Alharazad was not an easy woman to find, or to fool. Not unless she wanted to be found. And Nyx was the sort of woman that Alharazad delighted in underestimating. Safiyah knew, because she hadn’t thought much of her either, in the beginning. The colonial was slow, uneducated, and very dirty. But resilient. Terribly resilient.

Safiyah said, “What, no greeting?”

“You know each other?” Nyx said.

“In passing,” Safiyah said. “It took me a time to remember your face. You were much younger when you visited me, weren’t you?”

“Who let you out?”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell you everything now. Why would I do that? Simply congratulate me on finding you, and die gracefully.”

The old woman tried to bolt. The bel dames around them surged.

Nyx drew her blade, and stepped further into the room. She prepared for a good fight. A final fight. Safiyah could see it in her face, and thought it very cute.

Safiyah called the ravenous swarm of flesh beetles she had kept on call in anticipation of just such an event.

The screaming was perfectly lovely. The councilwoman even retched. Any day Safiyah could make a bel dame retch was a fine day indeed.

And the troublesome retinue of armed bel dames? Well, that only took a few moments longer.

Somedays Safiyah truly loved what she was.

In some other life, there was a woman named Inaya il Parait. She married a man named Khos. Khos loved her all his life, but she did not love him. She loved her children. She loved her freedom. She loved the idea of being normal, and leading a normal life.

But she had never been ordinary.

And now, she was coming apart.

Inaya watched the world from the sky. She was all-seeing, all-knowing. She wondered if this is what it felt like to be God. To see all the joy and horror at once, to pick up grains of sand one by one while a great tide of destruction threatened the world. She was just one entity. Her against the world felt like too much.

She knew she was breaking further and further apart, knew that she was fading, knew that with each grain she removed from the world, it was one less piece of her that she would have the strength to pull back.

The sand broke against the filter. She half hoped it would stop, but no—it simply ate the filter. Bled through. She spread herself thinner. Consciousness floated.

There once was a woman…

And then she felt something else ahead of her. Some other entity, something like her. It, too, ate at the sand. The tide had become a wave.

The wave soon became a runnel.

Inaya began to grasp back at the bits of herself. She felt some semblance of consciousness return. As she regained control, she was able to focus on the final movement of the sand, until every last grain was broken and removed.