Inaya curled up on the floor and sobbed. She was exhausted and hungry, and the world was completely out of her control. The logical part of her knew it was all a trick, just a trick, but fear and hunger crowded out that small, still, voice. It took a great deal of sobbing before she found peace again.

Later, one of the guards came by and pushed in a tin of food. Inaya shouted after him. “The girl. The girl who was here earlier? What’s happened to her?”

“She’s hung herself,” the guard said. “Two days ago.”

Inaya let her head sink. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

The guard bent over, peered at her from a safe distance. “You see how it is here, animal? We don’t have to do anything at all to you. You all do in yourselves. Wonder how long it’ll be before I cut you down?”

Inaya stared at the filter. He put his hand to the plate outside the entrance and the filter went opaque. He had not explained what the girl could have possibly hung herself with. Certainly not anything she had in the cell with her… not unless they gave it to her.

Inaya knelt, clasped her hands, and began to pray. “Martyr Mhari, full of grace….”

It was another eight days before the door opened again.

An unfamiliar guard stood there, outfitted all in crimson.

“Your husband is here to see you,” he said.

26.

Nyx stumbled into a soft valley on the other side of the first few humps of the hills that bordered the playa and into town without knowing it was a town, only that there seemed to be people walking about on the humped ground. She was babbling like crazy Eskander, talking to dead people. Above the settlement, the stir of ravens coalesced, some murderous cloud. She was covered from head to foot in terrible gouges, savage bits of her taken out by the marauding ravens. Her chest was slathered in Eskander’s dried blood from the burst water bulbs.

She lurched toward the first person she saw and yelled, “THEY ARE WAITING!” in Nasheenian.

The tall, dark-skinned stranger watched her with funny amber eyes and backed away slowly. The woman was immensely tall, her breasts about the height of Nyx’s head, and she carried a basket of bulbous little bugs, the same ones that had tried to eat Nyx in the desert. Nyx wasn’t sure where the woman was going with it—she saw no tents, no shelter, but in that moment, she wasn’t exactly running on logic.

Nyx grabbed at the woman’s long blue robes. Her clothing was slick, organic. Expensive. So soft.

The woman yanked the fabric away and babbled at her in some foreign language. It didn’t sound like anything Nyx had ever heard. Not even Khairian.