Nyx tried raising her head again and looked around. The room was dim. The floor was gritty and oddly damp. The whole room felt too damp. It was probably a basement room dug just above the old riverbed.
She tugged at her bonds—organic rope that fed off her sweat and blood. The more she moved, the tougher it got. Over that, barbed wire twisted into some bizarre shapes on the arm rests. Rasheeda liked to twist restraining wire into grim parodies of faces. They’d trussed her feet as well and pinned her at her elbows and wrists so she had to sit a certain way or risk losing circulation in her arms. She wished they’d tied something around her head to keep it up. She let it sink again.
Time stretched. Her head cleared. She was cold and thirsty. There was something wrong with her legs. She held her urine as long as she could before finally pissing herself. That was part of the game, of course, leaving her in a pool of her own urine, so thirsty she’d drink it if she could reach it. The light globe above her was never shuttered. How long they waited until they came to her depended on how desperate they were for information.
But what information? About Nikodem and the boxing? They’d know about that. Rasheeda didn’t want Nikodem anyway. Their goal was to keep her away from Nikodem, wasn’t it? Or were they using her to find Nikodem? What was this, another intimidation game?
She waited. Her body stiffened. She tried flexing her arms, her back, her shoulders, her legs. She was going to start losing feeling in her limbs if she didn’t find a way to move.
Nyx finally managed to get a look at her legs. Bloody wounds crisscrossed her flesh. The lines moved and wriggled. Alive.
They’d stuffed her wounds with bloodworms.
Her gut roiled. She looked up again. Something moved in the far dark corner of the room in the broken masonry. She briefly saw the shiny head of a giant centipede peek through. The pain would kick in soon—maybe another couple hours—when the bloodworms had excreted enough poison into her skin to start the slow burn. Her lower limbs already tingled.
She avoided thinking about her team. She didn’t think about the interrogation, about what she’d seen Rasheeda do to people. Instead, she thought about the black sand of Tirhan, the kind she’d spun stories about back in Mushirah. She thought about sitting on a deck under a couple of broad-leafed palm trees surrounded in dark green foliage, sipping cool coconut drinks spiked with vodka.
She thought about counting stars with Tej, and she remembered the good nights with that girl, what was her name? Radeyah, yes. Radeyah, with the kind eyes and quick tongue who’d told her they’d spend a lifetime growing old together in the same bed in a little beach house in Tirhan, though all that water in one place scared the shit out of Nyx. But Radeyah’s boy lover had come back from the front—most of him—and dreams of Tirhan and vodka and a lifetime of Radeyah’s sweet tongue and soft hands had ended.
She had told that story again, though, wrapped in bed with another sort of woman, a desperate outrider. Told her all about Tirhani beaches she had never been to and never wanted to see—“Don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you…”—but Nyx had lied and whispered to her Radeyah’s dream, not her own, because Jaks loved the sea, dreamed of the sea. Nyx had learned that from one of Jaks’s house sisters, the one who told her about Arran.
Arran. The note that killed Tej.
Nyx used them all to get to somebody else, to pick up some other note. It was her job. It’s what she did.
The door opened.
Nyx raised her head.
Rasheeda walked in, wearing loose trousers and a short coat. Her black hair was pulled back from her cool, flawless face, and she was grinning. Her eyes were flat and black and, paired with the grin, she looked like some kind of demon, something come up straight from hell to inhabit a soulless body. She carried a bag and a stool.
Behind her was Fatima.
Nyx wasn’t surprised. This was the sort of job Fatima would pull. Fatima was skinny—skinnier than Nyx had ever seen her—and her dark hair was shot through with white; very becoming on a Nasheenian woman. Fatima fixed a hard look on Nyx, then shut the door. Nyx hadn’t seen Fatima since she sent Nyx to prison.
Rasheeda snickered and set the stool in front of Nyx, just far enough away so Nyx couldn’t bite her nose off.
Fatima sat as Rasheeda unpacked her instruments from her bag.
“You look terrible,” Fatima said.
Nyx only looked at her.
Fatima’s mouth quirked up at the corners, not a smile. “You were much more difficult to track when you worked alone.”
Fatima waited a bare moment, glancing over at Rasheeda as the other bel dame laid out a series of scalpels and straight pins and blinking syringes on a scarlet-colored length of silk.
“You were told to stay off this note,” Fatima said. “Rasheeda and Luce were clear, as I understand it. Yet here you are, far from Nasheen, looking up an off-worlder. Where are Kine’s papers? I searched your safe house. Are they in the country? Who else knows about them?”
Nyx clenched her teeth.
“Your team’s dead,” Fatima said.
“You’re a bad liar,” Nyx said. “If you toasted my team you’d have told me all about the street they were on and the way you killed them. You wouldn’t stop with half-assed declarations. You’re a bel dame.”
Fatima’s mouth quirked again. “You think so? If you leave this place alive, perhaps we’ll see.”
Nyx grunted.
“We know you were at Kine’s,” Fatima said. “Did you speak to her before her death? What do you know about her work?”
Kine and her goddamn papers.
Nyx shifted a little in her chair. If she started talking, she’d be in trouble. She could make up stories, sure, but she didn’t trust that after several days of torture, she’d be able to keep the stories straight. But silence implied submission, and she wasn’t keen on submitting to anyone—not Fatima, not the magicians, not the queen, not God.
“I have no wish to send you home in pieces,” Fatima said.
Rasheeda squatted next to the instruments, giggling.
“Tell me,” Nyx said, “what do bel dames want with information from the compounds? Thought you would be on good terms with their security.”
“I want to know what you know about Kine.”
“What do you know about Kine?”
“Oh, stop it,” Fatima said, and her expression got ugly. “You want us to chop you up and leave you here?”
“You should have asked my team before you killed them,” Nyx said. “They’d have known just as much about Kine as I do.” Burning the pages had been a good idea. If the bel dames wanted the papers and wanted to keep Nyx off the note, it meant they were probably working with Nikodem. They wanted her to stay hidden. In Chenja.
Sweet fuck, Nyx thought are the bel dames working with the Chenjans? Were they working some kind of deal together to topple the monarchy?
“I don’t have any patience this afternoon, Nyxnissa.”
Nyx tacked that down. Afternoon. Not of the same day she was brought in, though, right? So she’d lost a day?
“You never did have much patience, sister-mine,” Nyx said, “and I don’t have much patience for traitors. When did you all decide to sell out Nasheen?”
“Rasheeda?”
Rasheeda grabbed the back of Nyx’s chair and tilted it. She turned Nyx around so she could see the tub of water behind her. A thin layer of ice coated the surface. The tub was padded around the base by a band of insulation that hummed.