“Where do you think she’s retiring once she steps down?” Alharazad said. “Not the fuck anywhere here. She’s not going to be popular much longer.”

“I’m sorry we kept you out of much of this, Nyx, but you understand the necessity,” Fatima said. “You would have done the same.”

Nyx felt numb. It was all so big that she had trouble getting her head around it. She had been used. Thoroughly, totally, and completely. She had given up everything—her home, and Anneke, Radeyah; and lost an entire team, lost Eshe—for what?

Alharazad laughed. “You look so confused. It’s all right. Are you really the last one standing?”

“Can’t be,” Fatima said. “You’d have to have gone through the tunnels to get back so quickly. Is this your new magician?”

“Indeed,” Safiyah said. It was the first time she’d spoken.

“And what are you called? Need a job?” Alharazad said, and laughed.

“I am on a job, actually,” Safiyah said lightly. “Perhaps you remember me, Alharazad. Surely you of all people remember my name, and how you angered my Family when you murdered our brothers.”

For a moment, Nyx didn’t register the look of horror on Alharazad’s face. She thought it was just gas.

But as Alharazad’s mouth began to work, Nyx realized it was more than just some passing bodily discomfort.

“You,” Alharazad said.

Safiyah grinned. “Me,” she said.

Inaya tore herself into a billion pieces. It was freedom. Complete, utter, perfect freedom. When she tore herself, she tore part of the world. Something folded. But instead of letting that piece of the world close back up, she kept it open. She bent the spaces around the tide of sand, and began to funnel it to the place where she kept herself.

There was a moment of deep resistance. Then the sand, too, began to break down, break apart. She transformed it. One moment, seething gray death. The next, inert matter broken up into its basic parts, perfectly packaged for storage in the twist she had made in the world.

She broke the weapon apart bit by bit, even as more people screamed and died around her, and the flow of sand gushed toward the edges of the filter. She began to spread herself thinner and thinner, blanketing the town, the world. She heard the caw of a raven.

As she spread apart, she was less and less aware of herself. The matter broke beneath her. She broke against it. She was losing. Something was being lost.

Safiyah gazed upon the face she first saw in the palms of her handler, several months past. She had enjoyed her sojourn in the desert, tracking down the one woman sure to draw this one out of hiding.