Her foot caught at the edge of the seam of the playa. She fell again, this time on the hard, cracked red surface. Her head thumped against the dirt. Her legs went numb. She tried to move her arms, to claw forward. They didn’t respond. The beetle pounced. She yelled and smacked it with her head; it scuttled off.
Dying always felt so peaceful.
She came to in the dim blue light of dusk. The ground was still warm, but the air had turned terribly cold. A sharp wind blew sand granules into her face. She coughed, and realized with a surge of hope that she had a terrible urge to urinate.
Nyx yanked her collapsible stew pot out of her pack and pissed in it. She brought the pot to her lips without hesitation. It wasn’t the first time she had to drink her own urine.
After, she lay on her side, chewing on her last strip of sunbaked worm until the final sun went down.
Then she was up again. How, she wasn’t so sure. One minute she was on the ground, and when she came to next, she was walking again, plodding forward like some half-dead, cancerous wanderer.
Then she raised her head and saw a black form winging its way across the night, just there at the edge of the surge of blackness in the northern sky, visible only because as it moved south the stars carpeted the sky behind it.
It was a raven. It alighted on her shoulder.
She blinked, and the bird was off again. For a moment, she wondered if she’d just made it up. Some blotchy darkness that her mind had turned into a bird.
“Bring water, you fuck!” she wheezed.
But it kept cawing, kept circling.
“Fuck you! I had to drop her! Wouldn’t have made it… made it this far.” She was out of breath. Wheezing. Her heart pounded in her chest.
She caught herself drifting, swimming through a cool waterfall in Druce with Radeyah.
She fell again. Fell hard. The breath left her body this time, and she gasped for air, rolled onto her back, faced the star-studded sky.
Dying wasn’t so bad, so why did she keep trying so hard to live?
She stayed down.
Closed her eyes.
She was back at the waterfall again, laughing with Radeyah like some drunk school kid. She had never laughed so much as she had in Druce. How was that possible? It was a contaminated little slice of exile, with oozing bugs and rot that ate Anneke’s first three gardens and secretive little people who all pretended they couldn’t speak Nasheenian. But there was also a whole lot of quiet there—outside Anneke’s shooting range, at any rate.
When she opened her eyes, her whole body was moving. She was covered in bulbous armored bugs, big as her fist. They were chewing at her bloody chest.
Nyx let out a yell, pushed back. A few of the bugs lumbered off her, slow as some fat inlander. They were chewing at her bandolier. They’d broken open the containers of blood, and were lapping it up with thorny proboscides that needled at her skin beneath her tunic.
She tried to push them off, but her hands weren’t responding again. One of them crawled up the length of her: dainty little feet across her neck, her cheek. She gritted her teeth. It perched there on her face, waving its antennae. It came up on its hind legs, waved its front legs like a charging beast.
Nyx snapped at it with her teeth. It was like crushing a grape, or a balloon. The thing just burst, and warm, wet fluid spattered her face, wet her mouth. She choked on bits of the thing, spit it out.
Her fingers twitched. Responded. She grabbed one of the ones on her chest. Mashed it with her hand. It popped, spilling warm, clear liquid across her hand. Nyx slowly brought her hand up to her face, sniffed at the liquid and shattered carapace. It was odorless. She licked it. It was clean and clear, like… water.
Or tasteless poison.
But for a woman who had slurped down another woman’s blood and her own urine just a few hours back, that possibility wasn’t enough to put her off.
Nyx grabbed another of the bugs making a meal of Eskander’s blood, and twisted open the end of it, like pinching off the end of a woody fruit. She sucked out the liquid inside.
It might not have been water, but it was close enough. She grabbed another one, and another, until the sluggish little fuckers began to catch on. As they started to pile off her and go lumbering off toward some rounded mounds in the sand, she scrabbled to her feet, still dizzy, and shed her burnous. She looped the end of it into a sack, and started collecting the bugs and tossing them in. When it was full, she tied it off and collapsed again.
Water, after a very long time in the desert. The feeling was better than any fuck, better than good whiskey, better than dying.
The raven was watching her from the top of another of the mounds, head cocked.
“Eshe?” she said.
No answer. Just the quizzical stare.
She peered, again, at the mound the raven perched on. There were at least a dozen or more mounds beyond it, all about the same size and shape. More ruins? More desert garbage?
She slumped onto the ground again, lost some time.
When she woke, the raven was pecking at the top of her head. She growled and snarled, tried to bat it away. The bird jumped back three hops, cocked its head.
It was still dark. She thought of something Yah Tayyib once told her. It was the secret to winning any contest, he said, in life or in the boxing ring—you just had to get up more often than you fell down.
There was a rising wind, then a clattering racket, like a thousand voices raised in the market, or some mess hall.
Nyx raised her head. Above her, the sky was full of ravens.
Some primal fear filled her, something far more terrifying than dying. She scrabbled to her feet and stumbled toward the mound the raven was sitting on. She hoped to dig into it and find some shelter.
She got within arm’s reach—and fell again.
She put out her hands, expecting to meet resistance.
Instead, she fell right through the mound—and into cool darkness.
25.
They left her for six days.
It was a blessing, though Inaya did not realize it until the third day, as she sat against the roughhewn wall, staring at the narrow shaft of light that brought in cool air during the day and buzzing insects at night. She had large, swollen bumps on her arms, legs, and face. Late summer heat soaked the humid air; there was no temperature control at all. She sweated during the day and shivered at night. There was a single refuse pail in one corner, caked in some specious gunk that made her gag. The pail had yet to be emptied, and her slop spilled over the lip of the bucket now and pooled in one corner. Her clothes were filthy. She, like her cell, stank.
During the day, Inaya listened for voices, conversation, to try and glean some hint of where she was. The type of holding cell was important. This one had a filter instead of a door, which was expensive. It was where an important prisoner would go—one suspected of being a shifter. If she was in some central city cell, they likely had an idea of who she was. But if she was still in Inoublie, there was hope that she could play at being falsely accused. Of what she was accused, of course, she still had no idea. Repeated attempts to talk to those who deactivated the filter long enough to pass her food and water—all of it infused with saffron—met with failure. The guards were all men—older, experienced men with sour, grimacing faces that told her exactly what they thought of her and her kind. She begged and pleaded with them like an innocent woman. In her situation, shedding tears wasn’t difficult.
But not one man spoke to her.
It made it easier, in the end, to sort out her story before they came for her. She knew what an interrogation looked like. Her second husband, Khos, had been a mercenary—a very good one—and he had worked for one of Nasheen’s best bounty hunters. God’s Angels, however, were not as… blunt as Nasheen’s bounty hunters. They would only use force against a woman if they had to… or if they could prove she was a shifter. If they knew she was a shifter—without a doubt—she would no longer be human in their eyes. And from the
cheerless faces of the men who brought her food, her humanity—if not in question—was already suspect just for being here. She had to convince them otherwise.
On the fourth day, they threw another prisoner in with her. Inaya did not know her, and her first fear was that it was some trick—put two shifters together and hope they incriminate themselves.
But the girl was young, only fourteen or fifteen, and not a shifter at all. Not unless she was playing the same game Inaya was.
“I don’t know why I’m here. There were riots. Did they take you in the riots?” the girl asked.
“What riots?”
“They say it’s the misborn”—Inaya could not help but grimace at the use of the derogatory term for shifters—“and a bomb went off at the Angels’ headquarters in the capital. There have been retaliations. It’s horrible. Really horrible.”
Inaya felt a wave of fear, but kept her tone neutral. “How terrible.”
“They’re going door to door. That’s why they took me. But it wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with anything. It’s all just a terrible mistake.” She wrung her hands.
Inaya stopped asking questions. She was afraid what the girl would reveal.
The filter was released on the sixth day. A woman entered. She wore a long black habit and blue wimple. Inaya paid special attention to the woman’s feet, because they were closest to her from where she sat on the bug-ridden floor. Some ant nest had spawned its queens overnight, and they tumbled into her cell from the narrow skylight. Their abandoned wings littered the floor, and made shimmering patterns across her own soiled habit. She had lost one of her shoes in the tussle with God’s Angels. What most interested her was not the woman’s sturdy, square-toed shoes, but the fact that she was not wearing any type of stocking. From far away, that fact may have been easy to miss, but from where Inaya sat, it was a glaring inconsistency in a Ras Tiegan woman whose hygiene and decorum had to be immaculate in order to gain a place as one of God’s Angels. It told her immediately that there was a chance she was still in Inoublie with lesser Angels. No woman in a major city would dress without stockings.
The woman wrinkled her nose, presumably at the stench of the cell, and said, “I’m to get you cleaned up. You’ll be meeting with one of the Arch Angels.”
Inaya’s eyes filled with tears. “Please, will someone tell me why I’m here? I went out to pray and these… men… I’m so frightened.”
“It’s not for me to say. The Arch Angel will see you. Stand up. Stand up or I will have you dragged out.”
Inaya stood. She let the tears continue. Her hands shook. She was suddenly self-conscious next to this clean, primly dressed matron. It took all the self-control she possessed to calm her nerves, and bite back her fear, shame, humiliation… This was a game. She must play her part consistently, or it would be her body getting cut up in some magician’s laboratory, dissected on a slab—possibly while she was still alive. And then the Fourré would break. Michel and Gabrielle could not tolerate each other at the best of times. Without Inaya as a go-between, it was quite possible the whole movement could become fragmented. In her mind’s eye, she saw all of her first-tier cadres devolve into violence and murder. She saw them give her away by demanding her release. What if they had already done it? What if that’s what the rioting was about? What if Michel had used her abduction as an excuse for going back to the tactics she explicitly wanted to move away from? She did not doubt for a moment that her abduction was a calculated one, but she did not yet know how or who. Michel, Adeliz, even Isabet could be suspect. And then there was Gabrielle. And the top tier of cadres. All eight of them had reason to doubt her new direction. To hate her for it.
The woman stripped Inaya bare and threw her under a cold sluice of water in a tiny room plastered in broken gray tile. The corners of the damp, slippery floor were teeming with cockroaches.
The water was cold. The woman threw a palm-sized washing cloth at Inaya and said, “Wash yourself.”
Inaya did what she could with the clean rag and no soap. When she stepped out of the water, hugging herself, shivering, the woman tossed a towel at her. It hit her in the face and fell onto the wet floor.
“Dry yourself.”
“I have a family,” Inaya said. “There has been some mistake.”
“Do not speak out of turn again. Follow instructions, and this will all go easier.”
Inaya picked up the damp towel.
She dressed in a shapeless gray habit and matching wimple. The woman carefully examined her head and face to ensure that not the barest hint of hair had escaped the severe, stiff wimple.
“You are acceptable,” the woman said.
Inaya wanted to ask why it was she had been detained again, but decided to wait to ask someone in authority. She knew better than to guess that this woman would be her interrogator. Anyone with any authority in Ras Tieg tended to be a man, generally a priest or a man with strong ties to the church. This woman may have influence, but she was not the one to plead her case.
She followed the woman through a low-pitched hallway. She heard muffled sounds from behind spongy doors that crawled with scarabs. The bugs kept the exact conversations muted, but the tone carried: pleading, sometimes frantic. She let herself wonder just how many people they kept here, and if all of them were shifters.
She noticed the woman glancing back at her as they walked. Watching for signs of distress? Discomfort? She was tired and hungry and slightly nauseous from all the saffron they were stuffing her with. She wanted to pretend she felt perfectly at ease, but would an innocent, non-shifter woman act that way? Or would she be trembling, terrified? Inaya had already picked her part. She needed to play it. So, though it pained her, she lowered her eyes and wrung her hands and began preparing herself for more weeping. One of her aunts had been a professional mourner, and she had always envied the way the woman could call up a sob on command. It got her what she wanted, and more. Men did not like to see women weep. It reminded them of their own failings.
The woman paused at one of the doors. This one was without scarabs. Inaya heard nothing on the other side of it. The woman knocked and entered.
Inaya was not certain what she expected. She had never been incarcerated before. She understood interrogation, but in her mind, interrogation meant fear, pain, torture. And those types of interrogations generally only happened if one was certain they had a person with information, didn’t they?
The room was without any kind of furniture. The floor was soft, spongy—some organic thing that ate whatever bodily fluids had been spilled here. It had the feel of any other type of cell, only cleaner because of the organics. The room’s only light came from glow worms set beneath a translucent band at the center of the ceiling. The worms inside were dying, so the light was orange instead of pale yellow. There was nothing else in the room.
“Go on,” the woman said.
Inaya walked into the room.
The woman shut the door. Inaya heard the soft chitter of the scarabs as they descended outside the door to muffle all sound. But the sound of what?
Inaya leaned against the door and pressed her ear to the soft interior surface. The walls were coated in the same organic matting as the floor. Her face came away sticky.
She moved away from the door, into the light. Was she to rot here, then? Brought into one cell after another? What was happening?
Inaya paced for a time, then finally settled into one of the corners furthest from the door to wait.
And wait.
It was many hours before they came for her. She had to squat in one of the empty corners to relieve herself. She expected a man, an interrogator, but it was another woman. This one said only, “Come,” and refused any and all questions.
They moved her four more times, to four identical rooms. After a while, she started to wonder if they were simply taking her around in a circle and plunking her down into the same exact room time after time. During one of the many moves, they fed her. Some curried meat and rice s
lathered in saffron. She had eaten so much saffron the last week, the smell of it made her gag. But hunger and boredom overcame her queasy stomach, and she kept it down.
Every time she thought she might sleep in one of the rooms, they moved her again. It was then that she realized they must be watching her, and purposely disrupting her sleep. The rooms were all windowless, and the lights were always on.
When the door opened for the fifth time, she was so tired and disoriented that she almost didn’t recognize the woman at the door as the one who had come for her the first time. As the woman moved into the room, a second figure came in behind her. The fear came, then, the fear she had been tamping down for days.
The man was dressed in the red robes and black cowl of a God’s Angel. He was young, younger than she expected, a few years her junior. He had a neatly trimmed beard and dark eyes set in a lean face with a sallow complexion. He carried nothing. His hands were folded neatly in front of him, hidden in the long sleeves of his crimson robe. His gaze met hers, and at once she felt filthy again, and somehow inadequate.
“Inaya il Parait?” He stopped a few paces from her, but she could see that he was a head and shoulders taller than her, nearly as tall as a Nasheenian.
It was startling to hear that name aloud, after all this time. But she still had the sense to shake her head. “No, that isn’t my name. Please, I think you have me confused with someone else. I just want to go home.”
The man nodded to the woman, and she shut the door.
“What time is it?” Inaya asked.
“That has little relevance here,” he said. “You say you are not Inaya il Parait. I have witnesses who say otherwise.”
“Then they too are mistaken. I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is. I just want to go home.”
“And where is home?”
“Tirhan. My family is there.”
“Is that so? You openly admit to marrying a Tirhani?”
“What? No. My husband is Mhorian.”
She had assumed they brought her in in connection with the Fourré. It had never occurred to her that they might think she was a Tirhani spy. Oh, God, she had not prepared to talk her way out of that.
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