Mulaghesh is roving through the medical wing when she nearly abandons her search. She can’t imagine a more futile task than this, combing through this ocean of dark stone for a single white dot.
She remembers something Sigrud told her during their hours-long briefing: Assume she knows you. Assume she believed you would know who she was and what she had been doing when you came to look for her. If she has something to hide, she would hide it in a place you know she has been.
But Mulaghesh doesn’t know a damn thing about Choudhry besides what she’s read. All she has are the few communications and requests she sent back to, to…
“To Ghaladesh,” thinks Mulaghesh suddenly. She stops a passing private and asks, “Soldier—what’s the quickest way to your communications department?”
***
The comms desk has the feeling of an ill-kept library, bookshelf after bookshelf of multicolored files. Mulaghesh searches the shelves for the sign of a white thumbtack, yet finds nothing. Dispirited, she’s about to ask the young private at the front desk if she perhaps saw Choudhry do something here, months and months ago, when she notices something.
She looks at the front of the desk. Right at the bottom, just above the stone floor, is a white thumbtack pressed deep into the wood.
Mulaghesh stares at the tack. Then she looks up at the young private, who’s watching her anxiously.
“Can I…help you, General?” asks the private.
“Uh, maybe.” She wonders what message the tack is trying to convey. Perhaps Choudhry put it here so that Mulaghesh or whoever would stand in this very spot and speak to the soldier at the front desk. “What can you tell me about your operations here, Private?”
“Is there anything specific you’d like to know, General?”
“I…suppose I’m looking for backups or copies of all communications sent out from this station, Private. Specifically sent back to Ghaladesh.”
“Well, each communication that goes out has to be copied and placed into storage, ma’am. If the communication isn’t received, we have to have some record of what was sent so we can resend it.”
“How long do you keep records of the communications?”
“We keep records for up to three years, ma’am, in case of an incident,” says the private. “But only those sent or received within the year are readily available.” She nods at the bookshelves. “The rest are in deep storage.”
“Can you show me the log?”
“Certainly, ma’am. What time period would you be looking for?”
She gives her six weeks on either side of Choudhry’s disappearance. This produces a considerable pile of paper, which Mulaghesh promptly sits down and starts poring through.
Two hours later Mulaghesh is still digging through the logs of communications and telegrams. They’re all categorized by date, then by the last name of the officer who issued the communication. Choudhry’s name is nowhere to be found except for the handful of communications she sent requesting files, which Mulaghesh has already scanned for code, to no avail.
After another hour Mulaghesh is about ready to give it up and try something new when she notices one officer’s name is different: ZHURGUT.
Zhurgut, she thinks. As in Saint Zhurgut? The Voortyashtani?
She looks closer at its log entry. The telegram destination is one she’s never seen before. Most of Fort Thinadeshi’s telegrams only went to five or six locations: Bulikov, Ahanashtan, and Ghaladesh, as well as the other installations throughout the region. This address is completely different.
“Because it doesn’t exist,” says Mulaghesh aloud.
“Pardon, ma’am?” asks the private at the front desk.
“N-Nothing. Never mind. Talking aloud.”
She looks closer at the line in the log. The name of a Voortyashtani saint…And the telegram’s destination doesn’t exist. Choudhry put the telegram through but she never intended it to go anywhere…so there was never anyone to call the comms desk and tell them they never got it!
Mulaghesh walks into the shelves, looking for the failed communication. She feels impressed by her own brilliance, but even more so at Choudhry’s: the girl was clever enough to use the comms desk backup files as her own cache, duping the attendants here into copying down her message under a fictional officer’s name and storing it away. Unless you knew to look for it, you’d never know Choudhry was involved at all.
She finds the file and glances around. The private at the front desk is busy recording something. Mulaghesh slides the file out, pulls out the transcription, and glances at the first line. It reads: “A13F69 12 1IKMN12…”
She sighs. “Ah, for the love of…”
It’s in code. But of course it would be, thinks Mulaghesh. She remembers Shara provided her with a Ministry codex when she first sent her out here. Now it’s just a matter of determining exactly which one Choudhry used.
“Well,” Mulaghesh says. “I guess I know what I’m doing tonight.”
***
She starts the long walk back down to the harbor, wishing she had Pandey here to drive her again. But she’s happy to steer clear of Fort Thinadeshi for a while, feeling certain she’s increasingly on Captain Nadar’s shit list. And it won’t do to have someone close to Biswal dislike her quite so much.
She should feel excited, she knows. She just figured out Choudhry’s signals and found the one possibly genuine communication that this operative ever made. But everything she saw back there actually makes her more worried.
Because you had to be pretty cunning to think up a scheme like that, and by all appearances Choudhry went the extra mile to make sure whoever came after her would find this. Not exactly the actions of a madwoman, then.
She’s approaching the checkpoint down into Voortyashtan when she glances north toward the thinadeskite mines. The machines are still churning away, hauling rock out of the enormous pit. She glances across the cliffs, absently noting how isolated the mines now seem, and reflects on the tremendous amount of damage this region has taken. Cities collapsing, bays dredged, mines carved and then caved in—it’s as if all the violence the Voortyashtanis once inflicted on the world has been redirected toward their very lands.
Then her eye falls on a little copse of trees about a quarter mile north of the mines.
She pauses. Cocks her head.
For some reason those tall pine trees suddenly seem familiar to her. Strikingly familiar, even.
She walks around the mines and toward the copse, leaning against the wind. It takes a while to get to them, but the closer the pines get the more familiar they seem. There’s something about the way they stand, radiating out in a circle with a gap on one side, like an entrance.
A memory flares inside of her: painting one palm with honey, waiting in the cold and the dark for the wind to carry its scent….
I’ve been here before, thinks Mulaghesh. Haven’t I? But it was very long ago….