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The Mhorians had been the last allowed refuge
on Umayma, nearly a thousand years before. They had brought with them dangerous
idols and belief in a foreign prophet, but they claimed to be people of the
Book, and custom required that they be given sanctuary. It was a custom soon
discarded, though, and the ships that followed the Mhorians were shot out of
the sky. Their remains had rained down over the world like stars.
    Were these women people of the Book?
    “You’re an alien,” he said,
tentative, a question.
    She laughed again, and the laughter
filled the corridor. “Your first?”
    He nodded.
    “Not the last, I hope,” she said.
    And then Yah Reza and the outrider
entered the hall and blocked his view, and Rhys turned away and walked quickly
past a bend in the corridor, where he could no longer hear the alien woman’s
voice.
    The memory of her laugh tugged at
something inside him, something he thought he’d left back in Chenja. He wanted
to pull back her hijab and run his fingers through the black waves of her
unbound hair. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. He had been too long
in Nasheen.
    When he arrived at Yah Tayyib’s
operating theater, he saw blood spattering the stones, hungry bugs lapping up
their fill. Another hard-up bel dame had come to collect zakat .
Another godless woman was destined to die.
     

3
    Nyx struggled out of a groggy half
dream of drowning and fell off the giant stone slab in Yah Tayyib’s operating
theater. The floor was cold.
    Yah Tayyib helped her up. One curved
wall of the theater was lined with squat glass jars of organs. Glow worms
ringed the shelves and hugged the glass. Nyx noted the long table at Yah
Tayyib’s left and the length of silk that covered his instruments, but her gaze
did not settle there long. She was interested in the medicine wardrobe at the
back. The one with the morphine.
    She was naked. Blood trickled down
one leg.
    “How do you feel?” Yah Tayyib asked.
He wore a billowing blue robe. Carrion beetles clung to the hem. He was a tall
thin man, well over sixty and gray in the beard. His face was a sunken ruin,
the nose a mashed pulp of flesh. But his hands, his all-important magician’s
hands, were smooth and straight-fingered.
    Nyx wondered how she was supposed to
respond to that. Her head felt stuffed with honey.
    “You were missing a kidney,” Yah
Tayyib said. “I replaced that as well.”
    “I traded it for a ticket out of
Chenja. The other one wasn’t mine either.”
    “I didn’t think it was,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “I put it in there six months ago.”
    “Ah,” Nyx said.
    “I’m quite sorry about the womb,”
Yah Tayyib said. “It was your original, you know, and uniquely shaped.
Bicornuate. I would have bought it myself, though for much less than you likely
sold it.” He always talked about body parts like bug specimens—dry and purely
academic.
    “I don’t care much how it’s shaped
or whose it is,” she said. “I care about what it can do for me. What time is
it? I’ve got Raine on my tail.”
    She looked around for her clothes.
They were stacked neatly next to the operating slab. She started to get
dressed, slowly. It was like trying to work somebody else’s body. She was still
a big woman, but she was down to her dhoti and binding, and both were tattered
and loose, hanging off her like a shroud.
    “You have a price on your head,” Yah
Tayyib said, and turned to wash his hands at the sink. Flesh beetles clung to
the end of the tap, bundling up drops of water in their sticky legs.
    “Yeah,” she said. “More than fifty,
apparently.”
    “You should turn yourself in to your
bel dame sisters. The bounty hunters won’t be so generous. They say it’s black
money this time. Gene pirates.” He wiped his hands dry on his robes and
regarded her. “What were you carrying?”
    “Zygotes,” Nyx said. “Ferrier work.
I was supposed to hand it off on this end, but I had to drop it and sell it to
some butchers to