“We have plenty of other offers, thanks.”
“Oh do you? I admit I am surprised. Only one of those red djinns can get you over.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Of course, I could get you over.”
“Is that so? And how would you do that? Dig?”
“Fly.” Safiyah turned to Kage. “And your little friend here can help with that. It’s why I approached her in the first place.”
“I think we’ll make our own way,” Nyx said.
“What, with the Chenjan? Oh, please. Ask her what work she has for you. Ask her what she traffics in. There’s a thriving market in human flesh here. There will be money made for your bodies, no doubt, but you will not be collecting it.”
“You seem to know a lot about what we’re up to.”
“I have a single-minded interest in arriving on the other side of this wall. To achieve that, I need a Drucian. It so happens one works for you. I propose a simple partnership until we reach the other side. Is that so remarkable?”
“Fuck, you even talk like a First Family,” Nyx said.
“I’ve found it’s easier to be who you are instead of pretending at something else. Fewer things to remember.”
Nyx regarded her once more. She was slight in stature, a head shorter than Nyx, and it made the size of her generous breasts and hips altogether more distracting. But Nyx was not so besotted that she failed to notice the fine scarring on the inside of the woman’s wrists as she spoke, the peculiar worm-wheels of a venom addict.
“Let me talk to my team,” Nyx said. “We have a few choices. They’ll want some say in it.”
Safiyah smiled, like a cat with a roach. “That is a fine line, honey sweet, but I suspect there is only one woman making all the decisions.”
“I’ll be in touch,” Nyx said.
“I’m sure,” Safiyah said.
“Remember what happened the last time we took on an addict,” Eshe said.
Nyx knew very well what happened the last time she took on an addict. Eshe wasn’t present to torture and kill her, but Nyx was. She resented him just a little for bringing it up.
“Thanks for that, Eshe,” she said.
“Listen, even if she is an enemy… you always said known enemies were better than unknown ones. So why not keep her close?” Eshe said.
“You put up a filter to deter bugs. You don’t invite them in to sleep with you on the off chance you can swat them later.”
“She’s a magician who knows the territory. And Nasheenian,” Ahmed said. “I trust a Nasheenian magician—even a First Family—far more than any Chenjan.”
“But she could use that against us,” Nyx said.
“She could just as easily use it against us if we don’t take her along,” Ahmed said.
“Kage, you have anything to say about this?” Nyx asked.
Kage had her gun resting across her thighs. She seemed to be contemplating the floor. She raised her head. “I did not think this was for voting.”
“It’s not,” Nyx said. “But I want your opinion.”
“If we do not go over soon, we will run out of money. And food. We will die here. Or die working here. It’s just logic. We must take the magician’s offer.”
“And it doesn’t concern you at all that she picked you out as some key piece of whatever plan she has for getting us over.”
“No. It means you need me to get over the Wall, too.”
That was a motive Nyx could understand. “All right. We ditch the Chenjan and take the magician’s offer. But if it all goes to fuck, I’m blaming Kage.”
Kage stiffened.
“It’s a joke,” Nyx said.
“Not sure it’s the best time for jokes,” Ahmed said. He stood. “I’m getting a drink. Anyone coming?”
Nyx was, for the first time in a long time, tired of drinking. She just wanted to sleep. “I’m staying in. We’ll have shit to do tomorrow.”
“I’ll go,” Eshe said.
Nyx figured Eshe was due for a drink.
“Anybody else?” Ahmed said.
Isabet turned her back to them and curled up in her burnous. Khatijah shook her head.
Kage uncurled from her seat. “Can I go tell the magician we will accept her offer?” Kage asked.
“Sure,” Nyx said.
“Let’s go,” Ahmed said to Eshe. “I’d like one more drunk night before some magician turns me into a cicada.”
Eshe and Ahmed asked around and found what the locals called a shebeen, just a knotted hunk of stone piled against the side of the Wall where a man sold bitter liquor from the carapace of a monstrous insect head the size of a small incendiary burst.
The liquor hit Eshe hard, harder than he expected, and two rounds later, the desert was a soft, gauzy sea of delight. He hadn’t felt this pleasant in a good long while. It made him want to buy more of whatever the liquor was to take with them over the Wall.
Ahmed didn’t seem to be faring much better. Eshe bought another round and finally asked him.
“So who was that woman tried to kill you? You tell Nyx yet?”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s dead. Did you see how fast Nyx was with that shot?” He held up his hands as if he were sighting down the barrel of a gun. “She moves faster that you’d expect, a woman her size. If I could move that fast I wouldn’t have been in intelligence.” He sighed into his drink. “It took the best people.”
“What, and left people like you and Nyx?” Eshe said.
Ahmed snorted. “Yeah. Bad guys.”
“I never wanted to be a bad guy,” Eshe said.
Ahmed raised his glass. “Sorry, kid. You are.” He drank. “I never wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be a farmer.”
“You ever worked a farm? I have. Forced into it by my house mothers. It’s shit work.”
“I did the same. I liked my house mothers a good deal more than you, though. They had a farm. It was a good life. Predictable.”
“Dull,” Eshe said.
“How’d you get out of it?”
Eshe shrugged. “Same as any boy. Dressed up like a girl and ran away.”
Ahmed ordered them another round.
Eshe shook his head. “I think that’s enough for me.”
“One more,” Ahmed said. He leaned toward him. “What are you going to do, at the end of this? Run off with your girl?”
“Who? Isabet? She’s not mine. Or anybody’s. Stay the fuck away from her. She’s trouble.”
“It’s not her I’m interested in.”
A veiled woman came over and refilled their drinks from a burnished brown vessel. Eshe could practically see the fumes coming off the stuff.
“Why’d you run away?” Ahmed said.
“You know why,” Eshe said. “You know what they do to boys.”
“My childhood wasn’t yours. I stayed with the same family my whole life. Sounds like you didn’t.”
“It was just like anybody else’s shit. You know, hired out to other people. Like a dog. Like a slave. It was a long time ago.”
Ahmed reached out, put his hand over Eshe’s. “Tell me. I was a house boy, too.”
Eshe didn’t pull away. Leaned toward him instead. His head felt lovely, relaxed, as if it were bobbing in a warm sea. He thought of Isabet, and what life would be like with a wife and child. It wasn’t a family he wanted so much as a sense of belonging. He wanted to matter to someone.
“Who cares what they did to us? It’s what we do with it that matters. That’s what Nyx says.” He polished off his glass. As he went to set it down, he nearly missed the table. Best to pace myself, he thought, but it was a faraway notion, like listening to someone else calling to him from across a wide gully.
“I think Nyx is going to grind us all up out here,” Ahmed said. “The same way our house mothers did.”
“It’s not like that. Nyx isn’t like that.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Nyx doesn’t fuck me and whore me out. How’s that?”<
br />
Ahmed pulled his hand away. Eshe grimaced.
“Sorry,” Ahmed said.
“Everybody’s always sorry. But it doesn’t change anything, does it?” Eshe said. The look on Ahmed’s face made him feel bad, so he reached out, took Ahmed’s elbow. “You really don’t get it. You think she’s some kind of fucking monster. But Nyx I get. As long as you’re useful to her, you’re safe. And she’ll protect you. What woman in your life ever protected you?”
“Women said I had a pretty face,” Ahmed said. “Fucking some squad commanders protected me at the front.”
“Nyx isn’t like that.”
“You just have to die for her, then?”
“You don’t get it.” Eshe released him. He tried to stand, but the table moved from under him. He sat back down, hard. “Everybody betrays you. It’s just a matter of when.”
Ahmed leaned toward him, so close Eshe could smell the liquor on his breath. Ahmed patted his cheek with his warm hand. The touch lingered. He stroked Eshe’s brow. “I’m sorry. You’re a good kid. I’m just worried that you’re with her. I don’t think anything good will come of it.”
Ahmed kissed him softly on the mouth.
Eshe pulled away, disoriented. “We should go. I have to take a piss.”
“I could have been a powerful magician,” Ahmed said. “Could have trained for it. I had the talent. But I didn’t want to be a weapon. Instead, I hacked off men’s arms and poured blood worms into women’s eyes.” He snorted; it sounded something like a laugh.
“We do what we have to do to stay alive,” Eshe said.
“How much longer do we have, I wonder?” Ahmed said.
“Let’s go.”
They stumbled away from the shebeen and followed the shadow of the Wall. Eshe stumbled behind a stir of dark tents and took a piss. When he finished, he went to where Ahmed stood a few paces away, his back to him. Eshe grabbed his hand.
Ahmed turned, and leaned into him. Kissed him on the mouth again.
“I’m pretty fucked up,” Eshe said.
“It’s a good thing I’m perfect, then.”
It wasn’t until he was entirely nude that Nyx thought to slow down, and only because his beauty stirred something both passionate and remorseful within her. After six weeks in the desert, lingering at the edge of death, staring into the black abyss of nothing every day, every hour, his beauty was nothing short of shocking, and the intensity of her own desire overwhelmed her.
Nyx came awake with a start, to the sound of someone vomiting. The dream lingered, hot and tangled. God, she wanted a good fuck now. Who had she been fucking?
The room was dark. She heard someone on the balcony outside, and went to go check it out.
Kage and Ahmed were there, flanking Eshe as he crouched at the edge of the balcony, heaving. Ahmed held a water bulb. When Eshe finished heaving, he washed his face with it.
“Get some fucking sleep,” Nyx said. “Kage’s little friend has us going over the Wall tomorrow.”
Eshe heaved again. Just a thin stream of mucus now.
“When did they get back, Kage?” Nyx asked.
“Not long,” Kage said.
It was only a few hours until morning prayer. They still called it out here, though Nyx wasn’t so sure it was Nasheen or Chenja’s God everyone was praying to.
When Eshe raised his head this time, Nyx could see him clearly in the blue glow of the balcony lights. He seemed very young, and lost, and so totally alone that for a moment he reminded her of her youngest brother Ghazi when he first learned he was going to the front, and that turned something in her gut.
“Get cleaned up and get to bed,” Nyx said.
Ahmed’s expression was fierce, and unexpected.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” he said, and Nyx felt that something had shifted, some subtle loyalty on her team that she should have paid better attention to.
“See that you are,” she said, and went back inside.
31.
“They’ll be moving you soon,” said the girl who delivered Inaya’s saffron-laced curry.
Inaya pressed herself to the floor and tried to see the girl’s face before the filter went opaque again. But all she saw before it snapped back on was the heavy, dusty hem of the girl’s muslin habit.
“Where?” Inaya whispered, but the girl was already moving down the hall.
She sighed and pressed her cheek to the cool, gritty floor.
The tally of days on the far wall had gotten muddled. Inaya suspected someone came in and wiped away her old marks whenever they took her out for interrogations. Or perhaps they put her in a new cell each time? Did all the cells look alike, or had she simply gone so mad that she’d lost the ability to think critically about anything at all, even her own surroundings?
She spent much of her time gazing through the vent that brought her air and light, contemplating the filter that masked it. Even if she could shift, the filter posed a problem. The grounds would be wrapped in filters, all of them coded for different individuals. This one would be coded for no one. If she got herself up there and tried to reach through, no doubt it would devour her arm. She needed a way out that did not rely on her suppressed skills.
For a time, she tried to get to know the guards, but they would not speak to her. The girl’s words were the closest thing to a friendly voice she had heard in many weeks.
Look to what you devour… When she closed her eyes, she sometimes thought of Khos, baring his marked skin to her. She tried to remember what was written there, but the words were all in Mhorian, weren’t they? Had she missed some vital clue?
They would move her now, to some work camp, and kill her there. Her only hope was to try and find a way to break free when they moved her. Or perhaps from the camp itself? How secure could it be, if they labored in the open air? Or would they put her underground in some mine? She’d never see the open air again.
Inaya lay on the floor contemplating her fate. It was the uncertainty that hurt her most. The cold, the deprivation, all of that was fine. She didn’t mind being on her own. She didn’t even mind the boredom. It gave her time alone with her thoughts. But the not knowing…
Over the next few days, she heard more movement outside. More heated words. She once heard three Angels walk down the corridor, talking about “riots” and “madness” but she couldn’t make sense of it. She heard women yelling at their jailers for news before their filters were activated.
Then her filter went transparent, sometime in the early evening as the blue dusk bathed her cell. She sat up. Her bones ached, and she was getting sores on her hips from lying still for so long.
Two male jailers dressed in deep brown robes escorted in a tall, thick woman at least twice Inaya’s size.
Inaya found herself backing up further into her cell to make room.
“Sorry, cat gut,” one of the jailers said. “We’re full up in here and you gotta make room.”
They stepped out, and the filter went opaque again, but not before Inaya saw another woman being escorted down the hall. She was not screaming but screeching, one arm half as long as the other, still webbed and covered in black feathers. Someone had stuffed her into a plain gray habit; it was damp and twisted with mucus and dried blood.
Inaya turned to her new cell companion. “What’s happening out there?”
“Revolution,” the woman said, grimly. Her face was puffy and badly bruised. She was at least two decades older than Inaya, with the beefy body of some cook or well-fed shop laborer. They had not bothered to clean her up yet. She still wore the clothes she had been picked up in, reeking of sticky saffron.
“You’re a shifter?” Inaya asked.
“Me? No. My husband was, though.”
“Was?”
The woman shook her head. “God only knows what bloody things are happening out there. He revealed himself. Now we’re lost.”
“What is happening? Please, I’ve been here for many weeks.”
“You don’t know
? No, I don’t expect they’d tell you, in here. Someone released a burst in Montmare. The Patron’s cousins were killed, and hundreds of others. The Patron took issue with his kin, and the people mourned the civilians, and then… you know the rest. You know what they do to people like my husband.”
“What are they doing? Please, exactly what are they doing?”
“Smoking them all out,” the woman said. “It’s the end days. The final purge of every shifter. There’s war in the streets. Everything’s burning.”
“And the Fourré? Who’s leading the Fourré?”
The woman looked confused. “What do you mean? The same as always. The Madame de Fourré is leading them. Who else would go on such a bloody rampage?”
Inaya leaned against the wall, slid to the floor. “This is very bad,” she said.
“Worse than that,” the woman said. “My sons have no parents now. I told these goddamned heretics that, but they don’t care. They just want to lock us all up and burn us. They won’t kill women though, will they? There’s still a chance for a trial? Tell me there’s a chance?”
“Of course,” Inaya said softly. “There is always a chance.” Inaya had known for some time that she’d been betrayed, but until now, she didn’t realize how badly. Michel must have turned the whole movement—Gabrielle, and the eight cell leaders—even Hynri!—all of them, in lock step with some bloody scheme to topple the government itself. But what would the people think of shifters now? They had become everything the people feared they were. Whatever the priests and Patron wanted to do to them now, they would have free rein to do so, without any repercussions. If her people were not bottled up in jars already, they soon would be.
“How long have you been here?”
But Inaya was staring up at the filtered blue light coming in from above, watching it slowly darken and fade all together, blanketing them in blackness.
32.
“It’s a lot of fucking rope,” Nyx said, eying the bundle knotted securely to Kage’s back.
Kage was used to carrying her gun; the weight of the rope was nothing. She endured their chatter only because in the many weeks she had traveled with these people, she realized very little would shut them up.
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