“Mhari,” he murmured. “Not the most inconspicuous place to meet.”
“It’s no fault of mine that you are not a woman.”
“Mhari is the saint of martyrs and victims,” he said. “That is not what we are.”
“Mhari is the saint of women.”
“As I said. Isn’t it time we embrace our true power?”
Inaya watched the flickering light of the bugs in glass above them playing off Mhari’s smooth, featureless face. Inaya wanted to see her weep blood, or morph into some base beetle. They were the sort of tangible miracles that could give her hope that some tiny portion of her time spent here was not time spent simply speaking to herself. The times she knew God, when she felt closest to Him, were when she shifted, when she gave in to her body’s deep need to cut loose, cut free, slough off her skin and become something else, something more, everything. A piece of everything. Did God feel like that? she wondered. Was that why she felt so close to Him then? All the more reason they hate us, Inaya thought. We know more of God than his priests.
“Did you find her?” Inaya asked.
“Yes.”
“A nd ? ”
“She went to Nasheen. I followed her across the border, and to the boy.
She chose to stay with him.”
Inaya’s chest tightened. “In Nasheen?”
“Yes.”
“You permitted her to do that?”
“I could not persuade her to return. I told you there was a danger in putting them together. Young love—”
Inaya’s laugh was soft, rueful. She wanted to sink into the stones at his feet and slowly suffocate him in molten rock. Her body fairly vibrated with anticipation. She took a deep breath. It had been easier to control herself when she believed she had no choices, when life was something that simply happened to her. She had done all the correct things. Married sensible men, raised children, kept a good house. She was dutiful and obedient and pious. She was all of those things because she believed there was no other way to be. Knowing there was something different was a blessing and curse. And it hurt her now. It made her… less predictable.
She knew better than to use Isabet’s name out loud, not here. “She was our best piece,” Inaya said carefully.
“She was a diplomatic solution to a situation for which the time for diplomacy has expired.”
“Your actions were unwise.”
“It was her decision. Our people have lived as slaves for too long. I would not force her to do anything against her will. She wanted to stay with that boy. Let her stay. I’m sure they will be back in a week or two when they have… tired.”
Inaya felt the heat in her face. She flexed her toes, an invisible gesture of frustration that she had perfected during her first marriage. When you had to smile and bow your head and stare at the ground every time someone disrespected you, you found ways to channel frustration. She hadn’t even noticed she did it until she came back to Ras Tieg.
“That was irresponsible of you,” she said.
“We should look ahead.”
“To what? War?”
“A show of force. That is all.” He moved a step closer—too close for decency. She felt the heat of him behind her. “We are powerful. And you are the most powerful of all, bound by no set form. If we show them our true power, they cannot help but take us seriously.”
Inaya had watched God’s Angels put black bags over the heads of her fellow shifters—old women and children, young men and teenaged girls—most of her life. It had only gotten worse now as the people they took away were her own operatives. She had made the same mistake with each of them, in the beginning, as she had made with Eshe—treating them like her own family, her own children. Every one of them had disappeared into some smoked-glass bakkie. No one saw them alive again.
“I believe they take us seriously enough already,” Inaya said. “It is not their minds we must change. It is the people’s minds. So long as they hate and fear us, we will not earn our place as human beings. And if we attack what they hold most dear, we simply affirm what our enemies say about us.”
“It sounds cowardly to me.”
“Let me tell you about cowards,” Inaya said. “Let me tell you about the cowardice I saw among you when I first came to Ras Tieg.”
That, at least, gave him pause. For a few moments they stood in silence, two renegade shape shifters in the last place any of God’s Angels would think to look for them. What foolish animal crept into its enemy’s house to hide?
“Tell me,” Inaya said softly, “how many more have come over to our cause since I joined you?”
“Impossible to say.”
“And who brought us the girl?”
“I still think—”
“I have not asked your opinion of my methods. Not in some time. Yet you still continue to offer up the same tired strategies. The same ones that nearly brought you to your knees before I joined you. I am done arguing with you on our path. It has been decided. Fly back to Nasheen tonight and bring her back.”
“This is a foolish course.”
“Do it, or don’t bother coming back,” Inaya said. She turned, and made to move past him, gaze lowered.
He grabbed her arm, jerked her toward him, made her look up. The space was narrow, and she did not have enough clearance to pull away.
She met his gaze. It was what he wanted, of course. Some acknowledgement of their intimacy. But there was no smile for him, no bowed head, no words to soothe his bruised ego. He was a grown man, and she would treat him like one.
“You were nothing before I found you,” he said, biting. “How long would it have been before you and the boy took to whoring yourselves out? He was a thieving cur, and you his little bitch.”
“How quickly your words curdle when you no longer have power,” Inaya said. Her skin prickled, and she felt a subtle ripple slide across her skin; her body’s desperate desire to be free. She was not a fool. She had been raised in Ras Tieg. When Michel followed Eshe back to the alley they shared in their first days in exile in Ras Tieg, she expected the worst. But he had remembered her from a diplomatic dinner in Tirhan, where he had posed as a servant in order to gain access. She thought him sly and moppish then—not trustworthy. Someone—her old contact, Elodie, perhaps—had told him she was a sympathizer. When he discovered who they were, when he understood exactly how they could be used, he invited them to join the resistance in Ras Tieg, the Fourré. She was under no illusions that he offered his hand in selfless friendship. They could eat and sleep there so long as they were useful. But one night, all of that changed, and in the morning, she was the leader, and he was second.
Until this moment, she had not realized that he believed that shift had been made in name only. He still thought she was the puppet, he the master.
Inaya let go.
It was a painful, delightful feeling, like giving in to the euphoric exhaustion at the end of a long labor. She took him by the shoulders—he was not a slim man—and let her arms melt across his torso, coating him in a shiny straightjacket of organic resin that roughly approximated the chitinous sludge of the bug secretions that made up the city’s foundations.
Her body trembled, and sweat beaded her upper lip. She felt the stitch in the world open, ready to accept those pieces of her she did not use during the transformation. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to unmake her entire body into acidic mucus and devour him whole. She breathed deeply. Her sleeves hung, limp, against the narrow bands of resin where her arms had been, which now connected her to Michel. His face was pale, with the barest hint of a quiver. He had seen what she could do, certainly, but never had it directed at him.
“If you touch me again unasked,” she murmured, “I will reach into your chest and stop your heart. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
Inaya pulled away from him as her body began to reknit itself. Organic sludge became human body, became tendons, sinew, tissue, skin. She dropped her pale arms so the sleeves covered them over before the stubs of her reformed fingers regenerated the nails. Her arms and fingers were sticky with mucus. The stitch in the world closed. And then the disappointment came over her. It happened each time she shifted back to human form, as if her body had half hoped she would never return to this soft shell.
“Come back with the girl,” she said. “Or leave the movement. We have no need of you.”
She moved past him, into the open ambulatory of the church. Three women sat in a pew at the front, weeping. Two priests with swords stood to either side of the massive altar, nearly fifty paces distant. The church was an organic monster, the largest thing in the city, built on the old bones of some dead ship and crafted skyward, with an open ceiling that protected them from the elements with nothing more than a custom filter. Expensive, considering Ras Tieg’s lack of magicians, but most churches had them, so God could gaze down upon them. To remind them of where they came from. Of where, one day, God might return them.
Inaya spared a glance upward as she walked. Inside, the light of the lamps along the aisles was low, so above, the stars were visible. This far south, the sky was as crowded as it ever got, with bold pinpricks of light from far-off places. She wondered, sometimes, what would happen if she truly let go. Just how far and fast she could travel when she broke her body down to its smallest parts. What were all of them, really, but bits of something else? Bits of stars?
She wanted to build a better world. So why did so many others want to keep it just the same?
She stepped into the humid night air. A drizzling rain fell, and scattered clumps of rotten leaves clotted the drains along either side of the cobbled way. Two more priests with drawn swords stood outside. As she passed, both murmured, “Go with God.”
“God bless,” she said. She closed her long coat over her habit, tightly binding her body against the rain, and the stares from passersby, and stepped out onto the muddy street, alone.
N
yx dreamed of bloody bel dames storming her seaside compound in Druce. She saw Anneke’s children’s faces mutilated, Anneke’s twisted body broken in the courtyard, and a blood-spattered trail leading upstairs, to Nyx’s bedroom. And there, at the top of the stairs, lay not the body of her lover, not the woman she had kept from Mercia and the bel dames, not the woman she was murdering blameless bodyguards to protect—the woman who loved the sea and tolerated Nyx and her monstrous history—but beautiful Rhys, his handless arms reaching out to her, the expression on his face a strange mix of horror and recognition. “You can’t hide from them. They’ll come for everything you love,” he said. “The way they came for me.”
And she woke up.
The world was still dark. It was at least an hour from morning prayer. She was covered in a thin film of sweat, and every part of her body was taut, alert, flooded with adrenaline. There would be no more sleep for her.
You’re a bloody fucking fool, she thought. The world will trash everything you care about. She had to let them go. The way she’d let everything else go. The way she’d let Rhys go.
Nyx rolled off the cot she kept in her office and walked into the back where Eshe had his pallet. He was still there, sleeping soundly, one arm thrown over his face. But the pallet opposite him—Ahmed’s place—was empty.
Nyx found Ahmed in the kitchen, already awake, his com gear carefully laid out on a blanket on the floor. He was packing each item neatly into his pack.
“Thought you might be gone,” she said.
“Where would I go?”
“Right,” Nyx said.
“Is everything… all right?”
“Of course,” Nyx said. The dream was fading, but the feeling it left her with was still there—a terrible premonition. She went to the sink and washed her face and hands.
“That new beggar is still there,” Ahmed said.
“I expected he would be.”
“How do you want to deal with it?”
“I don’t,” Nyx said. “Let them come.”
It was the anticipation that nagged at her most. She didn’t know how to solve anything unless she had the option of putting a bullet in it.
+
Fatima’s little spies showed up after dawn prayer.
Both women were young and scrappy, and there was something about the way they stood that made Nyx wonder if they were sisters or lovers. Whichever it was, they had known each other a long time.
The magician came in first, thrusting a scrap of paper at her that Nyx assumed was supposed to be a voucher from Fatima.
Nyx sized her up. She was a small woman, mid-twenties, with thick, dark hair tangled back with a frayed ribbon. Most of the flesh of her face seemed to have been packed into her cheeks, giving her a warmer, rounder appearance than her figure warranted. Her face was clean, but her clothes were grimy and tattered. She wore male garb—long khameez and trousers and somber colors—but her old burnous was a faded scarlet red.
The bel dame shadowed her. She was a head taller than her companion, wiry where the magician was skinny. She wore a sturdy pack and sensible boots. In the harsh light of dawn, the left side of her cheek and neck was a pocked ruin, as if flesh beetles had gnawed on the twisted face of some terrible demon. She turned her furrowed face to Nyx and said nothing. What was she, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Hard to tell with a face like that.
The bel dame met her stare. She must have been used to people looking away, because when Nyx held her gaze, it was the bel dame who broke away first.
“This is my team,” Nyx said. She introduced Ahmed, Kage, and Eshe.
The bel dame remained expressionless, but Nyx saw her staring off behind the three of them, as if searching for more bodies.
“That’s it,” Nyx said. “Six is already too many if it turns out we’re headed north. What are your names?”
The magician jutted her little chin out. “Eskander Ilyas,” she said proudly, as if the name should mean something.
“And you?” Nyx asked the bel dame.
“Khatijah,” she said.
“Good enough,” Nyx said. “Khat, let’s go into my office and you can brief us.”
“Khatijah,” the bel dame insisted as she slid off her pack.
Nyx ignored her and escorted the team into her office.