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region, orchards and farms during Italian times. It had produced agricultural surpluses until collectivization, when the brief but brutal rule of the aptly named Morgue had broken the Bantu and Ashaari farmers.
    But she wasn’t looking there, but north, to what was perhaps the most striking feature of the whole country.
    Haunt of djinns and nomads, repository of myth and legend, the EmptyQuarter meant nightmare and death for outsiders. Endless desert, dunes, salt flats; only a few nomad encampments mapped by the British during the Second World War dotted its forty-thousand-square-mile expanse. It was into the dreaded Quartier Vide that the Austrian archaeologist Karl Von Zirkel had disappeared in 1894, seeking a lost city mentioned by the early Coptic Fathers. It was from the Quartier Vide that the infamous Sheikh Dahir had harried the French in the twenties, until their planes wiped out his tribesmen with mustard gas. To this day small bands of
indigènes
roamed its wastes, nomading from seepage to seepage, or hand-dug oasis wells fed by shallow groundwater tables under the dunes.
    Tabbing back and forth from her e-mail to the map, she etched numbers beside symbols. Gradually they formed a vast dotted-line oval that stretched to the Western Mountains, nearly to the Red Sea, and across the Sudanese border. The eastern one was marked A. The western, C. The northern, B. The southern, a few miles north of where this trailer sat, was marked D.
    The numbers matched the sample names of the results from Sweden.
    She saved this in a hidden folder, one invisible to a casual user. Then erased the e-mail from her in-queue. She sat back, blotting her cheeks with a tissue from a dried-out container of wet wipes.
    It was real.
    What Costa Kyriazis had intuited, and died wondering about. What she’d suspected, inspecting photos taken from space, but never been able to prove.
    What had been found before in Libya, in the Sinai, in other regions considered arid and uninhabitable for all recorded history.
    The samples she’d sent to Scandinavia had come from wells or artesian seeps at widely separated locations. Yet chemically and isotopically, they were the same.
    Which meant they came from the same source, and the same era—an epoch thirty thousand years in the past.
    Hundreds of meters beneath the Empty Quarter, in the porous Nubian sandstone that stretched from the Mediterranean deep into Africa, lay a reservoir of “fossil” water. An underground aquifer, a primeval lake. She’d proved it existed, but not how large it was. Perhaps enough to irrigate all Ashaara for decades. Maybe centuries, if the watery lens was thick enough. But only drilling would answer that question.
    A more fabulous hoard than any legend of genies and gold. An unexpected, long-sequestered treasure. A secret that, once revealed, could lead to a secure and fertile future for an entire region prone to chronic drought and famine—or to war, mass murder, and genocide.
    A secret far more powerful than any explosive, Major, she thought.
    One she’d have to keep locked within her brain till she could consider how best to reveal it, and to whom.
    Pursing her lips, she took a last long look. Then shut down the computer, and sat in the whirring heat, alone.
Zeynaab
    W HEN the trucks leave she searches for her brothers through the litter of the crying and the wounded, those hit by bullets maybe not even aimed at them. A sick jerky feeling seeps into her stomach. She wants to claw her family back to her out of the milling dust. She thinks she hears them shouting, and she screams. But how small her voice is, how thin amid the crying and shouting all around. She stumbles. Rocks cut her feet. The dust’s too thick to make out the road. She glimpses a shadow with a gun. She turns and rushes away, until her sight reels and the air torches her lungs.
    Hours later she wanders an apocalyptic land. The wind’s kicked up hot as flames. Not a