“Most of the women here wear them.” Huda lifted the hem of her abaya and leaped across the gutter. “It’s better for us if we blend in.”

Huda threw another glance at the squat apartment block. Its dun-colored walls were the same shade as the dirt road, the rubble-strewn lot next door, and almost every other building in the slum of Saddam City. There were no trees to provide relief, no flowering vines. Thick dust coated every surface. The only hint of color came from the jade dress of a little girl standing on the corner, bouncing a baby on her hip.

Rania glanced at the boarded-up windows of the smuggler’s flat, then slid into her car. She slammed the door shut, catching her robe. She growled and tore the fabric free.

“Calm down,” said Huda. “Now you’ll have to sew a new hem.”

“I can’t believe it.” Rania jammed her key in the ignition. “That creep wants almost as much money as Kareem does, and the kids don’t even get a passport out of it.”

“And we can’t be sure he won’t dump them in the desert.”

“My friend Bashir said two of his cousins used this man’s services.” Rania steered the Volvo past a goat nosing for scraps in the trash. “The difference is, his cousins were full-grown men, not two kids barely in their teens.”

“I agree.” Huda glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t trust him.”

Inside the stifling apartment, the smuggler had stood with his back to the boarded-up window. Huda could see the outline of his body, his skinny neck, and the prickly stubble of hair on his head, but his face was all shadow. Huda couldn’t read his eyes, but she heard the slobbery lick of his lips as he named the price for smuggling their children out of Iraq.

“What do we do now?” Rania navigated past a market cobbled together from plywood, plastic sheets, and pieces of corrugated metal. Men sat out front with baskets of tomatoes and burlap sacks of grapes. A little boy hawked cheap cigarettes. “My car would never make the journey, but perhaps I could rent a vehicle and drive the kids up north to the Turkish border. They could cross on foot.”

“It won’t work,” said Huda. “Last time Ally’s husband returned from a trip up north, he said the number of checkpoints had doubled. It’s because of that warmonger George W. Bush, and his axis-of-evil talk. The same is happening near the borders with Iran and Syria.”

“What about Jordan, then?”

“You heard the smuggler—the only way to get there is through the desert. You’ll get bogged in the sand unless you have a new SUV or a Land Cruiser like they have at the embassy.”