“Up!” was the word she screamed, or maybe that was just some grunt, some noise, but the next words were her children’s names, and not even Nyx could mistake those.
“Are you all right?” Inaya yelled at them, and the children cried up at her.
Inaya raised her head to Nyx—her damp, mucus-crusted head—and her eyes were so very fucking black, and the look on that face, in that face…
“Haul them up!” Inaya snarled.
Nyx grabbed the lever and hauled them up like some other woman—someone far younger, far stronger, far less broken and exhausted. Sweat beaded her brow, ran between her breasts, her shoulder blades, long before she was tired or spent. She was shaking at the end.
When the bucket was close enough, Inaya reached into the well and hauled up the girl first—Nyx hadn’t understood her name—then Taite. The children hit the dirt and clung to their mother.
Inaya patted them down, asking after hurts. When she was done, she turned again to Nyx, opened her mouth to speak, and stopped. She turned to the blazing house.
“Khos,” Inaya said. Then, “Watch the children.”
And in a breath, an instant, she blew apart, piece by piece, and each piece disintegrated into another piece, another, smaller and smaller, until there was only a pale mist, a fog, as if she’d transformed into some cheap radio drama, and the mist blew across the yard and into the burning house; a howling, contaminated wind.
The children gathered around Nyx and gazed with her, open-mouthed.
Nyx’s mouth was dry. She tried working some spit into it and, “She do that often?”
“Never,” Taite said, breathless.
“Holy shit,” Nyx said.
“Holy shit,” the girl said. Inaya had apparently taught her children Nasheenian.
Nyx grabbed them each by the hand. “Let’s go,” she said, and started walking toward the blazing house and the demon.
When they got to the porch, Inaya was already there, human again, naked. She knelt over Khos as he coughed and spat, his face covered in soot.
“You’re a stupid fool,” she said.
“What happened?” Nyx asked.
Inaya slowly turned her head, stared at Nyx with her pitch-black eyes. “What do you think happened? They came for you. Looking for
you.
”
“Bel dames?” Khos asked, and started coughing again.
“Have you been drinking?” Inaya asked. Her eyes narrowed. “Were you
drinking
while these women tried to tear us apart?”
Nyx looked out at the park. “How many?” she said.
“Six, seven, I don’t know,” Inaya said. “I saw them coming up the walk. I knew what they were. I hid the children and… myself. They burned the house and left.”
Nyx felt a sudden, stabbing pain in her gut. “Left and went where?” she said.
Inaya shook her head. “I don’t—” She stopped. She, too, looked across the park.
“Rhys,” Nyx said, and began to run.
25.
R
hys found the house in disarray. Elahyiah argued with the housekeeper in the kitchen. Something to do with missing laundry. The girls were in the sunken study, in varying states of dress. Slippers and stockings littered the floor. He saw dirty, discarded head-scarves on the porch.
Elahyiah was pulling at an earring. He noted that her pair didn’t match. She was barefoot.
Outside, the neighbors’ houses were going dark. He heard revelers walking through the park to catch taxis downtown to the waterfront. They would soon find themselves in a deserted neighborhood.
“I’m going up to wash and dress,” he said.
Elahyiah did not acknowledge him then, but she came to him in the bathroom as he disrobed. He started the water in the tub.
She stood in the doorway.
“It was old business. It’s done now,” he said.
“What did you think, bringing that woman into our house?”
“I was thinking it was my house, and I could bring in whomever I please.”
“How can you say that? I’ve heard the stories of this woman. Eight years you lived with her—”
“Six. It isn’t as if we were married.
“That’s worse!”
“Is it? Elahyiah, please. I don’t want to fight over this. She’s nothing. She was not a wife, not even a temporary one. You insult me if you think we were anything but employer and employee.”
“I did not….” She choked on her words.
Rhys slipped into the tub. The warm water felt deliciously good. “I’ll be down soon.”
“We’ll be late,” she said.
“We’re always late.”
“Rhys…” She knelt by the tub. “I know it is not my place to ask. I know it is not my place to question, but you did not marry me for my silence.”
“No, I did not.” Rhys stared at the water coming out of the facet, his own skinny knees poking up from the water. He remembered the storefront back in Nasheen, in the dusty dive in Punjai. Nyx used to keep an ablution bowl near the door. Customers who came to her with bounty business all wanted to wash, after.
“That woman scares me,” Elahyiah said.
“I used to be like her,” he said.
“I don’t believe that.” She touched his face. “She is nothing. She has turned her back to God. I could see that in her face.”
“Am I so different?” He raised his head. “She stayed and fought. Here I am, hiding in Tirhan.”
“Hiding from what? The war? That is not your war, Rhys.”
“My father thought differently.”
“Mine did not. We came here because we will not fight a war for rich mullahs. This is our life, Rhys. We owe nothing to those broken countries.”
“I love you,” he said. And he did.
She bent and kissed him, softly. “God made us partners, love.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It was disrespectful to bring her here. That life is over.” He took her hand, met her look.
She nodded and pulled away. “We’re almost ready.”
Rhys let himself sink under the water, cut out sound. In the silence, he began to recite the ninety-nine names of God. He had his world back. Nyx would not come to him again. She had too much pride to ask for another favor.
In the warm silence, he felt something slipping away. Some rotten part of himself? Or was it some better part? The part that would fight for something more than a clean house and a well-paying job?
Her work is not honorable, he reminded himself. You are a father and husband. There is far more honor in that.
Rhys took his time and dressed in a clean khameez and bisht. He wore soft sandals. After dabbing on some perfume he opened the wardrobe and pulled a locked box from the top shelf. It was a sand-bitten old box of synthetic gray wood and amber. He ran one hand over it, and thought of the desert.
Four years ago, his wedding day, he had locked this box and sworn not to open it again. But for the last three days he’d wanted nothing more in the world than what it contained.
Rhys passed his hand over it a second time, disarming the spider poised beneath the lid. He opened it.
Inside, two jade-hilted pistols were nestled atop a length of green silk. Underneath were four boxes of non-organic ammunition. He didn’t want fever bursts in his house. Metal was expensive, but more stable.
He wanted to touch them. He wanted to grab his belt, get his holsters. Weapons at his hip again, just like the desert. That other life.
And if you pick them up, he thought, you’ll never put them down again. They are everything you put aside. Which do you want? You cannot have both.
Rhys closed the box.
He re-triggered the spider with a wave of his hand and replaced the box in the wardrobe.
“Rhys? Rhys, they’re starting the fireworks!” Elahyiah called from downstairs.
Rhys shuttered the light, watched the room go dim. The bloody light of the moons poured in from the windows. He faced the mirror next to the door. In the bloody light, with his neatly shaven head, his gauzy bisht, he looked like a dervish from one of his mother’s stories.
He started down the stairs.
“Ella? Ella?” Elahyiah’s voice again, coming up the stairs. The housekeeper’s name was Ella.
Rhys arrived in the kitchen. Elahyiah was struggling with Laleh’s headscarf.
“They’re too young for them,” Rhys said.
“Their cousins are wearing them,” Elahyiah said. “They’re already teased for not being clean. Let’s not give them anything else.”
“If your uncle starts in on us again about cutting our girls-”
Elahyiah put her hands over Laleh’s ears. “Stop that now.”
Souri tugged at Elahyiah’s sleeve. “I have to go,” she said. “Please, Ma.” She squirmed.
“I’ll take her,” Rhys said. He scooped Souri up and brought her into the privy just off the study.
“Can’t go if you watch!” Souri said.
Rhys sighed and turned away.
“Ella!” Elahyiah called again.
“Where did she go?” Rhys asked.
“Into the garden. I wanted to bring lemons for Uncle Shaya’s new wife.”
“I’ll find her,” Rhys said.
“Da! I’m done, Da!”
Rhys made sure Souri’s underclothes were in order and stepped back into the room. He saw Elahyiah at the counter with her head in her hands. Laleh clung to her hip.
“Elahyiah,” he said softly.
She raised her head. Her eyes were wet.
He took her face in his hands and kissed her softly, said, “I love you. Just you and no other. You understand that?”
She leaned her forehead against his, wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m at fault. Hush, now. I’ll find Ella and we’ll go to the waterfront? Yes?”
“I want to have fruit cakes!” Laleh said.
He palmed her head. “And you’ll have them,” he said.
Rhys walked to the back porch, through the filter, and into the dark garden.
“Ella?” he called. Was she out meeting men again? Elahyiah had caught the girl talking to some street boy on the porch once. Ras Tiegan girls were loose as wives’ tongues.
“Ella! Do you have those lemons?” He walked past the well, to the little patch of lemon trees at the edge of the yard. He tripped over something in the grass. He looked down. He’d kicked over a basket half-f of lemons.
Rhys picked up the basket. He peered into the darkness of the garden. “Ella?” he said, more softly.
He looked back at the house. The street was eerily quiet. The houses all along the block were still. He saw one light on, high up in a house one street over. Most everyone was already at the waterfront.
Rhys picked his way across the yard, holding the basket of lemons. So quiet.
He paused at the edge of the porch. The bugs. The bugs had gone quiet. No crickets. No cicadas. Rhys dropped the basket. He walked quickly back into the house, through the filter.
Souri looked up as he came in. Laleh was knotting her headscarf. “Da?” she said.
Elahyiah was opening the front door.
“Don’t!” Rhys said.
It all happened very fast.
Ella careened into the house, screaming. Behind her were three big women. The first inside grabbed Elahyiah by the hair. The second twisted the housekeeper’s skinny head. Her neck snapped. Rhys heard it.
There was a sudden, pervasive smell of oranges.
Rhys choked and raised a hand, called for the wasp swarm at the center of the room.
The girls began to scream.
He felt the filters go down. The constant humming—the singing that sent him to sleep at night—went silent. The house was naked.
The wasp swarm swooped toward the woman holding Elahyiah.