He put us off another week, and then another. Finally, Morehshin camped out in front of the lawyer’s office until he got the idea that his client’s well-being might be as important as constitutional law.
It took us over a month to get her out of the asylum.
The day Morehshin brought Soph back to the village, there was a particularly rancid smell hanging over the city. Slaughterhouse runoff was rotting in the sewer system, and it wouldn’t wash out until the next big rain. Soph’s usually sunny face was chalky, and her hands trembled when she reached out to embrace us in the tea house beside the Algerian Theater.
“My darling!” Aseel was stricken. “What did they do to you?”
Morehshin gave us a grim look. “You know what they do at that place.”
“I believe I saw… true darkness.” Soph spoke in a gravelly whisper, as if her throat was raw from screaming or sickness or worse.
I ordered drinks. The chairs were uncomfortable metal monstrosities, and the table was a piece of rickety carnival trash, but the mint tea was superb. Our waiter made a big show of pouring it from a great height into tiny, curved glasses, the steam making a soothing puff around our faces. We all sipped quietly for a minute.
“I can’t go back there.” Soph’s voice was stronger now. “I know our fight goes beyond my puny life, and that there are women counting on us in the future.” She grabbed Morehshin’s hand. “But I would rather die than endure that… evil.” Her eyes filled with tears and she shook her head over and over, repeating the twitchy motion until Aseel touched her cheek and murmured reassuringly.
“You’re safe now. That lawyer says they can’t put you back there unless you’re convicted.”
“Now I know why Penny took her life.” Soph dipped a finger into her teacup and drew a pentagram on the table with the cooling liquid. “There are things worse than death. So… many… things.”
I had seen Soph ecstatic and spellbinding and drunk and enraged. But I had never seen her like this. Terror distorted her posture, as if her whole being were focused on some amorphous danger. The problem was that nothing in the coming months was going to unburden her. The threat of further imprisonment was very real. As I watched her stumble through a conversation with Aseel and Morehshin, it occurred to me that the asylum had eroded her entire sense of self. She couldn’t thrive on the cold ideological isolation that kept Emma Goldman sane in prison. Her strength came from rituals that exalted love and community. Soph was not going to survive this battle if we waged it here, on these terms.
I tasted bile in my mouth. This war—this long fucking arc of history—had destroyed too many good women and erased the evidence. Nobody would remember Penny or Berenice or Aseel or Soph, but Comstock’s laws would last over a century. That self-satisfied lawyer who called Soph a nympho would have a civil liberties hagiography on Wikipedia. A memory invaded me, of watching a woman’s body fall from a great height, crashing into death before she had a chance to live. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to scream her name. All my heartbroken recklessness emanated from that moment, that person, that suicide I tried every day to forget. There were some things I couldn’t set right, but there were some things I could.
“Soph, we need to get you away from here. You spent years at Raqmu studying the ancient Nabataean texts about women’s spirituality, right?”
Looking up from the table, her eyes still red, Soph allowed herself a tiny smile of pride. “Of course.”
“And exactly how many years were you there?”
“Almost six.”
Flooded with relief, I looked at Morehshin. She was nodding slowly. Without intending to, Soph had already served her Long Four Years.
Soph continued. “I can speak a little Nabataean too, though I guess it’s ridiculous to say that one speaks a dead tongue.”
“It’s not dead. Not where we’re going. There’s a safe harbor about two thousand years ago in the Nabataean Kingdom—it’s a place where the Comstockers can’t go.”
Soph’s eyes widened, and she burst into tears again. But this time, it wasn’t a jagged, hopeless noise. It sounded like she was wringing demons out of her body. She warded off their return with the salt that ran through her fingers and down the fresh burn scars on her arms.
Aseel used her considerable powers of organization to get us the hell off the continent as covertly as possible. Sol had friends in shipping, and he was willing to do us one more favor—especially since Aseel had agreed to manage his sheet music business after the Midway shut down in late October. We would take the train to New York, travel by steamer to Lisbon, and from there catch another ship to Tel Aviv. There was a newly constructed train route that took us east from Tel Aviv into the Ottoman-occupied territories surrounding Raqmu, known in my present as Jordan.
Raqmu was a thriving city of scientists, travelers, operatives, and spies. Home to the first Machine discovered in recorded history, its towering stone monuments dated back at least four thousand years. Shadowed by mountains and surrounded by high, rocky cliffs the color of rose gold, the city was shielded from attack but open to countless nourishing streams of fresh mountain water.
Centuries of human engineering guided that water from a wild rush down foothills into an elaborate system of canals, waterfalls, and pools that fed the city’s gardens and growing populace. Architecture here had evolved to suit the soft sandstone of valley walls, with buildings burrowed into the rock to form vast cave palaces. Building facades were grand edifices sculpted directly into the stone. Generations of workers had cut a second level of streets and sidewalks above the basin floor, reached by stairs that wound between jagged outcroppings. As a result, the city grid appeared to be filling the basin and sloshing up its sides.
There was only one way to enter this marvel of art and engineering, and that was through a narrow passage called al-Siq that wound between smooth, curving cliffs studded by sentry towers. No invading army had ever made it through.
We hired a porter at the train station to carry our tiny collection of bags into the city. As we passed through al-Siq, slices of sun illuminated the elaborately carved doorways, windows, and facades that marked the entrances to archive caves, old and new. Some were humble and neglected, while others were hung with flags and guarded by gunmen. These places were full of forbidden histories, official documents, state secrets, and untranslated assertions in languages no one remembered. Some held controversial memoirs from famous travelers, reporting highly divergent timelines whose dark arcs we’d narrowly escaped. Others were packed with ephemera like two-thousand-year-old receipts for grain and slaves, or board games from the seventeenth century.
Ancient manuscripts in Nabataean described how the city’s first settlers dug shelters into the natural rock walls surrounding their hidden village—and discovered that any symbols recorded inside remained intact, no matter how much history changed.
Wind whistled past us, eroding al-Siq one microlayer at a time. Born from sediment swirling at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans, these sandstone walls dated back to the Ordovician period. Raqmu’s pink rock had first seen sunlight on the coast of a barren supercontinent drifting slowly across the South Pole. Though it was the first Machine discovered by humans, it was the youngest by far. It was also the only one that spawned archive caves. The four other Machines were millions of years older, embedded in rocks formed half a billion years ago during the Cambrian, when multicellular life first evolved. Raqmu’s uniqueness raised unanswerable questions. Was it a more sophisticated version of the other Machines? Had we inherited the work of engineers whose technology could capture and program wormholes? Were the Machines built by one of those early life forms, long extinct? Extraterrestrials? Or were they completely natural phenomena that we’d need another two millennia of geoscience research to understand?