Khos nodded. “You do that.” He thumped Rhys on the shoulder. When was the last time he’d done that?
The others slept. Rhys swam in and out of wakefulness until the blue dawn. The first dawn was the last thing he remembered before succumbing to sleep.
When he woke, someone was shaking him, and there were voices, loud voices, nearby.
He opened his eyes and saw Inaya standing over him, shotgun over one shoulder, her other hand on him, shaking.
“She’s gone,” Inaya said. There were dark circles under her eyes. There was bickering in the front room. Khos and Suha.
Rhys pushed off the slab. His new hands ached, and he was incredibly thirsty. Nyx’s slab was empty. Only a smear of dirt and loam and dried blood remained, broken carapaces, some dead flesh beetles.
The second sun had risen. It was well after morning prayer. I’ve forgotten prayer, Rhys thought, distantly.
“We need to find her,” Rhys said. He pushed into the front where Suha and Khos were arguing. He turned to ensure that Elahyiah was still asleep, and saw her tossing and turning on the thin mattress. Behdis hovered in the main doorway, peering into the graveyard.
Suha said, “Don’t go fucking it up. Eshe’s out now. He’ll find her.”
“If she finds the road and hitches a ride, we’ve lost her,” Rhys said.
“You hear me?” Suha said. “We all run off in five directions we won’t come together quick enough to bag her.” It was the most Rhys had ever heard her speak.
“Who the fuck put you in charge?” Khos said.
“Nyx did,” Suha said. “Last I heard, you family boys were all out of the covert recovery business.”
“That doesn’t mean we don’t know our shit,” Khos said.
“Then get your big head out of your big ass,” Suha said.
Rhys searched for a wasp swarm, but either his senses were still off or there were none nearby. If I was weak before, he thought, I’m useless now.
Eshe returned a quarter hour later. He led them north across the overgrown grounds of the graveyard. Khos and Inaya had chosen the safe house well. The grounds went on for at least two kilometers in every direction. It was a great place to lose somebody who was tracking you. Or just get lost.
Rhys picked his way through the underbrush with his new hands. Biting insects swarmed them in clouds. Rhys kept them from feeding on their party, but controlling the flight of the swarms proved to be too much. His blood was still humming dully with the bugs in his body as they made the last of the repairs. He had pissed out beady little blood mites half a kilometer back.
Eshe led them up a low rise, through a tangle of violet vines and hoarthorn. Rhys tripped into a small clearing.
Nyx crouched there next to a half-buried headstone, her back to them. She had one filthy hand on the lip of the headstone.
Rhys froze.
Suha held up her hand, warned them back.
“Nyx?” Suha said.
Nyx hung her head. Her hair was a tangle of unraveling braids shot through with broken bits of sticks and leaves. A giant mantid clung to the hem of her trousers. Rhys saw blood running down one bare arm. A new injury? Or was her blood not clotting?
Rhys reached once more to his hip-for a pistol he no longer carried.
We’ve grown soft and stupid, he thought, and heard his children screaming again.
“Nyx?” Suha said.
Nyx turned.
Her eyes were utterly vacant. No one looked back at them from those eyes. Sweat rolled down her face.
“Nyx?” Rhys said.
And then her arm slid off the headstone and she was on the ground. She started convulsing.
“Fuck!” Khos said. He ran forward and picked her up.
Rhys ran his hands over her. Bugs chittered and sang. He listened. There was something wrong with…. She’d caught something. The flesh beetles were in stasis while the blood mites fought it off.
“She’s sick,” Rhys said. “But it feels… tailored.” My God, Rhys thought, did Yah Tayyib kill her after all?
“That’s how she lost her skin,” Suha said. “The other magician couldn’t get rid of it either. The other magician said it was some tailored bug.”
They hauled her through the bush and back to the slab. Rhys and Behdis shot her full of antibiotics with a live syringe Inaya had in her bag. Blood ran freely down Nyx’s arm, like liquid mercury. Pooled on the floor.
She wavered in and out of consciousness. She slapped their hands away. At one point, she vomited, and Rhys and Behdis turned her over to keep her from choking on it.
Rhys stood over her. She was slathered in sweat. The syringe wound wasn’t healing properly. It still oozed. “We’re losing her,” Rhys said.
“We can’t take her to Yah Tayyib,” Khos said. “His place is right downtown. God and everyone will see us there.”
“My place,” Behdis said.
Rhys looked over at her.
“I got a place,” she insisted. “Got what we need there, too. Two more phials of biotics, yeah? We can get that.”
Rhys exchanged a look with Khos.
“I’m not putting her up with my children. Not risking that. It’s her they’re after. I won’t put my kids in danger.”
“We’ve come too far to let her die on the table,” Rhys said.
“I’ll tell her you said that,” Suha said, walking in. Eshe perched on her shoulder. Her gun was in her hand.
“We’re going to take her into town,” Rhys said. “We need to keep her breathing until then. We’ll shoot her full of antibiotics and leave it to God.”
“I don’t leave shit to God,” Suha said. “I can carry her.”
Suha and Khos carried Nyx outside while Inaya and Rhys woke Elahyiah.
She stirred, still groggy with thorn juice, and clung to him. “Love,” she murmured, “I had a terrible dream.”
“Come now,” he said. “We’re going back to town.”
“Home?” she asked.
“Soon,” he said.
He led her into the yard. Suha was wiping her hands on her trousers. “Body’s in the trunk. One of you has to ride sitting on the others in the back. Keep your heads down.”
Eshe the raven cawed and made a low, lazy circle above her head before perching on her shoulder.
Suha absently stroked his head. “You coming or not? Let’s go.”
Rhys helped his wife into the back. He stared a long moment at the trunk, then looked back to the tangled ruin of the mausoleum.
He straightened and asked Khos, “Is leaving the safe house really such a good idea?”
“You got a better one?
“No,” Rhys said.
“Then let’s get the fuck out of here before Inaya changes her mind.”
31.
T
hey drove to the other side of the city. Inaya watched the tangle of the twisted green countryside spill over into shantytowns and hill houses. Behdis brought them to a pit of a hovel at the edge of the Ras Tiegan district. Inaya would not have let a roach live there, let alone a human being. But this was where Suha stopped.
The house, such as it was, was so small that Inaya and Khos had to sleep out in the yard on tatty old burnouses from the magician’s days back in Nasheen. It was a dirty, refuse-filled yard, just like the house, but it was fenced, and there was a tattered awning.
Inaya sat awake with the shotgun on her chest, one hand on the barrel. She stared up at the big black patch of nothing above her, that patch of the sky they called the Void where no stars were visible, listening to Elahyiah and Rhys speaking inside. The sound of Elahyiah crying. She wanted to cry, too, but she didn’t have the strength.
She remembered her mother fucking dogs in the street. Her father’s desperation. She remembered her brother Taite running away after their mother was taken. Inaya had found him hiding underneath the house eating mayflies, the ones that tasted like strawberries. He hadn’t spoken for nearly a year after that. It’s what made him turn to the guts and tubes and bugs of their parents’ com unit. It was when Inaya started covering her hair and dressing like a martyr’s wife. She would not be like her mother. She would not be Other, a monster. She would be just another standard, another good Ras Tiegan matron. So she accepted her first marriage proposal, from a man twice her age with three other wives who had no shifters in his family. His uncle was in politics. He had two nephews working for the police. It was a political family who had hated and despised her for what her mother was, but a standard family nonetheless.
She had tried to bend the world, and change what all of them were. It’s not us who are sick, she thought—stirred by the memory of a woman beating her mother with a stick on the street—it’s the world that’s wrong. The contaminated world they built.
Her children, though… Could they really just keep running? Run to Ras Tieg where she and Khos and Tatie would be hunted like animals? And what of Isfahan? How much longer until she, too, began to show the talent? Inaya had known the risks of having children. Known and done it anyway. And God, she loved them. Her breath, her soul made flesh. It made her heart ache.
Khos shifted in his sleep, and began to snore softly.
She could do nothing, she supposed.
But doing nothing… that made her as bad at the woman who used to beat her mother in the street. It made her as bad as all the others in Ras Tieg—the ones who passed casually by while shifter children were dragged into smoked-glass bakkies.
Inaya stared up into the night sky.
“I will build a better world for you,” she whispered.
She closed her eyes. God, how her heart ached.
+
In the morning, Inaya woke with the dawn and prayed to Mhari for strength in the days to come, and thanked God for all she still possessed
.
Inside, Rhys sat them all around Behdis’s little table.
“Where’s Elahyiah?” Inaya asked.
“I took her home,” Rhys said.
“Not your house?”
“To her father. It’s what she wanted. It was Rasheeda who tried to kill us, and… that other one who pulled her out. I don’t expect it’s Elahyiah who’s in danger.”
Eshe sat next to him, back in human form. His eyes were ringed in dark circles. He sat hunched at the table, squeezed next to Suha. His hands looked stiff, curled into claws.
Inaya rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. He jerked his head up to look at her.
“I’m pleased to see you in human form again,” she said.
He frowned.
Khos leaned up against the wall near the back door, arms crossed.
“I wanted to get us all together while Behdis was out,” Rhys said. “She has six hours at the gym today.”
“Where’s Nyx?” Khos asked.
“She was… lucid, last night,” Rhys said. “Behdis and I pumped her full of antibiotics and cleaned her up. She started screaming at me, but…”
Khos grunted. “She must be better then.”
Rhys’s face softened. “She hasn’t said a word since then. She went back under this morning. I called Yah Tayyib to take another look at her, but I don’t know if he’ll come. I wanted to bring everyone together to figure out what it is we want to do.”
“You want to kill her,” Eshe said. His voice was oddly monotone. Inaya wrinkled her brow.
“I mean us,” Rhys said. “I want to know what we’ll do. If you and Suha want to keep Nyx, maybe that’s best. I want… I don’t know if…” He sighed.
“You want to know if we’re keeping her note or keeping her?” Suha said.
“I think the two of you should go back to Nasheen with her,” Rhys said.
“Fuck you,” Suha said. “There’s a note on her head. She forget to tell you that?”
“Shit,” Khos said. “When were you going to mention that?”
“It just came up on the boards,” Eshe said. “I found out last night.”