Zeli’s drone video showed the body of a dead man in the white uniform of the al-Muwahhidun in Maghreb. Any citizen of the empire—trader or soldier—who left its inner boundary wore the same. One leg ended in a bloody mess above the knee. A stomach-churning gash ran through his midsection. The audio picked up the noise of fighting. Smoke obscured half the image. The microdrone descended toward the body. Something metallic glinted from beneath the man’s skin. Nithya leaned forward instinctively, caught herself when it didn’t work. Zeli must have been controlling the drone manually, because it flew to where Nithya wanted a better look. As the camera neared, the details blurred, but the metal appeared to sit inside his stomach. A loud popping noise came from the right, and the video ended.

How did she get this? The empire’s border defenses made it hard to capture and upload any digital information.

Nithya sent a message to her teammate: You said you took this video yourself?

The answer came immediately: Yes. Pure luck having my camera there.

If Zeli got caught with this footage, she could be in danger from the al-Muwahhidun. Nithya hoped the girl’s microdrone couldn’t get traced back to her. Generic models were common in developing countries, cheap single-use devices in particular. If Zeli had used one, she shouldn’t be in immediate danger. But if this video gets out to the public, someone might trace it to her… or me.

Nithya couldn’t ignore the resemblance of the caliph’s man to the Machinehood attackers. She had to get the video to Welga, but she didn’t have a secure link to her sister-in-law. She could use a memoryless scatter channel, but she had to set it up with Welga first. A quick expansion of Welga’s feed showed her sister-in-law asleep in bed.

“Sita, leave a message with Welga’s agent. Tell her I’m sending an encrypted file from a colleague in Senegal. It has some footage that she might find interesting. The password is… the name of Luis’s favorite stuffed animal.”

The one that her husband kept in a sealed bag in the back of their old, non-reconfigurable static cabinet. He wouldn’t even let Carma play with it. She hoped Welga would remember its name, too.