Khos hailed the bakkie, and it stopped. A veiled woman leaned out. Khos opened the back door.

Inaya turned to Nyx. "You're a filthy, G.o.dless woman," Inaya said lightly.

"I've been called worse," Nyx said, "but not from anybody who killed for me."

"I didn't kill for you," Inaya said. "I killed for Taite. For people like... all of us. I would do it again."

Her son cried, and she moved his sling under her arm and carried him in front of her. She stepped into the bakkie.

Rhys looked at her. Last time.

Don't go, she thought. He wouldn't go.

He turned away from her. He got into the back seat.

Khos shut the door for Rhys and then opened up the front. He gave Nyx a little wave. "The bakkie's parked two blocks down, on West Maheed."

He got in. The woman at the wheel pulled back onto the street.

And just like that, it was done.

Nyx watched them drive off into the pale dawn. The second sun was coming up, and a brilliant band of crimson and purple ignited the sky.

Anneke snorted.

"You too?" Nyx said.

"f.u.c.k no," Anneke said. "Who do you expect to drive you out of this s.h.i.t hole?"

Anneke looped an arm around her waist, and they limped down the street as the double-dawn broke. "Is the radio busted?" Nyx asked.

"Yeah. Been a little busy, thanks to you."

"It's a long drive," Nyx said.

"No problem, boss. Unlike you, I get my buddies back over the border."

"Right," Nyx said. "Not like me." She looked back up the empty street. She felt as if something had been cut out of her, an organ she would miss.

"Boss?"

"I'm fine," Nyx said, and got into the bakkie.

38.

Rhys watched the second sun rise while Mahrokh drove them out of Dadfar. Next to him, Inaya sat quietly, and her son slept in her arms. Khos had the window down. Rhys heard the sounds of the waking city: mothers calling their children from sleep, old men hacking out the night's dust, the faint buzzing of wasps and beetles and the chittering of roaches as the sun warmed their lethargic bodies. He smelled curry and fried protein cakes and the peculiar spicy jasmine scent of red dye, the sort used for turbans. Rhys saw a woman step out onto her balcony and hang a prayer wheel. Three young girls robed in yellow and red ran out ahead of the bakkie and crossed the street to a bakery whose matron was just pushing open the door for the day.

But inside the bakkie, the only noise was the chitter of the bugs in the cistern. Rhys wanted to look back toward the waterworks, but they had turned away from that district three streets ago, and there was no one and nothing behind him.

Let me go back, he thought, and squeezed his eyes shut. No. This was for the best. He had fled into Nasheen because he didn't want to fight Nasheen. Some part of him had believed that if he ran to them unarmed, they would not harm him. He had been wrong.

As his father's only son, Rhys had grown up knowing he was immune from the draft. He would marry twenty or thirty women and inherit his father's estate, his father's t.i.tle.

But his father had been a mullah. A powerful one. And unlike some of the more powerful, he had wanted his son to perform the ultimate submission to G.o.d, the submission that he himself had never had the courage to perform. He had wanted Rhys to atone for his own sins.

Rhys remembered the way the air tasted that day: oranges and lavender. He remembered the sound of the cicadas. The water bubbling in the fountain in the courtyard just inside the gate. He remembered the sound of the servants and slaves outside, the intermittent cries of the overseers in the fields.

"It's time to speak of your future, boy," his father had said, and put his smooth hand on Rhys's head. He had smiled, his teeth so white, and sat across from him. His father was a tall man with a short beard and broad, generous face. You could stand near him, listen to him speak, and feel as if you were in the presence of some wiser man, a true mullah. His uncles were the same. Rich, powerful men whose influence allowed them to profit from the war, not fight in it.

"I have consulted with your uncles and spoken with your mother," his father had said. His birth mother, he meant. The others, Rhys called "Aunt." "We have prayed often to G.o.d so that we may find the best path for you, the most humble. A boy of our house has not served G.o.d at the front for three generations, and yet we sit on our hill and call ourselves pious men. How can we be pious without sacrifice?"

Even now, huddled in the back of a bakkie-a Chenjan deserter, dead if they found him-Rhys didn't understand the feeling that had overcome him at his father's words. The mounting terror. The knowing. War happened to other people. Other people died in G.o.d's war. Poor men. Nasheenian men. G.o.dless women. Like Nyx.

Not Rakhshan Arjoomand.

He would no longer kneel and pray with his father, no longer climb the crooked tree at the far end of his father's land and stare out over the city. In his mind, his whole life, he had built up and planned out his path, worked out ways to manage a household, playfully picked out wives from among the girls in the village below, and, above all, he had studied the teachings of the Prophet and spent long days trying to learn to submit his will to G.o.d's.

He believed, until that day, that he'd succeeded. If this was the life G.o.d wanted for him, submitting to that will was not such a terrible thing. His will and G.o.d's will were one.

The shock of this other life, this other path-blood and death in a foreign country-was so horrifying, so unexpected, that he did not have time to wonder at his own lack of humility. He had explained the impossibility of that other life. He had cursed his father. He threatened suicide. He sobbed. Seventeen years old, and he had sobbed in front of his father like a child. He had watched his father's generous face harden like a cut gem.

"I am worth more than this!" Rhys had cried.

"More?" his father had said, as if Rhys had told him he needed water in order to breathe. "More than a sacrifice to G.o.d? We must submit our desires to G.o.d's will. We are fighting a holy war. G.o.d's war. Every one of us. We fight. We die. This is who we are."

"It's not who I am," Rhys had said.

"Then you do not belong to G.o.d. You do not belong to me."

Rhys had summoned the bugs that night. He showed more skill in that one night than he had during his entire career as a middling magician in Nasheen. He confused and reprogrammed his father's security system and sent wasps ahead to sniff out his way. But his father had sent the blood bugs after him. The chittering creatures, large as dogs, caught him in their jaws and dragged him back, and it was as if the talent bled out of him in the face of these impossible monsters. When Rhys returned, his father had smashed Rhys's hands with a metal pipe. Smashed them b.l.o.o.d.y. Broken.

It was one of his sisters, Alys, who helped Rhys escape the second time. She called her friends, members of Chenja's own underground, and they had gotten him as far as the border. At the border, their vehicle hit a mine.

Bloodied faces. Body parts. He remembered the smell of burning flesh. Not his own.

After that, he ran.

Ran and ran and ran, until his skin peeled off and his lungs burned.

He had not gone to the front to sacrifice himself to G.o.d. He had not gone there to save anyone. In the end, he did not even believe he would save himself. He was just running, fueled by terror, a man running from G.o.d, from His will.

But Nyx had not been afraid.

She had volunteered for the front to protect her brothers. She'd protected the boys and women in her squad, until the end, and when she'd failed at that, she burned herself. Carried out the punishment she believed G.o.d would have meted out for her sin.

She drank too much, shot up and swallowed drugs, had s.e.x indiscriminately with both genders, did not bend her knee to G.o.d, but which of them had been more pious? Which had been stronger before G.o.d? The woman who had given her brothers and body to G.o.d and then rejected Him, or the man who pretended G.o.dliness but could not perform the ultimate act of submission?

Khos put his meaty arm up on the seat and looked back at Rhys. "You sure you don't want us to drop you off with somebody in Chenja? Must be somebody doesn't want you dead."

"No," Rhys said.

Khos nodded and turned again to the road.

Rhys felt a knot of fear in his stomach and reached instinctively for his copy of the Kitab, but it was not there, of course. Raine had taken everything from him during the interrogation.

Rhys closed his eyes. He did not think of Nyx's offensive remarks, the heat of her next to him, the way she looked at him when he read to her, her filthy fingernails and stained teeth and the terrible way she mangled her Chenjan. Instead, he thought of her hair. Long and braided, botched and unbound. Black glossy hair like the deepest part of the sky where there were no stars, just darkness. Umayma, at the edge of everything.

And he thought of Kine's words then-the voice that spoke with the same inflection as Nyx's, the voice that told him she had been making black market deals with Khairian nomads and interstellar gene pirates who sold her the base ingredients for winning the war.

"These are old-world powers that must be controlled," Kine had said, her voice even, a little distant. Kine had said, her voice even, a little distant. "To take the red sand out of its natural environment, to transport it out of the wastelands, could mean a disaster beyond our imagining. But handled the right way, correctly understood, it could win us the war without the need to alter our shifters. We could, effectively, cure the war by wiping out its cause." "To take the red sand out of its natural environment, to transport it out of the wastelands, could mean a disaster beyond our imagining. But handled the right way, correctly understood, it could win us the war without the need to alter our shifters. We could, effectively, cure the war by wiping out its cause."

But if she could not wipe out his people, she would find a way to enslave and modify the shifters.

Rhys opened his eyes and looked over at Inaya, her pale, dirt-smeared face, and tried, again, to see something of the shifter in her. But there was nothing. The air did not bend or crackle around her the way it did around Khos, as if he existed outside the world.

"I have wondered," Rhys said, "how you got Husayn's bakkie over the border."

Khos turned to look at them.

Inaya shifted her son in her arms. "How do you compel bugs to send your messages? How do you use them to mend flesh?"

"I could say it's a matter of examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do," Rhys said. "You would have to be a magician to understand."

"It is like that, then," Inaya said. "There is some knowledge one just has. That just is. There are things the people of this world can do that no one should know. Your bel dames know something of that. Nasheen's bel dames have existed in one form or another since the birth of the world. Before they cut up boys, they were responsible for killing rogue magicians and mutant shifters. Did you know that?"

"Yes," Rhys said, "I'd heard of it."

"It's no secret."

"How is it you know?" Rhys asked.

Inaya finally looked at him; her eyes were gray. "When you're born with a number of talents you do not understand, you spend your life looking for others like you, to understand why it is you've been cursed by G.o.d. You do this so you can receive forgiveness for whatever it is you've done. You will go to great lengths to find the knowledge you seek and will cross many borders."

"So what are you?" Rhys asked.

"A mistake," she said.

Khos said, "We're all mistakes. G.o.d's or man's."

Rhys resisted the urge to say something grimly optimistic in turn. The silence stretched, and he realized that Nyx was no longer there to fill it with some sarcastic remark about blood or s.e.x or the inevitability of human failing.

"It's so quiet," Rhys said.

"Yeah," Khos said. "It's nice."

"Yes," Rhys said, but there was a hollow place in his chest, a strange absence, as if some part of him were missing, a piece he never knew he had, or needed, or even wanted. But he missed it nonetheless.

39.

The queen's palace in Mushtallah was about what Nyx remembered. Or, at least, she knew nothing had changed much, even though it felt felt different. Maybe it was just different because getting into it without a Chenjan man was a lot easier. Maybe it was because people looked at how she was dressed and treated her better-money and power and all that cats.h.i.t. different. Maybe it was just different because getting into it without a Chenjan man was a lot easier. Maybe it was because people looked at how she was dressed and treated her better-money and power and all that cats.h.i.t.

She sat by a little fountain in yet another reception area, gazing out at a mural of the veiled Prophet receiving and reciting the words of G.o.d. The air was cool; the season had turned, though it never stayed cool in Mushtallah for long. Cicadas sang from the trees lining the interior of the courtyard, and three locusts rested on the lip of the fountain.

Nyx wore a green organic silk burnous over long black trousers, a white tunic st.i.tched in silver, and a black vest. The hilt of a new blade stuck up from a slit in the back of her burnous. She wore Tej's baldric, Nikodem's pistols, and a new whip attached to her belt. Her sandals laced up to her knees. Some lovely kid back in Punjai had done her braids for a couple bits. Good thing, too, because her hair was longer now and far better for having the ends razored.

She reached out and flicked one of the locusts into the fountain with the ring finger of her right hand. The new fingers were a good match. Most people didn't even notice a difference. She still woke up sometimes and clutched at them, expecting to find an absence.

A woman in yellow appeared from one of the inner doors.

"She will see you now," Kasbah said.

Nyx stood. "You going to disarm me first?"

"I will take your things as you pa.s.s, but let us excuse the formalities of the organics search."

"Come, now, Kasbah, we're already on such intimate terms."

"Are we, now?" Kasbah smiled thinly. "We have a long path to tread to clean this house," she said. "Come."

Nyx left her pistols and her sword with Kasbah and walked down a short hall, through a low curtain, and into a big spherical room. Nyx stopped short as she entered. She looked up. The whole room was gla.s.s. Above her, she saw that she was enclosed by or beneath some kind of tank filled with water. Strange creatures, some kind of fish or animals or something, swam lazily above her, around her. Rocks and seaweeds and odd tentacled things covered the bottom of the pool. The water was so deep, the tank went so far back, that she could not see past the first ten feet or so. Nyx's palms were suddenly damp, and she had to push herself to walk farther into the room. All that water....

The queen sat on a bench at the center of the room. When Nyx entered, the little woman turned and smiled at her with her round, too-young face.

"Nyxnissa," she said, and raised her hand.

Nyx moved inside, and Kasbah entered behind her.

"Queen Zaynab," Nyx said, and came around the other side of the bench.

"Sit, please," the queen said.

Nyx sat on the other side of the bench. The weight of the water in the tank surrounding the room made the air feel heavy. It smelled faintly of peppermint and ammonia.

"I heard you returned my woman."

"What's left of her, yeah."