The woman stripped Inaya bare and threw her under a cold sluice of water in a tiny room plastered in broken gray tile. The corners of the damp, slippery floor were teeming with cockroaches.

The water was cold. The woman threw a palm-sized washing cloth at Inaya and said, “Wash yourself.”

Inaya did what she could with the clean rag and no soap. When she stepped out of the water, hugging herself, shivering, the woman tossed a towel at her. It hit her in the face and fell onto the wet floor.

“Dry yourself.”

“I have a family,” Inaya said. “There has been some mistake.”

“Do not speak out of turn again. Follow instructions, and this will all go easier.”

Inaya picked up the damp towel.

She dressed in a shapeless gray habit and matching wimple. The woman carefully examined her head and face to ensure that not the barest hint of hair had escaped the severe, stiff wimple.

“You are acceptable,” the woman said.

Inaya wanted to ask why it was she had been detained again, but decided to wait to ask someone in authority. She knew better than to guess that this woman would be her interrogator. Anyone with any authority in Ras Tieg tended to be a man, generally a priest or a man with strong ties to the church. This woman may have influence, but she was not the one to plead her case.

She followed the woman through a low-pitched hallway. She heard muffled sounds from behind spongy doors that crawled with scarabs. The bugs kept the exact conversations muted, but the tone carried: pleading, sometimes frantic. She let herself wonder just how many people they kept here, and if all of them were shifters.

She noticed the woman glancing back at her as they walked. Watching for signs of distress? Discomfort? She was tired and hungry and slightly nauseous from all the saffron they were stuffing her with. She wanted to pretend she felt perfectly at ease, but would an innocent, non-shifter woman act that way? Or would she be trembling, terrified? Inaya had already picked her part. She needed to play it. So, though it pained her, she lowered her eyes and wrung her hands and began preparing herself for more weeping. One of her aunts had been a professional mourner, and she had always envied the way the woman could call up a sob on command. It got her what she wanted, and more. Men did not like to see women weep. It reminded them of their own failings.

The woman paused at one of the doors. This one was without scarabs. Inaya heard nothing on the other side of it. The woman knocked and entered.

Inaya was not certain what she expected. She had never been incarcerated before. She understood interrogation, but in her mind, interrogation meant fear, pain, torture. And those types of interrogations generally only happened if one was certain they had a person with information, didn’t they?