The child peered up at her from the dirt. The child’s face was at once familiar and foreign. It put her in mind of another child, one she had once seen in the mirror quite often.

For a moment, she thought the child might speak. But instead, the child leapt away and bolted into the house. That was just as well. It put off the inevitable.

She deftly, neatly, untangled this second filter to allow her entry, and stepped under the arch.

Inside, the house was cooler and drier than the yard. Natural light illuminated most of the smooth, rounded surfaces of the interior; the skylight it bled from was a smooth tunnel burrowed through solid secretions.

Two women lay in the recessed seating buried in the floor, settled just opposite a massive oven-stove that funneled most of the house’s heat through the walls, effectively baking the inhabitants to the most optimal temperature, no matter the season. The women were engaged in an easy conversation as they wove an intricate pattern of mellow scents and mild, lemony red mist into what she guessed would soon become a locust tailored to play chess or screes or some other board game with them.

One of the women was hugely pregnant, which she found oddly comforting. She had been traveling for nine days, and in all that time, had not seen one pregnant woman. Only the Families and a few undocumented refugees still birthed their children one at a time from the comfort of home instead of at the baby farms on the coast.

Beyond them, she could see out into the side yard where an older man wearing a long blue tunic and matching trousers tended the narrow rows of a burgeoning flower garden.

For a moment, none of them were familiar. But that was just a trick of the dim light.

“God the compassionate, the merciful…” the non-pregnant woman murmured, and stood. The organic matter they were weaving abruptly began to dissipate back into the world. The smell of it changed, too—burnt copper.

The woman was markedly older than her pregnant companion, but both bore the same slim build and petite frame. Her long dark hair was wound back from her skull in a knot. As she raised her hands to her mouth, the hennaed patterns that snaked from her hands and up into the drooping folds of her robe became visible. Her name was Sohrab sa Hadiyah so Ikram. She remembered the name because the city of Ikram had been swallowed by the war two hundred years before, and Sohrab would joke about it often at Family gatherings, telling lively tales about how one day she would rebuild it into a shining, ravenous traveling city mounted on the back of some monstrous scarab, a roving city exclusively for Firsts.