She took a deep breath and padded down the hall, listening for voices. After a time, she heard a strange buzzing sound coming from the floor. She paused. That’s when she realized that she had still not run into any doors. Where did all of these halls lead?

Nyx started to run. She needed to get out of this fucking pit.

She heard a sucking sound to her left.

Something reached out from the wall.

She shrieked. Stupidly.

And tumbled through the other side, into Safiyah’s arms.

“There you are,” Ahmed said, beside her. There was a swarm of insects at his feet, palm-sized cicadas with giant mandibles. “Big teeth,” he said, “but also a fine sense of smell.”

“Get me the fuck out of here,” Nyx said.

“Gladly,” Safiyah said.

Back at the camp overlooking Bomani, Nyx wiped the organic sludge from her skin with sand. Ahmed sat next to her, eating the last of their dried worm meat.

“Are we calling that it?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Nyx said. “If Fatima really just wanted to kill all of us on some fool’s errand, she’s succeeding pretty well.”

“Why did you take this job if you knew it’d kill you?” Ahmed said.

“Why did you?”

Ahmed gazed off toward Bomani. Behind them, Kage sat cleaning her gun, Isabet slept, and Safiyah was muttering to Ahmed’s little army of cicadas. About what, Nyx didn’t care to know.

“That bel dame came looking for me because I killed my commanding officer,” Ahmed said.

Nyx sighed. “Of course you did.” It was her own fault. She should have had each of them checked out on the bel dame boards before she signed them. Why hadn’t she done it? Because they were discharged, of course. She had assumed that every boy discharged from the front was being let go as part of the ceasefire. She wouldn’t think to sit around and weed out the ones who deserted for crimes committed. But this was a fine time to come out of the trenches if you were a deserter, wasn’t it? It was a lot harder to track a boy among a sea of boys than a young, pretty face surrounded by women and a scattering of old men.

“I had my reasons,” he said.

“Didn’t we all.”

“You’ve killed bel dames before.”

“I’ve also killed a lot of boys before,” she said, pointedly. “Don’t get me started on which is easier.”

“I’m sorry, Nyx.”

“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.” And then everything started to unravel. His calm way with each member of her team, slowly and carefully building alliances for the inevitable showdown. The way he showed just enough interest in everyone to say he was your friend, but not enough to show any one person they were a favorite.

“You should have told me this up front.”