Putting up a sign in the door saying you were looking for mercenaries generally wasn’t done, even in Nasheen. You told people you were looking for magicians and “bug killers” or “precision bug hunters.” Using that language would dissuade the order keepers for a while, but it wouldn’t fool anybody trying to track Nyx’s movements. She kept a watch on the street, looking for anybody paying too much attention to her business.

When she put up the sign, she expected to get a fair number of hedge witches and venom-addled tissue mechanics knocking on her door, but those could be weeded out pretty quickly.

What she didn’t expect was the long line of boys standing outside.

Nyx spent the morning interviewing boys between the ages of seventeen and thirty-six, most of whom should have been mixing up burst shells and developing contagions at the front. There were some real surprises, though—two or three were actual, God-fearing, certified magicians. When she turned them away, it wasn’t for lack of skill—she just didn’t respect them. If you were going to hump a team into the desert after some group of reckless rogues, you had to respect that team.

As she sat in the storefront memorizing names and faces—she learned most things by rote—she thought about how much it was like being at the front. When they sat down, she had a knee-jerk impulse to ask them for their orders, like she was back in Sharifa screening sappers.

There were fresh-faced young boys not a day over sixteen who hadn’t been at the front six months when they got pulled home. There were bug-addled twenty- and thirty-year-old veterans with missing eyes, severed limbs, poorly patched-together heads that barely kept their brains in, and worse; boys wearing long sleeves who twitched and jittered in their seats, trying to hide signs of venom addiction; young, bearded men with eyes deep and empty as dry wells; and the hardened ones, the distant ones, the ones who did not look at you but through you, off just beyond your left shoulder where the war still raged, where their best friends bled out, where a buddy took a bullet or a burst they were too scared to take themselves. Boys who had pushed their friends into fire, or abandoned them during a surge, listening to their cries as the Chenjans tore them apart; and there were the soft-spoken, matter-of-fact heroic boys, the few who had lived. They talked the least, said “sir” the most. They were the ones who’d done what she hadn’t, and what most living folks never would—they lost their limbs, their skins, their sanity to take a burst or a bullet for a friend, for a squad, to save a mission.