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prostitute, if that’s
what you’re asking,” Yah Tayyib said.
    “Then what’s he do?” she asked.
    Yah Tayyib folded his hands in his
lap. “He’s good with bugs.”
    “A bel dame could use someone good
with bugs.”
    “He’s worth three of you.”
    “You saying I’m a bad girl?”
    Yah Tayyib’s expression was stony.
“I’m saying you’re less than virtuous.”
    Well. She’d been called worse.
    The dancer slowed and stilled. The
match was about to start, and his time was up.
    Nyx scanned the crowd for Raine and
his crew, in case they’d gotten in through the cantina entrance. Her gaze found
a handful of very different figures instead. Three tall women with the black
hoods of their burnouses pulled up, the hilt of their blades visible at their
hips, moved through the throng of spectators, sniffing at glasses of liquor and
brushing bugs from their sleeves.
    Her sisters.
    Not the kind she was related to by
blood.
    Nyx hunkered on the bench. Her
insides shifted. She winced.
    “How much longer until it starts?”
Nyx asked.
    “A moment. The visitors wished to
speak with the boxers.”
    “The visitors?”
    “There’s a ship in from New Kinaan.
Had you not heard?”
    “What do they care about boxing?”
    “Not only the boxing,” Yah Tayyib
said. “The magicians. Ah, there she is.”
    At the far end of the room Yah Reza
stood in a door that opened into blackness. Husayn strode in from the darkness,
followed by a wave of purple dragonflies that coasted out over the heads of the
spectators and swarmed the ring lights. Nyx had known Yah Tayyib’s blind-eyed
boxer for years. They’d trained together back when Nyx came in from the front.
Husayn was a decade older than Nyx, big in the hips and thighs, with the beefy
legs of a woman who spent most of her days running—from what or to where, only
Husayn knew. She had a mashed-in pulp of a nose and a misty right eye that
wasn’t commonly talked about. Husayn kept a long list of dead men and women in
her locker—the ones she’d served with at the front.
    The spectators were finding their
seats. Nyx watched her sisters take up a position along the far wall. They did
not sit. They would look for a lone woman congratulating the winner at the end
of the bout—Nyx knew enough about the game not to bet on losers.
    Unless she wanted to.
    Jaks appeared from the more
traditional entrance, the one from Bashir’s cantina. She was a tough, skinny
little fighter with a face like death—long and hard and forgettable. She was so
sun sore she looked Chenjan. She had her chin tucked and her shoulders rolled,
and she walked with her hands up. She had no patron, no cut woman, no manager.
She walked alone and looked just the way she should: like a scared kid pulling
her first fight in a magicians’ gym.
    Another of the magicians, Yah
Batool, stepped up into the ring and announced the fighters.
    Jaks and Husayn touched fists. The
stir of dragonflies circled the lights, casting wide, weird shadows over the
faces of the crowd.
    When the buzzer sounded among the
caged insects kept just below the gym’s water clock, Jaks leapt forward and
opened with a neat right double-jab-crosshook combination. She was young, and
overeager. She could probably outlast Husayn if she wanted to, but when the
bugs signaled the end of the round, Jaks was already breathing hard, and her
face was bloody. Husayn had clipped her open. Yah Batool sealed the cut and
sent her back out.
    Rounds were three minutes long, and
in a magicians’ ring, the boxers fought it out until somebody was knocked down for
the duration of a nine-second count or tapped out in their corner. Nyx had seen
outriders go down three seconds into the first round. She’d also stayed up all
night watching two magicians pummel each other until one of them had an eye
dangling from its socket and the other was spraying blood every time she
exhaled.
    Jaks’s bleeding made Husayn
arrogant. Jaks knocked Husayn down in the third round. The