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?”
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.
“T
hey’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.
“I
t’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.
“It’s a lot of fucking wall,” Safiyah said.
They finally stopped in the shadow of the Wall. Kage, Nyx, and Safiyah led. The others were still far behind, bickering over rations.
“That,” said Safiyah, pointing to the seemingly sheer face of the Wall, “is why I need a Drucian.”
Kage watched Nyx try to figure it out. This section of the Wall was different from the rest, and Kage could see why immediately. Three hundred strides up the face of it, there was a crack, a crevice.
Kage faced the bare rock wall while Safiyah and Nyx spoke. The Wall was a lovely thing, she supposed, as much as anything outside could be. She scouted the climb as they bickered. Once she saw the best way to the top, she simply stepped onto the rock face and began to climb. The mutters of those behind her faded quickly. It was easy enough to let their words become nonsensical. Making any sense out of Nasheenian was difficult on a regular day. Doing so while scaling a wall was nearly impossible.
They nattered on, though, until one of them finally noticed that she was climbing. Then, cool silence. If it meant keeping them quiet, she would climb for days.
Though the Wall appeared to be sheer from far away, it was not. There were irregularities here, caused by some malformation in this part of the Wall. It was her size and dexterity the magician had needed, that was all. What concerned her was only that the magician had known enough about Drucians in general to bet that Kage could scale the Wall. Fatfingered Nasheenians and their flat-footed magicians would be useless on surfaces like this one. But Kage had grown up climbing walls. None quite so tall as this, perhaps, but the mechanics were the same.
And if she fell off and died, well—at least then Nyx or the fukushu-sha couldn’t kill her.
The magician had taken them far from the city, an hour before first light. But from this height, Kage could already see the city plainly in the distance, a dusty smudge in the shadow of the Wall. As she climbed, the wind picked up, and she had to stay focused. She paused on occasion to remap her route to the crevice. Her arms began to tire, and she had to rest more often. The wind became insistent.
Breathe.
Her mothers would have told her to breathe. To connect with the face of the Wall itself, to imagine she was part of it. A permanent, substantial thing. Not frail. Not fallible. Strong. Immovable.
She breathed, and took her next hold.