They ignored her, falling to their knees in the icy shallows to scoop water onto their heads. The sea-foam was pink, and flecks of fat and cartilage bobbed in the swaying surf, but it was cleaner than they were. They scrubbed at their skin and hair, and at each other’s skin and hair, careful not to step too deep, where the sharks and spikefish thrashed.

“Get back to work, the pair of you,” Skoyë scolded. “It’s not time to quit.”

They stared at her, incredulous. “The Mesarthim are here,” said Kora, her voice warm with wonder. “We’re going to be tested.”

“Not until you finish that uul, you aren’t.”

“Finish it yourself,” said Nova. “They don’t need to see you.”

Skoyë’s expression curdled. She wasn’t used to them talking back, and it wasn’t just the retort. She caught the edge in Nova’s tone. It was scorn. Skoyë had been tested sixteen years ago, and they knew what her gift had been. Everyone on Rieva had been tested, save the babies, and only one had been Chosen: Nyoka, their mother. Nyoka had a war gift of staggering power: literally staggering. She could send shock waves—into the earth, into the air. She’d shaken the village when her power first woke, and caused an avalanche that obliterated the path to the boarded-up mineshafts. Skoyë’s gift, technically, was a war gift, too, but of such a low magnitude as to make it a joke. She could cast a sensation of being prickled with needles—at least, she could for the brief duration of her test. Only the Chosen got to keep their gifts, and only in strict service to the empire. Everyone else had to fade back to normal: Unworthy. Powerless. Pale.

Piqued, Skoyë drew back her hand to slap Nova, but Kora caught her wrist. She didn’t say anything. She just shook her head. Skoyë snatched back her hand, as stunned as she was enraged. The girls had always been able to enrage her—not through disobedience, but by this way they had of being untouchable, of being above, peering down at the rest of them from some lofty place they had no right to. “You think they’re going to choose you, just because they chose her?” she demanded. Perfect Nyoka. Skoyë wanted to spit. It wasn’t enough that Nyoka had been chosen, plucked from this hell-rock frozen nowhere of an island, but she lingered here, too, in her husband’s heart and her daughters’ fantasies, and everyone else’s charitable memories. Nyoka got to escape and be preserved in false perfection, always and forever the pretty young mother called to greater things. Skoyë’s lips curled back in a sneer. “You think you’re better than the rest of us? You think she was?”

“Yes,” hissed Nova to the first question. “Yes,” she hissed to the second. “And yes.” Her teeth were bared. She wanted to bite. But Kora grabbed her hand and tugged her away, toward the trail that snaked up the rock face. They weren’t the only ones headed for it. All the rest of the women and girls had started back up to the village. There were visitors. Rieva was at the bottom of the world— where a drain would be, if worlds had drains. Strangers of any kind were as rare as storm-borne butterflies, and these strangers were Mesarthim. No one was going to miss out, not even if it meant the uuls spoiling on the beach.

There was eager chatter, stifled laughter, a hum and buzz of thrill. None of the others had bothered to wash. Not that Kora and Nova could be called clean, but their hands and faces were scrubbed and ruddy, and their hair, salty-damp, was combed back with their fingers. Everyone else was smeared and greasy and dark with blood, some still clutching their hooks and their knives.

They looked like a swarm of murderesses boiling out of a hive.

They reached the village. The wasp ship was in the clearing. The men and boys were gathered around it, and the gaze they turned on their women was full of distaste and shame. “I apologize for the smell,” said the village elder, Shergesh, to their esteemed visitors.

And so Kora and Nova saw Mesarthim for the first time—or the second, maybe, if they’d been babes in Nyoka’s arms sixteen years ago when she stood where they were now, her life about to change.

There were four of them: three men and one woman, and they were, indeed, as blue as icebergs. If there had been any wisp of hope that Nyoka might be with them, here it died. Nyoka had been fair-haired like her daughters. This woman had tight black curls. As for the men, one was tall with a shaved head, and one had long white hair that hung in ropes to his waist. As for the last, he was ordinary, apart from the blue skin. Or...he ought to have been ordinary. His hair was brown, his face plain. He was neither tall nor short nor handsome nor ugly, but there was something about him nevertheless that wrested the eye from his comrades. His wide stance, the arrogant angle of his chin? For no clear reason, Kora and Nova were certain that he was the captain, the one who’d shaped godsmetal into a wasp and flown it here. He was the smith.

Of all Mesarthim gifts—and there were too many to count, new mutations all the time in an ever-expanding index of magics—one gift was prime. Every person born in all the world of Mesaret had a dormant ability that would wake at the touch of godsmetal—as they called the rare blue element, mesarthium. But out of millions, only a handful possessed the prime ability: to manipulate the godsmetal itself. These few were called smiths, because they could shape mesarthium as common smiths shaped common metals, though they didn’t use fire, anvils, and hammers, but their minds. Mesarthium was the hardest substance known. It was perfectly impervious to cutting, heat, or acids. It couldn’t even be scratched. But to the mind of a smith, it was infinitely malleable and responsive to mental command. They could mine it, mold it, awaken its astonishing properties. They could build with it, fly in it, bond with it, so that it was something like alive.

This was the gift that children dreamed of, playing Servants in the village, and it was the one they were whispering about now, flushed and eager, saying what their own ships would be when they got their commands: winged sharks and airborne snakes, metal rap-tors and demons and rays. Some named less menacing things: songbirds and dragonflies and mermaids. Aoki, one of Kora and Nova’s little half brothers, declared that his would be a butt.

“The door will be the hole,” he piped, pointing around at his own.

“Dear Thakra, don’t let Aoki be a smith,” whispered Kora, invoking the seraph Faerer to whom they prayed in their little rock church.

Nova muffled a laugh. “A butt warship would be terrifying,” she said. “I might steal that idea if it turns out I’m a smith.”

“No, you won’t,” said Kora. “Our ship will be an uul, in loving memory of our home.”

Their laughter this time was insufficiently muffled, and caught their father’s ear. He silenced them with a look. He was good at that.

They thought that should have been his gift: mirth-queller, enemy of laughter. In fact, he’d tested as elemental. He could turn things to ice, and that was fitting, too. His magnitude was low, though, like Skoyë’s and everyone else’s on Rieva, and really, nearly everyone’s everywhere. Strong gifts were rare. It was why the Servants went out on search like this and tested people all over the world, seeking out those needles in haystacks to join the imperial ranks.

Kora and Nova knew they were needles. They had to be.

Their giddiness faltered, and it wasn’t their father’s look that quelled it, but the Servants’ as they surveyed the gathering women— and smelled them. They couldn’t keep their disgust from showing. One murmured to another, whose answering laugh was as harsh as a cough. Kora and Nova couldn’t blame them. The smell was grotesque even if you were used to it. What must it be like to the uuluninitiated, and those who’d never had to gut or flay anything? It was painful to be part of this milling gruesome crowd and know that to the visitors they were indistinguishable from the rest. They both formed the same desperate plea in their minds. They didn’t know that they thought the same thought at exactly the same moment, but neither would it have surprised them.

See us, they willed the Mesarthim. See us.

And as though they had spoken aloud—as though they had shouted—one of the four stopped talking midsentence and turned to look straight at them.

The sisters froze, clutching each other’s knife-stiff fingers, and shrank back from the stare. It was the tall Servant with the shaved blue pate. He’d heard them. He had to be a telepath. His eyes bored into theirs, and... poured into theirs. They felt him there like a breeze stirring grass, riffling through and seeing, just like they’d wanted to be seen, and then he said something to the woman, who in turn said something to Shergesh.

The village elder pursed his lips, displeased. “Perhaps the boys first...” he ventured, and the woman said, “No. You have Servant blood here. We’ll test them first.”

So Kora and Nova were led inside the wasp ship, and the doors melted closed behind them.

Chapter 2

Fresh Horrors

Sarai had lived and breathed nightmares since she was six years old. For four thousand nights she had explored the dreamscapes of Weep, witnessing horrors and creating them. She was the Muse of Nightmares. Her hundred moth sentinels had perched on every brow. No man, woman, or child had been safe from her. She knew their shames and agonies, their griefs and fears, and she had thought... she had believed...that she knew every horror, and was beyond surprise.

That was before she had to kneel in the blossoms of the citadel garden and prepare her own body for cremation. The poor broken thing. It lay in the white blooms, beautiful and rich with color—blue skin, pink silk, cinnamon hair, red blood.

For seventeen years this had been her. These feet had paced the citadel floors in endless restless circuits. These lips had smiled, and screamed moths at the sky, and sipped rain from chased silver cups.

All that it meant to be Sarai was anchored in the flesh and bones before her. Or it had been. Now she was ripped out of it, unskinned by death, and this body, it was...what? A thing. An artifact of her ended life. And they were going to burn it.

There would always be fresh horrors. She knew that now.