"Are you all they sent?" Nyx asked.

Rasheeda snickered again, still sticky and naked.

"They couldn't spare any more of us to go running after a rogue sister," Fatima said. She was tall, skinnier and darker than Rasheeda, almost Chenjan in color, and stronger in the face and shoulders. She bore a perpetual frown on her long countenance.

"Dahab's here," Rasheeda said absently. "Luce went for sodas."

Dahab and Luce. If they'd sent Dahab, it was a wonder Nyx was still alive. Four mad, skilled bel dames had tracked her across the desert. Why the f.u.c.k was she still breathing?

"What am I doing in the interior?"

"A suit's been filed," Fatima said.

"Cats.h.i.t. You don't have anything on me."

"I know a number of butchers outside Punjai," Fatima said. "One of them even bought a womb that matches your tissue samples. She sold it back to us."

"That doesn't prove-"

"We have Yah Tayyib," Rasheeda said.

"Yah Tayyib's taken an oath. He wouldn't testify. About black work or anything else."

"Wouldn't he?" Fatima said. "He knows the place of a bel dame. He knows we're just as happy to haul in rogue magicians as black sisters. We used to hunt magicians when they went rogue too. Black bel dames ruin our reputation."

Nyx lay back on the bed. Yah Tayyib, who had mended her when she was barely human, who recalled her body and mind from the front when she thought she had lost both there. The man who taught her to box.

"He wouldn't make a charge," she said.

"There was another complaint," Fatima said. "Not as potent as Yah Tayyib's, but a formal complaint nonetheless."

"Raine," Nyx said.

Fatima raised her brows. "You expected it?"

"I've been expecting him to file a formal complaint ever since I cut off his c.o.c.k."

"It was deserved," Rasheeda said.

"Deserved or not, he's filed a formal complaint about a bel dame doing black work," Fatima said.

"Lucky you left him his b.a.l.l.s," Rasheeda said, "or you'd get a fine for reproductive terrorism." She waggled her index finger and snickered.

"So what happens now?" Nyx asked. "You give me some kind of probation?"

"No," Fatima said. "We terminate your contract and send you to prison."

"What?" Nyx said. Prison was for draft dodgers and terrorists. Prison was for men men.

"The sentence came from the queen."

"I'm bored," Rasheeda said. "Where's my soda?" She went naked into the hall, calling for Luce.

Nyx stared into her skinny, veined hands again. It was like she'd woken up with someone else's body.

"How long do I serve?" she asked.

"A year, maybe less. We could have had you sent to the front."

"How did you find me?"

"We had Rasheeda posted at Jaks's residence."

Of course. She'd seen only three of them at the fight. "So you knew about Jaks?"

"We looked up your note," Fatima said, then wrinkled her nose. "You look and smell like death. I'll get you something to eat." She walked into the busy hall.

Prison, Nyx thought, with all the criminals Raine and people like her had put there.

Nyx tried to pull her legs off the bed. They were numb. How long had she been here? The window overlooking the street was barred, and the walls were solid stone. How the h.e.l.l could she get bars out of stone?

But Fatima was coming back into the room with a Plague Sister bearing a tray of something that smelled a lot like food, and Rasheeda had her arms full of bottles of soda. If there was a way out of this one, Nyx couldn't think of it. Didn't even know if she wanted it. Her body was done.

"Here," Rasheeda said, throwing her a bottle. Nyx's reflexes were off. She ducked instead of catching it. "You won't get any of those in the box."

"When she's done eating," Fatima told the Plague Sister, "I have a team coming to get her."

Nyx didn't finish eating, but they still came for her.

And prison was pretty s.h.i.tty.

4.

"It's time," Yah Reza said.

Rhys entered the plague hall. Yah Tayyib and two other magicians sat at a large circular stone table at the center of the room. Three Plague Sisters, the hems of their white robes dripping with spiders, sat across from them. Like Yah Tayyib's operating theater, the plague hall was a cavernous room lined with jars of mostly human organs. And like the magicians' quarters, the whole room hummed with the sound and feel of bugs. Rhys's skin p.r.i.c.kled. He had waited some time for this.

Yah Reza followed Rhys inside and bid him stand next to her within a pace of the table.

Three months after Rhys saw his first alien, Yah Reza had deemed him ready for a magician's trial. He had come to the interior and been independently tested by the Plague Sisters. He had read his performance in their faces, in the hard line the bugs themselves drew against him. The Plague Sisters kept a diverse colony of insects within their care, but he should have been able to manipulate them far more effectively than he had. If the organs and entrails he'd mended on the slabs had been those belonging to real human beings, he doubted his patients would have entirely recovered. Some may not have lived. He knew the outcome of his evaluation even before Yah Tayyib spoke.

"We have spent some time discussing your evaluation," Yah Tayyib said. "My fellow magicians and Plague Sisters agree that you have some skill in the arts. No doubt Yah Reza would not have undertaken your tutelage if she did not believe you were gifted." He carefully pressed the tips of his fingers together. "Unfortunately, we have not deemed your talent sufficient to grant you a practicing government license."

Rhys exhaled. What had he expected, that a Chenjan man in his prime would be given leave to walk through a palace filter and perform surgery on the Queen's ministers? There would be no easy road, no well-paying government job. But hearing it out loud felt better than he thought it would. Something, some expectation, had been cut away. Hope, maybe.

"However," Yah Tayyib said, "we find it acceptable to grant you a provisional license that allows you to practice so long as you are employed. Yah Reza has expressed interest in keeping you on at the magicians' quarters as a teacher, if you wish it. Otherwise, you're free to take up gainful employment with whatever employer you see fit. Do you have any questions?"

Rhys looked over at Yah Reza. She smiled her sen-stained smile. She intended on keeping him prisoner for the rest of his days, then.

"Yes," Rhys said, turning back to Yah Tayyib. "Is the denial of my government license based on my talent or my race?"

The old magician shook his head. "Rhys, if you were as talented as Yah Reza hoped, we would have no choice but to grant you a government license. Nasheen could not turn away one with such skill. But your talents are middling. We have no place among the palace magicians or within the First Families for a mediocre Chenjan magician. You are better suited for the private sector."

Rhys swallowed his words. What was there left to say? His father had cursed him the night he refused him. Cursed and abandoned him. This is my penance, This is my penance, Rhys thought, Rhys thought, this time among G.o.dless Nasheenians. this time among G.o.dless Nasheenians.

"Thank you," Rhys said finally.

Yah Reza led him out.

When the door closed behind them, she said, "It is not such a terrible thing, to teach Nasheenian magicians. You are capable with children and the teaching of standard arts."

"I will not be staying long," Rhys said. "I'll find employment elsewhere."

"Of course," Yah Reza said, and he should have realized then that she knew something he did not.

The magicians did no end of business with bel dames and bounty hunters. Both groups often came to the gym looking for new recruits-petty magicians and women just back from the front. Government officials frequented the fights as well, recruiting veterans and magicians as order keepers. Rhys spent week after week at the gym acting the part of a cheap harlot, trying to sell his services. But no bel dame would have him, and the order keepers, of course, would not even speak to him. The magicians could afford to pretend not to notice his accent and his coloring, but the rest of Nasheen... the rest of Nasheen saw him for what he was-a Chenjan man, an infidel, an enemy.

Yah Reza caught up with him one afternoon in his chambers as he penned a response to an ad for a tissue mechanic he had found in the morning's newsroll. If they wouldn't hire him on as a magician, he would spend his days digging into the guts of bakkies in Mushtallah. It was better than a lifetime of servitude to Nasheenian magicians. Most tissue mechanics were just like him-failed magicians working for bread and bugs.

"Why not give this up, baby doll? Are things in my gym so bad?"

"A well-appointed prison is still a prison," Rhys said.

Yah Reza clucked her tongue. She waved a hand toward his lamp and increased the light. Rhys felt the message she sent the bugs, the chemical tingling in the air. Why did it take so much more effort for him to produce the same reaction? Why gift this stubborn old woman with enough skill to raise the dead but relegate him to the role of messenger, with the occasional talent for staunching blood and fighting infection? G.o.d did not grant talent indiscriminately.

Gift or curse, it was not enough.

"I keep you on for your protection," Yah Reza said. "Nasheen will eat you alive, boy. Even if you had the talent for the real stuff, how long do you think you'd last in Mushtallah among the First Families? How long before a gang of women cuts you up and feeds you to the bugs? This isn't Chenja, doll, where all you men get a free pa.s.s. Boys play by rules here. Chenjan boys don't play at all."

"I'm going mad," Rhys said.

"Weren't you already? No sane man would be sitting there in that chair-not unless I was interrogating him."

Rhys met her look. Yah Reza was an old woman, but how old? Always hard to tell in Nasheen. Sixty or more, surely.

"How long were you at the front?" he asked. She had never spoken of it.

"Thirty years," she said. "Give or take. Intelligence, you know. Taught Yah Tayyib back when he was just Tayyib al Amirah, eh? One of my best students."

"You mean torture and interrogation."

"Oh, there was some of that," Yah Reza said absently. She sat across from him. Three cicadas leapt out of the wide sleeves of her robe and crawled across Rhys's letter. "Yah Tayyib lost three wives to the war, you know it? And all of his children. You think he would give you you a license? If you were his charge, he'd have turned you over to interrogation from the start. You'd be bleeding out in the interior right now." a license? If you were his charge, he'd have turned you over to interrogation from the start. You'd be bleeding out in the interior right now."

"Why didn't you do the same?"

"Me? Ah, doll." Yah Reza spit on the floor, and a dozen blue beetles scurried out from under the end table and lapped at the crimson wad of spittle. "More death doesn't cure the war, eh? Just makes it drag on awhile longer. Yah Tayyib, yes, he would do whatever it took to end the war. He would end it one Chenjan at a time. But then, so would most men. Women too. That's why this war never ends. n.o.body lets go."

"You're letting go?"

"Completely? Ah, no. Maybe one Chenjan at a time."

He leaned toward her. "Then let me go."

She gave him a sloppy smile. "You aren't a prisoner." She stood, and the cicadas flew back up into her sleeves. "Go see Nasheen. But don't expect it to love you."

Yah Reza set him up with his pa.s.sbook and paid his train fare to Amtullah. The interior. He did not use the s.p.a.ce-twisting magicians' gyms to travel. He had wanted to see the country, to be on his own. If he'd made himself an exile, he needed to live as one.

When he arrived in the city, he set up several interviews with merchants looking for magicians to accompany their caravans north, through the wastelands.

During the day, Amtullah was a raucous ma.s.s of humanity, full of half-breeds and chained cats and corrupt order keepers and organ hawkers and gene pirates. He had trouble following the accented Nasheenian of the interior, and the fees for everything-from food and lodging to transit-were far higher than he'd antic.i.p.ated. At night, the sky above Amtullah lit up with the occasional violet or green burst, remnants of a border barrage that managed to get through the anti-burst guns. The sound of sirens sent him to bed most nights, as regular as evening prayer.

But when he went to his interviews, he was cast off the porch or stoop or simply turned away at the gate more often than not. His color was enough. They did not wait to hear his accent. A little more talent, perhaps, and he could have perfected a version of Yah Reza's illusory eyes to mask the obvious physical evidence of his heritage. As it was, he kept his burnous up and his hands covered when he traveled, and spoke only when he had to. It saved him hara.s.sment on the street, but not from his potential employers.

He spent many months in Amtullah getting thrown off doorsteps and turned away from tissue mechanic shops. Hunger made him take up employment as a dishwasher at a Heidian restaurant in one of the seedier parts of Amtullah, the sort of place he did not like walking around in at night and liked living in even less. He worked fourteen-hour days, six days a week, and came back to the buggy room he rented smelling of sour cabbage and vinegar. The other three days of the week he spent at the local boxing gym looking for real work-magician's work-something that made his blood sing.

And every day, six times a day, he prayed. He submitted all that he was, this life, everything, to G.o.d.

He was pinched and spit on at work and on the street. His overseers were Heidian women, mostly indifferent, but the patrons were a mixed group, largely Nasheenian, and when he walked among them uncovered he was jostled and cursed and jeered. Retaliation would have meant the loss of his job. A few women, it was true, were disinterested-some were even kind-but the daily indignities of being a Chenjan man in Nasheen began to wear him down. He spent less time at the boxing gyms looking for work. He spent most nights with his forehead and palms pressed to the floor, wondering if his father had cursed him not to death but to h.e.l.l.

One late night, he decided to walk home from work down a street that would take him to the local mosque in time for midnight prayer. The streets were quiet that night, and the air tasted metallic, like rain. Or blood.

A group of four or five women walked toward him on the other side of the street. He paid them no attention until they crossed over to his side of the empty road and called out to him.

"You have the time?" one of them asked, and as they neared he could smell the liquor on them. They were young women.

"I'm sorry, I do not," he said. "It is near evening prayer."

"The f.u.c.k's that accent?" one of them said.

Rhys picked up his pace.

"Hey, man, I said, what's that accent?"

The tallest girl pulled at his burnous. She was stronger than she looked. The tattered clasp of his burnous snapped, and it pulled his hood free. He staggered.

"f.u.c.k, you're kidding me!" the tall one said.

They started to crowd him. Like all Nasheenian women, they seemed suddenly larger there together, in the dark along the empty street. And they spoke in loud voices. Always too loud. Overwhelming.

"That's a f.u.c.king Chenjan!"

"Smells like a p.i.s.ser, though. You a cabbage-eater, Chenjan man?"