“Nothing,” she said.
“An old injury,” he amended as he pressed his thumb against the back of her hand, rubbed her knuckles, pushed in slow circles up to her wrist. She had hairline fractures in the small bones of her left hand. Some had healed, but badly. It was a brittle hand.
“You shouldn’t be fighting with this,” he said.
She pulled her hand from him, and her mouth got harder. Her shoulders stiffened. “I can wrap myself. They told me magicians used tricks.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t finish.” He took her hand in his again. His ability to diagnose illness and injury had been the first sign that he’d inherited his father’s skill as a magician. A more talented magician might have been able to heal her hands, if the injuries weren’t so old, but Rhys’s skill was limited, his knowledge incomplete. The longer he stayed among the Nasheenian magicians, the more he worried things would stay that way.
“Does your family approve of you boxing?” he asked to fill the cool silence. Three locusts climbed up his pant leg. He moved his hand over them, and they dropped to the floor.
“Don’t have much family,” she said. “Where you learn to wrap hands? They teach you that in magic school?”
“My uncle took me to fights in Chenja,” he said, “when I was too young to know better. I wrapped his hands.”
“You got soft hands. You aren’t a fighter. You never fought?”
“I don’t believe in violence.”
“You ain’t answered the question.”
He finished taping her bad hand. He squeezed her fist in his palm. “There, that good?”
She made fists with both hands. “I been taped worse.”
“I’m sure,” Rhys said. He hesitated. If she had had a proper husband, or a brother, or a son, that man would have told her not to fight. He would have taken care of her. “You shouldn’t fight with that hand,” he repeated.
“I been doing it a long time. It’s fight or die where I’m from. Sometimes you have to run away just to live. I suppose you know something about that.”
Rhys did not answer.
“I don’t mind you’re black,” she said, magnanimously.
“It doesn’t matter what we mind,” Rhys said. “God sorts all that out.”
“Our God says your god is false.”
“They’re the same God.” He had not always believed that, even when he pressed his head to the ground six times a day in prayer and intoned the same litany in a dead language, the language of Umayma, brought down from the moons with the Firsts at the beginning of the world:
For years he had believed what the Imams told them, that Nasheenians were godless infidels who worshipped women and idols brought in from dead worlds, worlds blighted by God for their own idolatry. But when the muezzin called the prayers here, those who were faithful went to the same mosque he did with the other magicians, prayed in nearly the same way, and spoke in the same language—God’s language—though his birth tongue was Chenjan, and theirs, Nasheenian.
They were all Umaymans, the people from the moons who had waited up there a thousand years while magicians made Umayma half-habitable—all but the Mhorians, Ras Tiegans, the Heidians, and the two-hundred-odd Drucians, who had come later. Survivors of other dead worlds, worlds out of the darkest parts of the sky.
In the mosque, forehead pressed against the floor, Rhys never understood the war. It was only when he raised his head and saw the women praying among him, bareheaded, often bare-legged, shamelessly displaying full heads of hair and ample flesh, that he questioned what these women truly believed they were submitting to. Certainly not the will of God. On the streets he saw widowed women reduced to begging, girls like this one earning money with blood, and bloated women coming in from the coast after giving birth to their unnatural broods of children. This was the life that Chenja fought against. This godlessness.
Whenever the bakkie got sick or the milk soured, his mothers would blame “those godless Nasheenians, daughters of demons.”
“Rhys?”
He looked up from the outrider’s hands to see Yah Reza in the doorway. A dozen fungus beetles skittered past her into the room. The outrider flinched.
“Yah Tayyib needs you in surgery,” Yah Reza said.
Rhys squeezed the girl’s fist a final time. “Luck to you,” he said.
“We have some visitors come to see you boxers,” Yah Reza said. “You up for it?” She was slipping further into whatever vernacular the girl spoke.
“What sort of visitors?” the girl asked.
Rhys stood, and put away the tape. He walked toward the door.
“The foreign kind. They don’t bite, though, so far as I can tell.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, then.”
Yah Reza clapped her hands. “Come.”
Rhys turned past the magician and walked into the dim outer corridor. He saw a cluster of figures outside Husayn’s locker room and paused to get a look at them.
Two black women wearing oddly cut hijabs spoke in low tones. Though the hijabs were black, their long robes were white, and dusty along the hem. They wore no jewelry, and instead of sandals they wore black boots without a heel.
Despite their complexions, he knew they were not Chenjan, or even Tirhani. They were too small, too thin, fine-boned, and the way they held themselves—the way they spoke with heads bent—was not Chenjan or Tirhani but something else.
One of them looked out at him and ceased speaking. From across the long hall, he saw a broad face with high cheekbones, large eyes, and dark brows. It was a startlingly open face, as if she was not used to keeping secrets. Her skin was bright and clear and smoother than any he’d seen save for the face of a child. She was old, he knew, by her posture and her height, but the clarity of her skin made him want to call her a girl. It was not the face of a woman who had grown up in the desert or even a world with two suns. Unless she was the daughter of a rich merchant who had kept her locked in a tower in some salty country, hidden from the suns by dark curtains and filters for a quarter century, she was not from anywhere on Umayma.
“You’re very young to be a man,” she said, and laughed at him. Her accent was strange—a deep, throaty whir swallowed all of her vowels, and when she laughed, she laughed from deep in her chest. It was a boisterous sound, too loud to come from a woman with such a narrow chest.
“You’re not from Nasheen,” he said.
“Nor are you.”
She was not from anywhere in the world. But that was impossible. The Mhorians had been the last allowed refuge on Umayma, nearly a thousand years before. They had brought with them dangerous idols and belief in a foreign prophet, but they claimed to be people of the Book, and custom required that they be given sanctuary. It was a custom soon discarded, though, and the ships that followed the Mhorians were shot out of the sky. Their remains had rained down over the world like stars.
Were these women people of the Book?
“You’re an alien,” he said, tentative, a question.
She laughed again, and the laughter filled the corridor. “Your first?”
He nodded.
“Not the last, I hope,” she said.
And then Yah Reza and the outrider entered the hall and blocked his view, and Rhys turned away and walked quickly past a bend in the corridor, where he could no longer hear the alien woman’s voice.
The memory of her laugh tugged at something inside him, something he thought he’d left back in Chenja. He wanted to pull back her hijab and run his fingers through the black waves of her unbound hair. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. He had been too long in Nasheen.
When he arrived at Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, he saw blood spattering the stones, hungry bugs lapping up their fill. Another hard-up bel dame had come to collect
