The woman’s mouth had worked constantly at the wad of sen she kept in it. Her teeth were stained a bloody crimson. She turned to the lightning bug lamp and laughed.
“You’ve figured it all out, haven’t you, baby doll?” she had said, gesturing at the bugs. “We may find some use for you yet.”
It was then that he realized he had asked the bugs to light the room, something only a magician could do. They knew what he was, then.
Her name, she said, was Yah Reza. She said she would help him work on his Nasheenian and that hiding his ability with bugs from another magician would have been like trying to pretend he wasn’t Chenjan. She could see the difference. Now, she had said, he was hers, unless he wanted some other life—wanted to get sold off to gene pirates or the breeding compounds, or become a venom dealer or some mercenary’s translator.
“There are worse fates,” she had said, and something on the stuccoed wall behind her had shifted, and Rhys realized it was an enormous butterfly, big as his hand. “But I can make you a magician.”
A magician.
A Nasheenian magician.
“One that can practice in Nasheen?” he had asked, because he could not go back to Chenja. Something in his chest ached at the thought of it.
He remembered rubbing at the backs of his hands where his father had beaten him with a metal rod when he had refused him. But the magicians had healed those wounds as well, and the skin and bones were mended now, erasing the physical history of that night, those words. But not the memory. His or God’s.
“I can even get you a proper sponsor, once you’re trained. Better, I won’t ask what brought you across the border in the dead of night or how you did it. You get on with the magicians, you get immunity from the draft and the inquisition. What do you think of that?”
Rhys did not fear the Nasheenian draft—Nasheenians didn’t draft foreign men—or the inquisition; he was too smart for them. But Yah Reza offered him magic. In Chenja, to reveal his skill would have meant immediate training for the front, no matter that he was his father’s only son. As a standard, his father’s lack of sons had given Rhys a place at home. Men still headed families in Chenja. They still owned companies, acted as mullahs, ran the government. But as a magician, he would have been forced to the front.
“I’ll stay,” he had told her.
He spent some months among the magicians, learning the intricacies of bug manipulation and organic tech. His Nasheenian improved. He learned to look away from the women in the hall as he passed. They stared at him openly, like harlots. It was up to him to allow them to maintain some shred of honor. When he asked to leave the cavernous labyrinth of the magicians’ quarters and boxing gym to go sightseeing in Faleen, Yah Reza told him he was not yet ready. She encouraged patience. But her words did nothing to distill the growing sense that he was a prisoner there, kept at the discretion of Nasheen’s magicians until he proved worthless or useful. He did not know what they would do with him when they decided which he best embodied.
Yah Reza caught him by the elbow one afternoon as he hurried back to his rooms after another embarrassing encounter with a magician teaching him transmission science. He was not used to a world where women put their hands on him without reservation and regarded him as if he were a young but dangerous insect. Chenja was full of women, of course, but no Chenjan woman had ever grabbed him in the street, not even the lowliest of prostitutes. And no Chenjan woman had ever done the things to him that the women in the border towns had done before their magicians showed up. They would not have dreamed of it. They would have been killed for it.
He was still trembling when Yah Reza grabbed him.
“Come with me, baby doll,” she said. She wore a billowing saffron robe and smelled of death and saffron. A furry spider the size of Rhys’s thumb crawled along her sleeve, and a whirl of tiny blue moths circled her head.
He tried to quiet his trembling.
Yah Reza beckoned him. Rhys followed her through the long, twisting halls of the magicians’ quarters—cool, windowless corridors that suddenly opened into niches and vaulted chambers filled with locusts and cocooned creatures, lit sporadically by glow worms and fire beetles and the ever-present lightning bugs flaring and dying in the dark.
The preponderance of bugs in the magicians’ quarters made his blood sing, as if he was attuned to a bit of everything, able to touch and manipulate pieces of the world. He felt more alive here than he had anywhere else in his life, among those who spent their days coming up with new and interesting ways to kill his people.
I’ll take what I need from them and return, he thought. I’ll make it right.
The boxers’ locker rooms were three steps to the right of the transmission rooms, a corridor away from the internal betting booth, and three long bends of the hall from Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, where magicians and bel dames came to receive treatment for cancer and contagion. The corridors within a magicians’ gym were never the same length, never quite in the same location. Beneath each gym, the world was bent and twisted. The distance-bending corridors were relics from the times before Umayma was habitable, back when magicians lived belowground while they remade the world. This made it possible to step into a gym at the coast and emerge a few minutes later at a gym in Mushtallah or Faleen and Aludra. Practical for long distances, but dizzying over short ones.
As they approached the locker room for outriders, Husayn—the magicians’ favorite boxing nag—passed them in the hall, heading one twist of the hallway down to her own locker room. Husayn was a stocky woman with a face like a shovel. A novice magician scurried after her, carrying her gear.
“Hey, chimba!” Husayn called at Rhys. Too loud. The women in this country were all too loud.
Rhys did not look at her.
“Those magicians haven’t been able to wash that gravy stink off you, you know it?” Husayn persisted.
“I am still perplexed as to why it is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it,” Rhys said. “Perhaps Nasheen’s women sought to frighten away God with their ugliness.”
“Well now, if all your boys are as pretty as you, your boys best start covering up too,” Husayn said. “Ah, the shit I’d like to do to you.” She laughed.
What a fool, Rhys thought. Chenjan mullahs taught that men’s bodies were clean, asexual. Closer to God. Women, real women, were not stirred to sin at the sight of men. If these godless Nasheenian women were stirred at the sight of anything, it was blood.
Yah Reza shooed her away. “Come, now, this isn’t a whorehouse.”
Husayn cackled and moved on.
Rhys ducked into the other locker room. Inside, the light was dim, and a lean woman sat hunched on one of the benches, staring into her hands.
When he stepped in, she looked up. She was long in the face, like a dog, and she had narrow, little eyes and a set to her mouth that reminded Rhys of one of his sisters, the look she got when she wanted something so badly she made herself sick. He hoped this woman didn’t vomit. He knew who would have to clean it up.
Yah Reza moved past him and greeted the outrider.
The outrider stood. She looked uneasy, like a cornered animal—a dog-shifter in form, or maybe some scraggly adolescent sand cat. He might have guessed her for a shifter if he had seen only an image or picture of her, but in person he was able to see clearly that she was not. The air did not prickle and bend around her as it did a shifter. She was just some kid, some standard—just another part of the world.
Yah Reza talked low to the girl and rubbed her shoulders. She spit sen on the floor. Rhys knew who would have to clean that up too.
“This is Rhys. Come here, boy,” Yah Reza said, and Rhys walked close enough to see that he was a head and shoulders taller than the outrider.
“You bring your wraps?” Yah Reza asked the girl.
The outrider stabbed her fingers toward two long, dirty pieces of tattered muslin on the bench next to her.
Yah Reza spit more sen. “Rhys,�
� she said.
Rhys went to the locker at the back of the room, where they kept the extra gear. He unraveled a couple of hand wraps. He grabbed some tape and took a seat on the bench and finished unraveling the wraps.
“He know how to box?” the outrider asked, and even Rhys, with his nonnative Nasheenian, noticed her mushy inland accent. Where had they picked her up? Working some border town? The magicians were notorious for pushing girls into the ring before they were ready. It made the fights bloodier.
“I don’t believe in violence,” Rhys said.
“A shame too,” Yah Reza said. “He’s a damn fine shot with a pistol. But don’t worry none about his technique. He’s a magician, girl. He knows hands. You get on, and I’ll meet you in a quarter-hour. We got some fancy visitors want to meet you and Husayn before the fight.”
Yah Reza petted the outrider’s cheek.
The outrider sat back on the bench and eyed Rhys like he was a beetle turned over on its back, not sure if it was harmless or just playing at docility until she got close.
Rhys asked for her right hand.
She hesitated, and he thought that was odd from a woman who was about to go toe to toe with a seasoned fighter in a magicians’ gym. He realized then how young she was, maybe seventeen. It was hard to tell with Nasheenian women. They grew up fast, bore the marks of their short, brutal childhoods on their bodies and faces. Most of them were broken old crones at thirty.
He taped the wrap in place and began to loop it around her wrist and between her fingers. She had her palm flat and her fingers wide.
When he had first come to Nasheen, he’d thought he would hate all of its women for their ugliness, their vanity, but as he put the wraps on this little dog-faced girl, he found himself admiring her hands. She had strong, beautiful fingers, calloused knuckles and palms, and he saw her scars, and the dirt under her bitten nails. There was something splendid and tragic about her all at once.
He tied off her right hand and moved to the left. When he took her left hand in his, something about the way she held it, the way it felt beneath his fingers, made him hesitate. He pulled at her fingers.
She winced.
“You’ve done an injury to this hand?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“An old injury,” he amended as he pressed his thumb against the back of her hand, rubbed her knuckles, pushed in slow circles up to her wrist. She had hairline fractures in the small bones of her left hand. Some had healed, but badly. It was a brittle hand.
“You shouldn’t be fighting with this,” he said.
She pulled her hand from him, and her mouth got harder. Her shoulders stiffened. “I can wrap myself. They told me magicians used tricks.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t finish.” He took her hand in his again. His ability to diagnose illness and injury had been the first sign that he’d inherited his father’s skill as a magician. A more talented magician might have been able to heal her hands, if the injuries weren’t so old, but Rhys’s skill was limited, his knowledge incomplete. The longer he stayed among the Nasheenian magicians, the more he worried things would stay that way.
“Does your family approve of you boxing?” he asked to fill the cool silence. Three locusts climbed up his pant leg. He moved his hand over them, and they dropped to the floor.
“Don’t have much family,” she said. “Where you learn to wrap hands? They teach you that in magic school?”
“My uncle took me to fights in Chenja,” he said, “when I was too young to know better. I wrapped his hands.”
“You got soft hands. You aren’t a fighter. You never fought?”
“I don’t believe in violence.”
“You ain’t answered the question.”
He finished taping her bad hand. He squeezed her fist in his palm. “There, that good?”
She made fists with both hands. “I been taped worse.”
“I’m sure,” Rhys said. He hesitated. If she had had a proper husband, or a brother, or a son, that man would have told her not to fight. He would have taken care of her. “You shouldn’t fight with that hand,” he repeated.
“I been doing it a long time. It’s fight or die where I’m from. Sometimes you have to run away just to live. I suppose you know something about that.”
Rhys did not answer.
“I don’t mind you’re black,” she said, magnanimously.
“It doesn’t matter what we mind,” Rhys said. “God sorts all that out.”
“Our God says your god is false.”
“They’re the same God.” He had not always believed that, even when he pressed his head to the ground six times a day in prayer and intoned the same litany in a dead language, the language of Umayma, brought down from the moons with the Firsts at the beginning of the world: In the name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and Merciful…
For years he had believed what the Imams told them, that Nasheenians were godless infidels who worshipped women and idols brought in from dead worlds, worlds blighted by God for their own idolatry. But when the muezzin called the prayers here, those who were faithful went to the same mosque he did with the other magicians, prayed in nearly the same way, and spoke in the same language—God’s language—though his birth tongue was Chenjan, and theirs, Nasheenian.
They were all Umaymans, the people from the moons who had waited up there a thousand years while magicians made Umayma half-habitable—all but the Mhorians, Ras Tiegans, the Heidians, and the two-hundred-odd Drucians, who had come later. Survivors of other dead worlds, worlds out of the darkest parts of the sky.
In the mosque, forehead pressed against the floor, Rhys never understood the war. It was only when he raised his head and saw the women praying among him, bareheaded, often bare-legged, shamelessly displaying full heads of hair and ample flesh, that he questioned what these women truly believed they were submitting to. Certainly not the will of God. On the streets he saw widowed women reduced to begging, girls like this one earning money with blood, and bloated women coming in from the coast after giving birth to their unnatural broods of children. This was the life that Chenja fought against. This godlessness.
Whenever the bakkie got sick or the milk soured, his mothers would blame “those godless Nasheenians, daughters of demons.”
“Rhys?”
He looked up from the outrider’s hands to see Yah Reza in the doorway. A dozen fungus beetles skittered past her into the room. The outrider flinched.
“Yah Tayyib needs you in surgery,” Yah Reza said.
Rhys squeezed the girl’s fist a final time. “Luck to you,” he said.
“We have some visitors come to see you boxers,” Yah Reza said. “You up for it?” She was slipping further into whatever vernacular the girl spoke.
“What sort of visitors?” the girl asked.
Rhys stood, and put away the tape. He walked toward the door.
“The foreign kind. They don’t bite, though, so far as I can tell.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, then.”
Yah Reza clapped her hands. “Come.”
Rhys turned past the magician and walked into the dim outer corridor. He saw a cluster of figures outside Husayn’s locker room and paused to get a look at them.
Two black women wearing oddly cut hijabs spoke in low tones. Though the hijabs were black, their long robes were white, and dusty along the hem. They wore no jewelry, and instead of sandals they wore black boots without a heel.
Despite their complexions, he knew they were not Chenjan, or even Tirhani. They were too small, too thin, fine-boned, and the way they held themselves—the way they spoke with heads bent—was not Chenjan or Tirhani but something else.
One of them looked out at him and ceased speaking. From across the long hall, he saw a broad face with high cheekbones, large eyes, and dark brows. It was a startlingly open face, as if she was not used to keeping secrets. Her skin was bright and clear and smoother than any he’d seen save for the face of a child. She was old
, he knew, by her posture and her height, but the clarity of her skin made him want to call her a girl. It was not the face of a woman who had grown up in the desert or even a world with two suns. Unless she was the daughter of a rich merchant who had kept her locked in a tower in some salty country, hidden from the suns by dark curtains and filters for a quarter century, she was not from anywhere on Umayma.
“You’re very young to be a man,” she said, and laughed at him. Her accent was strange—a deep, throaty whir swallowed all of her vowels, and when she laughed, she laughed from deep in her chest. It was a boisterous sound, too loud to come from a woman with such a narrow chest.
“You’re not from Nasheen,” he said.
“Nor are you.”
She was not from anywhere in the world. But that was impossible. The Mhorians had been the last allowed refuge on Umayma, nearly a thousand years before. They had brought with them dangerous idols and belief in a foreign prophet, but they claimed to be people of the Book, and custom required that they be given sanctuary. It was a custom soon discarded, though, and the ships that followed the Mhorians were shot out of the sky. Their remains had rained down over the world like stars.
Were these women people of the Book?
“You’re an alien,” he said, tentative, a question.
She laughed again, and the laughter filled the corridor. “Your first?”
He nodded.
“Not the last, I hope,” she said.
And then Yah Reza and the outrider entered the hall and blocked his view, and Rhys turned away and walked quickly past a bend in the corridor, where he could no longer hear the alien woman’s voice.
The memory of her laugh tugged at something inside him, something he thought he’d left back in Chenja. He wanted to pull back her hijab and run his fingers through the black waves of her unbound hair. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. He had been too long in Nasheen.
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