Among the documents in the safe was her Remali passport. As the child of a Remali citizen, she was a citizen herself, and her father, a great believer in dual or even multiple citizenship, had insisted on her having the passport. She was glad of it now. She booked a seat on the first flight to al-Remal.

O

The man at the car rental agency looked at her with disgust and anger. Didn’t she know that it was illegal for a woman to drive in al-Remal?

She wandered through the terminal. Men stared at her. One said, in heavily accented English, “Cover yourself, woman!”

She found a taxi and gave the driver the name of the town from the ledger. “A little village on the southern outskirts,” he said. “I will take you there—but not dressed as you are. Dressed as you are, I will take you only to the Hilton.”

“Take me to the Hilton.”

At the hotel, she instructed the driver to wait. “Forever, if you wish—and are paying.”

She took a room and sent out for suitable clothes. A maid brought two horrible dark robes of some kind, at a price that must have been ten times what they were worth. Laila didn’t care. “Show me how to wear this,” she ordered. The driver was still waiting. He nodded approvingly at her new garments, but seemed offended when she immediately agreed to the price he asked for his services. Too late, she remembered Malik’s saying that a Remali enjoyed haggling more than he would enjoy having his first offer met. Well, too bad. She was in a hurry.

The village was an ugly place of poor mud-brick houses baking in the sun. The Arabic that Laila had learned from her father was serviceable, but it took her efforts and the driver’s to find a house that went with the name in the ledger. Inside, was a very old woman and another who appeared merely old. The room was dark after the blinding desert brightness, and Laila instinctively pushed back the obscuring veil. The older woman screamed and rocked back as if about to faint. Then she made a sign against evil—Laila recognized it as one Maliksuperstitiously used—and scuttled out the door. The other woman stared, came closer, stared harder.

“Are you who I think you are, young miss?” she asked Laila in Arabic. “You tell me. Who am I?”

“If you are who you seem to be, you are the child I nursed for the first year of her life.”

Laila’s eyes widened with horror. “My mother?” she asked, nearly gagging on the words.

The woman seemed shocked.

“Are you the one to whom my father has been paying money?”

“No. That was Um Salih, gone to Paradise five years now, by the will of God. Since then, the money has gone to another aunt of mine—the woman you just saw.”

“Why was she afraid of me?”