"I'd like to breathe," Nyx said. "Ease up."

"Your t.i.ts are too big."

"I haven't heard any complaints."

"I'm complaining."

"Huh," Nyx said. She pulled on a long tunic and burnous and tucked her botched hair up under a gutra and fastened it with an aghal. She needed to cut her hair again properly. She hated short hair.

"You ready, Anneke?"

Anneke slung her scattergun over her shoulder and went back out into the main room for her rifle. "Ready, boss."

"You don't think that's a little much?"

"Not where we're going," Anneke said.

"Khos, you're doing recon today," Nyx said.

"Yeah," he said.

She glanced at the curtain Rhys had hidden himself behind. Didn't bother. Sometimes he just exhausted her. He wasn't happy about Chenja. Or the liquor. He was never happy about anything.

"Let's go," she said.

She and Anneke walked out to the bakkie. Nyx did a quick check for explosives, then they both got in and drove to a local teahouse.

Chenjans dressed far more conservatively than Nasheenians, and it was probably the reason they suffered from fewer cancers. The people they drove past and shared the road with wore brightly colored vests and long coats and trousers and aghals and burnouses, and even some of the men veiled their faces. She expected to see more men in Chenja than she did in Nasheen, but unless there was a political rally or she stood outside a mosque around prayer time, the people on the street were still mostly women. All of the women wore veils and covered their hair, and most wore chadors. The few men she saw were swaggering old men or boys young enough to be the grandsons or great-grandsons of the old men. In Chenja, all of the street signs were in the prayer language, not local Chenjan, which was a similar script but not identical. Nyx's Chenjan wasn't the best, but she was better with the prayer script.

Luckily, Anneke knew the streets of Dadfar pretty well. She and Raine had worked in Chenja for a couple of years, and she had family in the city, so when Nyx said they needed to find out about a boxing gym-violent sports and gambling were outlawed in Chenja-Anneke knew the right teahouse.

The tea house sold tea and marijuana, and business looked slow. A couple of prayer wheels hung in the window. Most of the patrons were men either too young to be at the front or too old to get sent back. The old men played board games and smoked marijuana. The boys talked about weapons and girls. A gaggle of chador-clad women sat at the back, laughing in high, loud voices. Like all Chenjans, they wore clothing in gaudy, mismatched colors, as if making up for the fact that they had to live without liquor.

Nyx found a table close enough to the rear door to comfort her and sat with her back to the wall. Behind her there was a ma.s.sive flaking gilt frame with a picture of some Chenjan martyr on it. Maybe the owner's son. Nyx wondered why it was that the prescription against images of living things didn't apply to martyrs, just the Prophet and everything else.

"You sure this is the right place?" she asked Anneke in her broken Chenjan.

Anneke waved over the older woman standing behind the counter and started chatting to her in Chenjan. The woman, unveiled and pushing fifty, brought them tea and sat down and drank it with them. Nyx could follow most of what she said. The bar matron knew one of Anneke's sisters. She'd been widowed. Owning the teahouse paid the bills. She and her daughters kept it running. The man on the wall was her husband. He had been one of the suicide soldiers who bombed the Nasheenian breeding compounds three decades before.

Nyx looked up at the image on the wall again, examined the eyes. She wondered if she'd ever looked like that: the absolute faith, the grim purpose.

They exchanged a few more words about abandoned buildings and boxing, and then the bar matron lowered her voice and nodded.

Anneke said to Nyx, in Nasheenian, low, "Yeah, she's heard rumors of fights. Doesn't much like the idea of fighting in this town, but her husband used to do some of it."

They finished their tea, and the matron left to tend to the others. Anneke stood.

"We're good?" Nyx said.

"Yeah. There's supposed to be a fight in a few days about three or four kilometers from here at an abandoned waterworks. They hold a lot of illegal fights there."

"Good," Nyx said.

Anneke shrugged as they stepped back out into the heat of the day. "Well, that was easy. Let's get lunch. She owns the bakery next door."

"I'm not in the mood for sweets," Nyx said.

They picked up a couple of stuffed rotis at a food cart in the town square. It was market day, and the square was choked with merchants selling prayer rugs, scarves, hijabs, burnouses, baskets, dried meat, protein cakes, rotis, braided bread... just about anything Nyx could think of, and more besides. There were butchers and pseudo-magicians and what Nyx figured were probably gene pirates selling their services-real magicians didn't advertise in markets-and one of the fakes was hawking what he said were human organs in jars laced with ice flies.

She saw a long line of people-men and women-dressed from head to toe in white, making their way across the square. The white marked them as Tirhani pilgrims, and they bore their temporary visas around their necks. Dadfar was the death place of the Tirhani martyr, Manijeh Na.s.su, one of the daughters of the Chenjan caliph, back when they had one. She had led southern Chenja in revolt against the north and died trying to get water for her group of fighters after they were cut off from the only well for miles. Nyx remembered the water on the streets the night before, and wondered now if it had been some kind of Tirhani pilgrim thing.

"b.l.o.o.d.y f.u.c.king dung beetles," Anneke muttered, following her look. "You watch them. Someday they're going to show up here, guns hot, telling us they're our b.l.o.o.d.y liberators come to save us from ourselves."

"After selling guns to both sides," Nyx said. "It's real easy to sit out there on the coast playing holier than thou and getting fat off someone else's war." It was Chenja's reliance on Tirhani weapons that kept Tirhani pilgrims getting visas, and Nasheenian reliance on the same that kept them ferrying bug tech and magicians by the boatload to Tirhan. f.u.c.king dung beetles.

Across the square was a mosque, and the muezzin called out mid-morning prayer, bringing most of the activity in the market to a halt. Anneke dusted off the sidewalk in front of her and pulled the prayer rug from her back. Going into the mosque would have been risky. Always better to pray outside official s.p.a.ces when you were cross-dressing in Chenja.

Nyx wandered through the market as it cleared out. She bought a couple of mangoes-Rhys liked mangoes-and another roti. Most Chenjan food was s.h.i.t, but there was nothing better than a good roti.

She looked over the stalls nearest her and saw Anneke still p.r.o.ne on the sidewalk. She walked a little more until she came to the other side of the square, where a veiled woman sold prayer rugs. On the street behind the woman, a bakkie sat idling, its windows opaqued. Nyx started eating a mango as she watched the bakkie. Strange to leave your bakkie idling while you hopped into the mosque for mid-morning prayer. Chenjans weren't any more honest than Nasheenians, no matter what Rhys said. Somebody was liable to steal their transport. If not Nyx, then somebody like her.

The veiled woman who owned the stall was praying. The day was going to be hot. Nyx smelled curry over protein cakes and grimaced. Chenja.

She turned again to look for Anneke. As she did, she saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye. She ducked and thrust her elbow behind her. She caught somebody in the gut.

A bag went over her head, and the light bled away.

Nyx kicked out, but she was already off her feet. Something hard hit her in the head. She let out a long scream, hoping somebody around her would note that she wasn't being kidnapped willingly.

Somebody shouted something. Nyx got hit in the head again.

A bakkie door opened, and she was shoved inside. Her captor took the bag off her head. Nyx had one dizzying moment to look into Rasheeda's grinning face before her sister thrust a toxic scarab beetle into her mouth and gagged her with a rag.

Nyx choked on the beetle as its poison trickled down her throat, turning the world gray and hazy, making her too drugged to move.

20.

Nyx forced herself to focus. The poison was wearing off. She'd eaten most of the beetle while trying to breathe. Her head felt too heavy to hold up. She was strapped to a chair bolted to the floor. She was naked. She hadn't recognized the other women who stripped her and searched her, but she knew Rasheeda was working this with another sister. If Rasheeda had been working alone, she would have just killed Nyx.

Nyx tried raising her head again and looked around. The room was dim. The floor was gritty and oddly damp. The whole room felt too damp. It was probably a bas.e.m.e.nt room dug just above the old riverbed.

She tugged at her bonds-organic rope that fed off her sweat and blood. The more she moved, the tougher it got. Over that, barbed wire twisted into some bizarre shapes on the arm rests. Rasheeda liked to twist restraining wire into grim parodies of faces. They'd trussed her feet as well and pinned her at her elbows and wrists so she had to sit a certain way or risk losing circulation in her arms. She wished they'd tied something around her head to keep it up. She let it sink again.

Time stretched. Her head cleared. She was cold and thirsty. There was something wrong with her legs. She held her urine as long as she could before finally p.i.s.sing herself. That was part of the game, of course, leaving her in a pool of her own urine, so thirsty she'd drink it if she could reach it. The light globe above her was never shuttered. How long they waited until they came to her depended on how desperate they were for information.

But what information? About Nikodem and the boxing? They'd know about that. Rasheeda didn't want Nikodem anyway. Their goal was to keep her away from Nikodem, wasn't it? Or were they using her to find Nikodem? What was this, another intimidation game?

She waited. Her body stiffened. She tried flexing her arms, her back, her shoulders, her legs. She was going to start losing feeling in her limbs if she didn't find a way to move.

Nyx finally managed to get a look at her legs. b.l.o.o.d.y wounds crisscrossed her flesh. The lines moved and wriggled. Alive.

They'd stuffed her wounds with bloodworms.

Her gut roiled. She looked up again. Something moved in the far dark corner of the room in the broken masonry. She briefly saw the shiny head of a giant centipede peek through. The pain would kick in soon-maybe another couple hours-when the bloodworms had excreted enough poison into her skin to start the slow burn. Her lower limbs already tingled.

She avoided thinking about her team. She didn't think about the interrogation, about what she'd seen Rasheeda do to people. Instead, she thought about the black sand of Tirhan, the kind she'd spun stories about back in Mushirah. She thought about sitting on a deck under a couple of broad-leafed palm trees surrounded in dark green foliage, sipping cool coconut drinks spiked with vodka.

She thought about counting stars with Tej, and she remembered the good nights with that girl, what was her name? Radeyah, yes. Radeyah, with the kind eyes and quick tongue who'd told her they'd spend a lifetime growing old together in the same bed in a little beach house in Tirhan, though all that water in one place scared the s.h.i.t out of Nyx. But Radeyah's boy lover had come back from the front-most of him-and dreams of Tirhan and vodka and a lifetime of Radeyah's sweet tongue and soft hands had ended.

She had told that story again, though, wrapped in bed with another sort of woman, a desperate outrider. Told her all about Tirhani beaches she had never been to and never wanted to see-"Don't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you..."-but Nyx had lied and whispered to her Radeyah's dream, not her own, because Jaks loved the sea, dreamed of the sea. Nyx had learned that from one of Jaks's house sisters, the one who told her about Arran.

Arran. The note that killed Tej.

Nyx used them all to get to somebody else, to pick up some other note. It was her job. It's what she did.

The door opened.

Nyx raised her head.

Rasheeda walked in, wearing loose trousers and a short coat. Her black hair was pulled back from her cool, flawless face, and she was grinning. Her eyes were flat and black and, paired with the grin, she looked like some kind of demon, something come up straight from h.e.l.l to inhabit a soulless body. She carried a bag and a stool.

Behind her was Fatima.

Nyx wasn't surprised. This was the sort of job Fatima would pull. Fatima was skinny-skinnier than Nyx had ever seen her-and her dark hair was shot through with white; very becoming on a Nasheenian woman. Fatima fixed a hard look on Nyx, then shut the door. Nyx hadn't seen Fatima since she sent Nyx to prison.

Rasheeda snickered and set the stool in front of Nyx, just far enough away so Nyx couldn't bite her nose off.

Fatima sat as Rasheeda unpacked her instruments from her bag.

"You look terrible," Fatima said.

Nyx only looked at her.

Fatima's mouth quirked up at the corners, not a smile. "You were much more difficult to track when you worked alone."

Fatima waited a bare moment, glancing over at Rasheeda as the other bel dame laid out a series of scalpels and straight pins and blinking syringes on a scarlet-colored length of silk.

"You were told to stay off this note," Fatima said. "Rasheeda and Luce were clear, as I understand it. Yet here you are, far from Nasheen, looking up an off-worlder. Where are Kine's papers? I searched your safe house. Are they in the country? Who else knows about them?"

Nyx clenched her teeth.

"Your team's dead," Fatima said.

"You're a bad liar," Nyx said. "If you toasted my team you'd have told me all about the street they were on and the way you killed them. You wouldn't stop with half-a.s.sed declarations. You're a bel dame."

Fatima's mouth quirked again. "You think so? If you leave this place alive, perhaps we'll see."

Nyx grunted.

"We know you were at Kine's," Fatima said. "Did you speak to her before her death? What do you know about her work?"

Kine and her G.o.dd.a.m.n papers.

Nyx shifted a little in her chair. If she started talking, she'd be in trouble. She could make up stories, sure, but she didn't trust that after several days of torture, she'd be able to keep the stories straight. But silence implied submission, and she wasn't keen on submitting to anyone-not Fatima, not the magicians, not the queen, not G.o.d.

"I have no wish to send you home in pieces," Fatima said.

Rasheeda squatted next to the instruments, giggling.

"Tell me," Nyx said, "what do bel dames want with information from the compounds? Thought you would be on good terms with their security."

"I want to know what you you know about Kine." know about Kine."

"What do you know about Kine?"

"Oh, stop it," Fatima said, and her expression got ugly. "You want us to chop you up and leave you here?"

"You should have asked my team before you killed them," Nyx said. "They'd have known just as much about Kine as I do." Burning the pages had been a good idea. If the bel dames wanted the papers and wanted to keep Nyx off the note, it meant they were probably working with Nikodem. They wanted her to stay hidden. In Chenja.

Sweet f.u.c.k, Nyx thought are the bel dames working with the Chenjans? are the bel dames working with the Chenjans? Were they working some kind of deal together to topple the monarchy? Were they working some kind of deal together to topple the monarchy?

"I don't have any patience this afternoon, Nyxnissa."

Nyx tacked that down. Afternoon. Not of the same day she was brought in, though, right? So she'd lost a day?

"You never did have much patience, sister-mine," Nyx said, "and I don't have much patience for traitors. When did you all decide to sell out Nasheen?"

"Rasheeda?"

Rasheeda grabbed the back of Nyx's chair and tilted it. She turned Nyx around so she could see the tub of water behind her. A thin layer of ice coated the surface. The tub was padded around the base by a band of insulation that hummed.

"Those are expensive bugs," Nyx said.

Rasheeda pushed Nyx over.

Nyx went into the water face first. The lip of the tub caught her in the gut. Her head banged the bottom of the tub.

Cold hit her like a fist to the face.

The first time under, she didn't thrash, just shut her eyes and felt the cold eat into her bones.

Rasheeda pulled her back up. Nyx gasped and went back under, banging her head on the bottom again.