“Nothing happens in this city that I don’t know about.”

Her mother always did this, removing one by one the few things Karina enjoyed until her world seemed as sparse as the desert sands. Baba had been the parent who doled out kindness to match the Kestrel’s discipline, but now, without him, it was always either scolding or silence—so much silence. Karina’s dream of earning enough money to leave Ziran had always been far-fetched at best, but now she didn’t even have that.

When Karina looked up again, the Kestrel was looking down at her signet ring. The gryphon embossed into the ring’s surface seemed to gaze up at Karina, its eyes filled with disappointment.

“Karina, I cannot deny the past few years have been . . . difficult for both of us.”

Karina might have burst out laughing had she been with anyone else. The first years after the fire were a massive blur, but her one solid memory from that time was of an aching desire for comfort that never came. Karina had molded her grief into a sword, poised to harm anyone who dared get close. But her mother had built hers into a wall, and no sword, no matter how sharp, could take down defenses so strong.

Karina had stopped trying to scale that wall years ago.

The Kestrel continued, “I saw the solace your hobbies brought you, so I allowed them to distract you from your duties. But no more. You are seventeen now, and I will no longer accept such mediocre behavior from the future sultana of Ziran.”

The breath caught in Karina’s lungs. Mediocre. Her own mother thought she was mediocre.

“Our people deserve better than what you have shown me thus far. You haven’t even taken any interest in Solstasia, despite it being our most important custom.”

“Why does it matter whether I take an interest in Solstasia or not?” Karina blurted out. “It’s just another festival.”

“. . . Just another festival?”

An emotion Karina couldn’t name clouded the Kestrel’s face, and the plants around them seemed to curl toward her mother’s towering frame. The queen stood and ran her hand over the base of the fountain. She stopped at a small indent bearing the Alahari gryphon, and pressed her ring into it.

“Despite it all, still we stand.”

The tiles beneath Karina’s feet slid into the fountain, revealing a stone staircase leading down into the ground. “What the—!”

Her mother descended the steps, and Karina followed her into the dark. The stone that made up the passage was less polished than the sandstone of Ksar Alahari, and wet air shrank the coils of Karina’s silver hair. The sound of roaring water echoed around them.

“Why did Grandmother Bahia found Ziran?” asked the Kestrel, grabbing a torch off the wall to light their way. To the rest of the world, Bahia Alahari was a legendary figure, but to her descendants she was first and foremost family, and always referred to as such.

“She wanted to create a haven safe from the tyranny of the Kennouan Empire.”

“How did Grandmother Bahia found Ziran?”

“By winning the war against the pharaoh and the Faceless King . . . right?”

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the Kestrel turned to Karina. The torch’s light cast dancing shadows across her mother’s face, rendering it unrecognizable.

“This is how Grandmother Bahia founded Ziran.”

Her mother raised the torch high. Before them, thousands of shards of ceramic tile glittered in a mural stretching nearly two stories high. Motifs of screaming ruby birds and coiling emerald snakes mixed with jagged lines and complex symbols Karina had never seen before. In the corner of the torch’s beam, Karina caught a glimpse of a pitch-black swirl of water disappearing into the darkness.

“What is this place?” Karina breathed out.

“The Queen’s Sanctuary.”

The Kestrel stopped before a depiction of a man in an elaborate gold headdress holding the sun and moon in his outstretched hands. Thirteen masked figures clad in black knelt in a circle around him.

“For thousands of years, the pharaohs of Kennoua ruled the Odjubai and all who inhabited it.” The Kestrel’s tone was hushed, yet her voice resounded through the Queen’s Sanctuary louder than a tremor through the earth. “They rejected the blessings of the Great Mother to fashion themselves as gods among mortals. A king beside the pharaoh was a puddle next to the ocean.”

Karina edged beside her mother and gestured to one of the masked figures.

“Who are they?”

“The Ulraji Tel-Ra. Socerors who swore loyalty to the pharaoh as their one and only deity.” The Kestrel’s grip around the torch tightened.

“Sorcerers?” Karina waited for her mother to explain this was some kind of legend, but the Kestrel only nodded.

When the Zirani spoke of the Pharaoh’s War, they tended to focus on Bahia’s triumphant victory at the end. But the mosaic showed the whole bloody history from the start, every image tied to violence or slaughter in some way. To Karina’s left was a field of slaves toiling away beneath the sun, and to her right, a blood-soaked battlefield at the center of which Bahia wept.

Every picture of the Faceless King had his face clawed away, forever lost to time.

“Why did we make this?” Karina whispered. She placed her hand against a cluster of bloodred shards pooling from a wounded slave’s neck, then touched her own in the same spot. Ziran was the youngest of the great powers of Sonande, and her people had pulled themselves together after the horrors of Kennouan rule to build something new, a place containing bits of peoples from all over the desert yet entirely all its own. But this mural was a reminder of just how much of their own history had been lost to them. Even a thousand years of progress could not erase that.

“The past devours those naive enough to forget it.” The Kestrel lowered her torch and turned her full attention to Karina. “But this is not all I wish to show you. It’s time you learned why ensuring that Solstasia occurs is our family’s most important task.”

The Kestrel pressed her ring into another indent, and a portion of the mural slid away. Gusts of wind tinged with the lightest scent of earth brushed against Karina’s face as an endless expanse of starlight and sand stretched in front of her. The Outer Wall was nowhere to be seen.

The Kestrel gestured forward. “Go on.”

The compulsion to turn around that Karina often felt near the Outer Wall returned, but she could not stop herself from walking toward the miles of freedom stretched before her.

She took a step forward, then another.

She could go anywhere. Osodae, Kissi-Mokou, Talafri. Any of those cities were within her reach.

She could finally find out if the ocean was as blue as Baba had always said it was.

Another step.

A feeling akin to ice water pouring over her body stopped Karina in her tracks. Every inch of her skin crawled, and she gagged through a sudden onslaught of nausea. Try as she might, she could not step a single foot past the line where dark stone met pale sand. She tried to reach her hand out—it was right there, everything she’d ever wanted was right there—but it stopped in midair as if pressed against a wall. Eyes widening in horror, Karina turned to the Kestrel.

“You’ve never left Ziran,” she breathed out.

Her mother looked away. “I made my peace with it years ago.”

Every story Karina knew about her family came back to her at once, and she realized the common thread: all of them save for the tales of Bahia Alahari had taken place within the city limits. Karina had always assumed her ancestors had chosen to stay in Ziran by choice.

But this was no choice.

They were trapped.

5

Malik

Malik and his sisters huddled together as shadows curled up from the cracks in the walls, pooling on the floor like churning, ink-black water. As the wraiths chattered around them, Malik squeezed his eyes shut and told himself what he always did when the apparitions grew too frightening to bear.

Breathe. Stay present. Stay here.

This wasn’t real. It never was.

He opened his eyes. Another pair, bright as newly lit coals and slit black down the middle, stared at him through the miasma.

“You’re smaller than I expected.”

The voice boomed like an echo through a mountain quarry. The shadows rose from the ground in a swirling tempest, coalescing into a massive serpentine figure whose head stretched toward the sky. The ceiling of the dilapidated house had vanished, and overhead loomed a night sky unlike any Malik had ever known. These were the same constellations he’d memorized as a child, but fragmented as if viewed through a broken mirror. Startling blue light, the same color as Nyeni’s eyes, pulsed in the sky’s jagged edges.

Its scales shimmering iridescent black, the snake slithered forward, lowering a head the size of a cow down to Malik’s eye level. Hot, corrosive air blew from its nostrils, sending Malik into a coughing fit that wracked his entire body.