She lurched toward the first person she saw and yelled, “THEY ARE WAITING!” in Nasheenian.
The tall, dark-skinned stranger watched her with funny amber eyes and backed away slowly. The woman was immensely tall, her breasts about the height of Nyx’s head, and she carried a basket of bulbous little bugs, the same ones that had tried to eat Nyx in the desert. Nyx wasn’t sure where the woman was going with it—she saw no tents, no shelter, but in that moment, she wasn’t exactly running on logic.
Nyx grabbed at the woman’s long blue robes. Her clothing was slick, organic. Expensive. So soft.
The woman yanked the fabric away and babbled at her in some foreign language. It didn’t sound like anything Nyx had ever heard. Not even Khairian.
All the babbling drew others. They came out of the ground like insects. One minute—humped, chalky soil, and the next… people. In a few minutes Nyx found herself surrounded by the tallest, darkest people she’d ever encountered. Ringing her the way they did, they cast her in cool shadow.
Nyx clawed at them like a trapped cat and pushed her way out of the circle. She stumbled and caught herself before she fell. Her body was done. But she wasn’t.
“Nyx?”
She raised her head.
Eshe was running toward her. Where had he come from? Did they live in the air? He was dressed like the others, in bright, expensive robes. He was clean—even his hair had been washed. Extravagance, Nyx thought. Fucking waste of fucking water. Water.
He ran up and took her by the shoulders.
Her mutilated skin protested.
“Nyx, are you all right? Where’s Isabet?”
Nyx surged toward him. She threw a hard left at the center of his face.
His nose cracked, popped, sprayed blood like a burst balloon. He stumbled back, but didn’t fall over.
“Good thing I’m a corpse, you fuck,” she said, “or I would fucking kill you.”
She keeled over then, hoping to pass out. She didn’t.
Eshe leaned over her, bleeding on her, and then he was dragging her away from the crowd, down into the soil, into darkness.
+
Ahmed’s first sight upon waking was Nyx’s sallow, bloodied face. “Need you to translate,” she said.
No pleasantries. No soothing words. Not even a smile.
There was a tall woman standing behind her, wearing a flowing turquoise robe and matching turban with a loose end that trailed to her ankles. His vision was still fuzzy, and in the dim, he thought it was someone he knew.
“Who have you brought here?” he said. He squinted. Was it one of them? Had they found him? “Fuck, Nyx, who is that? Get her away from me!” He tried to move, but he was sore, and thirsty. Wherever they were was cool and dim. The walls gave off a greenish light, a pale bioluminescence that reminded him of something in a magician’s gym.
“Hush now, hey,” Nyx said, and took him by the shoulders.
Ahmed tried to rub at his eyes, but his arms felt weak.
“She’s just a local, Ahmed. Nobody you know.”
Ahmed relaxed, and she pressed him back onto the floor.
“I need you to translate, all right?” Nyx said.
He nodded.
“Do you speak Khairian?” he asked the woman.
“I do,” she said. The accent was remarkable. It almost sounded Nasheenian. “At least one of you is half-civilized.”
“Ask her about where we need to go. How far is the next water cache? Where can we find other Nasheenians? Big fat man calls himself Hamza Habib. Ask her that,” Nyx said.
“Nyx, she has no idea what that is.”
“Ask her.”
Ahmed swallowed, tried to wet his mouth. “Could I have some water?”
Nyx pushed some kind of fist-sized bug toward him. He flinched. It had a bulbous back end that had been gouged open.
“Go on,” she said.
Ahmed raised his head and sniffed at the ass-end of the mutilated insect. The tantalizing promise of water overwhelmed his initial repulsion, and he drank. The carapace of the insect was soft and papery, but the water was cool, familiar, and unexpectedly tasteless.
“You must go. You are not far from the Wall.”
Ahmed translated.
“The wall? What’s the wall?” Nyx asked.
The woman told him. Ahmed translated, “The end of the world.”
“Well, that’s fitting,” Nyx said.
“It does sound promising,” Ahmed said. He tried to get himself up on one elbow. He squinted in the dim light. It felt like they were in a cave. Eshe stood behind the foreign woman, dressed in strange clothing. His nose was newly broken; the blood and bruising was still fairly fresh. Ahmed saw other bodies around him. He realized they were what remained of Nyx’s team—Kage, Isabet, Khatijah.
Ahmed asked the woman, “Where are we?”
“These are our prayer niches. Your companion stumbled into one, drawn by the call of the ravens that nest here. You should go. If we tend to you, you must pay us in blood or bugs. You have neither. You must go, or you will indebt yourself to us. The boy already paid in blood.”
“What she say?” Nyx asked.
“We thank you for the hospitality,” Ahmed said. He tried to remember the Khairian social mores regarding hospitality, but his mind was still muddy. Indebted to them? What did that mean, exactly? It had the weight of something far more menacing than some social nicety. He was reminded of the strange two-faced language of Tirhani false politeness, and realized there may be something similar happening here that he didn’t understand.
“Do not use that word. We have given you nothing. You must go.”
“We’ll die in the desert,” Ahmed said.
“What is she saying?” Nyx repeated.
“You are only a few days from the Wall,” the woman said. “I do not know your destination, but there is little past that. You can purchase or sell all you like at the Wall. But not here. You must leave.”
“How many days?”
“The way you travel?” Her gaze moved across his body. She shook her head. “Three days.”
“She thinks it’s pretty important that we leave.” He regarded the others. “How are they?”
Nyx shook her head. “Khatijah woke up a while back. I hydrated everybody best I could before I went out again.”
“You… went out again?”
“Eskander kept saying the settlement was only a few days away. I held her to that. I left you here and kept looking.”
Ahmed watched the other woman. She was, outwardly, composed, but there was something about the way she gazed at him that made him uneasy. He felt the first stirrings of fear.
When he worked in intelligence, he found out quickly that there was no actual way to determine if someone was lying to you—not any that was better than a roll of the dice, anyway. Instead, what you watched for were indicators of stress. If you figured you had the guy who planted an acid-frag mine, you first asked him about other things—blades, guns, bursts, and looked for indications of stress. If there were none, you’d ask about mines, and then the actual specific weapon itself. More often than not, you’d see a growing number of stress indicators the closer you got to talking about the actual incident. That sort of thing worked on typical grunts, but spies and special operatives were another matter. They were smart enough not to talk to you about anything. Your only leverage was in learning something personal that you could use against them.
He knew nothing about how this society worked. Khairians often had multiple husbands who raised children and—in some cases—were even able to nurse them. Umayma was a wild place, with incredible mutations. He wasn’t going to make any assumptions.
“You must be gone by dawn,” the woman said. “Tell your people to be gone by then. We cannot be responsible for what happens. The boy has paid us in blood. He can attend your sickness. But you must go.”
“We have until dawn,” Ahmed said.
“I can’t fucking move our people at dawn,” Nyx said.
Ahmed sighed and told the woman, “You can see that we are not well. We can’t be gone at dawn.”
“Then you will die here,” the woman said, and turned. She walked directly through the wall behind her.
Ahmed closed and opened his eyes, thinking he had imagined it. Eshe and Nyx were still there, staring at him.
“Did I just…? That wall…?”
“It’s an opaque filter,” Nyx said. “There are a couple dozen of them out here, all covered in sand. Fell into it myself.”
“And you… you dragged us all back here?”
“It was that or leave your sorry asses to bake. I considered it.”
He must have had a strange expression on his face, because Nyx reached out a hand, gripped his shoulder, leaned in. “I’m a lot of things,” Nyx said. “I do a lot of shit you might not like. But I’m not fucking stupid.”
“What happened to you?” Ahmed asked Eshe.
“I found the settlement. But I don’t know any Khairian, and when I got here I was pretty sick and starving for protein. They fed me, but wouldn’t let me leave. They took my blood. I bled out a pint of it for the food and clothes.”
“Do you know why they don’t want us here?”
He shrugged. “These are some kind of… I don’t know… mosques or something to them. We’re not supposed to be here.”
Nyx sat with her hands on her knees, watching Kage. “Ahmed, you get the impression there’s more going on than that?”
“Yes. I don’t know what, though.”
“They’re mutants,” Khatijah said.
Ahmed turned. The bel dame was sitting up, drinking from one of the bugs Nyx had offered Ahmed. She must have been awake long enough to see him drink from one.
“Mutants?” Nyx said.
Khatijah stared into the ass-end of the bug for a long minute. “Yes,” she said. “There are ravens outside, right? This is the last settlement. The last place we got any record of Raine. We employ one of their little ravens as an informer.”
“How are they mutants?” Eshe said.
“Haven’t you seen them? Those aren’t individual ravens out there. And these aren’t bugs. It doesn’t matter. My contact is here. She can help us.”
“What about all the yelling at us to leave?” Nyx said.
“She’s right about that. We do need to leave, or we’ll get eaten up into one of these places so they can use all our organic bits to create new shit.” Khatijah worked off her pack. Eshe moved to help her, but she waved him away. She pulled out her slide and tapped out some code.
Ahmed smelled peppery lavender. She was trying to send a message.
“Do you need—” Ahmed began.
She nodded. When she spoke, her voice was a little hoarse. “I need you to call a bug to carry it. Eskander would have done that.”
Ahmed glanced over at Nyx, but her expression was perfectly neutral. He called a small swarm of red beetles. They ate the message Khatijah had coded, then buzzed out through the opaque walls of the shelter.
“She couldn’t tell you where Raine was headed before now?” Eshe said.
“That’s not a secure way of sending information. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re not the only people looking for him. The only way she’d talk is if we came here. Somebody scared her bad.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “We need to get out of here. Can we set up our own camp? This is a bad place to recover.”
“You’re welcome,” Nyx said, but she stood, and began packing up.
+
The ravens still circled the sky above the settlement. Nyx walked across the hills with Khatijah to meet the messenger. They had camped several hundred paces from the settlement, but Khatijah worried it wasn’t enough.
“You know I can’t move anybody,” Nyx said. “We had to drag Isabet and Kage. I don’t even know if they’ll wake up.”
“Perhaps you can leave them, then. Or is your decision to leave people to die in the desert more personal than you pretend?”
Nyx walked a good arm’s length from Khatijah, wary of her reach. Weak she may have been, but Nyx wasn’t feeling ready to go three rounds in a ring with a bel dame, either.
“Eskander was falling apart. She wasn’t going to make it much longer.”
“It’s as I expected. Fatima sent us out here to die.”
“You’re still pretty close-mouthed about the whole thing for a woman who was sent off to die.”
“You don’t understand Fatima.”
“I’m afraid I do. She sent me to prison. Tortured me. She’s no friend of mine, Khat.”
“Khatijah,” she insisted.
Nyx stopped at the top of the hill. Below, a soft, scrubby valley spread before them. After so long in blinding desert, it was delightfully inviting. “If we’re going to keep on, I’ve got to know why Fatima was having Raine tailed. Since when do bel dames put security on a politician? Bel dames go after terrorists and deserters. We’re not order keepers.”
Khatijah sighed. She, too, paused at the top of the hill. “Now that you’ve used up the bug, I’m going to die out here, right? So what’s the difference?” She grimaced. “He was marked as a terrorist. We had a note all written up for his head, but the Queen stayed our hand. She felt it was more dangerous to kill him. We didn’t know what the boys would do. So she put us on watch, just to make sure nobody else decided to kill him.”
“Like who?”
“Anyone. Chenjans. First Families. Rogue bel dames. The boys are a perfect munitions shell, primed to burst. All they need is a catalyst. His death would be it.”
“Then why’d they kidnap him? Why not kill him and set it off?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have come out here if I knew that. All I know is, I got sent off on a fool’s errand with the most hated bel dame in the fucking country. You killed a lot of friends of mine in Tirhan.”
“Not so friendly, I think, if you weren’t there with them,” Nyx said. She folded her arms. “What the fuck is Fatima playing at?”
“There,” Khatijah said, and pointed to a small figure making its way into the valley from the opposite side.
Nyx and Khatijah walked down to meet it.
As Nyx got closer, she realized that the black robe the figure wore was actually made of ravens’ feathers. The figure appeared to be a woman; small, dark, with a pinched little face that appeared almost Drucian and hands knotted up like claws, as if she suffered from some terrible arthritis.
Khatijah nodded when she met her; the closest a Nasheenian ever got to bowing.
“I’m Khatijah Basima, sent by councilwoman Fatima Kosan of Nasheen.”