She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She'd never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women.

"You're too thin," he said. "You look hollow."

He took her right fist in his palm and squeezed it. He leaned in to her.

"I have no love for you," he said.

"I never asked you to."

He took up her left hand and started wrapping. There was a noise in the doorway. Just behind him, Dahab turned. Roaches scuttled along the floor.

Dahab swore and stomped at them.

Rhys flicked his wrist toward the band of his trousers, and the razor blade Nyx had given him appeared in his hand. He tucked it between the middle and index fingers of her left hand. He looked only at her hands.

They said nothing more. He finished wrapping.

She made a fist to keep the blade in place, all but the barest hint of the edge hidden in her palm.

"You done, boy?" Dahab said.

Rhys squeezed Nyx's left fist. "Done," he said.

The bel dames escorted them out into the hall, up the stairs, and into the ring.

36.

Sometime after Khos came on board with her team, Nyx had gotten drunk and f.u.c.ked him. She hadn't been to bed with a man in years, and though he was too big and coa.r.s.e for her taste, when she was drunk, she didn't care. He was warm and tasted good and kissed her like a man who breathed women, dreamed of women, found bliss in the arms of women. And for Nyx, who had never known bliss or surrender with or toward anyone or anything, seeing him submit to sensation-to l.u.s.t, desire-was one of the most intensely erotic things she had ever witnessed.

After, while she pulled on her dhoti and braided back her mussed hair, he had asked her about Rhys.

"You should see the way the two of you look at each other," he said.

"We don't look at each other. He's just a kid."

"A pretty kid, by anybody's standard. And if even I can see that, I imagine you sure can."

"Well, no amount of looking is going to make any difference. He's still G.o.d full, and I'm still G.o.dless."

"Maybe you should find G.o.d again."

"Maybe he should become G.o.dless."

"You compromise for no one."

"No."

"That's a lonely place to be."

"You trying to open me up? You're n.o.body special."

"Haven't I already opened you?"

"The c.u.n.t is not the heart," she said, standing, "though a lot of people get the two confused."

He sat along the edge of the bed, behind her, and she could feel the heat of him, though his skin did not touch hers. He was a big man. Why did big men make her nervous?

She left him naked and alone and slightly bewildered on the thin mattress of his raised bed. She always left them bewildered, wondering if they had said something differently, or had said nothing at all, if she would still be in their arms, if she would have surrendered.

The next time she got drunk, she went to a brothel, and resolved to stop sleeping with people on her team.

Now Nyx stood inside a boxing ring, for real, for the first time since she'd left the magicians, since she ran off with Raine and his crew. She had taken this woman to bed too, and she hadn't surrendered then. She wouldn't now.

I use you all, she thought bitterly. I use you and then I cut you out like a cancer, like my womb... but they were still there, sticky and hot in her dreams, like the detritus of a butcher's shop, memories of blood and sand. And she remembered Rhys drawing the shape of a perfect heart in the air.

The air was wet and tasted like copper. Two overhead lights were on, lights that weren't made to be ring lights but had been rigged for it. She suspected she was in the abandoned waterworks that Rhys and Khos had told her about. This was where Jaks and all the Nasheenian boxers she smuggled in fought. They broke rules and risked their lives to b.l.o.o.d.y each other in front of an audience that loathed them as women and foreigners. They got bloodied up and took Chenjan money and f.u.c.ked off to gamble or drink it away and come back the next week, a little hungover, a little stung, and ready to do it all over again.

Dahab and Rasheeda herded Nyx and Rhys into the converted room. Nikodem was already sitting at a table ringside, and Dahab bound Rhys's hands again and shoved him down next to the alien. Anneke was balled up on the floor next to him, hands tied behind her, a short line connecting the bonds on her hands and feet, so she was bent backward. Her face was swollen. So, they'd gotten Anneke after all. Gotten her alive, even.

Jaks was already waiting in the ring. Behind her, working as her cut man, was the magician Nyx had been waiting for.

"Yah Tayyib," Nyx said. "Missed me so much you wanted to help put me back together again?"

Dahab prodded her into the ring.

Nyx ducked under the ropes and stood under the hot lights.

Yah Tayyib stood in Jaks's corner. He was hard-faced, and neatly dressed.

"This whole thing your idea?" Nyx asked. She looked at her own empty corner. "I get a cut magician? Or we still going to play this pretending I'm in boxing shape and have a whole right hand?"

"That's not the point," Jaks said.

"Give her the boy," Nikodem said. "It will remind her of what she's fighting for."

Nyx eyed Yah Tayyib. "This clean work?" she asked him, and couldn't keep the bite from her voice. "You pinch on me for running a womb for a couple of gene pirates and now you're selling us all out to some s.p.a.ce pirate? Who do you think you're saving, old man?"

"I'm ending your war," Yah Tayyib said.

"I spent time at the front too, old man. Don't pretend only you boys are martyrs."

"I have never pretended," he said.

"You smuggled Nikodem into Chenja. Why?"

"I owe you no explanations."

"You f.u.c.king patched me back together, old man. You gave me back a life. You do do owe me answers. What did you bring me back for? So you could see me f.u.c.ked up now?" owe me answers. What did you bring me back for? So you could see me f.u.c.ked up now?"

"Quiet, please," Nikodem called from her table.

Nyx swung around and peered out at the darkness. She could barely make out Nikodem's form. "Then give me some idea! Give me some reason why I'm dying. Why you're willing to slaughter my team! Why you're staging this bulls.h.i.t for some jilted kid's benefit."

"Shut up and fight," Jaks said.

"I don't even have any f.u.c.king gloves," Nyx said. She was buying time for Rhys to recover from the drugs now, but she didn't think they knew that yet. "Why not slit my throat and be done with it?"

"Because tomorrow Yah Tayyib gets me into the Chenjan breeding compounds," Nikodem said. "Because after that day my people will have all we need from your s.h.i.tty little world. When we're gone, you can stay here and destroy one another far more efficiently. Then I go and win the war for my people."

"Your sisters know about that?" Nyx said.

"Sisters? They're just here for show. When I go home, it won't be with those p.a.w.ns."

"You want a good show?" Nyx said. "You want a real going-away? You give me a proper magician."

"He'll work old-fashioned," Jaks said. "No magic, but he can keep you from bleeding in your face. Maybe get me a little longer with you."

"You never could accept your death," Yah Tayyib said.

Nyx turned on him. "You're right. That's why I came to you. I trusted trusted you." you."

"A bel dame can trust no one."

"I'm not a bel dame anymore."

It was the first time she'd ever said it out loud.

Dahab pushed Rhys up into the ring. Under the lights, he looked bigger, his shoulders broader. In the ring, for a brief moment, Nyx could have mistaken him for a fighter.

Nyx stepped toward him, grabbed his wrist with her bad hand. "You can do this?" she said softly.

"I've spent much of my life in one ring or another," he said. He looked her in the eye. She held the look for a long time.

G.o.d, why didn't I find you sooner? she thought.

Jaks tossed a pair of gloves across the ring. "Come now, bel dame," she said.

Nyx handed the gloves to Rhys. "You lace them on," she said, and bent forward so their foreheads touched. He did not draw away. So close, he smelled of blood and sweat and something even more intimate. Perhaps it was fear she smelled, or the biting chemical odor of a magician. But it was something uniquely Rhys. I'll miss you, she thought.

"Keep the laces on the left loose," she said. "I want to be able to get them off with my teeth. You know."

"I know," he said.

Rhys slipped on her gloves and took his time lacing them up. He was good with the knots on the right, but he tied a simple bow on the left and tucked the ends into the seam of her left glove.

"Good?" he said.

"Good."

Nyx was in no shape for a fight. She was worse off now than she had been back at Husayn's gym. She wanted to believe that Jaks hadn't had much time to box either, but as she looked across the ring and saw Yah Tayyib take off Jaks's coat, that hope went right out of her head.

Jaks was lean and muscled, and under the lights the contours of her body were that much more dramatic. She was also young, six or seven years younger than Nyx, and though she had lived a hard life, there was no way she'd been rebuilt as many times, in as many ways, as Nyx had.

Nyx didn't look out at Rhys or Anneke. And she would deal with Yah Tayyib later.

She looked at Jaks.

Yah Tayyib was rubbing Jaks's arms and shoulders. Nyx had no illusions that this would be a proper fight with proper rules. She saw no one at the buzzer. It was going to be one long round, with a moment or two for Rhys to patch her back up if she got too b.l.o.o.d.y. Maybe.

Nyx stood with her hands down and her left toe forward. She waited.

Jaks didn't put in a mouthpiece, and she didn't offer one to Nyx.

"Don't get hit," Rhys said.

"I'll try to keep that in mind," Nyx said.

Yah Tayyib took his hands off Jaks and waved at the buzzer. A thousand hard-backed beetles exploded into movement, sounding the bell.

Jaks leapt forward.

Nyx left her hands down until Jaks was within hitting distance. Then she ducked and blocked Jaks's wide, wild left hook. As Nyx ducked, she pivoted behind Jaks and caught her with a left jab to the back of the head.

The dull edge of the blade she held in her fist jarred her palm. She sucked in a breath, stepped back into a fighting stance.

Jaks stumbled and turned and moved away, rea.s.sessed.

They circled, hands up.

Nyx watched Jaks gnaw on strategy. She had opened too eager, just like she did eight years ago, hungry for a quick fight, for first blood.

Most people who watch a fight think it's all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.

Once two fighters knew how to fight, they stood pretty even. What made one win and the other fall wasn't about blood or sinew or sweat. It was about will.

Jaks was old enough to know that.

So was Nyx.

Nyx dropped her hands again.

Jaks made as if to hesitate, then stepped in and fired.