“Let him die here. I care nothing for weak-willed men. Those drugs will last for three days. He’ll be dead by then.”

Inaya heard them get into a bakkie. Heard it cough and sputter away.

She pressed her back against the outbuilding. Pieter. Her interrogator. He had a name. Of course he had a name. But in those long, terrible sessions she did not see him as a person. Just as he did not see her as one.

It would be hours more before she could shift. She settled down and waited. Sometimes waiting was the most difficult thing. She had waited many months. Already she was tired from all the walking, and desperately hungry. Surely there was more food inside?

Inaya crept back to the door. Her hand hesitated again at the handle.

Don’t be a fool, she thought. She pulled her hand away. She would wait until she could shift.

While she waited, she tried to doze, but she could not rid her mind of Pieter, the Angel. He was going to starve in there, the way he had left her to starve.

Goddammit, she thought.

She prayed.

Dusk. She woke to thirst… and something more.

Inaya’s body felt suddenly lighter, her mind, clearer, as if a curtain had been pulled away from her mind. She struggled to her feet.

And let go.

She surrendered to the delightful freedom of changing forms. She burst into a soft, wispy cloud, then yanked herself back and rebuilt her form into that of a large sand cat, then a tremendous black beetle. And finally, a wispy green mist—the fastest way to get back in.

She descended back to the compound, and slid under the door. She raced to the cells where the other shifters were kept. She coded her blood to match that of the dead Angel whose clothing she had stolen, and released them all.

In the last cell, as it went from opaque to transparent, she recognized Pieter.

He stood as the filter changed, and stared out at her—or, the misty wraith she had become.

“I knew it,” he said.

Would he murder all the shifters she had just released? Would she endanger them by releasing him?

He came to the edge of the filter. For a long time, they regarded one another.

Inaya made her decision.

38.

Nyx came to lying on her side. Went from blissful black nothingness to painful muzzy-headedness in the space of a breath. Tiny insects crawled across her face. She jerked upright. Her wrists were bound, so she wiped the bugs away on her shoulder. Turned out they were ants. Some kind of biting ants, and they bit hard. She put her face between her knees and scrubbed it clean.