[Issue 2023.67]

‘Woman, Soldier, Girl’, Priya Chand

Art © 2023 Katharine A. Viola

---

Decades later, there will be a memorial, and tourists who mostly walk past the memorial—there’s plenty of shopping, the latest fashions and a myriad of clever trinkets in the artisans’ district, where people are still discovering techniques and ideas lost during the war and subsequent occupation. It’s astounding, some say, that their ancestors didn’t do more to preserve these things. The occupation didn’t last that long, after all, and such an illustrious heritage cannot be so easily erased.

And those who know better—who listened to the things not said by their elders, who notice gaps in the patriotic histories—will pour out the truth.

---

The blast of the conches at noon, a steady whine rising above the heat haze, was our signal to put the guns down, tear the barbed wire off our perimeters, and finally—carefully—peel the boots off our feet, trying not to breathe when the collective odor reached our nostrils.

We exhaled war and inhaled peace—the Empire’s peace, imposed on us.

Waiting for our commander to return, Devi and I dismantled the steamdigger. Three banana harvests from my family, four bitter melon harvests from hers to pay for it. We did not need to say aloud that those invading firangs would have none of it.

Lieutenant Pathik called us to attention, to hear the terms of the treaty.

“Terms of interest have been condensed for your benefit.” None of us doubted that the men, in bigger fortifications surrounded by cannon, were hearing the same words. Lieutenant Pathik was very liberal. I wondered if I could keep that breath of fresh air in whatever came next.

He cleared his throat. “Henceforth we… will be subject to the Empire as one of its chief holdings. The… the Lunar Alliance is dissolved. Only the holding of Chowhal will retain autonomy, as a subject state.”

There was no need to say why, not when every person had seen the princes of Chowhal pledging marriage to firang brides in ghost-gowns paler than their skin; the carpets which had to be replaced yearly as the dust wore them down; the sweat beading on their royal faces as those stiff collars and tight black suits choked them in our heat.

Now our cities would be full of those impractical people, ready to blame us each time the land fought their imported ways.

But there was more. Lieutenant Pathik did not even pretend to clear his throat. He spat each word with the deliberation of a gharial. “Only the possessor of an authorized passport may build or reconstruct any sort of engine.”

We were not the first country to be subjugated by the Empire. Even growing up on a farm, I heard the stories. Imperial passports would not be dirtied by the fingerprints of a darkie, savage—whatever the slur of the season was.

But engines were everything. No one in their right mind farmed or made clothes without some ingenious contraption, gears and steam and the dance of the Creator. Engines were independence.

Some even said the engines spoke to them, in wisps of steam that coiled against the wind. It was another aspect of the old-fashioned thinking that said we must go back and live the lives of our mothers: fill ourselves with children who would work the fields, burying them when the rains failed or a plague swept through.

I was not going to live my mother’s life, and I was especially not going to do it for the benefit of the Empire.

Devi plucked at my sleeve. “Janaki! Don’t be foolish. Come back with me. Look, there’s a group from our village, right where we took down that tank. Come on.”

I refused to look at her.

I sold my parts from the steamdigger to a black-market dealer in the city of Khalikat, now festooned with unofficial signs in the language of the firangs. The shopkeepers were doing what they always did, catering to their soon-to-be best customers. I knew enough of the language to read it, but the words stuck in my throat like rocks. At least they still looked like our stores, as I passed by one lined from top to bottom with sandals in every size and color, from black to tan.

Outside the next alley, a leather-skinned woman hunched in a chair, holding a newspaper with nearly illegible firang words scrawled across. When I tried to pass by her without looking, her laugh was a caw. “Soldier-woman! Sipahi!”

For that, I did stop. I had shed all traces of my association with the war. I needed a job. “What is it?” I hissed at her, shifting the dupatta wound around my face and shoulders. In the dry season, only someone who can afford to wash their hair three times a day goes bareheaded.

The woman leered at me, revealing more gaps than teeth between her lips. “Let me tell you your fortune.”

“For how much?”

“Only thirty paise.” She jiggled an empty teacup in front of me. It was covered in dust.

I snorted. Thirty paise was nothing, but I already knew my future. In the city, unmarried females of the lower classes were nurses or servants, and I had seen enough blood for a lifetime. “Thank you, but I must go,” I said.

“You walk like a soldier,” she said. “If you want to impress a memsahib, you had better walk like a girl.”

I rustled through my purse and tossed her the last of my small change.

---

If the woman I was going to see had been smothered in gold rather than stiff, starched cloth, and if her carefully coiffed hair were black instead of brown streaked with honey, there would really have been no difference. Even the look of distaste was the same. I heard rumors the Empire was planning to enforce the caste divisions, but any rich city woman—Imperial or not—knew I was a yokel and would treat me accordingly.

As instructed, I knocked on the door at five p.m., and a woman who could have been my sister—at least, my sister in her best festival clothing—opened up.

“I’m here to see Sherwin Memsahib about the cook position.”

“Please come inside.” My fancy not-sister took me past a suite stuffed with imported armchairs—the cloth would never survive this weather—and then to a smaller, traditional-style sitting room. I relaxed against a bolster, crossing my legs. She looked at me and said, “Alice Mem is tolerant. If you are so lucky as to get a position here, I hope you are grateful.”

I waited for her to leave before standing up.

The stiff pose was nothing to a former soldier, though remembering the fortune-teller’s words, I rounded my shoulders and let my back slouch somewhat. Only ten, maybe fifteen minutes passed and then a tall, pale lady entered. She was much as I had imagined, although I hadn’t realized how ridiculous their clothing was. I could smell her armpits and did my best not to wrinkle my nose.

“Hello, Madame Sherwin. Thank you for allowing me to come here.”

She looked me up and down—not with any particular hostility, because who in their right mind has emotions about furniture? “You must be Jan—Jan…”

“Janaki, ma’am,” I finished. “But it is okay to call me Jan.”

“Alright, Jan. Can you cook?”

Of course I could cook, wasn’t I a young woman? I wondered what kind of place the Imperial capital was, for her not to know that all women learned to cook.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Alice, please.”

“Of course, Alice ma’am.”

I thought I saw her shrug, but under all those clothes I couldn’t be sure. “One last thing, Jan. Did you fight in the war?”

“Of course not,” I said. Was she hesitating? I wiggled my leg, as if my discipline only went so far.

“Then welcome aboard. Mina will help you settle in.”

The hardest thing was remembering not to behave like I had fought in the war. It was a blessing I did not have any visible scars, or nightmares like—they said—Alice Mem’s son, and as I had seen with several in the trenches. The gardener said that Alice Mem and her husband cooked and ate the boy to hide their shame, but it was clearly nonsense intended to deceive an innocent girl. I widened my eyes and ran back to the kitchen so I would not laugh in her face.

Things settled into a routine. I slept above a chaikhana with a mélange of women. One had supervised a textile factory in her husband’s name, but he was dead and the factory now processed raw cotton for shipping to the Empire’s clothmakers.

“They’ll sell us our own sweat next,” I growled one night at dinner, eating from a plate that was obviously repurposed from an automatic carriage. That clanking was gone, replaced by the arguments of people trying to remember how to manage horses.

The others gave me nervous looks. That kind of talk had been patriotic before the treaty; now, it was sedition. But all our talk was sedition anyway. Local women talking free of firang influence was sedition.

In the meantime, I let the firangs pay me for my sweat, trying not to think who had suffered for the meat and vegetables they set their tables with. Without machines, it was hard to believe that the harvest this year would be any good. The monsoon had been short, and Khalikat’s stunted trees drooped.

“You know, Jan, you’re quite good at making your food taste like what we’re used to,” Alice Mem said to me one night as I was leaving for the evening.

“Thank you, Alice ma’am.”

“Would you like to try using our coffee machine? To be honest, I’m a little bored with tea.”

I almost felt bad for thinking of her as another dirty firang. “I would be delighted to, Alice ma’am.”

She smiled at me. “Of course, strictly speaking it’s not allowed—but this’ll be between us, right?” And George Sahib, technically, but as far as I could tell, he only expressed passion when shooting our animals.

I nodded at Alice Mem, giving her the smile appropriate to my status. Grateful, not friendly.

---

There was a proper division—a men’s division—which had been targeted for their strategic position. Our group being the nearest, we were sent to extricate the survivors.

Kamala had been a wizard with the machines. For this task, she’d built something she called the “pangolin.” Overlapping steel scales protected a thin cloth tube inside which six of us could crouch, pushing it forward as the clawlike rotors in the front burrowed it halfway underground. It hurt my chest to think what she could have done if she were permitted to join the First Engineers.

“The main danger is the steam,” she had said, holding up the pipe that ran out from the rotors. “It needs to vent, but of course it’ll be visible from a distance.”

“We will go at night,” Devi said.

Kamala frowned. “This machine is not quiet. It is better to go in the daytime, if possible.”

After some debate—not much, the men were waiting—we decided to go early in the morning, when the fragments of sea wind would stir the earth and provide us some semblance of cover. A few charges were set up, but close to our trenches, so the cover from the explosives would not last long.

We knew Kamala’s machines were brilliant, but it was terrifying to hear the ping, feel the shuddering through our hands inside the pangolin as the rotors strained against the soil, half-burying us. The air was close, humid with sweat and the sweet oil Kamala used to keep her gears supple.

We made it, dented but safe. I crept from the edge of the pangolin, squinting against the afternoon sun, gulping the hot, dry air that I had never before known I could miss, the acridity of gunpowder and blood tickling my lips and tongue. “We are here to rescue you,” I said into the trench, as quietly as I could manage. Because the Empire had already destroyed this position, there was no nearby shelling. I could speak and be heard without screaming.

There were only three men left, one with the stump of his arm wrapped tightly, eyes glazed with bhang. The other two guided him forward, supporting him as they climbed the ladder out of the trench. Despite the beating they’d taken, this part of the trench was solid, courtesy of a special quick-pour method invented for the war. I kicked an edge, concealing the pain in my toes as the men reached the top.

“We have to hide in this thing?” one of them said. He looked at me, dropping his eyes to my thin shirt. “How many girls are in there?”

Kamala’s work would not go wasted. I forced my lips to widen into a smile, though by the twitching of my jaw it was unsuccessful, and said in the same voice I’d used to lure our donkey into its pen, “We have to go, quickly.”

He was not a complete fool. The three of them moved in and insinuated themselves towards the front. I pushed ahead, ignoring the warm hand across my hips, the repeated bumping as I steered the pangolin back. It was crowded with nine of us, after all, and I had to focus on breathing, surrounded by these men who had been pushed to their limits and then left without shelter—or showers—for several days.

I could hear explosions as I approached our trenches. More cover for us—I appreciated the foresight.

But when we extricated ourselves and the men, we discovered they were not charges but grenades, dropped by the Empire’s suicide-pilots from single-seater blimps, armorless for mobility and speed, who did not seem to care whether the division they were attacking had guns or not.

I sprinted for one of our unused cannon, followed by my squad and the men. Five of us on each gun, wheeling them as fast as we could to follow the blimp’s trajectory. Neither of us brought down the blimp, though our shells hemmed it in.

A triumphant shout cut itself off halfway.

One of the grenades had rolled to the edge of our trench, the blast blowing out a chunk of our poorly set concrete. Kamala must have put down whatever her next project was and, hearing the clank of the returning pangolin, was climbing the ladder to check on us.

The cloth over her body was too flat where her brilliant head should have been, one arm peeping out from its covering with fingers half-scrunched around a small wrench. Ten millimeters, imported steel and a Tabose factory stamp, perfect for delicate work. I can’t do anything without it, she always said.

Had said.

Someone had used a machine to move the concrete chunks, which were propped against the side of the trench, grey dust mingling with the more familiar brown.

“Ah,” one of the men said. “She was not even married yet.” He looked at the rest of us, shaking his head.

I studied the outline of the body under the uniform. It was powerful; his muscles were not from farmwork but training in single combat.

I bared my teeth and tilted my head so he would not see the lack of humor in my eyes, and that night I slept with my knife against my side, instead of buried beneath my pillow.

---

I went to Alice Mem’s house every day at dawn, letting myself in through the servants’ gate as quietly as I could manage. In those mornings, unwatched, I could pretend things were not altogether changed. The coffee machine was glorious, a masterwork of levers and gears that puffed clouds so delicate they reminded me of the lace doilies Alice Mem loved—and then, when its whirring came to a stop, it issued a single whistle. If I closed my eyes I could pretend it was the steamdigger, returned from Devi’s family for the week, but with a far better—if no richer—smell than the farm’s.

The design of the machine was different than what I was used to, and of course we farmers saved our money to buy clever hand tools for the harvest. I took my time learning it, adjusting each setting as Alice Mem had taught me, to see what it would do. It could even make chai, which saved me the trouble of trying to watch yet another pot on the stove—the firangs did not like the strong taste, even mixed with buffalo’s milk.

As the steam curled out of the machine, the warm, rich rise of coffee in its wake, I sometimes caught myself looking for messages in it, something that would tell me I was supposed to be here, now.

And then I shook myself out of that stupidity. If the gods were real, they wouldn’t have let any of this happen.

Make the coffee; do it well. I did not have the wealth or testicles for anything more.

Mina was in the kitchen, too, but she had mastered the art of becoming furniture more thoroughly than me. She squatted in a corner rubbing the plates clean, humming tuneless notes here and there. Maybe she’d served as I had—though, given the general opinion of women soldiers, neither of us would ever admit to it—and after she saw I had free rein over the coffee machine, she barely spoke to me.

So be it.

Once I mastered the coffee, Alice Mem had me take it to George Sahib in the mornings, giving herself some extra time to put on the makeup she’d curse in a few hours when it inevitably started melting. I brought her half a stick of kajal once, but she looked so puzzled by the thing that I smiled and ran to the kitchen. Lieutenant Pathik had told us there was no shame in retreat.

I wondered if he was in this city, shining some Sahib’s boots, or maybe posing in traditional dress for the tourists who wanted a picture of an exotic local, to keep them company through the motion sickness of their return flights. They always went home, when they grew tired of our “backwater.”

At dinner one night with the women, I mentioned how odd it was that the Empire should deride us for being backward after taking away decades of technology.

Sita, an older veteran from a different regiment, laughed. “Ever the innocent, Janaki! You don’t see? This is what they want.”

“They want us to be savages?”

“They cannot use us if we are not savage,” Sita replied, and the others nodded. “Why else I cannot find work?”

Sita’s sari could not hide the fringe of the starburst across her collarbone, obvious relic of bursting shrapnel. The Empire did not use it on civilians, ever. It was one of the things I did not hate about them.

But if a woman was in the line of fire, she was either a soldier or a prostitute.

We ate in silence for a while, until someone muttered, “Why not join the resistance?”

Our eyes darted around, seeking spies. Once upon a time, this chaikhana and its dirty stools would have been sealed by an automaton, the filigreed copper guaranteeing our privacy. Now, someone had cobbled together scraps, creating a gate that was impervious to thieves but not noise. A horse neighed and we all jumped.

Still, no one was paying attention. We were not important enough for that.

“What resistance?” I said, helping myself to more of the leftovers I’d brought them. I grabbed the chili powder and shook it on top as loudly as I could manage.

“Up north,” whispered Rani, a servant like myself. “It’s said the First Engineers fled and took what they could.”

I thought about Kamala’s inventions. “Who’s saying this?”

Rani blushed. “I… I know someone. An old woman, the one in the alley near the shoe store. She read it in the tea.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Sita snapped. “I know that doe-eyed bitch. She has an elephant’s ears for gossip, and a taste for swindling fools who still believe in the gods.”

“Oh? Then how does she know the names of those who have abandoned the Chowhali? All those men are going north!”

“And us?” I interjected before Sita could point out the obvious. “What of the women?”

“Those of us who could not give up the fight,” Rani said, shaking her head. Our eyes drifted to Sita, who was watching us intently.

“Will you go?” Sita said, her jaw hard.

As much as my blood told me to go, yes, run!—the same impulse that had driven Devi and me to leave our homes—I could not help but wonder why bother. What part of our society before the Empire had given itself to me and demanded nothing in return? The Empire had taken away our engines, it was true, but who exactly had been lined up to ensure my family could afford one before this?

Six of us at the table. Four of us had fought in the women’s clumsy annex, provisioned only with what we could bring to defend ourselves and leftovers from the “real” army. The other two were city brats whose former employers had bet on the wrong side—ours.

None of us replied to Sita, or looked at her until we were done eating.

---

Even a war could not stop talk of marriage.

“Really,” I said to Devi as we worked in our families’ adjacent orchards, “they say the entire left coast is gone, and still our parents are hunting matches for us?”

We were both excellent cooks, we could serve an entire tray of chai and snacks without embarrassing ourselves, and in a pinch, we could even sew clothes or sing a lullaby. Those skills demanded a husband to serve.

Devi winced, but did not stop picking. She was in a worse spot than myself, for I had brothers near in age to the both of us, and her family had, to their despair, five strong girls. Devi’s oldest sister was two years married, and we had not heard from her since the firangs sabotaged the nearby town’s commstrings. Devi’s mother claimed the steamdigger had whispered to her as it was turning the soil, and she had torn her clothes and cut her hair in mourning for her son-in-law and the children who would never be.

Back then, we believed her—and in the gods, and in the appropriateness of her mourning, though her daughter still lived.

“It isn’t right,” I continued when Devi did not respond. “Adi and Tippu will go off to fight any day now. Before that, you know they’ll insist on marrying you to whichever one is louder. Adi, probably. He loves to brag about how great his wedding will be.” The wedding—and its consummation, of course.

At this, Devi at last froze. “What do you want to do, then, Janaki? Switch places with them?”

We looked at each other. There were rumors of a women’s auxiliary. Those posters in town, the ones already torn and dirtied by the animals and the wind, with the proud rows of soldiers aiming their guns and blasting away the firang threat—what if some of those bodies were rounder, though equally hardened by work and war?

That night we broke out the steamdigger and rode it all the way until we found someone who would make us into soldiers.

---

If Alice Mem sometimes treated me like a girl training for marriage, George Sahib never forgot I was supposed to be furniture.

I stood in a corner of his private sitting room, holding the tray steady, waiting for him to finish his coffee. Today, he was splayed out on the divan in his socks, talking to someone on the phone. His morning newspaper had slid to the floor, but it was not my job to pick it up.

“Yes,” he was saying. “Yes, buy all the grain we can store. Eh?”

The line was bad. I wondered how long it would take the Empire to realize it would have to certify local techs, if they wanted to keep their systems running.

A trickle of coffee ran down George Sahib’s chin, staining the foolishly chosen fabric smothering his neck. “Ah, ah yes. Yes, the harvest was terrible. First year under control, you know. Her Majesty’s government is still figuring out what’s safe to allow the local beasts, and I’m sure my Lord Exchequer hasn’t thought to lower the taxes. The profit will be”—he at last put down the mug and dabbed himself with a handkerchief—”spectacular.”

I watched George Sahib’s stomach strain at the fabric of the vest he’d had tailored only two months ago.

His eyes flicked to me, then to his mug. There was a pattern of healthy winged babies on it, porcelain white with smeared red cheeks. I wondered what they had been eating.

He cleared his throat, and I sped to relieve him of the burden as his call went on and on.

I returned to the kitchen with my tray and handed the mug to Mina, whose main duties involved purchasing groceries and washing dishes; she had never learned to cook for a mild palate. She might envy me, but we were still both farmers’ daughters.

“Mina,” I said, “have you any news from your home?”

Mina frowned. “Not much. Only that the harvests were not good.”

“There has been no other word?”

Mina shrugged. “The firang markets are as full as ever. Did you have some issue with what I brought you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then I am busy,” Mina said.

I did not have the time to prod her. Dinner was a complex undertaking here, with all the transformations needed to make the food of our country resemble what my employers preferred to eat. I adjusted the dials on the pot they’d brought from home, a loudly hissing contraption that turned crisp vegetables into a mush both of them insisted was intentional.

As always, Alice Mem let me take the leftovers. I laid them out on our chaikhana’s table, next to the fruit Rani had brought. Three shriveled guavas and a clump of bananas that were more spots than skin.

If I left, these women might starve.

We would be no use to anyone if we were clutching our swollen bellies, weak from the spreading hunger. Aanchal, one of the city brats, brought back rumors every day. Mass deaths, whole provinces left to starve. Of course, those who had made themselves valuable to the Empire might be saved—but we’d not had very much time to insinuate ourselves into the Empire.

Time. That’s what we needed, and then it would be alright.

The Empire was not all bad. I had seen Lieutenant Pathik riding an elephant in the Khalikat Supervisor’s procession, and the traditional dress looked good on him. It was no worse, I reminded myself, than the roles we had before, under the petty local rulers who cared more about outdoing their neighbors than enriching their subjects. The Chowhali were not the Empire’s only allies, after all.

Sita left a week after news spread that wheat was now so expensive, whole families were reduced to a single roti at dinner. Too bad for her: Alice Mem let me have some for my table, and I shared it with my roommates. With only five of us, there was more to go around.

I didn’t care to ask if George Sahib had approved, or if he even knew. I just brought him his morning coffee and tried to remember songs from my childhood so I would not overhear his private calls.

---

It was a good thing I went to work so early, for one day I found the coffee machine had broken. When I poured water into the compartment and lit the fire underneath, it creaked unhappily and did nothing but belch puffs of burning coffee. I ran my fingers over it carefully. Brass, unlike steel, is delicate; it wears everything on its surface. But the surface was smooth. No sabotage, then.

There were tools in one of the kitchen drawers. Kamala had shown me how to use them. I remembered her clever hands, guiding me through movements more complex than repairing a bent autoshear—teaching Devi and me to repurpose the steamdigger, for we had refused to let anyone else dismantle it. The memory was tinged with regret and fury over her death, but from a distance, as if I were in a blimp overlooking the trenches, watching the dramas play out among ants who moved like people, thinking they could stop the inevitability of the Empire when they should have been looking to their own survival.

It was no different from how the farm had been, I once more reminded myself, and buried the part of me that wondered if Devi’s hands were sufficient to compensate for the loss of the steamdigger. At least our families would have money from its sale.

Once I removed the rear cover on the coffee machine, I peered closely at its gleaming parts, oiled weekly by the maintenance man. A gear had shifted, and the delicate components were unable to move until I pushed it back. Easy enough.

As I returned the tools, I realized Mina’s eyes were on me, mouth twisted as if she had eaten one of those oversweet firang desserts. I pretended not to see. If my skills were somewhat outside those of a farmgirl’s, who was to say that I was not merely lucky?

The coffee machine whirred back into life. The wind played with the steam, pushing it into shapes that looked like letters.

Leave

My spine turned to ice, the chill unwelcome so early in the day. I pushed the window open as if bothered by the smell, waving my hand so the wind would dissipate this nonsense. Doe eyes and elephant ears. Like Rani, I was being a fool. George Sahib’s telephone friends were better gods than the ones who were supposed to watch this land.

I kept working and heard nothing I was not meant to hear, and Mina kept working and said nothing to me. And neither of us fought for scraps in the native markets where only last week a woman and her children had been trampled for a single head of cauliflower.

Without comment, we split the leftover abundance of the Sherwins’ table every night before leaving their house. They did not stint us poor girls.

I could have continued like this forever, I think, if one day when I came to work Alice Mem had not stopped me at the servants’ gate.

I was surprised. She did not usually wake up so early—nor did I think she knew where the servants’ entrance was. Such details are generally handled by the men of the house, or their valets.

“Alice Mem,” I said. “I hope everything is alright.” I had learned this phrase from George Sahib, who used it frequently when talking to his son’s physician, or rather warder.

At this hour, Alice Mem had her hair pulled under a nightcap, and her face without its makeup looked flat, although the way her lips folded together was expression enough. “Jan.” She folded her arms across a heavy robe that suited the morning chill. “You lied to me.”

“About what, Alice Mem? I have never stolen, never—”

“You fought.”

“Who is saying this?” I said, my voice edged. To say that we were in confidence was overstepping my boundaries, but still—I could not believe she was done with me. What proof might she have?

Alice Mem shook her head and held out a faded picture, torn from a newspaper. There I was, in my uniform, nestled between Devi and someone I could only remember from her funeral pyre. Kamala had rigged herself a darkroom inside one of the old tanks we used to protect our bunker. I never found out how she managed to secure the silver nitrate.

It was not George Sahib’s paper—he had not, in this, defeated me. The picture’s caption was in the common tongue of our country, which I knew my employers—former employers—did not read. They kept a man for that task.

“Who will cook for you?” I was tempted to ask, but I knew the answer, at least until they found someone who understood the Imperial palate. I hoped the mush-cooker exploded in Mina’s face. I hoped she ended up with a starburst like Sita’s, impossible to hide.

“Goodbye,” I said, and turned on my heel without waiting to see if Alice Mem would answer. I was farther down the street than I’d expected before I heard the gate click shut.

I could serve another firang household. It was not as if they would ask for the history of my bloodline, the way one of our own mems would. I could do better this time, befriend anyone else in the house, no matter how odious. No matter how much I had to lie, or retreat into the role of a farmgirl who would not have run away from her parents’ constant talk of finding her a husband.

I could do many things, I thought, back in my room laying out my possessions on a clean sheet. I had not acquired much in Khalikat, mostly clothes—my least-favorite kurta bumped heavy against my hand. I reached into the pocket and drew out a wrench. I must have taken it when I fixed the coffee machine. Ten millimeters, Tabose stamp. I wondered if I should return it, if seeing the regret flicker in Alice Mem’s eyes was worth the effort.

I ran my fingers across its cool length, nudging the peeling calluses where I had once pushed artillery again and again. With the universities embargoed, a half-trained engineer could find work. A resourceful woman could do more.

I finished packing and left money on the mattress. Better not to trouble the others with a note. I slung my makeshift bag across my back, tying it carefully. Clumsy at first, then fluid, hands remembering the knots I’d practiced with Devi in training camp.

As I turned north, my stride became a march.

---

Sixty years after a contraband machine rammed the northern Imperial granary, the one-time regional governor’s mansion has been repurposed into a train station: a riot of latecomers and ticket counters and grab-and-go food. It’s quieter outside; the road was pushed back to accommodate a small plaza tiled with patterned stone. Somewhat northeast of its center stands a twisted column of steel and bronze, artistic in the way homemade things are. According to legend it’s the exact site where, when the leader of the granary raid was ordered to name her co-conspirators, she scrunched her too-thin cheeks and spat.

Tourists with time to kill sometimes stop and read the inscription at its base, but right now the locals are entranced by garish posters blanketing every free bit of plaster, whether it’s the stores or the low wall around the one-time governor’s gardens, now a public park. Election season.

The posters are cheaply printed. Quantity, not quality. Smiling faces—red lips and bleach-white teeth—preside over party slogans in a mix of local and localized Imperial script. All secular, after religious nationalism imploded fifteen years ago. The split between men and women is mostly equal. And, following last year’s repeal of a lingering Imperial law, several third gender and nonbinary aspirants have joined the fray of candidates.

Better, they say, to lose than not fight at all.

First published in a slightly different version in Fantasy & Science Fiction July/August 2021.

© 2023 Priya Chand

[Issue 2023.67]

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