Parvaneh followed her gaze. “Let us leave here and discuss your place with us,” Parvaneh said. “We are Family.”

“Place?” she laughed. “I have no place with you.” She pointed to the child. The child with her eyes, her chin, her face. “You already replaced me. Replaced a woman still living. Thought you could do better this time? Thought you could control her? You cannot control what you don’t understand anymore. There are no more conjurers. Haven’t been since me, and won’t be again.”

“Child—” Parvaneh stepped forward.

She felt the air condense. Unlike the Family members upstairs, some of these were still moderately skilled magicians, though not conjurers. True conjuring entailed far more than the rote trickery of a colonial magician. It was about more than simply directing or breeding or codifying existing flora and fauna. It was about creating something from nothing. Or, rather, creating something dynamic from an inert soup of primordial possibilities—chiefly from the organic composites of ancient wrecks like this one. That had been their purpose, after all, and it was that nostalgia for the safety and malleability of this ancient technology that kept the Families winnowing through this wreck, feeding off its brain-dead corpse.

“It’s your turn now,” she told them. She raised her arms.

“Hear us out, child!” Parvaneh said. “How can we aid you? Your mission? Surely you would not condemn a Family that could aid your mission. Your mission protects Family interests. They wouldn’t have called you otherwise.”

She smiled. The grin felt lovely on her face, but the faces that gazed back at her seemed to have no appreciation for it.

“Perhaps you can be useful in that, certainly,” she said, because if she had suggested it, of course, if she had told them outright that it was information or death, these mantids would have gone deep into stony silence. She knew them well. It was what she would have done.

Abdah said, “You must befriend her enemies.”

“And where can I find those?”

Parvaneh and Abdah exchanged a glance. Parvaneh said, “Go north, across the living seal, into the red desert. You still have the skill to open the Abd-al-Karim that far, do you not? They have been sent to the bones of Duha Dima. You remember it?”

“Not half as well as you do,” she said, “but enough.”

“You will know them when you find them,” Abdah said softly. “They are just like you.”

She half-thought to ask why it was anyone in the Families knew where to find a rogue colonial woman, but thought better of it. She wouldn’t have been freed to bring the woman in if she was somebody her Family, too, did not find dangerous to the success of their political machinations. They had bent the world too far. It was too close to breaking. Now it had to stop.