Inside the vast chamber, her stir of white-clad Family members were strangely frail, insignificant. She had spent a week outside among the mutant colonials, and she had been reminded of just how physically powerful those ravenous people had become outside the safety of the filtered residences and purified air enjoyed by the Firsts. Her Family and all those like it had stagnated here, desperately trying to maintain the conjurers’ bloodlines and eradicate the mutations among them. But even isolation had failed, after so many millennia, and all the Families truly had left to leverage were the secrets encased in these living tombs, and the shaping power that only a few could still wield.

“Who’s matriarch?” she asked.

When no one stepped forward, she simply cast her gaze across the sea of faces to suss her out. She knew much about being a matriarch. She had been one herself, for a short time. A very short time.

“I am,” one of the older women said. She moved toward her from the back of the assembly.

She recognized her as Parvaneh Ibraheem sa Hadiyah so Mushtallah. The woman was slight at the wrists and ankles, with a delicate face so achingly beautiful that for a moment she feared she would cry. The walking corpses outside weren’t half as pretty as the ugliest First Family outcast. After her exile among the colonials, this room of ravishing, large-eyed, soft-skinned beauties was like walking among aliens.

“We were just recently informed,” Parvaneh said. A hundred years ago, Parvaneh had commissioned the building of the Orrizo, the great monument to unnamed dead men at the center of Mushtallah. She had lost three sons to the conflict—not an undue number for a woman who bore just four children in her lifetime. As a general rule, First Families did not serve. Protecting their blood from the same massive mutations that plagued the colonials required strict breeding practices, and they had long ago exempted themselves from service. But the boys had been willful, headstrong radicals, and got blown up into so many pieces that not even a well-trained scarab army could have put them back together.

“It appears you were informed too late,” she said to Parvaneh. “As was I when they came for me. When they shut me up into that hole.”

“It was for your protection,” Parvaneh said.

“No. It was for yours.” She peered at the small child again, caught up in the older man’s arms. She knew him, too—Abdah sa Shukriya so Ifshira. Her great-grandfather’s brother. It was funny how time passed so quickly when you were free, but dragged on into what felt like century upon century when your brain was clogged with poison and your identity stripped away. Sometimes she felt as if she had been gone millennia. She expected some of them to have died, or show marked aging. But no. They were the same. All of them just the same.

A pity she was not.