"It doesn't matter what we mind," Rhys said. "G.o.d sorts all that out."

"Our G.o.d says your G.o.d is false."

"They're the same G.o.d." 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: In the name of G.o.d, the infinitely Compa.s.sionate and Merciful... In the name of G.o.d, the infinitely Compa.s.sionate and Merciful...

For years he had believed what the Imams told them, that Nasheenians were G.o.dless infidels who worshipped women and idols brought in from dead worlds, worlds blighted by G.o.d 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-G.o.d'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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.dlessness.

Whenever the bakkie got sick or the milk soured, his mothers would blame "those G.o.dless 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 zakat zakat. Another G.o.dless woman was destined to die.

3.

Nyx struggled out of a groggy half dream of drowning and fell off the giant stone slab in Yah Tayyib's operating theater. The floor was cold.

Yah Tayyib helped her up. One curved wall of the theater was lined with squat gla.s.s jars of organs. Glow worms ringed the shelves and hugged the gla.s.s. Nyx noted the long table at Yah Tayyib's left and the length of silk that covered his instruments, but her gaze did not settle there long. She was interested in the medicine wardrobe at the back. The one with the morphine.

She was naked. Blood trickled down one leg.

"How do you feel?" Yah Tayyib asked. He wore a billowing blue robe. Carrion beetles clung to the hem. He was a tall thin man, well over sixty and gray in the beard. His face was a sunken ruin, the nose a mashed pulp of flesh. But his hands, his all-important magician's hands, were smooth and straight-fingered.

Nyx wondered how she was supposed to respond to that. Her head felt stuffed with honey.

"You were missing a kidney," Yah Tayyib said. "I replaced that as well."

"I traded it for a ticket out of Chenja. The other one wasn't mine either."

"I didn't think it was," he said.

"Why not?"

"I put it in there six months ago."

"Ah," Nyx said.

"I'm quite sorry about the womb," Yah Tayyib said. "It was your original, you know, and uniquely shaped. Bicornuate. I would have bought it myself, though for much less than you likely sold it." He always talked about body parts like bug specimens-dry and purely academic.

"I don't care much how it's shaped or whose it is," she said. "I care about what it can do for me. What time is it? I've got Raine on my tail."

She looked around for her clothes. They were stacked neatly next to the operating slab. She started to get dressed, slowly. It was like trying to work somebody else's body. She was still a big woman, but she was down to her dhoti and binding, and both were tattered and loose, hanging off her like a shroud.

"You have a price on your head," Yah Tayyib said, and turned to wash his hands at the sink. Flesh beetles clung to the end of the tap, bundling up drops of water in their sticky legs.

"Yeah," she said. "More than fifty, apparently."

"You should turn yourself in to your bel dame sisters. The bounty hunters won't be so generous. They say it's black money this time. Gene pirates." He wiped his hands dry on his robes and regarded her. "What were you carrying?"

"Zygotes," Nyx said. "Ferrier work. I was supposed to hand it off on this end, but I had to drop it and sell it to some butchers to keep my sisters busy. I figure they lost at least half a day trying to figure out where I dropped it. No womb, no proof, no way to fully collect their note on me."

The fist in her belly tightened, contracted. She felt dizzy, and leaned back against the stone altar.

"You've indebted yourself to us again," Yah Tayyib said. "This is not the place to settle a blood note. Yours or theirs. Keep your b.l.o.o.d.y boys and your b.l.o.o.d.y sisters out of my ring."

"Still got something against bel dames?"

"You've never been a boy at the front."

"I can't imagine you being frightened of anything, Yah Tayyib."

"We all manage our grief differently," Yah Tayyib said. "Three dead wives and a dozen dead children make me more human, not less. You have chosen your path. I have chosen mine. This is the last time I do this for you, Nyxnissa."

"You say that every time. Is it too late to bet on the boxers?"

"What in this world do you own to bet?"

Nyx prodded at the red scarring tissue on her right hip. "I've got good credit," she said. She always paid her debts to the magicians... eventually.

"I doubt that," he said. "You've nothing more than rags and flesh."

She shook her head. Her vision swam. "I'll get paid when I've cleared the blood debt. I can buy whatever I need after that."

Yah Tayyib sighed. He walked over to the big wardrobe next to the medicine cabinet.

"Am I done bleeding?" Nyx said.

Yah Tayyib pulled out a deep mahogany burnous. "You'll expel the usual bugs in a few hours. They're aiding in the last of the repairs. Here, this is the most inconspicuous I have."

Nyx donned the burnous. It was surprisingly soft. "Organic?" she asked.

"Yes. It will breathe for you, if you need it to."

"Great," she said, as if that would make any difference tonight. "Walk me out?"

Yah Tayyib escorted her back through the labyrinthine halls of the magicians' quarters, all windowless. He took her to the internal magician's betting booth, where a young woman Nyx knew from her days at the gym stood at the window collecting baskets of bugs.

"I still have credit here, Maj?" Nyx asked.

"You always have credit," Maj said.

Yah Tayyib huffed his displeasure as Nyx set down a bet on Jaks so Hajjij for fifty.

"You're a mad woman," he said as Nyx picked up her receipt and then pushed back through the crowd of magicians.

"Maybe so," she said. But this would get her Jaks, and Jaks would get her the boy, and the boy would put money in her pockets-and save some Nasheenian village from contamination.

That was the idea, anyway.

Yah Tayyib brought her back to the gym, which had been transformed into a fighting arena. The lights outside the ring were dim. The last of the speed bags had been put away. A man who looked remarkably like a Chenjan dancer moved under the ring-lights and it took Nyx half a minute to realize the dancer really was was Chenjan-and male. Some instinctual part of her thought he'd look a lot better blown up, but there was something she liked about him, something about the way he moved, the delicacy of his hands. Chenjan-and male. Some instinctual part of her thought he'd look a lot better blown up, but there was something she liked about him, something about the way he moved, the delicacy of his hands.

She and Yah Tayyib negotiated the crowd to a bench at the back, along the edges of the darkness. Nyx kept her eye on the dancer.

"Who's he?" Nyx asked.

"The boy?"

He was probably eighteen or nineteen, old enough for the front. Not so much a boy, in Nasheen.

"Yeah," she said.

"A pet project of Yah Reza's," Yah Tayyib said. "A political refugee from Chenja. He calls himself Rhys."

"What kind of a name is that?"

"A nom de guerre nom de guerre," he said, using the Ras Tiegan expression. "Yah Reza tells me he used to dance for the Chenjan mullahs as a child. When his father asked him to carry out the punishment of his own sister because he himself was unable, Rhys refused, and was exiled. That's the story he tells, in any case."

"Does he do anything besides dance?"

"He's not a prost.i.tute, if that's what you're asking," Yah Tayyib said.

"Then what's he do?" she asked.

Yah Tayyib folded his hands in his lap. "He's good with bugs."

"A bel dame could use someone good with bugs."

"He's worth three of you."

"You saying I'm a bad girl?"

Yah Tayyib's expression was stony. "I'm saying you're less than virtuous."

Well. She'd been called worse.

The dancer slowed and stilled. The match was about to start, and his time was up.

Nyx scanned the crowd for Raine and his crew, in case they'd gotten in through the cantina entrance. Her gaze found a handful of very different figures instead. Three tall women with the black hoods of their burnouses pulled up, the hilt of their blades visible at their hips, moved through the throng of spectators, sniffing at gla.s.ses of liquor and brushing bugs from their sleeves.

Her sisters.