Memories always flickered, just there, at the edges of the gray world. Brief images. Fighting. Blood. And that blazing, ethereal light. She… yes, she remembered a world eaten by plague and contagion and rebuilt into some other world’s image. Whether it was the world outside her cell anymore or if that world had become something else, she did not know.

“Not this time,” they said, and clawed at her.

She twisted and fought. Dug fingers and teeth into flesh. But they pricked her, doped her, and her body went limp, like a fresh caught mock parrot. She tried to snarl—but that, too, had left her, so she snarled at them silently.

I had a name, once. Fear me.

I.

They dragged her into the light.

After a few days of detox, they lashed her to a chair in a dim, dry room. There was a large devotion mounted in a scarab carapace on the wall. No windows. Just the door. When the door opened this time, the world was not quite so gray, and she had a sense of herself. Knowledge.

I have a name. The bitches took my name.

Two slim women entered. Bug women. They wore long, shapeless tunics, aprons, and hijabs of the same off-white color. One had a soft smear of blood on her apron. She could smell it. The women had three sets of blinking butterfly syringes peeking out from the front of their aprons. She flinched at the sight of them. A shadow moved through the door behind the women.

She lifted her head, regarded the shadow. “You’re not like the others,” she said. Her voice came out broken and raspy, not at all the way she remembered. When she once spoke, so long ago, people thought the sun was singing.

The new woman was slender at the waist, but broad in the arms and shoulders; top heavy. She wore dark trousers, tunic, burnous, but no weapons. They wouldn’t have allowed it here. She stood a little closer than the women who held the syringes, easily confident. No fear. What she was was written in the lines of her face. The tautness of her body.

“What can I do for you, bel dame?” she asked the shadow.

“I heard you were a woman,” the hunter said. “And a powerful magician… once.”

“I’ve been a lot of things,” she said. “Once.” Her memories suddenly stretched and flexed, unfolded—delicate as a locust’s wings. It was an overwhelming vista, a gasping, stomach-knotting glimpse into blood and darkness and absolute power. Power that blotted out the sun.

She gasped.

“You bloody fucking bitches!” she screeched, and jerked at her bonds. The chair rattled.

The Plague Sisters reached for the syringes.

“You bitches!”

The bel dame waved the sisters away. “I’m searching for a bug,” the bel dame said. “Someone willing to go back into the desert. Someone not afraid of my kind.”