Bel dames ran through every generation of her family.
Gas lamps meant they were in Mushtallah or Amtullah, one of the major cities in the heart of Nasheen. If that was true, it meant Nyx had been out a long time—and she was in a lot of trouble. Behind Fatima was a long, thin window that looked down onto a street the color of foam. Extravagant figures cloaked in peach and crimson milled past the smoky glass like burned jewel bugs. Nyx no longer wondered if she was still half asleep. Her dreams were never so colorful.
“She’s coming around again,” Fatima said to the raven.
The raven shivered once, hopped from Fatima’s shoulder, and began to morph into her sister Rasheeda. A few minutes later, Rasheeda was mostly human again, naked, covered in mucus, tossing her head of dark hair and snickering. Feathers rolled out across the floor.
Rasheeda came alongside the bed and wiped the worst of the mucus from her face and neck with one of Nyx’s bedsheets. She had a peculiar way of cocking her head that put Nyx in mind of the raven.
“You look terrible,” Rasheeda said.
“You helped,” Nyx said.
Nyx tried to sit up. Rasheeda snickered again. Unlike Fatima’s illustrious line, Rasheeda’s was nothing special—she’d been just another grubby kid from the coast whose mother was into career breeding. Nyx heard that Rasheeda had gone mad at the front, ripping out entrails and eating Chenjan hearts. There was only one suitable occupation for a madwoman from the front after she was discharged.
Nyx gazed down the length of her own body. She swam in the black nightdress of the Plague Sisters. She pushed up the sleeves and saw her own tawny wrists and arms, like sticks. She dared not look at her belly or legs. The bullets her sisters shot her with had been tipped with bugs. They’d whittled her down to almost nothing.
“Get me something to eat,” Nyx croaked, and Rasheeda laughed.
One of the Plague Sisters strode into the room, white skirt trailing behind her. A cloud of spiders clung to her hem, darkening the fabric.
The Plague Sister fussed with Nyx’s bedding and probed at her arm with the puckered snout of a semi- organic needle, which blinked at Nyx with half-dumb eyes. Nyx flinched. The sister gave her a disapproving frown and pulled away from her arm, taking the blood sample with her.
“I’ll mark her for final analysis,” the sister said, “but the venom should be out of her system.” She walked back out, her entourage of insects pooling behind her.
“Are you all they sent?” Nyx asked.
Rasheeda snickered again, still sticky and naked.
“They couldn’t spare any more of us to go running after a rogue sister,” Fatima said. She was tall, skinnier and darker than Rasheeda, almost Chenjan in color, and stronger in the face and shoulders. She bore a perpetual frown on her long countenance.
“Dahab’s here,” Rasheeda said absently. “Luce went for sodas.”
Dahab and Luce. If they’d sent Dahab, it was a wonder Nyx was still alive. Four mad, skilled bel dames had tracked her across the desert. Why the fuck was she still breathing?
“What am I doing in the interior?”
“A suit’s been filed,” Fatima said.
“Catshit. You don’t have anything on me.”
“I know a number of butchers outside Punjai,” Fatima said. “One of them even bought a womb that matches your tissue samples. She sold it back to us.”
“That doesn’t prove—”
“We have Yah Tayyib,” Rasheeda said.
“Yah Tayyib’s taken an oath. He wouldn’t testify. About black work or anything else.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Fatima said. “He knows the place of a bel dame. He knows we’re just as happy to haul in rogue magicians as black sisters. We used to hunt magicians when they went rogue too. Black bel dames ruin our reputation.”
Nyx lay back on the bed. Yah Tayyib, who had mended her when she was barely human, who recalled her body and mind from the front when she thought she had lost both there. The man who taught her to box.
“He wouldn’t make a charge,” she said.
“There was another complaint,” Fatima said. “Not as potent as Yah Tayyib’s, but a formal complaint nonetheless.”
“Raine,” Nyx said.
Fatima raised her brows. “You expected it?”
“I’ve been expecting him to file a formal complaint ever since I cut off his cock.”
“It was deserved,” Rasheeda said.
“Deserved or not, he’s filed a formal complaint about a bel dame doing black work,” Fatima said.
“Lucky you left him his balls,” Rasheeda said, “or you’d get a fine for reproductive terrorism.” She waggled her index finger and snickered.
“So what happens now?” Nyx asked. “You give me some kind of probation?”
“No,” Fatima said. “We terminate your contract and send you to prison.”
“What?” Nyx said. Prison was for draft dodgers and terrorists. Prison was for
“The sentence came from the queen.”
“I’m bored,” Rasheeda said. “Where’s my soda?” She went naked into the hall, calling for Luce.
Nyx stared into her skinny, veined hands again. It was like she’d woken up with someone else’s body.
“How long do I serve?” she asked.
“A year, maybe less. We could have had you sent to the front.”
“How did you find me?”
“We had Rasheeda posted at Jaks’s residence.”
Of course. She’d seen only three of them at the fight. “So you knew about Jaks?”
“We looked up your note,” Fatima said, then wrinkled her nose. “You look and smell like death. I’ll get you something to eat.” She walked into the busy hall.
Prison, Nyx thought, with all the criminals Raine and people like her had put there.
Nyx tried to pull her legs off the bed. They were numb. How long had she been here? The window overlooking the street was barred, and the walls were solid stone. How the hell could she get bars out of stone?
But Fatima was coming back into the room with a Plague Sister bearing a tray of something that smelled a lot like food, and Rasheeda had her arms full of bottles of soda. If there was a way out of this one, Nyx couldn’t think of it. Didn’t even know if she wanted it. Her body was done.
“Here,” Rasheeda said, throwing her a bottle. Nyx’s reflexes were off. She ducked instead of catching it. “You won’t get any of those in the box.”
“When she’s done eating,” Fatima told the Plague Sister, “I have a team coming to get her.”
Nyx didn’t finish eating, but they still came for her.
And prison was pretty shitty.
4
“It’s time,” Yah Reza said.
Rhys entered the plague hall. Yah Tayyib and two other magicians sat at a large circular stone table at the center of the room. Three Plague Sisters, the hems of their white robes dripping with spiders, sat across from them. Like Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, the plague hall was a cavernous room lined with jars of mostly human organs. And like the magicians’ quarters, the whole room hummed with the sound and feel of bugs. Rhys’s skin prickled. He had waited some time for this.
Yah Reza followed Rhys inside and bid him stand next to her within a pace of the table.
Three months after Rhys saw his first alien, Yah Reza had deemed him ready for a magician’s trial. He had
