The only way to make it work was to move Inaya to one of the factory compounds in Basmah and have her keep her job there. It meant no recovery time after the baby came. It also meant living dormitory-style with no security. She wasn’t going to be happy, but unless they collected this bounty soon, he was out of extravagant options. Mahdesh had already loaned him more money than Taite knew how to pay back, and though Mahdesh asked for nothing in return, Taite worried over it—spending his lover’s money to help the sister who would burn them both if she knew.
He heard someone coming up the stairs and stopped his work. He grabbed his pistol.
Whoever it was knocked three times.
“It’s Husayn.”
He stood, and opened the door. Husayn had a haggard, wide-eyed look, as if death itself had clawed at her from the desert.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Someone’s here, says she’s your sister.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Half-breed, like you. Pale. Pregnant. Real, real upset.”
“Send her up.”
Husayn walked back down.
Taite put the gun in his belt. He’d told her not to come unless it was urgent. Had something happened, or was she still angry at being roomed with whores? She couldn’t stay here. There was no way to get her to work from Aludra.
He went to the covered window and peeked out. It was dark outside. At least she’d waited for dark.
He heard her huffing up the stairs and ran back to the doorway.
Sweat pouring down her face, she stumbled on the last step, and he caught her.
She was crying.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
They both sagged to the floor. He held her as she sobbed and clutched at him.
“What happened? Did somebody do something to you? Inaya?” If they’d touched her, if anyone had touched her—
“Raine is looking for you,” she said.
“What?”
“He came to the brothel. I don’t know how he found me. The mistress screamed at him, and he shot her. He shot her in the head!”
“What happened?”
“He said he’d take you in pieces, Tatite. He said… he said terrible things. I thought he’d cut me. I thought—”
“What did you say to him?” Taite started looking around the room for what he could grab and run.
“I said I didn’t know where you were. I swear, I said it.”
“Inaya,” Taite said gently. He took her by her wrists and pulled her off him, looked into her red-rimmed eyes. “Inaya, thank you for that. But, Inaya, you’ve led him here.” The sister he’d known in Ras Tieg would never have been so careless. What had become of her? Who had she become back in Ras Tieg, casting votes the way her husband told her to, turning away from her own kind, damning her own parents? He could understand her desire for protection. He could understand turning away from the movement that had cost them everything, but where was the woman he remembered, the one who could hack a com and retrofit a gun, the woman who had helped wash and soothe their mother after the worst of the attacks?
Her eyes widened. She looked over her shoulder at the door.
“We have to move,” he said.
“He said he wanted you to tell him where Nyx was. He said… he said….”
Taite grabbed his pack, threw in some bursts, his wallet, and his bank book. He grabbed a couple of transceivers from the com and threw in Kine’s dictation sessions.
He took Inaya’s hand. “There’s a back stair. Please, please hurry.”
Inaya was still sobbing. “I can’t. I can’t get up. I’m so tired.”
“You can. Come here. Get up.”
Taite lifted her. He didn’t know how he did it, picking up his older sister, this towering figure he had so admired before his exile. The strong one. The shifter. He dragged Inaya toward the hidden door at the back, opened it. He heard someone else on the stairs behind them. A lot of someones.
He was fucked.
He looked into Inaya’s tear-stained face and took it into his hands. “Go to Nyx,” he said. “She’s in a garret in Dadfar, in the Rihaada district on Lower Maida and Seventh. Are you listening to me? You need to cross the border. Do you understand? You need to cross the border.”
“I can’t go to Chenja! They’ll kill me on sight, the bursts—”
“You can,” Taite said. He kissed her forehead, her lips, her eyelids. He had a memory of his mother doing the same to him, the last he ever saw of her. He could not remember her face. “You can… A bird can fly across a border.”
“Don’t ask me to do that. Never ask me to do that!”
He shook her. “Then you’ll die here with me, do you understand?” He shouted at her, and his gut churned as he shouted. He sounded like their father. He threw his pack at her. “Take that. There’s water in Husayn’s bakkie, and a couple bucks in change in my pack. Get the fuck out of here! Right now. Right now!”
“Taite!”
He prodded her into the dark stairwell and shut the door behind her.
He pulled out his pistol and crept behind the com. In the sudden silence, the quiet dim, he looked up at his little saint, at Baldomerus, and he prayed.
When they walked in, Taite started shooting.
22
Nyx faded in and out of awareness. For a time, she thought she heard voices outside the door. The sound of moist clicking, the shuffle of insectile legs, roused her.
When she looked down, she saw a giant centipede gnawing at her left leg with its finger-long pincers. She yelled and jerked in the chair, scaring it back into its hole in the masonry. Her body was instantly covered in a sheen of cold sweat. She fought to stay conscious.
When she next came to, Luce was standing over her.
“Doesn’t look like so much now, does she?” Luce said. She took Nyx by the hair and searched her face.
Nyx faded again.
She dreamed of water. Cool, suffocating water. She swam in a great lake so clear and blue she could see the ruins of old cities below. And then she was drowning in it, drowning in cold, pulled down toward the dead cities, cities full of sand. So cold.
Someone dumped a bucket of water over her. She came to with a start.
“You stink,” Luce said, and set the bucket next to her.
Fatima was closing the door.
They had left the chair from their last visit, and Fatima sat in it again.
“Good morning, Nyxnissa,” Fatima said.
Nyx licked at the moisture on her lips. Her hands had gone numb. She tried to flex them—the fingers she had and the fingers she thought she had. Her whole body was stiff and growing increasingly unresponsive. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She peered at the bel dames and wondered where Rasheeda was.
“I believe I was asking you yesterday where Kine’s papers were,” Fatima said. “I think it’s an easy question. One answer and we give you some water. What do you think of that?”
What Nyx thought was that her throat was so dry she couldn’t speak. But she was no good to them dead.
She moved her mouth but didn’t let any sound out.
“What’s that?” Fatima said, leaning toward her. She gestured irritably at Luce.
Luce walked out and came back with a water bulb. She held it to Nyx’s lips and let her drink.
Nyx gulped it all down, licked her lips again. She tried to grin, but it hurt to move her face.
“Kine’s papers,” Fatima said.
“I didn’t kill her,” Nyx rasped.
A sound came from outside the door, muffled.