Pain radiated up her arm, and she bit back a cry of pain. It was the first time he had resorted to physical violence. She felt as if she had won something.

“I need to know who your cell leaders are,” he said. “Tonight. Or I will start unmaking you from toe to tit.”

Inaya knew, then. “You’re a shifter,” she said.

He released her. Inaya danced away, out of arm’s reach. “My God,” she said. “Not just any shifter, though, are you? Not a raven, a parrot, a dog… not even a fox. No, you’re… you unmake things, you said. I have… heard… all about unmaking.”

“Then you know what I can do to you.”

“How can you work against your own kind?”

“My kind? My kind? You rabid animals are nothing like me. You’re locked in one form. One guise. Just some beast. God’s Angels are all things. We can become anything. Everything. We’re the very hand of God Himself.”

Inaya had believed herself many things, but never the hand of God. She steeled herself. She wanted to shout and clap. Her skin rippled with the renewed desire to shift, to giveaway what she was. I am like you! She wanted to tell him, but of course, that wasn’t true. She wasn’t like him at all.

“What was it like, when you first shifted? When you gave in and became something else?” Inaya said. “Did you feel you had sinned?”

“Names,” he said. But she saw his disquiet now. He had given himself away. He pressed his hands together. She saw the skin ripple. Saw the slight twitch of his eye. He was a mutant like her. He could become any organic thing he wished. He could reach inside of her and stop her heart.

“You’re the same as all the people you murder,” Inaya said. “How lovely that must be, to murder yourself every day.”

“You know nothing,” he said. “You’re an animal. Just like the rest of them.”

“And you’re a god, is that it?” She laughed again. “I wonder what God has to say about that.”

“You can ask Him when you see Him,” the Angel said. He retrieved the papers from the floor.

He left her. The female jailer returned, and escorted her back to her cell.

Inaya waited in front of the filter. It went transparent. Her jailer pushed her inside—into a pool of blood.

Inaya slipped on the floor, and fell to her hands and knees. Mettie’s large body was laid out on the stones. She was very still. Blood pooled from a gash in her head. Inaya crawled forward and found that Mettie was still breathing.

“Wait!” she called after the jailer. “She’s been hurt! Please. She needs a magician!”

“That’s what happens when dogs like her argue with God’s Angels,” the jailer said, and the filter went opaque.

“Mettie? Mettie?” Inaya cried.