I touch him. I tell Lisha to haul out this agent’s click from the Kettering compound.

  Interrogation. The only thing I know. When a new click jacks in and something else comes crashing down, someone needs to ask the questions.

  She gives me a four-letter name, the same name: Keli.

  I bleed the agent and her click across my boots.

  I go home. I don’t make it to the sink before I vomit.

  The summons comes after I interrogate the fourteenth of Keli’s turned agents.

  Defense puts me in a dark little conference room with the bubble-haze of another filter over it, programmed to allow only us in. There’s a ceiling of twisted blue glass, and glow worms pulse inside of it, shedding blue-filtered light. Inside the filter, there’s only me and two Defense Suits.

  I sit at a square table dipped in chalk blue.

  They stand. They always stand. They’re bigger than even me, tall and broad-shouldered, black hair, black eyes. I can never tell them apart.

  “You have the name of the one causing these problems,” the one on the right says, “yet you have not located him.”

  “He’s outside the realm of my authority,” I say. Meaning he’s just a name. He could be anyone, anything, nothing.