When Ro Keyes quit the military, he was looking forward to a slower pace of life. A chance to pursue his love of learning as part of an exchange program with Kabul International University. But you know what they say? You can’t escape your past. Or, as it turns out, your birthright.
As a woman in Afghanistan, Ziya Khalizai has no choice but to marry the man chosen for her. Perhaps it won’t be so bad? He did promise to protect what was left of her family, after all. But promises get broken, and futures get destroyed. Ziya’s spirit? Luckily, she still has that.
Haunted by their pasts plus several unruly ghosts, Ro and Ziya set out to save lives, but around them, people are dying. How? Why? And more importantly, will they be next?
Judged is the fifth and final book in the Electi series, but can be read as a standalone.
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The Beginning: Ro…
Someone had left fingerprint smudges on the brass door plaque, and I paused to rub a handkerchief over my name. Mr. Robert Kemp. I shared the cramped space with Bashir, a London-educated researcher who originally hailed from Islamabad. He specialised in object-based learning while I focused on social and cultural aspects, which meant our noticeboard was covered in photos of people we’d met and places we’d visited, and the shelves underneath held trinkets as well as textbooks. Bashir was back in Pakistan visiting his family this week, which had I been any other man on the planet would have meant a peaceful day working on my thesis, but instead…
“Morning, old chap. Turned out sunny again.”
Instead, I got Peregrine Sumner III, who guffawed at his non-joke and put his feet up on the desk as he leaned back in Bashir’s chair.
“Yes, it did.”
“I overheard Faruq saying you plan to visit Kandahar?”
“Some of the outlying villages, yes.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I went there? It was right before the Battle of Maiwand, and one of my men was run down by an elephant when the damned thing got startled by a field gun.”
You know the old saying that dead men tell no tales? It was bullshit. To those unfortunate enough to be able to hear them, dead men talked incessantly, and even earplugs couldn’t block out the sound. Perry was a former British officer, shot in 1880 during the second Anglo-Afghan War in the very spot where my office had been built. He’d been stuck there ever since.
“You’ve mentioned it once or twice.”
“Raj, that was the elephant’s name. Surly old fellow, he was.”
“I need to work, Perry.”
“Work?” he snorted. “A man needs to get outside and use his hands, not stare at a magic box.”
I’d tried to explain computers to Perry many times, but he still viewed them as a cross between witchcraft and science fiction. Same with mobile phones and TV. What was wrong with a good old telegraph?
Sometimes, I wished I’d never started speaking to him. When I kept my mouth shut, the spirits, ghosts, souls, ghouls, whatever they were, never knew I could see them. After all, nobody else could. I never used to be able to either, but one day when I was six years old, I woke up and there they were. Wilbur at the far end of the garden near the swing set, Jamal on the way to school, Harry beside the playground. It never occurred to me that talking to them wasn’t normal until my foster mum sent me to a psychiatrist. Then I got sent to a group home, and I quickly worked out that if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life there, I needed to keep my mouth shut.
And so I did. In the twenty-seven years since, I’d only discussed spirits with one person—Shaykha Bushra, an old Afghan mystic who seemed to know me better than I knew myself. I hadn’t mentioned my own experiences, obviously, but she’d told me change was coming. And she’d been right—I’d left my old job, I’d moved halfway across the world, and her granddaughter had ruined me for all other women. Almost unconsciously, I touched the string of turquoise beads encircling my right wrist. Ziya had put it there four and a half months ago, and I hadn’t taken it off since. Probably never would.
“Yes, work. I have a thesis to finish,” I told Perry.
“You live in the past, you old codger.” Perry spread his arms. “Look to the future. There’s so much out there waiting to be discovered.”
Said the man who flatly refused to believe we’d sent a man to the moon, even when I showed him a video.
While I did embrace technology, the past fascinated me, and I wanted to save our history for future generations before it was too late. Every day, ancient artifacts got destroyed by war or razed to the ground to make way for modern development. And all the little pieces of knowledge locked up in people’s heads faded, important facts lost with the elders before they could pass them on to the next generation.
“The future and the past are linked,” I told Perry for the hundredth time. “We need to learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again.”
Although considering the current situation in the Middle East, we seemed hell-bent on ignoring everything we should have known. My research on how past conflicts had shaped life in Pashtunistan, the area covering modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, probably wouldn’t have much of an impact—I knew that—but at least I’d have done what I could.
And I had one significant advantage that other anthropologists didn’t—I could talk to people who’d died in those conflicts as well as those who’d survived the years that followed. I just had to be extremely careful how I worded my findings.
“Man will always make mistakes,” Perry told me. “There’ll always be war. Survival of the fittest, what ho.”
“I understand that.” And I accepted it. But we still needed to be smarter if humankind was to have a long-term future.
“Say, did you find out what that explosion was yesterday?”
“A car bomb.”
“Another one?”
The security situation had improved in recent years, but terrorist attacks were still unfortunately a part of daily life. Sometimes, it felt as if the city was teetering on a knife-edge of tension and one wrong move by the wrong people would push it into war again. Shaykha Bushra had told me the world had bad energy.
“Yes. Near the French embassy.”
“How many is that this year?”
“Three so far.”
Plus a dozen shootings and a kidnapping. A journalist for Natural World magazine had vanished along with her photographer, bodyguards, and translator near Tangar, which wasn’t a million miles away, and the story had been all over the news. Did I worry living in Kabul? Of course, but I’d learned how to look after myself, and besides, crime levels were rising everywhere. Last week, a guy had blown himself up inside Madame Tussauds in London. The internet was already full of bad-taste jokes about the melted exhibits in the World Leaders’ area being an improvement.
Footsteps sounded on the tiled floor outside—Faruq, if I wasn’t mistaken. He took short, quick steps and insisted on wearing flip-flops all year round. Even when it was bloody snowing. A lesser mortal would have got frostbite in winter, but not Faruq. He was the only person in the department who wasn’t affected by the shifts in temperature, and he hadn’t deviated from his favoured shalwar kameez during the whole time I’d lived in Kabul. His hair had grown longer—he’d gone from slightly unkempt to man bun—but his wife liked it that way so he wasn’t allowed to cut it short. And I could hardly comment. I’d grown a beard to fit in with the locals, and I hadn’t bothered trimming it for at least two weeks.
“Here is the tea.” The cups clinked on the silver tray as he set it down on my desk. “And my wife made baklava.”
“She’s an excellent cook. You’re a very lucky man.”
Faruq nodded, pleased, and took a seat on Perry’s lap. Well, not so much on his lap but right in him. At first, I’d been disconcerted by seeing one person pass through another, but I’d grown used to it over the years.
“Did you hear Simon is returning to the United States?”
“Really? When? I thought he was here for two more years.”
Simon was another of the lecturers, specialising in dirt, excrement, and decay—DEAD for short—and what decomposing matter meant to anthropology. I’d sat in on one of his talks last month, and it was more interesting than I’d imagined, although I couldn’t say I fancied studying the subject myself. I’d seen enough shit to last a lifetime in my previous job.
“His mother is sick. They say it is the cancer.”
“Fuck.” Faruq glared at me. He wasn’t fond of cursing. “Shit, sorry. Uh, are we organising some sort of collection?”
“Yes, I am doing it. I will purchase a card and gifts for his family.”
I grabbed a handful of afghani notes from my pocket—a hundred afghanis equalled roughly one pound sterling—and passed them over.
“Here you go. Did you hear any more about that bomb yesterday? Anything from your brother-in-law?”
Faruq’s sister was married to a lieutenant in the Afghan National Army, and the whole family ate together most evenings. I suspected half of Faruq’s non-university-related tales came from talk over dinner.
“Six men died and nine are in the hospital. It was the Khyber Liberation Army.”
Again? The KLA had been responsible for the last bomb too. For decades, they’d been an obscure little group based in the Khyber District of Pakistan, but thanks to a charismatic new leader and funding from various overseas organisations, the ragtag collective had transformed into a force to be concerned about. The Pakistan Army was having a crackdown, which meant the KLA had spilled over the border to cause chaos in Afghanistan instead. They opposed westernisation and enforced a strict moral code that bordered on barbaric. For the past few years, foreign money had been flowing into Kabul’s regeneration, giving the city new malls and cinemas, wedding-cake-style housing estates that sat among the shanty towns, and a diverse group of cultures at the new university—everything the KLA abhorred.
“The army’s no closer to rounding up the ringleaders?”
Although people knew the self-styled KLA general’s name—Dayyin Rouhani—nobody had seen him for months, and he remained as elusive as the bomb-maker himself. Whoever he was, I had to grudgingly admire his skills, even if I hoped he’d blow his fingers off someday soon.
Faruq shook his head. “They are ghosts.”
Perry chortled, which looked bizarre since his mouth was superimposed over Faruq’s.
“If only he knew,” Perry said.
Let’s not go there, eh?
The KLA leaders definitely weren’t ghosts. I knew that for certain. Not only were ghosts stuck in one place with limited communication skills, but they also seemed to be victims rather than aggressors for the most part. Every single one I’d spoken to had met a nasty end, and they usually displayed the evidence to prove it. Bullet wounds, shrapnel damage, streaks of blood—the scarlet trail down the front of Perry’s jacket was a case in point. He’d died in his army uniform, and now he’d wear it for eternity.
Did ghosts stick around forever? Most of them, it seemed, but I wasn’t sure all of them did. One or two had told me the same fantastical tale, of a spirit guide that visited them right after they breathed their last to tell them about the Electi, a group of magical assassins who’d work with the spirit to avenge their death. Only once the Electi had bumped off the spirit’s killer would the spirit be allowed to leave earth.
No matter how many times the tale was relayed, it always sounded far-fetched. Perry swore every word was true, but I’d never met a ghost who’d so much as heard an Electi—the air crackled when they got near, apparently—let alone spoken to one. In any case, the soldier who’d shot Perry was long-since dead and buried, so I was stuck with his chatter until I left Kabul, come rain, come shine. And I’d admit to feeling a little envious that ghosts couldn’t sense temperature. Perry was probably the most comfortable man in the whole damn building.
“The KLA are human,” I told Faruq. “Although their actions aren’t.”
They’d killed two children with last month’s bomb. Two young boys whose siblings would mourn them, whose friends would miss them, whose parents would never see them grow up. I’d walked past the spot where they died, and there they were, limbs missing and faces burned, more confused than anything else. Ghosts didn’t feel pain either, and that was a blessing, but seeing them stuck there made me question once again why I’d come to Kabul.
Because you wanted to help, Ro.
But stemming the violence was like trying to stop an arterial bleed with a Band-Aid.
“They are animals.”
“Animals? No, they’re not. Animals tend to follow unwritten rules. They adapt to their environment through positive and negative feedback and act out of necessity rather than desire. Humans are far more unpredictable. The logic behind their actions is often warped.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. Like what happened at that village you visited earlier in the year. Balaguri? Remember I helped you to type up your notes from there?”
A chill ran through me, icy crystals that started at the base of my spine and needled their way upwards to the nape of my neck. It wasn’t the first time I’d had that feeling. My gut was well-honed to sense trouble.
“What happened at Balaguri?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
I made an effort to unclench my teeth. “No, you didn’t.”
“It got burned. Half of it was razed to the ground, and many men died.”
No. No, that shouldn’t have happened. Couldn’t have happened, not now. A deal had been made. Balaguri was meant to be under the protection of Tabesh Siddiqui, a neighbouring opium producer and all-around asshole. The man who’d married the woman I felt drawn to like a moth to a flamethrower. Dread settled in my gut like second-hand musket balls.
“Why? Who did it?”
“A man from Balaguri stole a cow from the next village and would not give it back. So the lashgar, they burned a house, and then more houses caught fire, and there was a small war.”
The lashgar was a local militia, often sent to dispense justice at the behest of a jirga, or tribal council. The practice of burning down an offender’s home was disturbingly common, but to wipe out half a village over a fucking cow? Why hadn’t Siddiqui stepped in? And more importantly, had Ziya’s family survived?
“I’ll need to postpone today’s seminar. Could you let the students know?”
“Huh?”
Faruq’s expression said he hoped I was joking. I wasn’t. His mouth turned down at the corners as realisation dawned.
“You are serious about this?”
“I need to take the afternoon off.”
“Why?” Five seconds passed as Faruq came up with his own thoughts. “Balaguri? You are going to Balaguri?”
“Yes.”
“But why?” Faruq was understandably puzzled. Attacks were a common occurrence in that corner of the world, and I didn’t usually drop everything to investigate. “You want more information? I will ask people.”
“Ask, please. But I still need to go to Balaguri.”
The Beginning: Ziya…
“Ziya, why are you sweeping here?” my husband asked.
Of course, he would have told Dina to do it, but he didn’t understand that Dina was a lazy gaday bacheeay who would make trouble for me if I didn’t follow her instructions. And he also didn’t understand jealousy. Dina had been married to Tabesh for the longest, almost twenty years, which put her in her early thirties. And in that whole time, she hadn’t given him a son, or in fact any children at all. Neither had Delal or Daneen. Yet I’d fallen pregnant immediately. Tabesh had celebrated the news by forcing himself on me again, then pushing half of my workload onto the others so I’d give him a healthy child. The baby was a miracle, he said. A gift.
“I can still sweep,” I told him. “Dina’s feeding the horses.”
“Don’t sweep this part of the house. You should rest.”
“But—”
“Rest!” He snatched the broom out of my hands and threw it on the floor. “Sit in the living room. And don’t answer me back.”
His face twitched, and I was certain that if I hadn’t been pregnant, I’d have felt the palm of his hand. Last week, he’d given Delal a black eye when she burned dinner. I might have felt sorry for her if she weren’t so nasty to me.
Tabesh’s gaze burned into my back as I left. With his quick temper and imposing size, it wasn’t difficult to see why everyone feared him—not just his wives, but men from Kabul to the Khyber Pass. And that was the only reason I didn’t cry myself to sleep every night.
This marriage hadn’t only been about me, you see.
Balaguri, the village where I grew up, my home, had always been volatile. A tinderbox that was constantly embroiled in some trouble or another. Whether it was the Taliban throwing their weight around, or a petty squabble with a rival tribe, or a battle between the US Army and whatever militia happened to be on the rise… Balaguri suffered. And after my father’s death, the fragile truces he’d negotiated fell apart, and people died. Too many people. Grandma. Gulab, who’d worked with Baba to grow food for their stall at the market. My best friend, Quaseema. Her cousin and her aunt. We’d needed help, and the only person who’d offered it was Tabesh.
Of course, nothing in life was free. My uncle negotiated Tabesh’s protection as my mahr—the price for my marriage. A dowry, if you like. Under Islamic law, the mahr should have been money paid to me, but laws got bent, laws got broken. And if sacrificing my freedom would save Balaguri and the people I cared about, then it was a price I’d gladly pay. I still had a brother. Yafir had just turned fifteen. Our father’s death had cut Yafir to the core, and I didn’t want him to suffer the same fate.
So there I was. A wife, a prisoner, and soon to be a mother. The only problem? I was almost certain that Tabesh wasn’t the baby’s father.
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