It had been a long time since a true Kildar was in the valley, and the old people had bemoaned that. The new Kildar, furthermore, truly had brought back the good times. The Chechens no longer extorted “taxes” and burned farms when they didn’t pay up. They no longer stole children. They no longer took the food and livestock. And the money the Kildar brought in — often through killing Islamics which to the mostly Orthodox believers in the area was a good thing — spread out. Things were looking up in the region.

Thus, Martya’s status, even as a “harem slave,” was far higher than it had been as the daughter of a penniless farmer, much less as a whore. She loved the Kildar for bringing her into his household, for feeding her febrile mind through learning, for giving her status even in her parents’ eyes. And she was counting the days to her sixteenth birthday.

But at the moment, she had a problem. The noise from Katya’s room was disrupting class. Especially the whooping.

Katya was the one thing in the Kildar’s household Martya did not enjoy. The Russian whore was… evil. Mean didn’t begin to describe it. She would do small, petty, things that she could get away with to hurt the other girls. And there was little they could do about it. The whore was being trained by the Kildar as an “insertion agent,” a spy. And the Americans had given her special powers and, notably, poisoned fingernails. Even before she’d started training, all of the girls had feared her. Now they were terrified of her.

But she had changed after the last battle. She hardly put on anyone at all anymore and occasionally did nice things for them. She had fixed Nikki’s broken CD player. She had helped Martya with her English lessons.

But the girls weren’t willing to place too much faith in the unexplained change. Not with Katya.

So knocking on her door to ask her to turn down the stereo was the last thing that Martya wanted to do. But Tinata had insisted. Nobody was getting anything done.