Up close, the filter was a shimmering curtain. They pulled up at the bakkie barn outside the main entrance, the one opposite where the train pulled up, and it was teeming with dark figures. Asleep? Some of them. A few boys stirred and offered open hands. Others padded after the bakkie, pulling tattered coverings from baskets of bread or saffron or locusts for trade or sale. The cry and stink and closeness of the men made Nyx think of the front, and her nostrils were suddenly filled with the smell of lavender. She coughed.

The patrol alighted from the caravan and took up an immediate defensive posture around Nyx and Mercia. Around them, the horde of boys stared back.

“How bad is it inside?” Nyx asked the patrol leader.

“It’s been worse,” she said. “First few weeks we thought they were going to riot. Once they coded the filter to keep boys out, though, it settled down. Some.”

There were more enlisted women posted immediately outside the city’s filter, and some boys too, clad in full combat gear more appropriate to the front—shiny, body-hugging organic slicks, acid sprayers, fully automatic contagion guns, polished boots, and machetes. They held the line in groups of three and five, small but intimidating squads that gave Nyx the impression that there was some ravaging Chenjan horde waiting outside the gates, not a rag-tag stir of discharged Nasheenian boys.

The squad ushered them to the edge of the filter. Nyx slid through. Her skin prickled. The dog-leather thong on her left wrist crackled and smoked. Sand fleas turned to gray dust and dropped off her flesh.

They waited a few minutes for another bakkie, this one armed by a smaller patrol of three women.

“We’ll be going to the diplomatic residences on the south side of the city,” Mercia said, “in Nafisa Square.”

“Thought all the dips were living in Mushtallah,” Nyx said to Mercia as they waited. “You have places for them out here?” She had assumed Mercia was just renting a place near Fatima’s.

“The bel dames made them,” she said. “They purchased some of the old Family houses.”

“How’d the Families feel about that?”

“They bought them legally. I’m not aware of any political motive.”

Nyx doubted that.

“How about that ship in the sky? You know anything about that?”

“The aliens? No more than what I hear on the radio. They’ve come to parley with the Queen of Nasheen. What about, I’ve no idea. They have been here before, though. Have you heard of New Kinaan?”

Nyx’s chest tightened. “Sure have,” she said. She stared up at the light, and wondered just what it was Fatima had in store for her this time.