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"You think my ass is hot?"

"I think all of you is hot, Laurie."

Some things, she thought, are better than sex. Being thought "hot" is sometimes one of them. "Okay. I'll leave you alone for now. But when we get back to Olson Hall you better show me that you really think all of me is hot."

"Deal," Hamilton agreed.

Though they were lying on their backs in the dirt next to each other, she didn't bother to snuggle in. Hamilton was right; there was something obscene about two robots cuddling.

"You done good, today, Laurie," Hamilton said.

"Thanks. You, too. Though this suit is a damned uncomfortable thing and pretty unflattering to a girl's figure."

At first Hamilton said nothing to that. After a few moments, though, she realized he was laughing.

"What's so funny?"

"Well . . . I was just thinking, a girl in a heavy infantry suit is perfectly dressed under the enemy's law. What's the difference between wearing a burka and wearing Class B armor?"

She thought about that for a few seconds before answering, "I can't kill people as easily wearing a burka."

Kitznen, Affrankon, 14 Duh'l-Qa'dah,

1530 AH (11 November, 2106)

Ishmael escorted the two burka-clad girls from the house to the market. That was part of his official duty; he didn't hit Besma up for baksheesh for it. This was to the good as Besma only had the two dozen dirhem she'd begged from her father to buy some new clothes and shoes for the new girl in the house. Her father's wife had objected, and her older stepbrother, Fudail, had sneered, but still her father had given over the money. Besma was, after all, the pearl of his heart.

They went into a women's and girls' shop, a simple door into an old brick building with a sign to one side and the windows painted black. Ishmael had to wait outside with the other various mahram, the men suitable as escorts for women because sexual intercourse was prohibited between them and the women escorted.

Ishmael was not exactly in that category. He could legally have had intercourse with either Besma or Petra, had they been married. Ishmael, however, was a eunuch, having been castrated as a boy, just before he was sold. He couldn't really be expected to have intercourse with anyone and so was mahram as a practical if not a legal matter. Even so, Ishmael's master, Abdul Mohsem, was taking some risk by having him escort the family's womenfolk.

One aspect of that risk was visible just across the street from where Ishmael and the rest of the mahram squatted outside the women's store. Ishmael didn't know what the crime was, but he saw a group of mutaween, wearing their traditional brown robes, drag a man from another shop and force him up the street to one of the usual sites reserved for executing the judgments of the police for the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue. There was a stout pole there, affixed into the cobblestones. From the pole hung a looped rope.

The man being forced blubbered and begged for mercy. It was not forthcoming.

First, one of the mutawa knocked the man to his back by a blow to the face. Then two others gathered up his legs and lifted them. A fourth dropped a loop of rope over the ankles while a fifth pulled on the rope to raise the feet. Once this was done a sixth lashed the rope to a pintle on the pole. The man's shoes were removed, and the senior of the mutaween took a long, stiff but flexible stick from another and bared his right arm to the shoulder.

Even from as far away as he was, Ishmael heard the hiss of the stick. He could have been considerably farther away and still heard the scream of the victim.

The shop was small and the shelves and racks something less than full. Dust gathered here and there showed that the emptiness was not a recent phenomenon. And yet Besma had said that this was one of the better women's shops in the town. Petra assumed this was so, and really didn't even notice the emptiness of the stock or the dust where no stock lay. Her town's one remaining general store had had even less.

"What was that?" Petra asked, as the reverberating sound of a human scream penetrated the shop's black-painted windows.

"The mutaween," the shopkeeper answered. "They become more vicious with each passing day. And if you're a poor Nazrani minding your own business . . . I'm Muslim and it still makes me sick what they do to the Nazrani."

Petra gulped. She was both Nazrani and poor. Worse, she was owned. What would they do to her?

Besma patted her arm. "Don't worry," she insisted, "I won't let them near you and they wouldn't dare touch me."