Below her was a stir of mad people who did not care whether she lived or died. Behind them, far to the south, her own family no longer saw her. Here, on this blighted mountain of a wall, she was alone. Totally and completely alone.
She caught her breath. Clung to the Wall. Suddenly rigid.
Breathe.
Live alone. Die alone. If she let go, would it matter? Nyx would not accomplish her mission. Perhaps the team would disband. No one would burn her body, or return it to the darkness of her family’s vessel. No one would sing over her. No one would care.
“It is the worst fate,” her mother Sokai had once told her, “to die alone, in silence, among strangers. Promise you will always come home.”
But she could not go home to a place that no longer saw her.
She glanced up. The gaping maw of the crevice was still far from her reach. She pressed her forehead against the gritty wall. She needed silence, but for the first time in many weeks, now that she had it, her mind wanted to clutter it up, use it to till up old sorrow.
Reach. Climb.
She moved up the Wall again. The sun was coming up, and at this height, it beat down on her exposed neck and shoulders, heavy as a winter coat.
She exhaled, and reached for the next hold.
Her fingers slipped.
The world broke then. Some carefully muted thing inside of her howled, and her children were screaming again.
The sun was blinding.
Her children were dying.
Kage regained her hold, and pressed herself against the Wall. The muscles in her legs and forearms were trembling violently.
The raiders were Ras Tiegans. They stormed through the settlement and smoked them out of the caves; picked them off one by one with pistols, and when the pistols jammed up, they used swords. Ras Tiegans had a longer reach, and better weapons, than any Drucian. The Nasheenians helped ensure that.
They were young people, always, and they laughed as they did it, as if it were some game, some adolescent rite of passage, to murder Drucians in their homes.
But Kage had seen them coming. She had climbed the sheer face of her family’s cave, her newborn twins strapped to her back, and hidden there as her people were smoked out and killed.
The Ras Tiegans drove X-shaped markers into the ground in front of every cleared cave, and tied purple banners to them.
Kage watched as two of them chased her cousin up the side of the hill just opposite her. One grabbed her cousin by the ankle and yanked her down.
“Can Drucians fly?” he yelled, and tossed her back down the rise to the sharp stones below.
His companion leapt on Kage’s cousin, stabbing again and again with his sword until her blood ran freely.
It was then that Kage’s children began to cry.
Let go. Fly.
Show them Drucians can fly.
Kage’s grip loosened.
If she had let go then, would things have been different?
“Hush, hush,” she had told her babies, but they had cried, and cried, and she wrapped them tightly and pulled them to her breast as the Ras Tiegans routed her people.
It was not until long after, when the valley was filled with corpses and the smoke began to dissipate, that she realized her babies had stopped moving.
Let go.
Kage opened her eyes. The sunlight hurt her eyes, and that was fine. Everything hurt. It meant she was alive. It was what she told herself when her kin discovered her dead babies, and she fled everything she ever knew to evade the formal ceremony that would have stripped her of everything she was.
She released her right hand from the Wall. Wondered what it was like to fly.
Then she gripped the next hold, and pulled herself up.
Three more moves, and she had both hands on the lip of the crevice.
She pulled herself up into the cool darkness and rolled onto her back. Beneath her, the interior of the Wall was warm and spongy. She stared at the moist ceiling. As she watched, it seemed to rise and fall with the pace of her breath. She sat up. Pressed her hand to the Wall. Recoiled. It was like putting her hand onto warm, still-living meat.
The Wall was… alive.
+
“Fuck me,” Nyx breathed. “Did she really get up there?”
“They’re a remarkable people,” Safiyah said, “for infidels.
Eshe, you ready to shift?” Nyx asked.
“Not until Isabet is pulled up safely,” he said.
“You make it sound like you don’t trust me with her,” Nyx said. Eshe frowned. Nyx wasn’t quite sure when she started losing him.
About the time Isabet started bedding next to him at night, she supposed. It was a dangerous time to play this game, when they were so close to the end.
The rope came down. Three hundred paces of it, braided into a ladder so flimsy that it turned Nyx’s stomach to see it. She wasn’t so sure she was going to get up it, let alone anybody else. Her plan with Isabet was just to tie her to the end of it, and pull her up last.
Ahmed went first, then Khatijah, then Safiyah. Nyx figured that put it at three against one in case Safiyah went turncoat.
Nyx stayed back to have them haul up the gear first, then she mounted the ladder. She was not a fan of heights. And not twenty anymore. It took well over an hour to make the long, bloody fucking climb.
She arrived at the top trembling and sweating. She lay back in the crevice and chugged a water bulb. For a minute, she thought her senses were fucked up, but no… the ceiling above her seemed to be… moving. Like it was breathing. “Fuck me,” she muttered.
Ahmed came over and leaned over her. “Not what you signed up for?”
“There better be a fucking better way back over,” she said.
Safiyah smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile, more like the way a cat who’s just left a dead roach on your pillow looks right before you head to bed. Nyx stared past her where Kage was reloading her gun onto her back. Of all of them, Kage seemed the most composed. How that kid took everything in stride was baffling. Nyx had been with novice bel dames who cracked under less pressure.
Once Eshe had secured Isabet, Ahmed and Nyx pulled her up. Eshe was last, squawking into the narrow space just as Isabet’s fingers met the lip of the crevice.
Ahmed untangled Isabet from the ladder. They left it in the crevice. Nyx paused, waiting for Eshe to fly past her or catch a ride on her shoulder, but instead, he landed neatly on Ahmed’s shoulder. Ahmed glanced over at him, looking surprised. Eshe took flight again, heading for the other end of the crevice.
Nyx started walking through the dim corridor after him. It was just a matter of time, she suspected, before Eshe’s allegiances started shifting—Isabet and Ahmed were the best picks, she figured. Isabet for being pretty and Ahmed for being pretty and cunning. What, did she think he’d be a kid forever? No, she’d just hoped she taught him better. Taught him not to give his heart to just any pretty fool who crossed his path. You started caring about somebody, you did stupid things. Like murder a diplomat’s bodyguards. And haul a bunch of outlaws across a desert.
Never ended well.
Safiyah, Khatijah, and Kage had already reached the end of the long corridor. They stood framed in the light, blocking her view. “What? Don’t tell me there’s not a way down like you said?”
Nyx pushed past them, just squeezing by in the narrow space. She came up short at the edge of the opening, and grabbed the warm wall to steady herself. She gazed onto an alien vista. The sight of it twisted something in her belly. It tasted like fear.
A boiling mass of black-violet clouds swathed the sky. Below them was a crimson sea of sand so bloody red that Nyx had a moment of dissonance. Some raging, nameless feeling of dread overcame her, and she thought, My God, this is what hell looks like. I’ve been sent to hell. Had she been dead all this time, just locked in some death-dream?
Towering, funnel-shaped structures swelled from the bloody desert, mountainous features so high that their bulbous tops pierced the oppressive cloud cover. Far below, at the base of them, the wind whipped up eddies of red sand, obscuring whatever lived or grew or preyed on the ground. She wondered if the seven gates of hell were down there, or if this was just one of the seven in the Wall. It wasn’t impossible, was it?
Safiyah grinned. “Looking for the angels? Guardians of hellfire? Oh, I assure you they are there. Perhaps not as dangerous as they once were, but potent enough. The Aadhya rule this hell. We are just travelers.”
At Nyx’s feet, a long tier of stairs dug into the face of the Wall terraced gently downwards, into the spitting sand.
“Before we go, I advise you all to cover any wounds you may have,” Safiyah said. “The sand here feeds on blood.”
“All of it?” Eshe said.
“All of it,” Safiyah said. She opened her arms to the sky. “You will learn to love it. Or it will destroy you. Neither is unpleasant. Are you coming, or shall we gawk at the gate all day?”
She started down the steps.
“Safiyah?” Nyx called after her. “Why is this cave up here? What for?”
Safiyah laughed her hack-hack-snort laugh that made Nyx cringe. “The Aadhya of course. How do you think they escaped from this hell in the first place?”
“Why were those people walled up here?” Khatijah asked.
“Truthfully? They walled themselves in with this contagion, millennia ago.” Safiyah regarded the bloody, swirling landscape and shrugged. “I suppose it worked. The world could have been much worse, you see. It could have all been like this.”
“How did they… do this?” Eshe asked.
“There have been bursts that ensure that nothing bred in a place will ever come out straight again,” Safiyah said. “Chemicals that twist blood codes out of shape. You don’t see them much anymore, but they exist. I wouldn’t have put it past the early magicians to cook up something like that, something that mutated far beyond their control.” Her stare got distant then, like she wanted to sit there at the table with those same magicians and see what they were cooking up. Nyx had seen the same expression on bel dames thinking about some boy they hadn’t killed yet.
Ahmed turned to Nyx. “Why would anyone take a political prisoner out here?”
Nyx gazed into the abyss. “Because they could do anything they wanted to him here. Question is, what the fuck was it?”
T he noise outside Inaya’s cell got louder. The voices, more frantic. There was more screaming. Not just during the day, but at night as well. People were being dragged through the halls.
“I can’t stand this,” Inaya’s cellmate, whose name was Mettie, said. She chattered on the first few days, but, like Inaya, eventually fell into a deep depression.
They spent the time playing word games and exchanging stories. Inaya’s were always general, guarded. She shared some of her family life in Tirhan, but little else. It still felt too dangerous, even now.
Mostly, Inaya listened. Not just to Mettie, but to everything happening in the hall. Things were not cooling outside the walls, but getting worse. She desperately yearned to take back control of it all. Every time she heard a cry, her body tried to shift, to break free.
“I’m going to kill them when they come for me,” Mettie said. “It’s not worth trying,” Inaya said.
“No, no,” Mettie said, and her gaze got a faraway look, as if she were back with her husband and sons, watching her whole world get torched. “No, when they come for me, I will fight. Not like you. I won’t sit here and rot like you.”
But it was not Mettie they came for first. It was Inaya.
A new female jailer, one Inaya had never seen before, hauled her through the filter. Mettie tried to run, but the jailer cried out, and two more men came from the other side of the hall. They tackled Mettie. She made a good show of it. Inaya admired her attempt. Why haven’t I tried to run? she thought.
The female jailer led Inaya away as Mettie still fought. Mettie cried after Inaya, “Break out the first chance you get, girl! They will eat us here!”
Inaya found herself back in one of the organic rooms with the glow worms in the ceiling. She found it to be a nice change of scenery. She wondered if she could ask for a change of clothes. A shower, perhaps. Then she started to cry, because it was insulting, to realize how deferential she had become in just a few weeks. Months? They had not even touched her, really. They had not cut off a limb or suspended her over fire. They had not even starved her. Yet here she was, cowed and broken.
The Angel entered. Not a new one, but the same one who had caught her out with the letters. She found it oddly comforting to see him again, and hated herself for that, too. For his part, he did not seem as confident this time. There was worry on his face, and something more. Inaya recognized it immediately, because it was something she had felt every moment of every day now for some time. It was fear.
He had brought the letters. He pulled them from his ledger again, and threw them onto the floor in front of her.
“Those are yours,” he said.
She said nothing, as she had done last time.
“Those are yours!” he said again. “You are the Madame de Fourré. And we have you. So who is leading in your stead? I need names.”
Inaya simply stared at the letters.
“We hoped it would break apart without you,” he said. “And we certainly aren’t going to make a martyr of you. I have every intention of letting you live here the rest of your life.”
“No one likes a martyr,” Inaya said softly.
“Exactly,” he said, and there was excitement in his voice. She realized she had given him what he wanted, again—speaking meant he was getting somewhere.
She sighed. What did it all matter now?
“But without those names, you are useless to us. If you are not the Madame de Fourré, you are nothing. Just another of the misborn. If that’s so, I send you to a work camp and take off your head. And the heads of your children.”
“My children are in Tirhan.”
“That is where you are wrong,” he said. “Your husband and children are still here. And we will take them apart piece by piece until we have those names.”
Inaya laughed. She saw him start at that, and it made her laugh more. “You don’t have my husband,” Inaya said, “but that is a very pretty bluff.”