to the front, never been a bel dame. You could see the difference in the grin, in the eyes.
Jaks leapt from her seat and bounced around. She paid the tab and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Nyx hunched and shifted her weight to alter her usual walk as they crossed the bar. Jaks moved out the door, and Nyx looped an arm around her narrow waist and turned to press her lips to Jaks’s neck, letting her hood shield her profile. She saw a stir of figures hanging around outside but couldn’t catch their faces in the dim night. Her sisters would be figuring out soon that she had bet house credit on the wrong boxer and wouldn’t be showing her face at the betting booth to collect.
Jaks was only a little drunk; the liquor made her happy.
“Listen,” Jaks said as they stumbled down the alley, groping at each other. “We need to be quiet. I’ve got company.”
“I’m a spider,” Nyx said.
Jaks took her down a dead-end alley near the Chenjan district. Something hissed at them from a refuse heap. Nyx reflexively pushed Jaks behind her. Three enormous ravager bugs, tall as Nyx’s knee, scurried out from the refuse pile. One of them stopped to hiss at them again. It opened its jaws wide. Nyx kicked it neatly in the side of the head, crushing an eye stalk. The bug screeched and skittered off.
Jaks laughed. “I should have warned you. They don’t spray around here. Lots of mutants.”
They climbed a rickety ladder to the second floor. Nyx felt like she’d been running forever, since the dawn of the world. Time stretched.
A boy’s sandal hung from the top rung of the ladder. In that moment, Nyx saw the pile of Tej’s things again, the detritus the Chenjan border filter had left of him. A sword, a baldric, his sandals.
Nyx caught her breath as she peered into the little mud-brick room. A couple of worms in glass lit the place. There were two raised sleeping platforms on either side of the room. A boy looked down at her from the one at her right. He looked nothing like Jaks. He was large and soft where she was small and hard. His hair was curly black and too long for a boy his age.
“My house brother,” Jaks said. “Arran. Sorry, he doesn’t do tea.”
He didn’t look like he’d spent a day at the front, but he was the right age. Nyx had expected to feel something when she saw this one. Rage, maybe; bloodlust. But he was just another boy. Another body. Another bel dame’s bounty.
Along the far wall was the kitchen space: a mud-brick oven, all-purpose pot, two knives, and a sack of what must have been rice or maybe millet, knowing a boxer’s take.
Arran rolled back into the loft.
“Come up,” Jaks said.
Nyx came.
She kissed and licked Jaks in a detached sort of way. It was like watching two people she didn’t know having sex.
Nyx lay awake after, until Jaks slept. She was aware, vaguely, of being hungry. She moved like a dream, smelling of Jaks, and slunk down the ladder and into the darkness near the oven. She reached for the biggest of the kitchen knives and put it between her teeth.
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
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.
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.
