Ramazan watched calmly as the cardiothoracic nurses hooked the patient up to various monitors and IV drips and looped restraints around his hands so he wouldn’t pull his breathing tube out. Nisreen needed to know that Ramazan would be home even later than he’d earlier assumed. He didn’t want to risk waking her up, so he pulled out his mobile phone and sent her a text message. She replied promptly and said she was going to bed. He replied with a “good night,” and the response was a solitary 
he texting shorthand for bawsa, meaning a kiss, common across the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to the x symbol used in the Americas, which had a Christian, religious origin. Not the most passionate exchange, but then again he didn’t expect her to be in the best of moods, not after the day’s events. And their marriage had long lost what little passion it did have. At least they were still together.
He left the ICU and got himself a strong cup of coffee. By the time he came back to the patient’s room, the last of the nurses was leaving. He nodded to her as she passed him, then edged closer to the bed, riding a swell of trepidation.
The stranger was still unconscious.
Ramazan just stood there for a long moment, weary and woolly-headed, uncertain about what he was even doing there, the low beeps of the monitors and the gurgle of the breathing pump adding to his trance. Then he snapped out of it and, with hesitant fingers, reached over and pulled down the blanket and the hospital gown to uncover the man’s chest.
The man had a wide dressing across the middle of his chest where the vertical incision had been made, but some tattoos were visible now on either side and below it.
Ramazan stared at them, mesmerized. Then he looked over his shoulder, made sure no one was coming in, and pulled out his mobile phone. He took a series of quick pictures of the tattoos. He also took one of the man’s face, for no conscious reason. Then he put away his phone and covered the man up.
He hovered there a bit longer, studying him, unsure about the hold this stranger had over him. Then he tore himself away, left the room, and made his way home.
7
After Taymoor left, Kamal ended up at home, a small top-floor walk-up three blocks east of the Halles Bazaar that was currently swirling in a haze of apple-and-honey-flavored tobacco smoke from a narguileh water pipe, cold raki, carryout pizza—a recent craze imported from the Naples eyalet that was sweeping the city—and bland escapist television.
While he was never much of a social animal, Kamal hadn’t always been that much of a loner. He lived alone, which was normal, given that he wasn’t married. Mixed cohabitation was, of course, out of the question in Ottoman society, given the strict limitations that tradition imposed on how men and women could interact. Dating wasn’t allowed; unmarried men and women could meet openly only for brief encounters in the company of chaperones and strictly as a prelude to marriage. Not even Murad and his reforms had been able to do much to loosen that. But, of course, human desire was impossible to cage entirely. Men and women found ways to see each other in secret, despite the risks involved. And in those instances, women often found the veil to be a useful ally in helping shroud their movements.
Beyond the confines of his single lifestyle, things had become more complicated lately, making it harder for Kamal to be around some. Across the various strata of society, people were becoming edgier, more fearful, and more polarized. Now his job was even making some of his closest friends and family palpably less comfortable around him. To many, he was a hero and a protector—more than ever, after the recent arrests—but to others, he was a pariah, even though he was part of the antiterrorist unit and not the fearsome Z Directorate that handled internal security. More often than not, it didn’t bother him too much; he viewed their apprehension about him as misguided paranoia. What did bother him—what was causing him more anguish than he’d ever known—was the fact that the apprehensive group included his brother Ramazan and Ramazan’s wife, Nisreen.
What did all the adulation in the world matter if those he loved most held him in such contempt?
They’d stopped inviting him over or even speaking with him weeks ago, after yet another argument had degenerated into hurtful words. He hadn’t seen them or his beloved little nephew and niece for—how long had it been? He couldn’t remember. It was… insane. After all, he was putting his life on the line to protect them, to keep their way of life safe. How could they not see that?
Taymoor was right. They were in the wrong. Nisreen had chosen her friends poorly. Azmi was a traitor, after all—a member of the White Rose. She ought to have known better. That’s all there was to it.
They’d come around. They had to.
And yet… Ramazan and Nisreen—they weren’t fools. Not by any stretch of the imagination. How could they be getting this so wrong?
As if to taunt him, the evening news came on, and the first image was of the beheadings ceremony that morning. Kamal reached for the remote and switched channels, only to come upon an almost identical report. A third channel yielded the same result. He killed the screen, took a deep pull of his water pipe, and stared out the open French doors. The late-evening sky was awash with swathes of purples and pinks, bathed with a tranquility that seemed oblivious to his malaise.
It hadn’t always been this way.
As a child Kamal had known a gentler world. Of course, the cold war with the CRA—the Christian Republic of America—had always been there, but it hadn’t threatened to boil over as it now did. And the great war against Russia had simmered back to a tense stalemate, even though the tsar never missed an opportunity to rattle his tongue about the constant encroachment of Islam onto Orthodox lands, no matter how well Murad V had treated the Slavic people living under his rule in the Balkans.
But there was peace, and there was prosperity: having long since subjugated their Persian adversaries and conquered Arabia, the Ottomans controlled the largest oil reserves on the planet, and the cheapest to produce. And with a virtual monopoly on the global supply of oil, they had, for almost a century, maintained a firm lid on the ambitions of their enemies.
Under the previous sultan’s inspired leadership, the empire had thrived. Murad had been ambitiously progressive. A tireless reformer, he championed the social, economic, cultural, and even religious transformation of his empire and only stopped short of political reform. He made cautious but marked progress in spreading education, improving the rights of women and the conditions of the poor, and encouraging the arts. Murad had also overseen the launch of the Internet across the empire, an invention that had originated in an Istanbul university lab and one that the staunchly Puritan Americans were still unwilling to embrace.
He had set the empire on course for a fairer, brighter future. But it was a tightrope to walk. Relaxing the limitations of free speech, combined with the networking effect of the Internet, had allowed radical new ideas to blossom; Murad had let the genie out of the bottle, and he needed to make sure it didn’t overwhelm him and his rule. He also had to make sure any public debate of these reforms didn’t escalate into civil unrest, since facing off against the reforms and their supporters was an entrenched religious establishment that wasn’t easy to tame.
For a while, Murad managed to maintain order and stability and safeguard his empire’s hayba—its stature and prestige—without having to resort to excessive coercion. But the reform tightrope proved to be trickier far from the capital, in a remote corner of the empire: the Diriyah eyalet of the Arabian peninsula.