Nyx faded in and out of awareness. For a time, she thought she heard voices outside the door. The sound of moist clicking, the shuffle of insectile legs, roused her.

When she looked down, she saw a giant centipede gnawing at her left leg with its finger-long pincers. She yelled and jerked in the chair, scaring it back into its hole in the masonry. Her body was instantly covered in a sheen of cold sweat. She fought to stay conscious.

When she next came to, Luce was standing over her.

"Doesn't look like so much now, does she?" Luce said. She took Nyx by the hair and searched her face.

Nyx faded again.

She dreamed of water. Cool, suffocating water. She swam in a great lake so clear and blue she could see the ruins of old cities below. And then she was drowning in it, drowning in cold, pulled down toward the dead cities, cities full of sand. So cold.

Someone dumped a bucket of water over her. She came to with a start.

"You stink," Luce said, and set the bucket next to her.

Fatima was closing the door.

They had left the chair from their last visit, and Fatima sat in it again.

"Good morning, Nyxnissa," Fatima said.

Nyx licked at the moisture on her lips. Her hands had gone numb. She tried to flex them-the fingers she had and the fingers she thought she had. Her whole body was stiff and growing increasingly unresponsive. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She peered at the bel dames and wondered where Rasheeda was.

"I believe I was asking you yesterday where Kine's papers were," Fatima said. "I think it's an easy question. One answer and we give you some water. What do you think of that?"

What Nyx thought was that her throat was so dry she couldn't speak. But she was no good to them dead.

She moved her mouth but didn't let any sound out.

"What's that?" Fatima said, leaning toward her. She gestured irritably at Luce.

Luce walked out and came back with a water bulb. She held it to Nyx's lips and let her drink.

Nyx gulped it all down, licked her lips again. She tried to grin, but it hurt to move her face.

"Kine's papers," Fatima said.

"I didn't kill her," Nyx rasped.

A sound came from outside the door, m.u.f.fled.

"What was that?" Fatima said.

"Sounds like a dog," Luce said. "I'll check it out, but the filters are up. No shifter is getting through that filter."

Luce opened the door. She didn't close it, and Nyx heard her heading upstairs. From the open door came the unmistakable sound of a barking dog.

"Why bother holding out now, sister-mine?" Fatima said, and her voice softened. "There's no one in this world who will know or care if you live or die. I am your sister. This time next year, I'll be on the bel dame council. You understand that? Why not tell me what I need and we'll welcome you back, sister. Isn't that what you wanted? Kine's papers, and all's forgiven. Do you hear me, Nyxnissa? I have the power to make you a bel dame again. No one else would give you that."

Nyx was drooling on herself again. She blinked a few times and raised her head. "You think I'm f.u.c.king stupid?"

"The thought had crossed my mind," Fatima said, and her tone flattened again.

"Teams are replaceable," Nyx said. "I'll get another team. You want your seat on the council, you'll have to torture something useful out of some other woman."

"Your sisters were all you had, Nyxnissa, and in your greed you lost us. I've never met a woman so despised."

"Yes, you have."

"Is that so? I have three daughters and a son at the front," Fatima said. "My lover is descended from the First Families. You? You have nothing. No one."

Nyx heard a soft clicking from outside the door. She raised her head an inch, just an inch, and saw a fist-size black roach skitter into the room.

Nyx shut her eyes.

There was a pop and a flash that Nyx could see even from behind her eyelids. Flash bug.

Fatima cried out.

A gun went off. Fatima screeched again. Noise and movement.

Nyx opened her eyes.

Khos stood next to her, naked, and covered in mucus, still shaking off the last of his dog hair. Anneke was in the doorway. She threw him a pair of cutters.

He bent and worked at Nyx's bonds.

Fatima was crawling toward one corner of the room, clutching at her bleeding face.

Nyx looked down dumbly at her own ruined, swollen hand as Khos worked.

"Go, go! Hurry up!" Anneke said.

A swarm of locusts burst through the door, throwing it wide, and circled the room.

Nyx heard Rhys's voice then, from outside. "The other rooms are clear, but Rasheeda's heading back this way."

"Do we have another exit?" Anneke asked.

Khos cut the last of the wire from Nyx's elbows and started on her legs. Nyx tried flexing her fingers. Everything was numb. Even her legs now. She leaned over and coughed up blood.

Khos finished with her legs.

She tried to push herself up, tried to stand. Her whole body shook. Pain blazed up her legs as circulation returned. She looked down and saw blood leaking from the wide, wriggling wounds. If she let go of the armrest, her legs would buckle.

Khos scooped her into his arms. She had forgotten how big he was. She looped her bad arm around his neck and tangled the fingers of her other hand into his dreads.

He carried her outside the little room and up the stairs. They were in some kind of busted-out tenement building. It stank of p.i.s.s and dogs and human s.h.i.t. Anneke yelled something at Khos. Rhys was at the top of the stairs. A halo of dragonflies circled his head. He was very beautiful.

"Out," Rhys said. "Right now. She's coming in the back."

They barreled out the front of the building. Khos set Nyx in the back of the bakkie as if she were made of gla.s.s. Blood smeared the seat. Khos started the bakkie, and Anneke slung into the front. Rhys climbed in next to Nyx and held her.

It was strange, being held.

Anneke had her rifle pointed out the window. "Go! Go!" she yelled. She fired.

Nyx heard something scream.

Anneke fired again.

"What the f.u.c.k was that?" Khos said.

Anneke spit out the window. "It ain't illegal to kill bel dames in Chenja."

"Is anything broken?" Rhys asked Nyx as he ran his hands over her. "You know what day it is?"

She named a date, two days after her market trip with Anneke.

"That's about right," he said. He pushed her cropped hair out of her bruised face. "Did they break anything?"

"Been coughing up blood," she murmured.

"All right," he said. He touched her bandaged hand. "They put anything on this?"

"No."

"All right. I can put something on it. You'll lose the whole hand if it goes gangrenous." He pa.s.sed his hand over her legs, and she felt a nasty p.r.i.c.kling. The worms writhed.

Rhys knit his brows, splayed his fingers, and as the minutes slid by, the worms began to drop off, one by one.

My magician, she thought.

"Where are we going?" Nyx asked.

"I have a place," Khos said. "Don't worry about it. They'll give us harbor as long as we need it. We cleared out after you went missing. Before they searched the safehouse."

"Yes," Nyx said.

"They told you about that?" Rhys asked.

"They said you were all dead."

"We don't go down that easy," Anneke said.

"No," Nyx said as the lights outside blurred past, as Rhys sat with one arm holding her to him as Anneke kept watch at the windows, her rifle out, and as Khos drove to someplace she'd never been, in a foreign country that hated her and her people almost as much as she hated them. Her head felt like someone else's. Someone else's broken body. She had been here before.

"That's all right," she said.

"You need anything?" Khos asked. "You need some water? I've got some up front."

"No, no," Nyx said, "but I could use a whiskey."

She rolled her head against Rhys's shoulder and pa.s.sed out.

23.

Khos had spent his teenage years on the streets of Mhoria. He had spent one too many nights on the other side of the great divide that separated men's and women's worlds, and the priests-the rhabbams-had cast him out of polite society for it. So Khos had made his way as a petty thief and errand runner for a while, and had gotten into his fair share of fistfights. He had seen a lot of maggoty wounds, of bodies devoured by bugs and dogs. On Nyx's crew, he had seen and done worse. But he had never seen it or done it to anyone on his team.

Nyx looked horrible. He sat at her bedside and tried to tell himself it was her own f.u.c.king fault. She was the most Nasheenian woman he knew, and that made her headstrong and arrogant and skilled enough to cut his head off if it caught her fancy.

"How did you find me?" Nyx asked. He and Rhys had gotten her to take in some water, a little food. Rhys had done some bug work on her face and cleaned up her legs, but they had to hire a local hedge witch to do the rest, which Rhys seemed to find embarra.s.sing. Useless f.u.c.king magician, Khos thought. He never understood why Nyx kept him on the team. He wished she'd f.u.c.k the little p.r.i.c.k and get it over with.

She lay behind a gauzy curtain in a discrete room. He'd shown her the lock on the door, and told her she was at the top of the house. There was a narrow grill far up on the wall. He could hear the splash of the fountain in the courtyard.

"I tracked your scent," Khos said. There were no chairs in the room. The mattress sagged under his weight. "From where Anneke said she lost you. I could only keep up until the edge of the city. After that, Rhys sent out some bugs."

"So what's this place? You just on good terms with every brothel mistress in three countries?"

"No," he said, and hesitated. Then, "All right, it's a brothel, yes, but it's also a safe house we use for the underground."

"We?"

It was stupid to keep her in the dark about it now, but it had become habit over the years. Nyx was a dangerous woman. The people on her team knew that better than anyone, and everyone else she met had a pretty good idea. If she took issue with who he helped, who he betrayed, and the laws he broke, she would murder him for it. He had seen her kill people. It was never pretty.

"I've been helping the local wh.o.r.es in Nasheen smuggle their boys out for the last three years," he said, all in a rush, as if he'd opened a vein.

"Oh, you f.u.c.kers," Nyx said. She put a hand over her eyes. "I used to cut off the heads of men like you."

"Yeah, I know."

"Who else is here?"

"We're all here. They agreed to take all of us."

"And of course it's a brothel." Nyx crinkled her mouth. It looked like it hurt. "You must have gotten a lot of grateful women into bed."

"Only the ones who were interested." But none of them was you, Khos thought. He'd had his one night with her in Punjai, early on, before either of them knew who or what the other really was.

She grunted. "Can the underground do anything to help us?"