“When you come back from the Belt, I want us to make another baby.” Sarah cupped his face. “Promise me.”

They both knew the pledge she wanted was that he would come back. “I promise.”

He drew her close. “How did you find out that John Moseby is John Santee?”

She yawned again. “How did I find out that you gave a false report to the commander of the shadow warriors? Is that your real question?”

“You’re too smart for me.”

“I know.” Sarah curled up against him. “Redbeard told me. I don’t know how he found out.” Her nipples stiffened against him. “It was after you asked for my hand in marriage. That’s when he told me.” She giggled and her nipples tickled him. “He said a Fedayeen who violated his oath had committed a capital offense. He asked me if I thought such a man was a worthy husband.”

He pulled her on top of him.

“I told him…I told him you must have had a good reason to lie…” She slipped him inside of her, rocking gently. “…and surely…surely a man who thought for himself, without the burden of law or tradition, surely such a man was the best of all husbands.” She bit her lip, back arched, her eyes locked on him. “I said…I said, Uncle, if you hadn’t come to the exact same conclusion, surely you would have turned him over to the Fedayeen rather than risk being branded a traitor yourself.”

Rakkim groaned, his cries slowly trailing off.

She flattened herself against him, the two of them prickly with sweat. She waited until they got their breath back. “Why…why did you tell them Moseby was dead?”

He was still inside her, feeling her pulse as his own.

“This man broke his oath,” she said. “What was it about him that made you break yours?”

He remembered the last time he had seen Moseby. The man was a light sleeper, but not light enough. He had opened his eyes, felt Rakkim’s knife against his throat, but made no move to struggle or resist. Moseby was a shadow warrior too, he knew how skillful Rakkim had to be to sneak up on him. Moseby let out a long sigh, released his fear like a flock of white doves. Rakkim looked down at him and knew he had never felt at such peace with himself as this dead man did. Go on, Moseby whispered, not wanting to wake his wife, who lay sleeping beside him. Do what you have to and go quietly.

“Rikki? Why did you lie for him?”

“When I met him…it was before you and I were together, before I had any hope for us to be together. The way he looked over at his wife when he thought he was going to die…I never saw anybody so in love before.” Rakkim felt her grip him, enclose him with her heat. “Moseby…he was the only man I was ever envious of.”

Rakkim and General Kidd washed their hands and feet with clean sand as the muezzin called the faithful to dawn prayer from the minaret. The light brown sand was imported from the general’s Somali homeland, its fine grit an accepted way to wash in that arid place. Swathed in white robes, they quickly filed into the mosque with the other men, the only sound their bare feet shuffling on the cool slate.

It had been almost three years since Rakkim had been to mosque with Kidd, and he missed it. Missed sharing meals with Kidd’s family afterward, missed seeing Kidd as a father in a more intimate setting. His own father murdered when he was nine, Rakkim had learned from Kidd’s stern but loving treatment of his children, his patient guidance, and patterned his own behavior accordingly. Choosing to remain in hiding after the death of Redbeard, he and Kidd had continued to meet privately, maintaining their friendship and Rakkim’s back-channel contacts with the Fedayeen. Now though, leaving soon on this mission into the Belt, Rakkim had wanted to pray with him, for perhaps the last time.

Rakkim rested on his haunches inside the mosque, eyes half closed, listening to the imam’s sermon, and the sound of the man’s voice might as well have been the crash of waves in the distance. He sat in the tiny mosque, packed so close that he could hear the rustle of Kidd’s white djellabah beside him, inhale the faint sandalwood oil Kidd rubbed into his anthracite black skin. The only white man in the mosque, Rakkim was half a head shorter than the others, Somalis mostly, with a scattering of Ethiopians and Nigerians, all of them Fedayeen, retired or active-duty. Like Kidd, the older men had journeyed to the former United States when the Civil War broke out almost thirty years ago, men who had left their homes and families behind, risking everything for the chance to conquer new lands for Allah. Fierce fighters, they had died by the hundreds, by the thousands, most of them buried in haste, without proper treatment, their graves unmarked. Still they had come, heeding the call. Rakkim, aware of his own faith only by its absence, felt honored to be among them.

As a newly minted major in the army of the Islamic Republic, Kidd had led a brigade of African volunteers at Newark, Bloody Newark, or the second Gettysburg, as later historians called it. Kidd knew nothing of Gettysburg, he only knew that the standing order never to retreat was madness. To fight to the last man only meant there would be too many warriors in Paradise and not enough on the ground, where they were needed. Hopelessly outnumbered, Kidd had led a controlled retreat, gathering American Muslims with him as they drew the rebels from the Belt deeper into parts of the city still standing, high-rise neighborhoods where the rebel tanks had trouble maneuvering. On the fifth day of the battle, Kidd took control of all the Islamic forces and counterattacked, outflanking the rebels and halting their advance.

Rakkim’s eyes were on the imam, but he saw only the footage from the war museum, video of Newark burning, the flames like a tidal wave. The battle raged for three more days, the city wreathed with oily smoke, the streets clogged with the dead. Newark was the deepest penetration into the Muslim republic by the rebels, and while not a victory for either side, it was Kidd who staved off a Muslim defeat and stymied the rebels’ plan to head into Pennsylvania and Ohio, splitting the republic. A cease-fire was declared a week later, a cease-fire that had held ever since. Given a battlefield promotion by order of President Kingsley, after the armistice Kidd had created the Fedayeen, a small, elite force of genetically enhanced holy warriors.

The army had fifty times the men under arms as the Fedayeen, but they were poorly led, poorly equipped, and poorly trained, garrison soldiers strung along the border, ill suited for combat. Redbeard had told Rakkim that the army’s weakness was no accident. The Fedayeen remained outside the military chain of command, a praetorian guard operating without any oversight, answering only to General Kidd and the president. The calculation had worked well for many years, but the rise of the Black Robes had created fissures in the ranks of the Fedayeen, testing the loyalties of even the most devout. Three months ago, an entire company of Fedayeen, eighty fighters, had defected, taking their heavy weapons with them to a Black Robes’ stronghold outside of Dearborn, Michigan.

The imam leaned against the pulpit, white-haired and bent as a stick, his voice echoing, every sound magnified in the stillness, as the faithful nodded in agreement. Unlike the lavish grand mosques scattered across the city, this little mosque in the Fremont district was plain and unadorned, solid as the worshippers themselves. The floors were gray slate, the walls immaculate white plaster, the dome of beaten copper. The mihrab on the east wall, an ancient, wooden crescent indicating the direction of Mecca, had been brought over from Kidd’s boyhood village outside Kismaayo. Rakkim felt comfortable here among the old warriors and their many sons, more comfortable than in any other mosque. While the fundamentalist clerics bellowed demands from the pulpit, this Somali imam’s sermon stressed traditional values of piety, simplicity, and duty, urging the faithful to avoid the gaudy distractions of the modern world. Study the Quran, the imam repeated, exhorting the brothers to care for their families as Allah cared for them, “in this way shall you find peace in this world, and reward in the next.”