Nyx sat on the roof a good deal longer, refilling her glass until the bottle was empty. She wondered how a person was supposed to sleep at night, knowing the kind of shit Safiyah did. But was it really all that different? Killing a hundred people or a million? After a while, they all blurred together. Oh, sure, there were some you thought about more than others. The boy from Radha who screamed for three hours for his mother after Nyx threw an acid burst into his garret window. The pretty girl from Barsa who Nyx killed as she lay between her naked thighs. Just reached up and pushed two thumbs into her eyes, fleshy jelly. Nyx had been drunk and high on some military grade narcotic then, so that memory was milky and distorted with the memory of the three other times they fucked. And then there were the twin boys who had taken an entire textile factory hostage in Aludra. When Nyx finally got in, she found nothing but bent, twisted, bodies. Charred and bashed in, ragged clothing. But it was not the female workers who had drawn their wrath. No, the women had gotten out the back. All that was left when the twins came in were half a dozen young boys, twelve to sixteen, not one of whom had done a day of combat training. They were frail, skinny, pretty little things—what was left of them, anyhow. Nyx found the boys upstairs, sobbing over the last two bodies. These ones were mostly just melted flesh. They had run out of bullets, and used acid on them.

When they stared up at her, Nyx wasn’t even so certain the boys knew what they had done. Slitting their throats was clean and easy, but when it was over, she sat exactly where they had, staring down at their bodies as they bled out and blood pooled around her sandals. She wondered what somebody else might think, coming upon her that way, surrounded in a factory full of mangled bodies. She half hoped they might kill her.

Now, Nyx sighed and stood. She took one last look at the sky. For the first time in a very long time, she believed there was another world on the way… a world that had to be better than this one. Cause fuck knows it couldn’t be any worse than the one she knew.

She understood, now, why she and Safiyah got along so well.

48.

Inaya walked into a tavern called the Lapping Cat. It was at the far eastern edge of Inoublie, the half of the city left blessedly untouched by the devastating sand. She walked to the bar keep, who appeared more than a little surprised to see a woman wearing a modest habit and wimple enter his tavern.

“Is there a message here for Inaya Khadija?” she asked.