The girl nodded. Still didn’t meet her eye. Another Drucian thing, and one of the most infuriating. They refused to look anyone in the face but lovers and close family. Worse than Chenjans.

“I’ve been interviewing all day and you’re the first who brought her own gun. Can you shoot it?”

“Yes.”

Nyx handed back the gun. “Let’s prove it.”

She brought the girl up onto the roof. Eshe followed them up. Ahmed the magician was still in the back, working on a bakkie she’d picked up. The space on the roof wasn’t big, but it was private, tucked between two slightly taller buildings.

Nyx pointed out across the scrappy line of other hopefuls to the beggar squatting against the tile of the building opposite, the same one she saw her first day at the storefront. When the lines thinned, he should have gone off as well, but he hadn’t. He was old, maybe fifty, skinny and sickly, with venom scars on his arms. Some hard-up war vet.

“I want you to kill that man. Can you do that?”

The girl’s face remained expressionless. It was like trying to read a stone.

“Is that a problem?” Nyx asked. She watched the girl carefully. This was the toughest test of all. Would she kill on command? Could she?

The girl slid up to the lip of the rooftop. Knelt. Steadied her gun against her shoulder.

“Nyx—” Eshe said.

“Hush,” Nyx said.

“You can’t be serious, Nyx,” Eshe said.

Nyx turned, and saw that Ahmed had joined them. He stood on the ladder leading up to the roof, only his head and shoulders visible.

“When am I not serious?” Nyx said.

She heard two shots in quick succession. Loud. Nyx pressed her hands to her ears, too late.

She went to the edge of the roof and looked down. The beggar was still. The Drucian had not shot him in the head, though. That injury would be too obvious. It was two to the chest. She must have hit some vital organ, because the man had simply bowed over, rather anticlimactically. No one outside seemed to be any wiser, though a few vets raised their gaze to the rooftop.

“Where you learn to shoot?” Nyx asked.

“Leaf bugs,” the girl said. “We have a lot of leaf bugs.” She began to pack up her gun, still expressionless.

Nyx had picked palm-sized leaf bugs out of her bed every night in Druce. “All right. What you want in exchange for service?”

“Room and board,” the girl said.

Nyx raised her brows. “That it?”

“I just need to… get away.”

They always needed to get away.

“What’s your name?”

“Isao Kage.”