smart for them. But Yah Reza offered him magic. In Chenja, to reveal his skill would have meant immediate training for the front, no matter that he was his father’s only son. As a standard, his father’s lack of sons had given Rhys a place at home. Men still headed families in Chenja. They still owned companies, acted as mullahs, ran the government. But as a magician, he would have been forced to the front.
“I’ll stay,” he had told her.
He spent some months among the magicians, learning the intricacies of bug manipulation and organic tech. His Nasheenian improved. He learned to look away from the women in the hall as he passed. They stared at him openly, like harlots. It was up to him to allow them to maintain some shred of honor. When he asked to leave the cavernous labyrinth of the magicians’ quarters and boxing gym to go sightseeing in Faleen, Yah Reza told him he was not yet ready. She encouraged patience. But her words did nothing to distill the growing sense that he was a prisoner there, kept at the discretion of Nasheen’s magicians until he proved worthless or useful. He did not know what they would do with him when they decided which he best embodied.
Yah Reza caught him by the elbow one afternoon as he hurried back to his rooms after another embarrassing encounter with a magician teaching him transmission science. He was not used to a world where women put their hands on him without reservation and regarded him as if he were a young but dangerous insect. Chenja was full of women, of course, but no Chenjan woman had ever grabbed him in the street, not even the lowliest of prostitutes. And no Chenjan woman had ever done the things to him that the women in the border towns had done before their magicians showed up. They would not have dreamed of it. They would have been killed for it.
He was still trembling when Yah Reza grabbed him.
“Come with me, baby doll,” she said. She wore a billowing saffron robe and smelled of death and saffron. A furry spider the size of Rhys’s thumb crawled along her sleeve, and a whirl of tiny blue moths circled her head.
He tried to quiet his trembling.
Yah Reza beckoned him. Rhys followed her through the long, twisting halls of the magicians’ quarters—cool, windowless corridors that suddenly opened into niches and vaulted chambers filled with locusts and cocooned creatures, lit sporadically by glow worms and fire beetles and the ever-present lightning bugs flaring and dying in the dark.
The preponderance of bugs in the magicians’ quarters made his blood sing, as if he was attuned to a bit of everything, able to touch and manipulate pieces of the world. He felt more alive here than he had anywhere else in his life, among those who spent their days coming up with new and interesting ways to kill his people.
I’ll take what I need from them and return, he thought. I’ll make it right.
The boxers’ locker rooms were three steps to the right of the transmission rooms, a corridor away from the internal betting booth, and three long bends of the hall from Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, where magicians and bel dames came to receive treatment for cancer and contagion. The corridors within a magicians’ gym were never the same length, never quite in the same location. Beneath each gym, the world was bent and twisted. The distance-bending corridors were relics from the times before Umayma was habitable, back when magicians lived belowground while they remade the world. This made it possible to step into a gym at the coast and emerge a few minutes later at a gym in Mushtallah or Faleen and Aludra. Practical for long distances, but dizzying over short ones.
As they approached the locker room for outriders, Husayn—the magicians’ favorite boxing nag—passed them in the hall, heading one twist of the hallway down to her own locker room. Husayn was a stocky woman with a face like a shovel. A novice magician scurried after her, carrying her gear.
“Hey, chimba!” Husayn called at Rhys. Too loud. The women in this country were all too loud.
Rhys did not look at her.
“Those magicians haven’t been able to wash that gravy stink off you, you know it?” Husayn persisted.
“I am still perplexed as to why it is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it,” Rhys said. “Perhaps Nasheen’s women sought to frighten away God with their ugliness.”
“Well now, if all your boys are as pretty as you, your
What a fool, Rhys thought. Chenjan mullahs taught that men’s bodies were clean, asexual. Closer to God. Women, real women, were not stirred to sin at the sight of men. If these godless Nasheenian women were stirred at the sight of anything, it was blood.
Yah Reza shooed her away. “Come, now, this isn’t a whorehouse.”
Husayn cackled and moved on.
Rhys ducked into the other locker room. Inside, the light was dim, and a lean woman sat hunched on one of the benches, staring into her hands.
When he stepped in, she looked up. She was long in the face, like a dog, and she had narrow, little eyes and a set to her mouth that reminded Rhys of one of his sisters, the look she got when she wanted something so badly she made herself sick. He hoped this woman didn’t vomit. He knew who would have to clean it up.
Yah Reza moved past him and greeted the outrider.
The outrider stood. She looked uneasy, like a cornered animal—a dog-shifter in form, or maybe some scraggly adolescent sand cat. He might have guessed her for a shifter if he had seen only an image or picture of her, but in person he was able to see clearly that she was not. The air did not prickle and bend around her as it did a shifter. She was just some kid, some standard—just another part of the world.
Yah Reza talked low to the girl and rubbed her shoulders. She spit sen on the floor. Rhys knew who would have to clean that up too.
“This is Rhys. Come here, boy,” Yah Reza said, and Rhys walked close enough to see that he was a head and shoulders taller than the outrider.
“You bring your wraps?” Yah Reza asked the girl.
The outrider stabbed her fingers toward two long, dirty pieces of tattered muslin on the bench next to her.
Yah Reza spit more sen. “Rhys,” she said.
Rhys went to the locker at the back of the room, where they kept the extra gear. He unraveled a couple of hand wraps. He grabbed some tape and took a seat on the bench and finished unraveling the wraps.
“He know how to box?” the outrider asked, and even Rhys, with his nonnative Nasheenian, noticed her mushy inland accent. Where had they picked her up? Working some border town? The magicians were notorious for pushing girls into the ring before they were ready. It made the fights bloodier.
“I don’t believe in violence,” Rhys said.
“A shame too,” Yah Reza said. “He’s a damn fine shot with a pistol. But don’t worry none about his technique. He’s a magician, girl. He knows hands. You get on, and I’ll meet you in a quarter-hour. We got some fancy visitors want to meet you and Husayn before the fight.”
Yah Reza petted the outrider’s cheek.
The outrider sat back on the bench and eyed Rhys like he was a beetle turned over on its back, not sure if it was harmless or just playing at docility until she got close.
Rhys asked for her right hand.
She hesitated, and he thought that was odd from a woman who was about to go toe to toe with a seasoned fighter in a magicians’ gym. He realized then how young she was, maybe seventeen. It was hard to tell with Nasheenian women. They grew up fast, bore the marks of their short, brutal childhoods on their bodies and faces. Most of them were broken old crones at thirty.
He taped the wrap in place and began to loop it around her wrist and between her fingers. She had her palm flat and her fingers wide.
When he had first come to Nasheen, he’d thought he would hate all of its women for their ugliness, their vanity, but as he put the wraps on this little dog-faced girl, he found himself admiring her hands. She had strong, beautiful fingers, calloused knuckles and palms, and he saw her scars, and the dirt under her bitten nails. There was something splendid and tragic about her all at once.
He tied off her right hand and moved to the left. When he took her left hand in his, something about the way she held it, the way it felt beneath his fingers, made him hesitate. He pulled at her fingers.
She winced.
“You’ve done an injury to this hand?” he asked.
