Zezili gazed along the clean, neat streets of Saolina. Women stopped under the awnings to chat. Lines of children sat outside the schoolhouse, eating hasty lunches of rice and dried fish. Dajians cleaned out the bubbling fountain of azure-colored stones in the square while traffic of all sorts – yellow carts pulled by bears and dogs, rickshaws, and the occasional ridiculous tirajista-trained organic tricycle – wove their way around the fountain, up and down the blue stones of the street. She loved her country. Loved it fiercely just the way it was, even when it hated her. Her Empress told her murdering dajians would save all of this, but she had heard that before when her mother said that murdering Zezili’s father would solve all of their problems. “We’ll have a fresh start,” her mother had said. “You can forget he had anything to do with you. You’re only mine now. A real Dorinah.” But even without him working inside the house and around the grounds, even after he was many years dead and burned, she thought of him still, and how his face was so like hers, and how she could see his eyes staring back at her when she looked into a mirror.

They had not been able to maintain her mother’s country estate after that. Her mother had tripped on a stair that should have been mended long before, and broken her arm, and lost her livelihood. A woman with only one good arm wasn’t called on as often to make mirrors.

Zezili thought about those consequences, about the ripples, and wondered how powerful were the ripples she made with the hundreds of deaths she was cutting out across Dorinah. Who would clean the fountains? Mend the stairs? Harvest the food? And how long would it be before they came for women like Zezili, too? She was not so insulated as the Empress, maybe. She could see it because she had lived in the country her whole life. She knew the economy relied on dajians, and she knew that there were plenty of women in Dorinah who would happily burn her with them, as if she weren’t a human being at all.

She thought of the day her mother fell and how it changed everything. She thought of how that day would look for Dorinah, when it woke up from the genocide of its dajians and found itself economically ruined… while a storm of invaders burst through the mirror connecting their worlds.

Zezili glanced back at the salon. She had hundreds more dajians to kill in the morning, and she needed to come up with a real plan on how to stop the madness of it all without forfeiting her own life.

Chapter 26

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