She climbed up the ladder to Arran’s loft.
He came awake before she reached him. She heard the straw stir. She took the knife from her mouth, cut her palm, and as she met the top of the ladder, said, “Arran.”
Following Jaks to find this boy had cost Nyx a kidney, her womb, and a year’s worth of zakat from Yah Tayyib.
It had cost Tej his life.
Nyx shoved her bloody hand against the boy’s mouth and brought up the other hand with the knife.
When infected boys came home, they jeopardized the lives of women like Jaks and Kine and little Maj. It’s what she told herself every time. It’s what she told herself now as she shoved her knife fast and deep into Arran’s naked armpit three times.
Arran flailed in the straw. Nyx listened for Jaks. Sex and liquor and a hard fight would send even the worst of sleepers into a dead quiet, but anybody who lived like Jaks might be able to shake off worse.
Arran tried to catch her wrist with his other hand. Nyx rolled the rest of the way up onto the platform and pinned him still. She waited until the strength bled out of him, then began to saw at the neck with her stolen knife. For a stretch of time while she cut off Arran’s head, she wasn’t a bel dame at all—just another body hacker, another organ stealer, another black trader of red goods. The only difference was, when she brought this boy in, her sisters would forgive her. Her sisters would redeem her.
She had collected the blood debt this boy owed Nasheen.
Nyx tugged off her burnous with sticky fingers and bundled up the head. She was an hour’s walk from the local collector’s. Her feet were numb, and her legs ached.
This was all she knew how to do.
She got lost somewhere outside Jaks’s place and turned around in circles, listening to the scuffle of feet and bugs. She remembered what Jaks had said about the mutants. Dark shapes hissed and skittered through the alley, some of them big as dogs—only without the cozy fur. She stumbled over a head-size ravager gnawing on a human hand. It caught hold of the end of her bloodied bag and tried to jerk it out of her hands. She bludgeoned the enormous bug to death with Arran’s head.
Light and noise from the apartments hanging above her seeped into the street. Her bundle grew heavier as she walked. She kept losing her grip, and the head thudded onto the dusty street, picking up more sand. The organic burnous would eat most of the blood, but not for much longer. Even bugs got full.
She’d just turned off onto a lane she recognized when she caught the sound of footsteps behind her. She didn’t turn, only picked up her pace. Her insides were hurting again. She needed a second wind, but she’d already spent her fourth getting into Faleen.
The footsteps behind her broke into a run.
Nyx ran too.
The way was mostly dark, cut through with rectangles and lattices of light. She ducked in and out of darkness. Bugs hissed and scattered around her.
She was twenty-four years old, a bottom-feeder among the bel dames, and she was about to be far less than that.
“Nyx! Nyx!”
She kept running. Just keep going.
Two shadows leaked out of the alley ahead of her. She knew their shapes before they leapt—a fox and a raven. Shifters tracked better in animal form. The third would come from behind. She put one arm over her head to deflect some of the blow.
Her sisters cloaked her from all sides.
I’m a fool, Nyx thought as she hit the dirt, suffocated by the weight of her sisters’ bodies. It took three of them to pry the burnous from her clenched fingers.
Nyx howled. She twisted, found an opening through fur and feathers and long, black burnouses.
They shot her. Twice.
Nyx heard her sisters’ voices in hazy snatches, little clips of song and breathy whispers. Rasheeda, the raven, had once been an opera singer. A soprano. Nyx had never much cared for opera. It was all about virgin suicides and widowed martyrs. She got enough of that in real life.
The air was sultry and smelled of death and lemon. Nyx saw tall women wearing the white caps of Plague Sisters moving through the hall. She could hear the click and scuttle of insectile legs. The Plague Sisters were a guild of magicians specializing in the decontamination of bel dames and the refurbishment of discharged soldiers. Nyx had been among them before, back when her carcass was hauled in from the front, charred and twisted. But she’d been too ruined even for the Plague Sisters, and they’d sent her to Yah Reza and Yah Tayyib, two of the country’s most skilled magicians. Nyx’s first memories of reconstituted life were of Faleen. The sound of cicadas. Yah Reza’s eyes, the color of sapphire flies.
Fatima minced into the room with a white raven on her shoulder… Rasheeda the raven. Fatima spent a moment fussing with the gas lamp near the bed. Fatima was picky about things, and had gone so far as to pose her bodies for pick up. She also dabbled her fingers in bel dame politics. She had the patience for it, and the bloodline. Bel dames ran through every generation of her family.
Gas lamps meant they were in Mushtallah or Amtullah, one of the major cities in the heart of Nasheen. If that was true, it meant Nyx had been out a long time—and she was in a lot of trouble. Behind Fatima was a long, thin window that looked down onto a street the color of foam. Extravagant figures cloaked in peach and crimson milled past the smoky glass like burned jewel bugs. Nyx no longer wondered if she was still half asleep. Her dreams were never so colorful.
“She’s coming around again,” Fatima said to the raven.
The raven shivered once, hopped from Fatima’s shoulder, and began to morph into her sister Rasheeda. A few minutes later, Rasheeda was mostly human again, naked, covered in mucus, tossing her head of dark hair and snickering. Feathers rolled out across the floor.
Rasheeda came alongside the bed and wiped the worst of the mucus from her face and neck with one of Nyx’s bedsheets. She had a peculiar way of cocking her head that put Nyx in mind of the raven.
“You look terrible,” Rasheeda said.
“You helped,” Nyx said.
Nyx tried to sit up. Rasheeda snickered again. Unlike Fatima’s illustrious line, Rasheeda’s was nothing special—she’d been just another grubby kid from the coast whose mother was into career breeding. Nyx heard that Rasheeda had gone mad at the front, ripping out entrails and eating Chenjan hearts. There was only one suitable occupation for a madwoman from the front after she was discharged.
Nyx gazed down the length of her own body. She swam in the black nightdress of the Plague Sisters. She pushed up the sleeves and saw her own tawny wrists and arms, like sticks. She dared not look at her belly or legs. The bullets her sisters shot her with had been tipped with bugs. They’d whittled her down to almost nothing.
“Get me something to eat,” Nyx croaked, and Rasheeda laughed.
One of the Plague Sisters strode into the room, white skirt trailing behind her. A cloud of spiders clung to her hem, darkening the fabric.
The Plague Sister fussed with Nyx’s bedding and probed at her arm with the puckered snout of a semi-organic needle, which blinked at Nyx with half-dumb eyes. Nyx flinched. The sister gave her a disapproving frown and pulled away from her arm, taking the blood sample with her.
“I’ll mark her for final analysis,” the sister said, “but the venom should be out of her system.” She walked back out, her entourage of insects pooling behind her.
“Are you all they sent?” Nyx asked.
Rasheeda snickered again, still sticky and naked.
“They couldn’t spare any more of us to go running after a rogue sister,” Fatima said. She was tall, skinnier and darker than Rasheeda, almost Chenjan in color, and stronger in the face and shoulders. She bore a perpetual frown on her long countenance.
“Dahab’s here,” Rasheeda said absently. “Luce went for sodas.”
Dahab and Luce. If they’d sent Dahab, it was a wonder Nyx was still alive. Four mad, skilled bel dames had tracked her across the desert. Why the fuck was she still breathing?
“What am
I doing in the interior?”
“A suit’s been filed,” Fatima said.
“Catshit. You don’t have anything on me.”
“I know a number of butchers outside Punjai,” Fatima said. “One of them even bought a womb that matches your tissue samples. She sold it back to us.”
“That doesn’t prove—”
“We have Yah Tayyib,” Rasheeda said.
“Yah Tayyib’s taken an oath. He wouldn’t testify. About black work or anything else.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Fatima said. “He knows the place of a bel dame. He knows we’re just as happy to haul in rogue magicians as black sisters. We used to hunt magicians when they went rogue too. Black bel dames ruin our reputation.”
Nyx lay back on the bed. Yah Tayyib, who had mended her when she was barely human, who recalled her body and mind from the front when she thought she had lost both there. The man who taught her to box.
“He wouldn’t make a charge,” she said.
“There was another complaint,” Fatima said. “Not as potent as Yah Tayyib’s, but a formal complaint nonetheless.”
“Raine,” Nyx said.
Fatima raised her brows. “You expected it?”
“I’ve been expecting him to file a formal complaint ever since I cut off his cock.”
“It was deserved,” Rasheeda said.
“Deserved or not, he’s filed a formal complaint about a bel dame doing black work,” Fatima said.
“Lucky you left him his balls,” Rasheeda said, “or you’d get a fine for reproductive terrorism.” She waggled her index finger and snickered.
“So what happens now?” Nyx asked. “You give me some kind of probation?”
“No,” Fatima said. “We terminate your contract and send you to prison.”
“What?” Nyx said. Prison was for draft dodgers and terrorists. Prison was for men.
“The sentence came from the queen.”
“I’m bored,” Rasheeda said. “Where’s my soda?” She went naked into the hall, calling for Luce.
Nyx stared into her skinny, veined hands again. It was like she’d woken up with someone else’s body.
“How long do I serve?” she asked.
“A year, maybe less. We could have had you sent to the front.”
“How did you find me?”
“We had Rasheeda posted at Jaks’s residence.”
Of course. She’d seen only three of them at the fight. “So you knew about Jaks?”
“We looked up your note,” Fatima said, then wrinkled her nose. “You look and smell like death. I’ll get you something to eat.” She walked into the busy hall.
Prison, Nyx thought, with all the criminals Raine and people like her had put there.
Nyx tried to pull her legs off the bed. They were numb. How long had she been here? The window overlooking the street was barred, and the walls were solid stone. How the hell could she get bars out of stone?
But Fatima was coming back into the room with a Plague Sister bearing a tray of something that smelled a lot like food, and Rasheeda had her arms full of bottles of soda. If there was a way out of this one, Nyx couldn’t think of it. Didn’t even know if she wanted it. Her body was done.
“Here,” Rasheeda said, throwing her a bottle. Nyx’s reflexes were off. She ducked instead of catching it. “You won’t get any of those in the box.”
“When she’s done eating,” Fatima told the Plague Sister, “I have a team coming to get her.”
Nyx didn’t finish eating, but they still came for her.
And prison was pretty shitty.
4
“It’s time,” Yah Reza said.
Rhys entered the plague hall. Yah Tayyib and two other magicians sat at a large circular stone table at the center of the room. Three Plague Sisters, the hems of their white robes dripping with spiders, sat across from them. Like Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, the plague hall was a cavernous room lined with jars of mostly human organs. And like the magicians’ quarters, the whole room hummed with the sound and feel of bugs. Rhys’s skin prickled. He had waited some time for this.
Yah Reza followed Rhys inside and bid him stand next to her within a pace of the table.
Three months after Rhys saw his first alien, Yah Reza had deemed him ready for a magician’s trial. He had come to the interior and been independently tested by the Plague Sisters. He had read his performance in their faces, in the hard line the bugs themselves drew against him. The Plague Sisters kept a diverse colony of insects within their care, but he should have been able to manipulate them far more effectively than he had. If the organs and entrails he’d mended on the slabs had been those belonging to real human beings, he doubted his patients would have entirely recovered. Some may not have lived. He knew the outcome of his evaluation even before Yah Tayyib spoke.
“We have spent some time discussing your evaluation,” Yah Tayyib said. “My fellow magicians and Plague Sisters agree that you have some skill in the arts. No doubt Yah Reza would not have undertaken your tutelage if she did not believe you were gifted.” He carefully pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Unfortunately, we have not deemed your talent sufficient to grant you a practicing government license.”
Rhys exhaled. What had he expected, that a Chenjan man in his prime would be given leave to walk through a palace filter and perform surgery on the Queen’s ministers? There would be no easy road, no well-paying government job. But hearing it out loud felt better than he thought it would. Something, some expectation, had been cut away. Hope, maybe.
“However,” Yah Tayyib said, “we find it acceptable to grant you a provisional license that allows you to practice so long as you are employed. Yah Reza has expressed interest in keeping you on at the magicians’ quarters as a teacher, if you wish it. Otherwise, you’re free to take up gainful employment with whatever employer you see fit. Do you have any questions?”
Rhys looked over at Yah Reza. She smiled her sen-stained smile. She intended on keeping him prisoner for the rest of his days, then.
“Yes,” Rhys said, turning back to Yah Tayyib. “Is the denial of my government license based on my talent or my race?”
The old magician shook his head. “Rhys, if you were as talented as Yah Reza hoped, we would have no choice but to grant you a government license. Nasheen could not turn away one with such skill. But your talents are middling. We have no place among the palace magicians or within the First Families for a mediocre Chenjan magician. You are better suited for the private sector.”
Rhys swallowed his words. What was there left to say? His father had cursed him the night he refused him. Cursed and abandoned him. This is my penance, Rhys thought, this time among godless Nasheenians.
“Thank you,” Rhys said finally.
Yah Reza led him out.
When the door closed behind them, she said, “It is not such a terrible thing, to teach Nasheenian magicians. You are capable with children and the teaching of standard arts.”
“I will not be staying long,” Rhys said. “I’ll find employment elsewhere.”
“Of course,” Yah Reza said, and he should have realized then that she knew something he did not.
The magicians did no end of business with bel dames and bounty hunters. Both groups often came to the gym looking for new recruits—petty magicians and women just back from the front. Government officials frequented the fights as well, recruiting veterans and magicians as order keepers. Rhys spent week after week at the gym acting the part of a cheap harlot, trying to sell his services. But no bel dame would have him, and the order keepers, of course, would not even speak to him. The magicians could afford to pretend not to notice his accent and his coloring, but the rest of Nasheen… the rest of Nasheen saw him for what he was—a Chenjan man, an infidel, an enemy.
Yah Reza caught up with him one afternoon in his chambers as he penned a response to an ad for a tissue mechanic he had found in the morning’s newsroll. If they wouldn’t hire him on as a magician, h
e would spend his days digging into the guts of bakkies in Mushtallah. It was better than a lifetime of servitude to Nasheenian magicians. Most tissue mechanics were just like him—failed magicians working for bread and bugs.
“Why not give this up, baby doll? Are things in my gym so bad?”
“A well-appointed prison is still a prison,” Rhys said.
Yah Reza clucked her tongue. She waved a hand toward his lamp and increased the light. Rhys felt the message she sent the bugs, the chemical tingling in the air. Why did it take so much more effort for him to produce the same reaction? Why gift this stubborn old woman with enough skill to raise the dead but relegate him to the role of messenger, with the occasional talent for staunching blood and fighting infection? God did not grant talent indiscriminately.
Gift or curse, it was not enough.
“I keep you on for your protection,” Yah Reza said. “Nasheen will eat you alive, boy. Even if you had the talent for the real stuff, how long do you think you’d last in Mushtallah among the First Families? How long before a gang of women cuts you up and feeds you to the bugs? This isn’t Chenja, doll, where all you men get a free pass. Boys play by rules here. Chenjan boys don’t play at all.”
“I’m going mad,” Rhys said.
“Weren’t you already? No sane man would be sitting there in that chair—not unless I was interrogating him.”
Rhys met her look. Yah Reza was an old woman, but how old? Always hard to tell in Nasheen. Sixty or more, surely.
“How long were you at the front?” he asked. She had never spoken of it.
“Thirty years,” she said. “Give or take. Intelligence, you know. Taught Yah Tayyib back when he was just Tayyib al Amirah, eh? One of my best students.”
“You mean torture and interrogation.”
“Oh, there was some of that,” Yah Reza said absently. She sat across from him. Three cicadas leapt out of the wide sleeves of her robe and crawled across Rhys’s letter. “Yah Tayyib lost three wives to the war, you know it? And all of his children. You think he would give you a license? If you were his charge, he’d have turned you over to interrogation from the start. You’d be bleeding out in the interior right now.”
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