Her only living daughter, Karina silently corrected.
Perhaps it was adrenaline from her win or even just the several cups of wine she’d drunk earlier, but Karina felt no fear as she stepped toward the blade, even as Aminata tugged at her sleeve in alarm.
“Do it,” she said, her second challenge of the night. “I dare you.”
Besides, if she died, she’d get to see Baba and Hanane again. She’d never have to be queen.
The bard tensed to lunge, and a chill ran down Karina’s spine, followed by a high-pitched keening in her ears. A shadow shifted, and in seconds there was a Sentinel behind the man with a sword several times larger than his small blade. The warrior moved with unnerving speed, her pure white armor almost skeletal in the fading light as she unbalanced the bard with a swift kick and snatched his weapon from the air.
Karina and Aminata huddled together against the wall, watching with wide eyes. When a Sentinel fought, you didn’t interfere—you got out of the way and thanked your god that they hadn’t come for you.
The Sentinel elbowed the bard in the face and then snapped his wrist with the ease one used to break a twig. He crumpled to the ground in a pool of his own blood, his arm twisted at an unnatural angle beneath him.
The high-pitched keening in Karina’s ears grew as the Sentinel turned to her and Aminata, and she noticed now the silver-and-crimson sash stretched across the woman’s chest. This wasn’t just a Sentinel—this was Commander Hamidou. Someone at Ksar Alahari was very upset if they had deployed the Sentinels’ leader to come fetch her. Karina wasn’t sure if she should be touched or afraid.
After a glance to check that Aminata was all right, Karina jutted her chin in defiance at the warrior. The Sentinels had their uses—chiefly, undertaking the kinds of missions too delicate to trust with average soldiers—but something about them had always made her uneasy. “All right, you’ve caught me. Who are you taking me to, Farid?”
A too-long silence passed before Commander Hamidou replied, “I’m taking you to your mother.”
And for the first time that night, true terror filled Karina’s veins.
3
Malik
His heart hammering in his throat, Malik bolted after the boy who had stolen their papers, Nadia and Leila running behind him. He raced by a group of Arkwasians in bright kente cloth browsing through rattles made of bamboo, and nearly ran into a group of children playing wakama. The whispering of beings that shouldn’t have existed floated on the breeze, and terror spurred Malik faster.
He eventually lost sight of the boy near a group of merchants loading antique carpets into a wagon. They were Earth-Aligned, judging by the insignia of Kotoko embroidered into their green clothing.
“Um, excuse me,” Malik whispered, nearly doubling over from exhaustion. He wanted to ask if they had seen a boy carrying a red-and-brown leather satchel, but as always happened when he tried to talk to strangers, the words stuck in his throat. “Has there been—do you know—have you seen a boy with a bag?”
The merchant’s eyes narrowed as he took in Malik’s knotted hair and tattered clothes. A second too late, Malik realized he hadn’t masked his accent before speaking.
“Get away from me, you damn kekkis,” the merchant spat, a glob of phlegm landing on Malik’s frayed tunic.
The siblings scurried away before the man could assault them with something stronger than words. They searched for nearly an hour, but it soon became clear the boy was gone. Every person Malik tried to approach for help turned them away, a few going so far as to throw rocks and bits of trash at them as they approached.
Eshran hatred was nothing new to Malik. This had been the reality for his people for more than two centuries, ever since the Zirani army had marched into the mountains to quell a war between the Eshran clans and had never marched out. The Zirani claimed that the Eshran elders had been unable to pay their debts afterward, which justified the continued occupation. The elders argued that Ziran had used the war as an excuse to steal fertile Eshran land as the Odjubai grew ever more inhospitable.
Malik didn’t know which story was true. All he knew was the reality he lived in, one with the Zirani at the top and his people at the bottom.
Unable to walk another step, Malik sank to the ground beside a crumbling sandstone wall. Their search had taken them back to the outskirts of the checkpoint, where the chipekwe dozed peacefully in the sand and the griot from earlier idly played her djembe beneath the baobab tree. The woman’s bone-white tattoos seemed to dance up her body as she played, and even though exhaustion racked Malik’s core, the yearning to heed her call returned.
He hung his head in shame, unable to look either of his sisters in the eye. That satchel had been their only chance of starting a new life of Ziran. Without it, they had less than nothing, and he had no one to blame but himself.
“I’m so sorry,” Malik choked out. He forced himself to look at Leila, but she had her eyes closed. Her lips moved in silent prayer, and both Malik and Nadia knew better than to interrupt her.
“Why did you leave the line when I told you not to?” Leila’s shaking shoulders betrayed the calmness in her voice. Nadia’s gaze bounced back and forth between her siblings, looking almost as distraught as Malik felt.
“The boy,” Malik said weakly, the words sounding hollow to his own ears. “He needed help.”
“That didn’t mean you had to help him! Did you forget what Mama told us before we left? ‘The only people you three will have out there are one another. Nobody else is going to care what happens to you, so you have to.’ Does some stranger you don’t even know matter more than we do?”
Malik’s mouth opened and closed several times, but nothing came out because Leila was right. He had acted with his heart instead of his head, and now all their hard work, months of travel and backbreaking labor, was gone. The full severity of the situation hit him, and he instinctively reached for the strap of his missing satchel, then clutched his shirt instead.
“I—I—”
The shadows around him twitched, inching slowly closer as if drawn to his despair. Malik pressed his palms to his eyes until they hurt, Papa’s voice in his head admonishing him for his weakness. Real men didn’t cry.
But the more Malik tried to force it down, the higher the pressure within him rose. They couldn’t stay in Ziran, not when they had no money and no one would give work to Eshrans. But they couldn’t go home either—they didn’t have any home to go back to. Home now meant Nana and Mama, and they were both at a camp in Talafri depending on the money Malik and his sisters were supposed to be sending back for them. Returning empty-handed was not an option, but what other choice did they have?
Nadia said something to him, but Malik couldn’t hear her over the sound of his thoughts clogging his mind. The shadows crowded around him, whispering words in languages he didn’t know. Malik’s back hit the wall as he crouched down, his hands to his ears and knees to his chest, unable to look away as the shadows coalesced into beings.
Bloated, fishlike apparitions weaving through the legs of the crowd. Knee-high insects with multicolored scales squawking in the trees beside pulsing clouds of green fog littered with human teeth. Hellish creatures with the heads of donkeys and the bodies of scorpions scuttling in and out of the needle-thin cracks in the stone around them.