She looked startled. Then something like disgust tore at her face. It was a reaction he was becoming accustomed to. But it still cut at his heart. He had hoped the interior was different.

She kept moving as she said, “You’re in Amtullah, boy.”

It was never anything but that—boy. Not sir, not patron, not “What’s your name?” Just… boy. As if he had walked off his house mother’s stoop just yesterday.

Ahmed had never heard of Amtullah. That in itself wasn’t odd, he supposed. He grew up in the southeast, near the Drucian border. There weren’t a lot of people there, or proper schools. His first squad thought his accent was a laugh, and it had taken him two years to suppress it.

He gazed over the stir of women, toward the city proper. In the south, there were still some green things, so he expected the rest of the interior would be like that too, but no—even on the train, all he saw of the interior was dry and desiccated, just like the front. Yet, unlike the border towns, this city was intact. He saw elegant minarets in the distance rising from a cluster of domed public buildings and upscale tenement houses, all of it surrounded in a massive filter that blanketed the stir of the city like some kind of membrane. It was the most massive filter he’d ever seen, and he spent a long time working out how to deal with it. Outside, the boys and men who had come with him were headed toward customs, already arguing with the armed women who he assumed would carry the city’s only passkeys.

He found a call box inside the station and dialed the only civilian pattern he still remembered.

After the line stirred and chittered and spat for some time, a thin voice rose from the darkness and rasped, “Who is this?”

“Amtullah. Filter. You done one before?”

“Who is this?”

“You said to call if I ever came home.”

He heard something clatter on the other side of the line. “Been a long time, friend.”

“Have you done that filter or not?”

“Call this pattern. Oval. Square. Circle. Circle. Triangle. Hex. Got that?”

He repeated it.

“Good. She’ll hook you up.” There was some noise in the background. Ahmed wondered if the man had a proper family now, someone he had to hide Ahmed from. “Don’t call again.”

“I won’t.”

“Ahmed?”

“Yes?”

The man’s voice broke. “Everyone has his fate, but I asked God, the compassionate, the merciful, at each prayer for your safe return. May God preserve you.”

Ahmed hung up. Stared at the filter. His commanding officer had told him once that fear in the ranks was rampant, yes, but it was fear that kept people in line. “They need to fear me more than the enemy,” she told him. “That’s the secret to any great command.”