Rapture (36 page)

“Do you have any idea what we can do—”

“You’ve done all you can do to me,” Inaya said. She met his gaze for the first time. She looked at him, really looked, and she realized how young he was, how fearful. Yes, he had power over her, but little else. If they really thought they had the Madame de Fourré, she realized, she would have been moved from here already and given over to some other Angel, someone older, more experienced. He still wasn’t sure. My God, she thought, why didn’t I understand that sooner?

Her silence had made him unsure, and it was his uncertainty that was the only thing keeping her from being cut up and put into jars.

“I assure you we can do much more,” he said. He crossed the room to her.

A part of her—the part that had been here for so many weeks or months—wanted to cringe away from him. But instead, she stood her ground. He was only a head taller than her, and slender. He smelled of cinnamon and perfumed pomade.

“Do you have children?” she asked. “A wife?”

“I need names,” he said.

“What is your wife’s name? Surely they prefer God’s Angels to have wives. I suspect they think it gives you focus.”

He took her by the arm, twisted it behind her.

Pain radiated up her arm, and she bit back a cry of pain. It was the first time he had resorted to physical violence. She felt as if she had won something.

“I need to know who your cell leaders are,” he said. “Tonight. Or I will start unmaking you from toe to tit.”

Inaya knew, then. “You’re a shifter,” she said.

He released her. Inaya danced away, out of arm’s reach. “My God,” she said. “Not just any shifter, though, are you? Not a raven, a parrot, a dog… not even a fox. No, you’re… you unmake things, you said. I have… heard… all about unmaking.”

“Then you know what I can do to you.”

“How can you work against your own kind?”

“My kind? My kind? You rabid animals are nothing like me. You’re locked in one form. One guise. Just some beast. God’s Angels are all things. We can become anything. Everything. We’re the very hand of God Himself.”

Inaya had believed herself many things, but never the hand of God. She steeled herself. She wanted to shout and clap. Her skin rippled with the renewed desire to shift, to giveaway what she was. I am like you! She wanted to tell him, but of course, that wasn’t true. She wasn’t like him at all.

“What was it like, when you first shifted? When you gave in and became something else?” Inaya said. “Did you feel you had sinned?”

“Names,” he said. But she saw his disquiet now. He had given himself away. He pressed his hands together. She saw the skin ripple. Saw the slight twitch of his eye. He was a mutant like her. He could become any organic thing he wished. He could reach inside of her and stop her heart.

“You’re the same as all the people you murder,” Inaya said. “How lovely that must be, to murder yourself every day.”

“You know nothing,” he said. “You’re an animal. Just like the rest of them.”

“And you’re a god, is that it?” She laughed again. “I wonder what God has to say about that.”

“You can ask Him when you see Him,” the Angel said. He retrieved the papers from the floor.

He left her. The female jailer returned, and escorted her back to her cell.

Inaya waited in front of the filter. It went transparent. Her jailer pushed her inside—into a pool of blood.

Inaya slipped on the floor, and fell to her hands and knees. Mettie’s large body was laid out on the stones. She was very still. Blood pooled from a gash in her head. Inaya crawled forward and found that Mettie was still breathing.

“Wait!” she called after the jailer. “She’s been hurt! Please. She needs a magician!”

“That’s what happens when dogs like her argue with God’s Angels,” the jailer said, and the filter went opaque.

“Mettie? Mettie?” Inaya cried.

She tried to staunch the flow of blood, but as the hours passed, Mettie’s breath got shallower. Inaya’s cries for help went unanswered.

In the morning, Mettie was dead.

And the prison was terribly, terribly quiet.

Breakfast did not come.

Nor did dinner.

Inaya sat at the edge of the filter and screamed for someone to come for Mettie’s body. Then she screamed for food and water. She could hear other prisoners yelling, their voices muffled by the filters. But no guards. No prisoners being transferred. It was as if life in the prison had stopped.

Mettie’s body was beginning to stiffen, and Inaya was terribly thirsty. She began to test the filter. She tore off the end of her habit and pushed it through the filter. The habit sizzled and disintegrated. She tried a few strands of her hair. The filter ate them, leaving nothing behind.

Mettie’s blood caked the bottoms of her shoes, and that gave her an idea. She wiped her shoe with Mettie’s blood and stuck it through the filter, quickly.

When she pulled the shoe back in, the blood was gone, and some of the cloth had frayed, but it hadn’t disintegrated.

Inaya regarded Mettie’s thick body. Nasheenian filters were much worse than most. They’d take off limbs, eat entire people. But here they wanted to keep prisoners alive, and that meant keeping filters dangerous, but not deadly. She would not be eaten going through this filter, not all at once, but she would be badly injured unless she protected herself with something the filter would find equally as appealing.

She listened to the world outside the filter. A few prisoners had taken up pounding on the walls with their plates or refuse buckets, but that didn’t last long. Everything was made of clay, and eventually broke into shards. Inaya knew that because she had once tried doing the same.

Eventually, she would excrete enough saffron that she could shift, but even then, escape wasn’t certain. The walls were made of solid pieces of stone, and the filters would eat her in any organic form, no matter which she took. She was no magician; she couldn’t change the direction of the nits in the weave.

That meant the only reliable way out… was through.

Inaya took a deep breath.

She went to her overflowing refuse bucket and poured it out into one corner. She gagged as she banged the bucket on the floor until it broke.

Then she took the largest shard and knelt in front of Mettie’s body. Her blood would coagulate soon. Then what chance did she have?

Inaya gritted her teeth. She plunged the shard into Mettie’s chest and sawed her open from neck to navel. There wasn’t much blood there, though. She had to heave the body over onto its side, to get at her back where the blood had pooled. The blood was partially congealed already, like gelatin. Inaya coated her legs and arms in the stuff, but knew it wouldn’t be enough. If she could shift, she could repair herself on the other side of that filter. But the saffron had not worn off yet. If she arrived on the other side incapacitated, she’d be no better off than she was in here.

The more she thought about what she needed to do, the less likely she was going to be free. For the first time in many, many years, she asked herself what Nyxnissa so Dasheem would do.

She disrobed. The blood was already cool. She covered her shoes and habit in blood as well, then put her soiled clothing back on. Shivering now, she finished gutting Mettie’s body. A heap of entrails lay beside her. She stopped twice to vomit. Then she dragged the body to the edge of the filter.

Inaya knew she was going to have to push through very quickly. The soles of her shoes were slick against the bloody cell floor. She had hollowed out Mettie’s body as best she could with her crude tools, but she knew it wasn’t going to be enough unless she could push the body out ahead of her very quickly.

The filter popped and crackled. The sounds of her fellow prisoners had grown fainter. But it was the promise of water that decided her.

Inaya took a few gulps of air, then pushed her head and shoulders as deep into Mettie’s body as she could.

She grabbed the corpse at the rope belt that tied the habit, and heaved herself and the body forward.

They rolled through the filter together.

Inaya’s skin burned. It was instantaneous.

She yanked herself free of the corpse and threw herself clear.

The body’s skin was scorched. She smelled burnt flesh. Gray ash covered her own skin. Her habit from the chest down had disintegrated. She slapped at her bare skin, wiping away the ash to reveal rosy skin beneath, as if she’d spent far too long in the sun. But it was not a burn. The blood, her habit, her shoes, and the top layer of her skin had been completely eaten. She put a hand to her face. Blood and offal still covered her face and hair and shoulders.

Inaya stared at the filter. The corpse’s feet had not made it clear—from the shin down, it was still caught in the cell.

She looked left, then right down the empty corridor. Her raw skin was starting to tingle. She stood on tender feet and began limping forward. When her jailer took her to the organic cells they usually went left. So she went right.

She passed cell after cell, each of them protected by opaque filters. There was no way to turn them off unless she had the proper organic code. They would be tailored to specific individuals. Until she had the ability to shift and recode her blood to match those codes, she could not help them.

Inaya stumbled to the end of the hall. There was a solid door here, no filter. She stood on her toes and peered into the next hall. It was empty. Just a large reception room.

She yanked on the handle. It was locked.

“God be merciful,” she muttered. She saw there was a faceplate beside the door. Like the others, it would require someone with the correct blood code to get through.

She swore and turned back the way she had come. There had to be water somewhere. She minced back the other way, toward the interrogation rooms. Her heart beat a little faster.

There’s no one here, she reminded herself, but without knowing what had become of everyone, she couldn’t say when they would return. What if it was just some emergency that required their assistance? Or the facility was in lockdown? What if they were due back any moment?

The scarabs that previously covered the doors of occupied cells were gone. Every cell door was open. She peered into each of them, looking for a discarded glass or bulb of water. Found nothing. They were all empty.

All but the last cell.

In the last cell, she found a man.

He was sprawled on the floor. If there was any blood, the organics would have eaten it all. She recognized the crimson robe and black cowl of God’s Angels. There was a table at the center of the room, like the room she had stood in when they presented the letters.

On the table was a clear water pitcher, nearly empty, and one halfempty glass.

She paused in the doorway. It occurred to her that this may all just be some elaborately concocted scheme to get her to further incriminate herself. Or maybe the water was poisoned, and that’s what killed the man? She had not run an underground organization for nearly five years by being stupid.

But the insanity of that—of staging a riot, and a prison lockdown, all to get her to definitively declare who they already knew she was seemed a little mad even to her. Her thirst won out over caution.

Inaya ran to the table, circling as far away from the man as possible. She drank straight from the pitcher. The water was lukewarm at best, and tasted as if it had been sitting a good long while.

She watched the man on the floor. He still hadn’t moved. Her skin prickled, and she realized she had a way out. As soon as she could shift, she could copy this man’s blood code, free the others in the cells, and open the door on the other end of the hall.

But she had to wait. And this water had to last… for as long as it took. She peered back outside. The corridor running away from the regular cells kept going. She glanced back at the body again.

There was, of course, another option.

She pulled the tattered bits of what remained of her habit from her shoulders and wiped her face and arms with it. Then she began disrobing the corpse. Did they have female God’s Angels?

She was about to find out.

“I
t’s just the wind and sand. No figures,” Kage said. The spitting sand severely limited their visibility. Nyx had hoped Kage would have better luck with her good eyes and a scope.

“We’ll camp here,” Nyx said. It was less than an hour until dark. Getting down the Wall had taken nearly as long as getting up. The footing was treacherous, and the wind got worse as they descended. In any other landscape, Nyx would have preferred to keep going through the darkness, but the way Safiyah talked, that was a bad idea.

Nyx glanced back at the magician. She had drawn her hijab across her face, and like Kage, wore goggles. Nyx wondered why she hadn’t thought to bring her own fucking goggles. The sand stung her eyes, and sand fleas bit her shins. At least, she hoped they were sand fleas, and not something toxic. What the fuck had she gotten herself into? When she found Raine, she was going to pummel him herself.

“If you’re camping, you’ll want to draw a circle!” Safiyah called over the howl of the wind.

“No circle will stay drawn in this weather!” Ahmed yelled back.

“I’d do it anyway,” Safiyah said.

Nyx pointed Kage to the nearest rock formation. It would offer some protection from the scathing sand. Nyx’s skin was raw with it.

“The nomads sometimes camp here,” Safiyah said. She pointed to carved rings in the rock face. “We can attach the tent there.”

“What tent?” Nyx asked.

Safiyah shrugged off her pack and unrolled a billowing canvas sheet. “You really should have come to this desert more prepared,” she said.

They made camp against the hard face of the formation. Ahmed and Khatijah roped the top of the canvas to the carved rings and staked out the other end in the sand.

“Does this ever let up?” Eshe yelled over the howling wind.

“Not this close to the Wall,” Safiyah said.

Behind the rudimentary tent, life was more bearable. Ahmed laid out their burnouses on the floor, and staked the open sides of the canvas down once everyone was inside.