Free Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris Page A

oil to keep the sand from encroaching on the street.
    Ten minutes later Ahmad pulled up to a small metal door that looked like an old service entrance but was actually the women's entrance to the lab. She thanked him, checked that her
burqa
was
securely fastened, and quickly got out of the car. Glancing around just long enough to see that the parking lot was empty, she descended the stairs to the doorway and swiped her ID tag. A green light flashed and the door swung open. She let out a sigh of relief.
    There was no security guard—or perhaps he was sleeping somewhere—and she tiptoed past his desk into a hallway lit with its usual gray fluorescence. Her new sandals squeaked on the floor as she scurried down the corridor to the laboratory door. Inside, she switched on the lights and went quickly to her primary workstation, a small white desk in the corner which she kept meticulously clean. She set her purse on the desk and fumbled inside for the baggies containing skin and trace substances and two small vials with samples from the fetus. She stuffed the baggie with the skin samples into the pocket of her skirt.
    Her hands were shaking as she hastily opened the desk drawer and put the remaining items inside, tucking them beneath a neat stack of tissues so they wouldn't roll around. She had taken the precaution of labeling them all with false ID numbers and names from the other cases she was working on.
At-Talib, Ibrahim.
A construction worker who'd been poisoned.
Roderigo, Thelma.
A housemaid who'd died of blunt-force trauma to the head. She shut the drawer and locked it.
    It took a few minutes to prepare the skin sample from Nouf's fingernails, but just as she was sliding it into the microscope, there was a noise behind her.
    "
Sabaah al-khayr!
"
    It was a simple good morning, but the shock of it, the loudness and sharpness of the voice, nearly made her cry out. She managed to keep from dropping the sample. Turning, she saw her coworker Salwa.
    Katya let out a strangled reply: "
Sabaah an-nur"' The light of morning to you.
    "Who is it?" Salwa demanded. The loudness of her voice always made Katya feel caught, even when she wasn't guilty.
    Katya realized that she hadn't removed her
burqa.
She lifted it now, showing Salwa her face.
    Salwa frowned. Self-appointed chief of the women's section of
the lab, she was a short, quick, sturdy woman who strode about with a pencil behind her ear and her
burqa
flipped up. It rested on her crown like a coronet, and she wore it just as imperiously. In the rare event that a man peered in at the door, the other women always scrambled to find their
burqas
and fasten them on, whispering apologies and hiding their faces in fear. But Salwa, whose
burqa
was always at the ready, would stare defiantly at the intruder. If she determined that the man was someone who might report back to her boss, she would grudgingly draw the pencil from behind her ear and use it to roll the
burqa
down, just as a medieval mullah might unscroll a parchment for an illiterate king.
    Even when her
burqa
was down, there was no sequestering the mighty voice with which Allah had blessed her. It was a voice to shake the tables and make the beakers sing. It was in constant use, its resonant power augmented by the building's clean lines and plain surfaces. Once it had even interfered with the muezzin's call to prayer. Half the time Katya suspected that Salwa got her way because so many people around her were so eager to keep her quiet.
    "What are you doing here so early?" Salwa asked, drawing closer to Katya with a look of frank suspicion on her face. "Take off your
abaaya.
Let me see your arms and shoulders."
    Katya felt irrationally panicked. "My
abaaya?
"
    "Yes. Do it."
    She unzipped the front of the black cloak and slid out of the garment, revealing a white button-down shirt and a long black skirt. Salwa came closer, unbuttoned Katya's cuffs, and used her pencil to raise the sleeves. Katya realized she was looking for