“I’m glad he’s dead,” she said. A rickshaw clattered past, draped in colors as somber as what Eshe was wearing. Outside a wedding or non-shifter birthing celebration, Inoublie was a colorless sort of place during the day. The buildings here were squeezed close together, bucking up against the massive grated storm drains that kept the streets clear during the rainy season. Tangles of trees lined the roads, many of them twice as tall as the buildings, their broad canopies bowing in the rain. Ancient root systems jutted from cracks in the tiled sidewalk. Mourners often draped wreaths of white and gold flowers over them during a funeral procession. The old, rotting flower chains had broken and tumbled to the sidewalk, forming a fine, slick skein of rot on the tile.

“Remember that next time you get the chance to kill somebody,” he said.

“You don’t have to kill everyone.” She enjoyed bickering for bickering’s sake, like a child. He was nearly twenty-one now, and her shrill, seventeen-year-old fury felt like something half-remembered from a lifetime ago.

“Yeah, next time we’ll try your way.”

“I know why you do it,” she said. “The Madame told me about your mother.”

“My… mother?”

“The bloody Nasheenian assassin.”

“She’s not… that’s a complicated story.”

“Did you hear they’re pardoning assassins now, in Nasheen?”

“Where did you learn that?”

“It was in the papers, of course.” The radios in Ras Tieg were all censored, so most people held up the less rigidly enforced papers as truth. Eshe knew better.

“Well, you’re wrong. They’d never do that.”

“I know what I heard.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. He had no interest in discussing his… mother with her. Or Nasheenian politics. But he knew who he should talk to about it.

Isabet huffed off down the street, slipping and sliding on the rotten flowers. He paused a moment to watch her go. Her habit was mostly shapeless, but he had seen her in trousers before, the first few times he bumped into her at the Madame de Fourré’s place, and it was hard to get the shape of her legs and ass out of his mind now as he watched her slide along.

He shook his head and went off in the opposite direction, sticking to the center of the street where the way was less precarious. Some days the women here drove him to drink. But mostly, he just prayed harder that God would help him untangle what it was he really wanted from them.

“When were you going to tell me?” Eshe asked.