(Content warnings: brief depictions of gun violence, loss and grief)
Hajira made her walk across the valley the day after the Zai murdered her son.
The reddish-yellow sky loomed above her like a hazy weight. The Zai would be there in their compounds. She expected every member of the tribe huddled inside with their autojezails stockpiled for the next round of bloodshed.
The terraced farms on the overhanging valley seemed empty of workers. Those were always visible to her, even as a child, when the Durr tribe and the Zai were still allies. The windsuit navigation said it would take a little more than half an hour from her village to the other end of the valley. She was willing to make the trek as the heavy lumbering legs made walking more comfortable with mechanization, but they were not comfortable enough for her to ignore the ache in her bones, the pain of the years embedded in her marrow.
Hajira had never experienced the cold outside the windsuits, never experienced the wind sweeping the Mareekh dust into her eyes, but she felt it—felt the ice of her soul covering every moral boundary that once governed her life since Shehzad was murdered: the teachings of her parents, the ways of clan and tribe, the lessons the Qur’an and Sunnah had given her. She remembered what the maulvis told her, of the times of jahiliyah when the tribes before the Prophet’s time would be lost in carnage before the revelations unified them. How different were her people now, she thought? It was a question buried under a blanket of hatred.
She had no plan. She gazed at the blood-brown cliffs to her sides, the cold desert regolith carpeting her path to the village where her enemy slept. Hajira could only muster vague memories of what the Zai village had looked like from her youth. Cluttered metal longhouses within metres of each other covered in Mareekh soil to protect their inhabitants from radiation. The terraced farms looming over them from the valley’s slopes. Had a stranger walked as she was walking, through the empty rocky path between villages, making that same lumbering sojourn she was, they would have thought the Durr and Zai villages were the same—two ends of the same community of a few thousand souls, not knowing what mutual disgust walled these villagers away from each other.
She thought to herself what she would do once she confronted any Zai before her. Could the gloves of the windsuit wrap themselves around a Zai neck? Would she let them kill her, their jezails opening up her body as they had done to her son? The scenarios passed through her mind, the fugue of her despair clouding her soul, secretly cursing the fate that had led her to this hole.
•••
They were children of the Second Hijra.
Hajira only recalled snippets of that exile. The stories came to the children of the villages from their elders. They were taught that the lands which they tilled, where their sheep had grazed, where rice and wheat flourished, were for others to take. The rivers were drying, and underneath them foreigners found minerals more valuable than gold. The foreigners needed those minerals, more than the villagers did, to help them build new settlements, away from the planet their ancestors lived and died upon. The Company—one of many that dug those lands—sent them away, to Mareekh.
The Company gave them everything. The longhouses where they slept, covered with soil to protect them from radiation. The water they discovered seeping deep under the ground feeding the reservoirs they drank from. They were given seeds and supplies to plant garlic, corn, dates, oranges, and pomegranates, all grown under the canopied farms that terraced the ridges to the west of the villages. There was a power in growing their own food. Beyond an alternative to the packaged meat supplement given to them, it gave them a sense of liberty from the Company’s grasp.
What they were taught in school, in translated books the Company gave the teachers, was supplemented by darker tales their parents’ parents gave. “They forced us away from our lands,” Hajira’s Nani once said in her longhouse apartment. “They robbed us of everything. When our people were told to leave, some of us tried to stay. They were killed, by the unbelievers and even other Muslims. Our own people. They took those minerals to build huge towers beating against the skies on those planets they found for them. Planets with real lakes and blue skies, just like the ones we had at home.”
Nani would repeat the same story, often looking out to the sides of the apartment as if the longhouses had windows like the homes the children saw in their picturebooks. Hajira could never know what her grandmother’s soul saw. She had imbibed the images of their homeland from her own Nani, images that Hajira had no reference towards. Yet, even at a young age Hajira understood the underlying, unspoken lesson that her grandmother and elders were trying to speak to—the importance of lineage, of continuity, the immeasurable value of a bloodline that crossed planets. What lived inside her was an ancestral voice that whispered to her every day a simple lesson: you honour us through the simple act of living and surviving.
Mareekh was her only homeland. Hajira was a child of the dark metal interiors of their longhouses snaked with tubes and piping, and the rocks scattering in the valley outside. The tales of how her ancestors lived before the depredations of the Company were far removed from her life learning Quranic recitation from the longhouse maulvis, or the ten-minute outings into the wastelands, exiting the airlocks and quarantine showers to play underneath the clouded sky in her windsuit.
It was their work on the terraced farms that made Hajira think of what life could have been. The farms were magical, one of the few areas where the men and womenfolk of the tribes would work together. It was also there that Hajira first met Marwah.
In the years that followed, she could recall few details. In every instance when those memories returned, it was those eyes, green lamps blinking through the visors of her juvenile windsuit, that stood out in Hajira’s mind. Under the radiation covers that blanketed the terrace farms, those eyes were clearer than anything else. It was a verdancy that reminded her of the stories her mother told her of their ancestors’ original homelands, the lands of rivers and forests where the Jabee, Lochi, and Ghan people lived, where the fruit grew under blue skies and not the artificial light hidden from the radiation of the Mareekh landscape. Those green eyes marked the days of the Durr and Zai friendship, where the village longhouses were open to each other.
Hajira’s father would visit his friends in the Zai compounds. He’d known many of them working alongside each other in the Company mines, since the Zai usually acted as foremen or informal interlocutors between Company bosses and Durr workers. Hajira knew that many of the Durr resented this relationship, a vestige of the simple fact that the Zai came to Mareekh before the Durr. Hajira’s father was able to gain the trust of many of the Zai who, along with their mining duties, took part in the barter system between the villages for food and other goods.
He took her along for these trips, his only surviving child, a fact the Zai would think odd—usually only letting their sons outside their villages—but understanding the special feeling he had over this girl, a tiny girl dwarfed by tall men whose beards were resplendent with oil and perfume inside their homes. It was a privilege, Hajira would think, to break the monotony of her quotidian life by seeing the Zai village. Without these visits, she spent her days in school amongst dozens of other children of various ages, staring at the tablet-book material her irritable teachers would force them to read. Hajira would long for the breaks where she would play by herself in the regolith, staring out into the sky where the faint sun shone anemically over the valley.
The Zai took as much pride in their farms and families as the Durr did. They showed Hajira and her father their pomegranate fields, the redness of that fruit evoking something deeper in her than the redness of the soil outside their longhouses. The pomegranates always sparked a fascination within Hajira. She had heard from her father about the challenges growing them—their high need for water, and how, when insufficiently hydrated, they would split open as they dropped dead to the ground. There was something in that juxtaposition between their jewel-like beauty and their fragility that spoke to her, making her think of their life on Mareekh. She wondered what her ancestors would think of it, the need to fight for a life on a planet that knew not how to sustain their existence.
Under one of the pomegranate trees a girl played a game of catch with a smaller boy, each using the brim of their tunics to fling a ball in the air while the other one would catch it. Hajira was curious, venturing away from her father as he let go of her hand, laughing uproariously at some joke the Zai men had said. When she came closer, the girl looked at her, those jeweled eyes drawing her closer.
“What are you looking at?” the green-eyed girl asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re not from here.”
“I’m Durr. This isn’t my longhouse.”
The girl hesitated. “We’re Zai. We’re not supposed to talk to the Durr.”
Hajira looked behind her. “That’s my father,” she said, pointing to her father and a group of laughing men. “He’s a Durr. He’s talking to a Zai.”
“We’re supposed to be enemies.”
“Who said that?”
“The elders.”
“The elders talking to my Babba right now?”
The girl frowned, the unhappy look of someone who’s been bested. “That’s my Chachu, my father’s brother.”
“I think he’s friends with my Babba now.”
The girl looked back to the other children. “Then come play with us.”
Hajira followed the girl. She said her name was Marwah. Marwah led her to the rest of the children, all staring at Hajira as if she was one of the aliens their elders had said lurked in the far reaches of Mareekh beyond the valley. Marwah walked ahead, tall in her spotted red tunic and headscarf, her arms swaying wildly as if she could not control her movements.
She stood in front of the six children, four boys and two girls, her hands on her hips.
“Listen. This is my guest—” she turned to her side. “What’s your name?”
“Hajira.”
“My guest Hajira. She’s a Durr, but we can still play. Any problems?”
The children, face blackened from playing in the soil, shook their heads silently as if afraid of Hajira’s newfound friend, the friend who turned back, her emerald gaze glowing with something warm, something that spoke of a new home.
•••
Hajira’s father traded with the Zai often. Every trip taken with him was an excuse to see Marwah, who seemed invariably present amongst those fields that seemed to dwarf them both. The games they played became more intimate, involving fewer children. After a while, it would be only Marwah left to spend time with. This seemed to energize her, her newfound Zai friend a well of charisma powerful enough to allow Marwah the right to dictate which games they would play.
One day they were allowed to go outside the farms in their windsuits. On the rocky slopes, they chose to spend their precious few moments gazing at the hazy valley where the Zai and Durr villages lay, the pill-shaped longhouses scattered on each end, the reddish plains resting beneath a murky sun. For the first time, standing next to Marwah, Hajira felt at peace with the land, its harshness muted in her presence.
They walked together on the steps to the airlock. Hajira paused before an object she hadn’t noticed before—a metal plaque positioned near the last step towards the longhouse entrance. Foreign words were etched on it, some half-eroded by stones and wind.
“What’s so interesting?” asked Marwah.
“We don’t have this in our village,” said Hajira. “Can you read it?”
“They don’t teach you English?”
There was a slight pause. Hajira refused to respond, not wanting to admit that wasn’t one of the subjects her teachers taught. “What does it say?”
Marwah pointed to the first set of letters on the top left: “EMM—AAA—ARRR—ESSS.”
“What does that mean?”
“ ‘Mars,’ ” said Marwah. “That’s what the unbelievers call ‘Mareekh.’ ” Marwah continued reading: “ ‘MARS COLONY 56—ZAI VILLAGE.’ ” She moved close to the plaque, pointing at the letters beneath the title. “ ‘Given to the Zai people for their co-operation in the spirit of friendship with the Consolidated Exploratory Company.’ ”
“Why didn’t the Company give this to us?” Hajira wondered.
“Our tribe was here first.”
“So?”
“So that means we’re better.”
“Don’t say that!”
Behind the visor, Hajira could see Marwah’s face. Hajira’s sense of hurt seemed to have affected her, her green eyes cast downward in shame. “Let’s go inside,” said Marwah, leading Hajira back inside the airlocks where they took their quarantine showers before changing into their shalwar kameez.
“I’m sorry,” said Marwah after the shower.
“Why?”
“About what I said. We were always told we were better than the Durr, and that the Company liked us better. I know it’s wrong. Sometimes I just say things because I can say it.”
Marwah stared at Hajira, her eyes almost tender.
“Forget it,” said Hajira.
“We have time. What do you want to play?”
This was the first time she was asked what she wanted to do. Hajira had a quietness in her that often resulted in being overlooked even amongst the other Durr children, and she felt buoyed by the thought of her own agency with Marwah. Hajira suggested playing hide and seek in the hydroponic farms.
They spent the next hour chasing each other through the vertical jars of cucumbers, passing through them to reach the farthest end of the terrace, weaving between the pomegranate trees, their sandals imprinting themselves on the Company soil donated to the villagers. Feeling a pang of guilt, Hajira hesitated, thinking of the punishment her father would give if he knew she was plowing unthinkingly through precious soil. In the stillness of the field, she felt small, warm arms grabbing from behind, the weight of Marwah on her back causing them to fall to the blackened ground in a fit of laughter.
She felt Marwah’s hands let go. Hajira lay on her back, panting, looking at the tall brown ceiling of the farm’s interior lit by artificial lights. She turned her face. Marwah lay to her side, her head resting on folded hands like an infant sleeping. She stared at Hajira with curiosity.
“Your eyes are pretty,” she said.
“So are yours.”
“I know,” Marwah said with a giggle. “That’s what my Babba always says. I wonder if the other men would say the same. To both of us. When we’re older, I mean.”
She knew what Marwah meant. Marriage was like aging—it was a scenario that never seemed a possibility. With that future brought into relief, Hajira was struck by a sadness at the potential of losing Marwah as quickly as she had found her.
“I don’t like thinking of the future,” said Hajira. “It seems lonely.”
“Even if you’re married?”
Hajira said nothing. For a moment she closed her eyes, feeling a hand brush a tuft of hair near her ear coming out of her headscarf. “We’ll still be friends.”
The feeling of Marwah’s hand, so close to her face, injected calm in Hajira. She opened her eyes to see her gaze, a trust brewing between them, a balm to the solitude she now realized had been her companion all her life.
Her reverie was broken when she felt a large hand clasping at her forearm, pulling her up from the ground. It was Hajira’s father, dragging her with a fury away from Marwah. She looked back to see her friend, standing erect, face worn with bewilderment as Hajira was led away from the farms, away towards the showers and airlocks and outside where her father’s rover was idling, saying little aside from one sentence: “You can’t trust a Zai for anything.”
•••
Hajira knew not to ask her father when next they would see Marwah. An elder was never to be questioned. His anger was vague. She only heard snippets of conversation between him and her mother, words like “fraud,” “thief,” “arrogant” abounding without a narrative. Her father—a man of dignity and ferocity—was too distant a figure to explain the rupture between him and the Zai traders. It was only in the longhouse school, when they were taught mathematics and agricultural science in their own tongue, that the other children spread rumours of a greater strife:
“The Zai have everything, they even teach their children English.”
“The Zai labourers have the best jobs in the mines—that’s what my Babba told me.”
“They hate us. They have weapons and they’re going to take our longhouses because they’re having too many babies.”
Hajira had been hearing more of that over time. She initially dismissed these ideas—why would the same people who had brought them in their homes, to trade with people like her Babba, now want them dead?
After a time, she didn’t want to hear her classmates' bigotry. She could think of no reply to it, and felt no need to ostracize herself from the other children. Ultimately, she didn’t want to hear about the Zai at all.
She only cared about one of them, Marwah, who existed beyond the boundaries of tribe or clan. In her more solitary moments, Hajira would imagine if Marwah thought of her, whether she longed for Hajira’s presence in the same way that Hajira longed for hers.
•••
Did her ancestors see time the way she did? Hajira often wondered that as she aged, if perhaps, under the blue skies the elders spoke of, time barely withered them and battered their bodies more slowly than Mareekh did. This new homeland of theirs wasn’t meant for their bodies, much less their souls, her Nani often said. As she grew older, she wasn’t certain this was factually true, even if it felt spiritually true. Time is God, Hajira would hear. Perhaps if time worked differently in this world, if their lives were shorter, it was another divine test, that humans were meant to do more with the shortness of their years in the hope of pleasing God.
Or perhaps it was the same. The cruelty of days bursting apart. Her ancestors would have been, like her, wanderers of their own souls, accepting what needed to be accepted in the hope that the end would be swift, and they could sleep in the hope of Paradise.
But time could give gifts, too. Gifts like Ahmed. He was a good man, so she was told, from a good clan. She bore a son, Shehzad. Children were a gift, and the sense of joy she and Ahmed held was incalculable. There were no sheep for the aqiqah, so the village resorted to banquets held in the longhouses, one for the men and a separate one for the womenfolk, where the meat supplements were cooked with the vegetables they had grown, and where tambourines were brought out as they sang their na’ats in praise of the Prophet and showered Hajira with clothes.
The day after Shehzad’s circumcision, performed by one of the Company doctors on one of their rare visits to the longhouses, she was struck by a flash of wonder, thinking of Marwah and the life she was living in the far end of the valley. Did she also have a son? Was she holding him close to her, assuaging the pain of the cutting?
With every year, the thought of Marwah dimmed—not the look of her face, or the image of her eyes, but the longing for her presence, a closeness unencumbered by duty or obligation. Would that she could see her again, Hajira would think, an idea that she would immediately put to the side as war came for their people.
•••
It was water that destroyed the peace.
Hajira heard through Ahmed that Reservoir 2, one of the first deep water pumps in the region, had been contaminated. “Perchlorates from the soil in the water,” said Ahmed. The village had already seen the effects. Women losing babies. Men doubled over in nausea. Children barely able to move as the perchlorates destroyed their thyroids.
Their misery was compounded by the seeming lack of consequence for the Zai village. Reservoir 1 was untainted. The Zai could bathe and drink their purified water with ease. The bitterness felt in the Durr longhouses was strong. Physical pain rubbed against the blister of humiliation as the Durr were forced to take handouts from the Company and trade with the Zai for canisters of spare water.
Hajira spent most of her time outside of the longhouse working with the womenfolk in their farms. Hydrating pomegranates with their limited water, she heard the other women spreading rumours of a Durr man shot in the Zai village after being cheated by two Zai men over a water canister. Or perhaps it was a Durr youngster shot by a Zai father who refused to let his daughter marry a man from a lower tribe. The explanations for the murder all had one thing in common: it was a Durr man being harmed and insulted. The Zai, once their brethren, who had shared meals and said Friday prayers with them, were the engineers of all their calamities.
Hajira heard other rumours—that the men of her tribe were stockpiling weapons that seemed to come from nowhere. “It’s the Company,” one of her friends said. “The kuffar are throwing us guns for us to kill each other.”
“They’re trying to distract us from their own mistakes poisoning our water,” one of the other women said.
One day returning to her apartment, Hajira saw Ahmed with Shehzad cross-legged in their front room facing each other, a long weapon laid between them. It was frightening, a mesh of metal and plastic whose presence amplified the silence between father and son. She stood back at the room’s threshold, afraid to breach the conversation.
“What is this?” asked Ahmed.
“A gun.”
“Jezail. This is what our ancestors used to fight the English and the other tribes. Now we need to use this to defend our own.”
Shehzad nodded with approval. Ahmed leaned over to grab his son’s hands, bringing them out to touch the barrel of the autojezail. “The Zai used to fight our tribe for centuries before we came to Mareekh. This is how we kept our dignity. This is how we kept ourselves from being destroyed.”
Hajira felt horror in his words. A part of her wanted to intervene, to take that weapon and throw it outside the longhouse, in the hope that a Mareekh whirlwind would suck it into oblivion. She knew there was little to be done—this was part of her son’s education in adulthood, something only a father could teach, and no matter her hatred for this death-learning, it was not her way to interfere.
At night, under the thin sheets with Ahmed, she could barely sleep, hearing only the groaning of the metal tubes over her. She thought of the history her husband was trying to impart to her son. The menfolk were always making the decisions to kill and die. Was this the way her forefathers lived, in that blue-green paradise? It seemed an appalling existence, more disturbing for how it seemed they had not evolved beyond it.
•••
Shehzad was reaching manhood when Ahmed died.
He was one of the few Durr the Company allowed in the Tharsis Mines. Most of the low-level workers were Zai. In the seven years since her husband taught her son about the way of the gun, Ahmed never spoke of any conflicts between the Zai and Durr in the mines. Perhaps it was the Company’s boot that kept that conflict stifled, lest it undermine Company profits.
She heard the news from one of his friends, close to violating purdah as they told her of her husband’s death behind the sliding door of her apartment. They’d found his body at the bottom of a regolith pit, crushed by one of the automated dozers the Company used to strip away the land for chromium. It had somehow lost control of itself, pushing Ahmed and itself into the giant scar they’d sliced into the ground.
His janazah was over a metallic slab near the outer rim of the village. Only the menfolk were allowed—it was Ahmed’s fellow Durr mining workers who buried him. They took Shehzad with them. When he came back to the longhouse apartment, she expected the same tears she had been shedding since she heard the news. Instead, he looked haunted, his eyes sharpened, his mouth bearing lupine teeth as he told her what his father’s friends had revealed: it was no accident, as the Zai murdered him.
“How do you know this?” asked Hajira. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the opening room, her tasbih in her hand, her son’s accusations disturbing her worship.
“That’s what the miners said,” said Shehzad, his voice constricted by rage. “He got into a fight with a Zai man at work.”
“Over what?”
“They don’t know. But the Zai man insulted him!”
Hajira rose from her sitting position to Shehzad, placing her hands on her son’s broad chest. “Do you know it’s true? Did they see it?”
“They said it was true!”
“But did they see it?”
Shehzad stepped back from her, tears reaching his thin, juvenile beard. “Everyone knows about the Zai and the Durr. We’ve been at each other’s throats since before we came to Mareekh.” His voice was cold, with a determination that chilled Hajira.
“What do you think you can do about it?” Hajira’s hands were clasping at the lapels of his tunic. He grasped her wrists and brought her hands gently down. He went into his room silently. Her eyes trailed after him, his shoulders hunched down as the sliding doors to his room opened.
Hajira barely slept. She woke up the next day suffocated with terror. Out of instinct, she went to Shehzad’s room. He was gone, and his father’s autojezail, mounted over the front sliding doors, was missing.
•••
Even with his windsuit on, she knew it was him.
That morning she’d spent roaming frantically, calling on her friends, her screams drowned in the clanging interior of the longhouse corridors.
Perhaps he was out in the plain, she thought. Perhaps she could catch up to him. She put on her windsuit and left the locks. A rover appeared from a distance heading straight for the longhouse, its wide tires creating a miniature dust storm in its wake.
It stopped a few metres away from her. She recognized the driver as one of her husband’s few Durr co-workers. Two other men were in the body of the rover’s flatbed enclosure. They dismounted, lowering the back of the vehicle for her to see.
She pushed them away. Her son’s body, crumpled like a pile of soiled clothing, bore the signs of autojezail blasts, clear holes in his chest large enough for the platform of the rover to be visible, bits of blood and torn flesh frozen in the frigid air. She collapsed to the vehicle’s side. Vague voices could be heard on her audiochannel:
“Hajira bibi, I’m sorry.”
“They’ll pay, bibi, you’ll see, inshallah.”
Those voices became muffled, drowned quickly in the shriek of wind turning into a terrifying silence before she fainted.
•••
Hajira was in bed when Shehzad was buried. The janazah was made by the menfolk in the outdoor cemetery. She imagined each worshipper lined in front of the graves of her son flanking the grave of her husband, metal boxes covering each corpse from the winds.
She had visitors in the longhouse apartment, a handful of middle-aged villagers asking if she was well, giving her food. Hajira took their care and concern with grace, even if, she realized, she no longer recognized their faces, their clan, or any of their histories. The arresting loneliness she was left with metastasized. In her empty bed, where she first lay with her husband, where she played with her son, she was sunk in the thought of oblivion, of the extinction of the line threading between her ancestors and the emptiness of a childless life.
•••
Her mind was empty when she left the outer airlock, the windsuit helping her brace for the cold Mareekh air. It was only out of the longhouse that she realized the cruel freedom she lived with now. The expanse of the valley flanked her sides, its openness making her feel oddly liberated from hope and any inhibition she would have if she met a Zai on her way to their village.
There was no border. In the valley’s plain, where only ochre rocks stood in her way, Hajira saw nothing for minutes until an unfamiliar longhouse appeared on the horizon. It was small, perhaps built for a few families, or one large one. As if a beacon, it called to her, a place where the violence of her heart could be sated.
She trudged closer. The distance gauge in her windsuit told her she was coming close to a few metres when the airlock of the longhouse opened.
Her heart stopped. Hajira expected a confrontation that she couldn’t match, perhaps a Zai with an autojezail ready to make a shot in the centre of her chest. Instead, it was a lone unarmed figure descending from the steps of the airlock. Hajira froze, not knowing what to do. The figure came closer, its hands up, palms outwards, moving slowly as it came close enough for the audiochannels to connect.
“There’s no one here with weapons.” The voice was feminine, aged and hoarse. “Please leave.”
Hajira was struck by the fear in her words. She moved closer to the woman, roused by a pity that she’d thought was calcified within her. “I’m not here to hurt anyone,” she said.
The woman dropped her hands. “We didn’t have anything to do with the killing.”
She’d heard the news, thought Hajira. The Mareekh winds pick up the dust of rumour.
“That was my son. My son.”
“No,” the woman whispered. She lumbered in her windsuit, her hand reaching out for Hajira, who recoiled before she felt her gloved hand squeezed by the stranger’s grip.
Hajira could see her eyes through her visor. Green. Lapidary. She knew who it was, a recognition that seemed mutual as she moved forward, the whine of her windsuit noticeable through her audiochannel. She said nothing as Marwah called her name, the note of surprise turning into a desperate plea as she moved even closer. “Maaf, Hajira, Allah maafi,” said Marwah, begging for God’s forgiveness, bringing Hajira’s hand to her visor as if wanting to kiss her palm.
She was struck by the strangeness of it all. They had been blown together again, two pebbles in a wasteland, meeting each other through the shifting of time’s wind.
“We heard about the murder,” said Marwah, nodding in the direction of the longhouse. “It’s only my daughter who usually lives here with me. We’re alone. We don’t live near the other villages.”
Her voice quivered. There was a story behind that ache, of loss and isolation. If only she could feel her, thought Hajira, if only those lips could touch her skin and she could fill her void with her friend’s warmth and the hatred corroding her could be cleansed. Her soul ruptured—the dissonance between her own pain and what she imagined Marwah’s to be.
“Is she inside?”
“I sent her to the village once I heard of the killing,” said Marwah. “I hate what they did, Hajira,” she continued. “I hate what we’ve become.”
Marwah let go of Hajira’s hand. Through her audiochannels, she heard a rumbling behind her. They both turned. Dots appeared in the valley—rovers spraying Mareekh dust in the air.
“Go,” Marwah said. “They know this is a Zai longhouse.”
Hajira turned her head back. As a child, she saw Marwah’s eyes and envisioned a world blooming with joy. Now death and solitude bound them. She brushed past Marwah towards the steps to the longhouse and sat down, the mechanical sound of the windsuit whining as she heard the voice of her friend questioning what she was doing.
Hajira closed her eyes. After a few long moments, she felt the presence of Marwah next to her. She placed her gloved hand on top of Hajira’s as they both stared back to the plain. The thunder of the rovers resonated. Hajira would be there, a sentinel sitting on the steps of her enemy’s home, waiting for her people to come.
Perhaps they would stop. She had a momentary hope that they could somehow recognize her, know that she was one of them, a fellow kinsperson, and inject in them the mercy she felt now. The softness that now blanketed her heart felt immense and powerful, as if some sacred alchemy had turned leaden anger into a golden warmth. If only her tribesmen could see it, imbibe it, and take a taste from it, with her being the waterbearer of tenderness in this parched landscape.
Perhaps it mattered little. God’s fate had brought her to this point regardless of what would happen. The trucks approached, the outline of men atop the rovers with their autojezails becoming visible. She said her kalima and closed her eyes, feeling the sensation of Marwah’s hand on hers. The warmth of her hand was contained within its gloved sheath, yet somehow it was also present in Hajira’s heart—a warmth that embraced the peace that would come to them both with their blood irrigating the land.
