It might not have been water, but it was close enough. She grabbed another one, and another, until the sluggish little fuckers began to catch on. As they started to pile off her and go lumbering off toward some rounded mounds in the sand, she scrabbled to her feet, still dizzy, and shed her burnous. She looped the end of it into a sack, and started collecting the bugs and tossing them in. When it was full, she tied it off and collapsed again.

Water, after a very long time in the desert. The feeling was better than any fuck, better than good whiskey, better than dying.

The raven was watching her from the top of another of the mounds, head cocked.

“Eshe?” she said.

No answer. Just the quizzical stare.

She peered, again, at the mound the raven perched on. There were at least a dozen or more mounds beyond it, all about the same size and shape. More ruins? More desert garbage?

She slumped onto the ground again, lost some time.

When she woke, the raven was pecking at the top of her head. She growled and snarled, tried to bat it away. The bird jumped back three hops, cocked its head.

It was still dark. She thought of something Yah Tayyib once told her. It was the secret to winning any contest, he said, in life or in the boxing ring—you just had to get up more often than you fell down.

There was a rising wind, then a clattering racket, like a thousand voices raised in the market, or some mess hall.

Nyx raised her head. Above her, the sky was full of ravens.

Some primal fear filled her, something far more terrifying than dying. She scrabbled to her feet and stumbled toward the mound the raven was sitting on. She hoped to dig into it and find some shelter.

She got within arm’s reach—and fell again.

She put out her hands, expecting to meet resistance.

Instead, she fell right through the mound—and into cool darkness.

25.

They left her for six days.

It was a blessing, though Inaya did not realize it until the third day, as she sat against the roughhewn wall, staring at the narrow shaft of light that brought in cool air during the day and buzzing insects at night. She had large, swollen bumps on her arms, legs, and face. Late summer heat soaked the humid air; there was no temperature control at all. She sweated during the day and shivered at night. There was a single refuse pail in one corner, caked in some specious gunk that made her gag. The pail had yet to be emptied, and her slop spilled over the lip of the bucket now and pooled in one corner. Her clothes were filthy. She, like her cell, stank.