The door behind her burst open. A rolling stir of gray sand poured out after her. She took off again, running for the church. It was the tallest building in Inoublie. Her skin prickled, then roiled, and as she ran, she simply let go and burst apart into a misty green cloud, pouring forward as fast as the wind could carry her. All around her, she saw more shifters transforming themselves into their alternate forms ahead of the gray tide.

Inaya reached the parapet of the church and found a safe place to reform. She pulled herself back together, painfully, and shook off long strings of mucus, coughing black beetles. The air was bitterly cold against her slimy, naked skin, but she ignored it, and stared, instead, at the tide of gray flowing out along the streets. With every person it devoured, it seemed to grow larger, stronger; a gray ocean come to eat the entire city.

She saw Adeliz across the street on the opposite roof, standing with two parrots and a raven. Below, those unable to flee fast enough screamed and disintegrated under the onslaught.

Inaya stared at the wave, wondering if it would ever crest. Surely it would run out of organic matter to eat? It couldn’t keep getting larger, could it? And what had Isabet meant, that this was all for her? Then she heard a terrible crackling sound, and gazed back to the factory. The sand had devoured the base of the structure, the bug secretions that had bound the base of the building together.

It didn’t just eat people. It ate everything organic. Inaya raised her head and gazed out past the filter, to the lush, wild jungle that surrounded Inoublie.

“My God,” she said, because Nyx had delivered them a plague after all.

“Well, you’re mistaken about that,” Nyx said. “He’s in Nasheen, and he’s very much alive.”

Alharazad laughed. “Don’t try and bluff me, girl. Raine isn’t coming home alive. We made certain of that.”

“Why did you send me after him if you never meant him to come home alive?”

“It was because we didn’t want him coming back alive that we sent you, you fool,” Alharazad said. “I sent you after him because you were the only bel dame we had with the guts to murder him where he stood, and you’d do it without getting the order.”

“So that’s why you wanted me to be a bel dame,” Nyx said. “So I’d kill him for you. What purpose does that serve?”

Fatima sighed. “Nyx, you are sadly behind the times.”

“Enlighten me.”