“She didn’t think you would come. And if it had been her or another bel dame at your door, you would have killed them outright. But she said that if you wouldn’t come… She said she has a job for you. She wants you to be a bel dame again. She says now that the Queen’s pardoned you and she’s leading the council, she has the authority to redeem you.”

Nyx felt something flutter inside of her, something that had been dead a good long time.

“She must be very desperate to send you here with an offer like that,” Nyx said. “Or she must think I’m very stupid.”

“Things are bad, Nyx.”

“How do you profit from this?” Nyx knew enough about politicians to know that even Mercia was likely a fine one at this point, and fine politicians didn’t do anything unless they stood to profit from it.

“It’s not about me, exactly, it’s about… saving Nasheen.”

“Of course it is,” Nyx said.

She raised her gun and aimed it directly into Mercia’s face. The little diplomat had the sense to tremble. The color bled out of her face.

“Get the fuck off my porch,” Nyx said.

“You going to fuck her or kill her?” Anneke asked when Nyx sent Mercia off with her bodyguards. “You never look that close unless it’s one or the other.”

Nyx stood with Anneke in the prayer room on the second floor, watching Mercia and the bodyguards get into the bakkie. Downstairs, the rest of the kids had come home and joined Avava and Sabah, still arguing about who was going to make dinner. Nyx supposed their choices would be fried locusts, yam noodles, or something unsavory that they had fished out of the ocean. They had pulled some globular one-eyed monster out of that seething, viscous sea the week before, and the thought of it still gave Nyx the dry heaves.

“Not sure yet,” Nyx said.

Anneke sighed. She had a stooped way of walking now, something to do with the degeneration of her spine. Genetic, the magicians had told her. Shouldn’t have hauled around forty kilos of gear for twenty-five years of mercenary work, either. But what was done was done, and though bone regeneration was possible, eliminating the root cause of her disease was not, and no matter how often Anneke went in to get it fixed, her body would just fail again. Anneke’s hair was shot through with white now, and her pinched, Chenjan-dark face was the face of an old woman, though she wasn’t much older than Nyx.

“You gotta make a decision sometime,” Anneke said.

Nyx said, “She upstairs?”

“Who? Oh. Yeah.”

“Mercia see her?”

“No.”

“You tell Mercia about her?”

“Fuck no, why’d I do that?”