She sniffed at Ayah’s forgotten glass. The malty stuff gumming up the bottom was bad bootleg liquor. Nyx kicked the body’s leg away from the chair and sat down with the glass to wait. Sipped the liquor. Not bad. She listened to the thump-thump of explosions in the city center, and the low grumble of angry humanity. Blood congealed on the floor. Tiny blood mites began to appear along the edges of the room and scurry their way across the bare stone to the pooling blood.

That made two less people who knew where Anneke and Radeyah and the kids were. And a very simple message to Mercia. It should have been the most relaxed Nyx had been in years. She should have enjoyed killing this cleanly, and fucking a smarmy young diplomat. Instead, she found herself thinking of another woman back home, and a house full of kids, and Anneke’s crumbling back.

She finished her drink, and went out into the rumbling dawn to find Fatima.

5.

Ahmed traded his face for a ticket out of Sahar. It seemed a fair enough deal at the time—the butchers told him it was a pretty face, and they had a fair number of mutilated veterans coming off the front who’d have use for it. As it was, he could use a new face himself. It was harder for bel dames to hunt down faceless men.

But when he woke on the butcher’s block, his vision a gray haze, a dull throbbing in his swollen mouth—like it had been stuffed with gauze—and he pressed his fingers to his engorged face and lips and tried to speak… he knew something was terribly wrong.

They had not taken his face.

They had taken his tongue.

A tall woman entered. Her hands were bloody crimson, her gaunt face a hallowed mask. In her fingers she held a strange creature—half worm, half beetle. It was flat and smooth, with savage hooks at one end.

“Open,” the woman said. He did not recognize her. Someone else had made the deal with him, and another woman had taken him here. She gripped his chin firmly in one hand, presented the worm-bug with the other. “Open,” she said, “Or did you never want to speak again?”

He opened. The worm fell into his mouth, wriggling and lashing. The morphine had taken the edge off, but he felt it when the worm jabbed itself into the stub of what was left of his tongue.

Ahmed retched.

“Don’t fight it,” the woman said. She slapped his shoulder. Left a long red smear of blood. “Just let it settle. In a week you won’t even notice it.”

He choked and drooled and finally, painfully, mumbled something like a curse. The worm waggled on the stub of his tongue. His words felt mangled, mushy. He gagged again.