A crescent of low dunes hunches around a shallow basin of hard-packed grit. It isn’t much—no rock wall, no friendly cliff—just a fold in the desert’s skin where smoke can be kept low. The night comes down fast in Kamoklopr, the heat draining away as if someone pulls a plug. What’s left is cold that bites through leather.

  They bring the wounded in first. Blood darkens the ground in sticky patches that the desert will pretend not to see. A man coughs and laughs at the same time, then turns it into a groan as if his ribs make the decision for him.

  Horses stand with their heads low, eyes half-lidded, flanks twitching.

  The fire they dare is small and ugly—more ember than flame—fed with camel dung and splinters of broken spear hafts.

  Naci squats by the fire with her cloak pulled tight, hair crusted with dust, face cut by windburn and the thin abrasions of sand. Her hands don’t shake when she drinks. They don’t shake when she wipes her mouth either. She has learned a kind of calm that isn’t peace so much as a refusal to fall apart until the job is finished.

  Across from her, Lanau sits cross-legged, palm flat on the sand, eyes half-closed as if listening to something beneath the world. The beads and charms on her braid click softly when she breathes.

  “The desert,” Lanau replies, dead serious. “It says we smell like arrogance and boiled meat.”

  Puripal sits a little apart, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. In the firelight his face looks carved—sharp planes, shadows that don’t soften.

  “I thought it smelled like victory,” he says.

  Lanau shrugs. “The desert doesn’t care about victory. Only whether you leak.”

  Ta, bandage dark at his throat, gives a weak cough that might be laughter. “I leak a lot. Emotionally. Is that why it hates me?”

  “It hates you because you talk,” Jinhuang says.

  Jinhuang sits near the edge of the little circle, wrapped in a cloak that looks too big for her, eyes fixed on the darkness beyond the dunes. Fol is beside her. Lizi is on the other side of Jinhuang, knife across her lap, gaze flicking from shadow to shadow like she expects the night to leap.

  Dukar stands, restless, pacing the curve of the basin. His boots crunch softly. Every few steps he looks out toward the far horizon where Qixi-Lo’s glow stains the sky faintly, the city’s light a smudge behind the dunes like a bruise that won’t fade.

  Behind them, the Banners settle into positions without being told. The ones who can stand check their muskets. The ones too tired to do anything simply sit with their backs against saddles, eyes open, refusing sleep.

  Naci taps the butt of her musket against the sand, once. The sound is small and final. It pulls attention the way a throat clearing pulls attention in a quiet court.

  “The shaman,” she says.

  No one asks who. Everyone knows.

  Lanau’s jaw tightens. “I can’t touch her,” she repeats, the words worn by repetition and still sharp with frustration. “Not in that spirit-shape she’s wearing. She’s not anchored where I can hook her. She’s… like smoke.”

  Puripal’s eyes narrow. “If she’s smoke, she still comes from fire.”

  Lanau holds up two fingers. “I can feel her. I can tell when she’s close. I can warn you when she’s about to crawl into someone’s bones and make them braver than they have any right to be.”

  “Useful,” Horohan says.

  “And I can find where her body is,” Lanau adds. “The real one.”

  Naci’s eyes sharpen. “That’s the piece we can break.”

  Puripal tilts his head. “Assassination.”

  Lizi’s grip tightens on her knife. “Where is her body?”

  Lanau closes her eyes again, palm still on the sand. For a long moment she doesn’t speak. The fire pops. A horse snorts. Somewhere beyond the dunes, something small scurries—desert mice, or the kind of thing that eats corpses when armies stop looking.

  “In the palace,” Lanau says finally. Her eyes open. “She’s guarded. Not by many.”

  “Good,” Puripal murmurs.

  Naci looks around the circle. Her gaze catches each face, measures the exhaustion, the anger, the fear tucked behind jokes.

  “We don’t chase her spirit,” she says. “We bait her army. We make them stretch. We make them commit.” She taps her musket lightly against her knee. “And when she thinks she’s winning, we cut the thread she’s pulling.”

  The desert night closes tighter. Stars burn cold and indifferent overhead. Qixi-Lo’s distant glow watches them like an eye that doesn’t blink.

  ...

  The sun climbs out of the horizon like a weapon being drawn, and the light comes down hard enough to make the sand glitter like ground glass. Heat begins its slow, patient work of turning everyone into thirst.

  The armies find each other again the way storms find each other: by the simple fact that there isn’t room in the world for both.

  Yohazatz riders crest dunes in loose swarms, camel cavalry sliding behind them like moving towers, banners snapping. Dolma’s influence is visible even without seeing her—men ride straighter, shout louder, charge into crossfire.

  Naci’s Banners spread in a shape that looks too thin to hold.

  Puripal rides along the line, calling short orders, voice carrying. He doesn’t waste words. His cavalry shifts like a school of fish—small groups sliding out, striking, vanishing. Steppe tactics dragged into the desert: feigned retreats, sudden turns, arrows loosed from angles that make shields useless.

  A Yohazatz unit charges a “broken” Banner flank and finds nothing but sand and stakes half-buried under cloth—camouflage over a shallow pit. Horses scream as legs vanish. Riders tumble. The moment they try to regroup, Banners rise from behind a dune and send a clean volley into exposed throats.

  And then, like a new variable introduced by a spiteful god, the dunes part near the center and a cluster of riders appears—not just Yohazatz, not just Dolma’s puppets.

  Royal colors. Royal arrogance. A camel draped in fine cloth that is already gathering dust like the desert is trying to humble it.

  Nemeh is there.

  Naci sees him and for a heartbeat her mind doesn’t accept it. She had expected him to hide behind walls, to send orders, to let other people die as proof of his importance.

  Puripal sees him too, and his expression shifts—not fear, not surprise exactly, but the tight calculation of a man realizing the enemy has offered him a shortcut.

  “He’s here,” Puripal says flatly.

  “Good,” Naci replies.

  Because Nemeh’s presence is a knife that cuts through complexity. If he’s on the field, he can bleed. If he can bleed, the story can end.

  Dolma’s influence still hums through the Yohazatz line. Their charges remain too bold, their morale too unnaturally high. But Nemeh is the kind of man who doesn’t like sharing attention—even with a ghost. He rides near the front, too visible, too eager to be witnessed.

  Naci and Puripal adjust without pausing, as if the plan always included this.

  They begin to shape the battlefield around him.

  A Banner unit “breaks” in front of Nemeh’s camel line, fleeing in a way that looks panicked and is in fact measured.

  Nemeh pushes forward, taking the bait because he thinks it’s glory. His guards shout warnings he ignores because he was raised in silk and told caution is for other people.

  Puripal’s cavalry slips behind a dune line and rises again at Nemeh’s flank.

  Naci rides toward the center where Nemeh can see her. She wants him to see her. She wants him to feel the old hook of pride catch in his ribs.

  She lifts her musket slightly, not in salute—more like pointing.

  “Khan Regent Nemeh!” she calls, voice carrying over the roar of hooves and the crack of muskets. “Is that you, or did someone dress a camel in jewelry?”

  Heads turn. Even in battle, insults have gravity.

  Nemeh’s gaze snaps to her. His face—beautiful in the way polished stone is beautiful—hardens instantly. The air around him seems to tighten.

  Naci grins, feral. She rides closer, staying just beyond reach.

  “I heard a story,” she calls. “From my father.”

  Nemeh’s jaw works. He says something to his guards—too low to hear. His camel shifts, impatient.

  Naci’s voice rises, cruelly clear. “He said you lost all reason when my mother rode Noga’s stallion.”

  It lands. People might not know the names, but they know the shape of humiliation. A prince beaten in a duel. A gift horse turned into a trophy.

  Nemeh’s eyes flare.

  Naci reaches into a saddlebag with theatrical ease. She pulls out a strip of dried meat—dark, tough, salted. She holds it up, turning it so the sunlight glints on the fat.

  Then she bites.

  She chews slowly, deliberately, as if savoring a feast instead of blood-and-salt. She makes sure Nemeh sees her teeth work.

  “Mmm,” she says around it. “Do you know what this is?”

  Nemeh’s voice finally carries, sharp as a whip. “Shut your mouth.”

  Naci swallows, smiles wider. “We cut the horse down,” she calls, bright as a knife. “The black stallion. The one you couldn’t stop thinking about.” She takes another bite. “This is its flesh.”

  It is almost certainly not true. It doesn’t need to be. The point isn’t the meat. The point is the picture it paints inside his skull: his brother’s favorite weapon turned into someone else’s meal. Yohazatz pride turned into jerky.

  Nemeh makes a sound—half snarl, half laugh.

  He kicks his camel’s flank and then, with a sudden, violent decision, he leaps down. Sand explodes under his boots.

  His guards surge, shouting, but he waves them back with a gesture that says witness me.

  Nemeh draws his sword.

  Altan Kherem.

  The Golden Scourge catches sunlight and throws it back in a savage line, bright enough to make the air look cut. The blade’s gold inlay gleams, old and expensive.

  Nemeh points it toward Naci, arm steady.

  “Come,” he calls, voice ringing. “Duel me. I will kill you like I killed your mother.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The battlefield seems to pause around that sentence. It doesn’t, not truly—men still die, horses still scream—but attention sharpens. Even Dolma’s unnatural morale feels, for a heartbeat, like it leans toward the sound, hungry.

  Naci laughs.

  “I would love to,” she calls back. “Truly.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing salt across her knuckles like paint. “But I lost at xiangqi.”

  The absurdity hits the air like a slap.

  Somewhere behind her line, a Banner lets out a startled bark of laughter and then immediately regrets it.

  Nemeh’s face contorts. “What?”

  Naci shrugs grandly, as if apologizing for being too busy to die. “I’m not in the mood to embarrass myself twice in one week.”

  Nemeh takes a step forward, furious, and the movement is exactly what Naci and Puripal have been pulling him toward—away from his command, away from his safety, into the place where pride has to fight with its own hands.

  “Khan of Tepr!” he roars. “Fight me!”

  Naci tilts her head, considering him like prey. Then she glances slightly to her side.

  “Actually,” she says, voice suddenly light. “Here comes the one who won at xiangqi.”

  She shifts her reins and moves aside, clearing a path.

  Dukar walks forward. Slow at first, then steadier. His posture is rigid, his face carved into a calm so sharp it could cut. Sand clings to his boots. Blood stains his sleeve. His amber eyes burn with anger. His cloak flaps once and settles.

  Nemeh stands opposite him, Altan Kherem angled down, the sun caught along its edge like it wants to worship.

  For a moment they just stare.

  Nemeh’s lips curl. He looks at Dukar with disgust.

  “You,” Nemeh says, and the word is not a greeting. It is a spit.

  Dukar’s eyes don’t flicker. “Me,” he agrees.

  Behind Dukar, Puripal is very still in the saddle. His fingers curl around his reins as if the leather might run away. He watches Nemeh the way a man watches the last loose nail in a door he has been barricading for eight years. Poison, traps, politics, absence—nothing sticks. Nemeh keeps standing back up like a curse.

  Dukar keeps walking until he is close enough that Nemeh’s breath would reach him if Nemeh ever learned to exhale like a human.

  “You wanted to duel?” Dukar asks, voice quiet.

  Nemeh’s smile widens, pleased to have pulled a bigger animal out of the brush. “I want to watch you break,” he says. “And then I want to watch Puripal kneel when he realizes you were the only thing between him and the ground.”

  Puripal’s mouth twitches behind them.

  Dukar tilts his head a fraction, as if considering a tedious administrative request. “You talk too much.”

  Nemeh’s gaze flicks—just once—to Puripal. There is an old hatred there, childish and absolute. Then he looks back at Dukar with renewed focus, as if Dukar is merely the weapon Puripal is holding.

  “You love him,” Nemeh says softly, almost curious. “That’s your weakness. I never understood why you keep collecting people to bleed for.”

  Dukar steps in, sword coming up, and the duel begins like a door being kicked open.

  Steel meets gold with a sound like a bell being struck in a temple. Sand explodes under their boots. Nemeh swings first—fast, vicious, aiming for a quick end, because in his mind quick ends are the most beautiful kind. Dukar doesn’t give him the beauty he desires.

  Dukar slips inside the line of the Golden Scourge, blade close, body turned, shoulder leading. Nemeh’s second cut whistles past Dukar’s cheek close enough to shave skin. Dukar answers with a strike that would take Nemeh’s wrist—except Nemeh twists and the tip only kisses flesh, drawing a bright ribbon of blood.

  Nemeh laughs as if pain is flattering.

  “You move like a guard,” he says, and it is meant as insult.

  Dukar’s reply is a grunt, and then his sword is at Nemeh’s throat. Nemeh jerks back, barely avoiding it, eyes flashing with a sudden, sharp surprise.

  He didn’t expect this.

  People rarely expect Dukar to be the storm. He has spent a life being the wall.

  The fighters circle. The desert sun makes their sweat into salt. In the periphery, warriors keep dying, but the air around this duel feels carved out—an invisible ring formed by the instinct of soldiers who know when a story is about to decide itself.

  Nemeh presses, trying to overwhelm. He uses Altan Kherem’s reach, forcing Dukar to give ground in half-steps. He wants Dukar to retreat until the sand behind him turns into a wall, the same way he once forced Gani into the edge of her own arena.

  Dukar doesn’t retreat blindly. He gives ground the way a hunter gives a deer room to run—only to guide it into the snare.

  They exchange blows so fast the eye cannot count them, only feel the rhythm: cut, parry, hook, twist, disengage, strike again. Dukar’s footwork is ugly but effective. Nemeh’s is beautiful like a peacock’s—showy, proud, built to be watched.

  Dukar watches only what matters: Nemeh’s hips when he turns, the tightening of his shoulder before a lunge, the slight flare of nostrils when he gets angry.

  Nemeh’s anger grows because Dukar doesn’t react correctly. He doesn’t flinch at the famous blade. He doesn’t slow at the famous name. He doesn’t look at Nemeh like a prince.

  He looks at him like a problem to be solved.

  “You think you can do better than what your mother did?” Nemeh snarls, breath ragged now, sweat cutting clean lines through dust on his face. “You think you can trap me like she tried?”

  Nemeh retreats one step, just enough to create space, and in that moment his left hand flicks to a small pouch at his belt. Powder. A pinch, quick as a thought. He smears it along the flat of Altan Kherem like he is anointing a holy object.

  Then he strikes flint.

  The blade catches.

  Flame crawls along the gold inlay, licking the edge, turning the sword into a burning line of sun. The heat blooms outward, sharp and immediate. Even at a distance, warriors flinch as if the air itself has been punched.

  Naci’s jaw tightens.

  Nemeh grins, teeth white in a soot-streaked face. “This is how I killed her,” he says, and his voice is almost tender with cruelty.

  Dukar’s expression doesn’t change, but his eyes narrow. Fire changes everything. It turns parries into burns. It makes near-misses into wounds. It eats the air and forces distance.

  Nemeh uses that. He swings wide, forcing Dukar back with sheer heat. Dukar’s sleeve catches a lick of flame and chars. He slaps it out without looking, eyes never leaving Nemeh’s.

  “Careful,” Nemeh taunts. “You’ll smell like your mother Gani soon.”

  Dukar’s answer is a feint that makes Nemeh’s flaming blade carve empty air. Then Dukar steps in anyway, too close, risking the burn. He catches Nemeh’s wrist—not the sword wrist, the other one—and twists hard.

  Nemeh hisses, forced to adjust, and in that adjustment Dukar’s sword slips under the flaming edge and clips the underside of Nemeh’s forearm. Blood sprays, instantly dark in the heat. Nemeh staggers back, surprised again.

  He is still stronger in the moment. The fire gives him pressure, fear, spectacle. He drives Dukar toward the edge of the trampled sand where stakes and bodies and broken gear make movement treacherous. For a heartbeat, Dukar’s heel hits something—a dropped bow—and his balance shifts.

  Nemeh’s eyes light up.

  He lunges for the killing cut, flaming blade aimed not at ribs or shoulder but at the neck, because he wants Dukar’s head to drop like an offering.

  Dukar does something very unromantic.

  He throws sand.

  A handful, fast, into Nemeh’s face. It isn’t noble. It isn’t pretty. It is exactly the kind of tactic that keeps people alive on the steppe: if someone has eyes, ruin them.

  Nemeh jerks his head back, blinking, cursing as grit bites into his lashes. The flame on his sword stutters as his grip shifts.

  Dukar uses that heartbeat.

  He steps inside the line and slams his shoulder into Nemeh’s chest. The impact drives air out of Nemeh with a grunt. Dukar hooks Nemeh’s ankle with his boot and shoves.

  Nemeh goes down hard, the burning blade slicing a bright arc in the air as he falls. Sand explodes. Fire hisses as it kisses grit. The smell is immediate: hot metal, scorched oil, pride cracking.

  Dukar drops with him, weight like a wall collapsing.

  Altan Kherem’s flame gutters, starved against the sand. Nemeh tries to twist, tries to bring the blade up, but Dukar’s knee pins his sword arm and Dukar’s forearm presses across Nemeh’s throat.

  Nemeh’s eyes, watering from sand and fury, lock on Dukar’s.

  Dukar leans close, voice low enough that only Nemeh will hear it over the roar of the surrounding battle. “You don’t get to use her name,” he says. “Ever.”

  He shifts his grip, hands moving to the angle that will break a neck cleanly. Efficient. Final. He could do it. He knows he can. There is no hesitation in his body, only a calm that has been sharpening since the first day he dreamed of it.

  Nemeh’s mouth opens.

  “Dolma!” he gasps, the name torn out like a last weapon.

  And the air changes.

  It isn’t dramatic thunder. It is a pressure behind the eyes. A hum in the bones. The kind of wrongness that makes horses scream and men suddenly feel brave in ways that do not belong to them.

  Dolma’s influence slams into Nemeh like a wave.

  His pupils blow wide. The pain in his body—the pinned arm, the bruised ribs, the sand in his throat—becomes distant, like it is happening to someone else. His muscles surge. Strength blooms where there should be only exhaustion. He grins up at Dukar with teeth stained red.

  Dukar feels it immediately. The way Nemeh’s body stops responding like a normal body. The way the throat under his forearm becomes iron instead of flesh.

  Nemeh laughs, choking through Dukar’s pressure. “Not… today,” he rasps.

  He bucks hard, not caring about tearing himself. He wrenches one arm free enough to slam his elbow into Dukar’s side. Dukar’s ribs scream. He doesn’t let go, but his grip shifts, and that shift is all Nemeh needs.

  Nemeh twists like an eel. He drags his pinned arm anyway, grinding it under Dukar’s knee with a sound that should make him howl. He doesn’t. His face contorts in something like ecstasy.

  “Foul,” Borak snarls from a few strides away, already moving, musket forgotten in his hands. Above him, eagles wheel low, shrieking as if offended too.

  Horohan’s sword is half-raised, eyes blazing. “That isn’t a fair duel anymore.”

  Naci’s voice cuts through, sharp as command. “No.”

  Borak halts like he has hit a wall. Horohan’s jaw works, furious, but she stops. They both glare at Naci as if she has lost her mind.

  Naci doesn’t look at them. Her gaze is locked on Dukar and Nemeh, on the way Dolma’s invisible hand is trying to rewrite the end.

  “We finish it,” Naci says, and there is something old in her tone—something like a daughter refusing to let anyone steal a rightful kill from her family.

  Dukar fights to keep Nemeh pinned, but Nemeh’s boosted strength makes it messy. He claws for Altan Kherem, fingers scraping sand, finally closing around the hilt. The blade is no longer flaming, but it is still the Golden Scourge.

  Nemeh jerks it up toward Dukar’s gut.

  Dukar shifts and catches the wrist, forcing the point aside. The sword tip slices his coat instead of flesh. Dukar’s teeth bare in a snarl he didn’t know he still had.

  For a heartbeat, they are knotted together on the sand like animals.

  Naci moves.

  She swings down from her horse and strides forward with her white musket in her hands. The weapon looks wrong in the desert light—too pale, too clean, like a bone pulled from a corpse and polished. She walks through the edge chaos as if the world has decided to part for her.

  She stops beside them and lifts the musket without hurry.

  Nemeh sees it. Even with Dolma’s strength in his veins, something in his eyes flickers. Fear, brief and furious. He tries to twist away, but Dukar slams him down again, forearm across his throat, holding him still like an executioner’s block.

  Naci places the muzzle on top of Nemeh’s head.

  The contact is intimate. Cold metal against hot, filthy hair.

  Nemeh’s breath hitches. “You—”

  Naci’s face is very calm. Her eyes, in this moment, look like her mother’s: storm-lit, cruelly clear.

  She speaks not to Nemeh, but past him, into the dry air, as if the desert itself is a witness and a messenger.

  “Mother,” she says quietly.

  Dukar’s eyes flick up, startled, then soften for half a heartbeat. He doesn’t loosen his hold.

  Naci’s voice stays steady. “You didn’t get to finish,” she murmurs. “So I am sending you the eternal last sibling.”

  Nemeh’s eyes go wide. He tries to speak, to spit out another insult, another threat, another name.

  Naci doesn’t give him the time.

  She squeezes the trigger.

  The musket roars.

  For a heartbeat, the sound is so loud it seems to erase everything else—hooves, screams, arrows, even the wind. Smoke bursts around Naci’s hands. The recoil punches into her shoulder. The smell of powder blooms, bitter and thick.

  And Nemeh does something only a man being held up by a ghost would do.

  He breaks his own arm.

  He jerks his forearm up at the last instant—his right arm, already pinned awkwardly—forcing it between muzzle and skull. The bone takes the bullet’s impact. The shot hits flesh and bone at point-blank range, and the arm tears apart with a wet, obscene crack, skin splitting, blood and fragments spraying across sand and Dukar’s sleeve.

  Nemeh screams.

  It is high and involuntary and full of the sudden realization that there are limits even to arrogance. His body convulses. Dolma’s boost carries him through some pain, but not that—nothing carries a man through watching his own limb become a ruined shield.

  He gasps, choking, staring at what remains of his arm as if it is betrayal.

  “Dolma!” he cries again, voice cracking. “Dolma—help—”

  He waits for the strength to surge back, for the numbness to return, for the ghost to pour more borrowed fire into his veins.

  But Dolma doesn’t respond and her spirit form suddenly disappears.

  ...

  Deep inside the Qixi-Lo palace, in a room lit by a single brazier that burns with a low, sickly flame, the air tastes like crushed roots. A circle has been drawn on the floor in pale powder—chalk and salt or. Inside it sits Dolma.

  Wrapped in layered robes, hair undone, hands folded in her lap. Her head is bowed as if in prayer. If she were anyone else, she would look like a tired old woman waiting for her tea.

  A servant kneels beside her, eyes rolled back, lips moving soundlessly. A tether, a mouthpiece, a spare set of lungs.

  A blade drives through the servant’s spine from behind. The man arches, mouth opening on a breath that never becomes a scream.

  Ta yanks the sword free and lets the body fold to the floor, boneless.

  “Sorry,” Ta tells the corpse. Then, to the others: “He wasn’t.”

  Jinhuang stares at Dolma, at the stillness that feels like a held knife. “That’s her?”

  Lanau steps forward, voice low. “That’s what she leaves behind.”

  Fol shifts his stance, ready to grab, ready to shield. “So we kill the shell?”

  “No,” Lanau says, and her tone is suddenly sharp enough to cut. “If she dies with her spirit loose, I have no clue what could happen.”

  Dolma’s head lifts slowly, as if she is waking from a dream. Her eyes open and they are too clear, too bright, like a lamp behind glass.

  Her lips part.

  A voice speaks through her mouth that doesn’t feel like it fits. “Little windling,” it says, and the words curl toward Lanau like smoke seeking a throat. “You came all this way to tug my braid?”

  Lanau’s smile is thin. “I came to pull you out of the sky by your ankles.”

  Dolma’s gaze slides to Jinhuang and Fol and Lizi. It lingers on Lizi a fraction longer, amused. “Pirates. Lovers. Pretenders. How charming.”

  Lizi bares her teeth. “Say one more cute thing and I’ll cut your tongue out and feed it to your own shadow.”

  Dolma chuckles—soft, intimate, like a grandmother enjoying a joke. “You think your knife scares me?”

  Lanau drops to a knee and reaches into her pouch. She pulls out a strip of cloth braided with eagle feathers and bone beads, and the moment it clears the pouch the brazier flame leans toward it like it recognizes a rival. Lanau lays the braid across the chalk circle, then presses her palm to the floor.

  The air thickens.

  The lantern flame gutters. The room’s shadows deepen, stretching toward the circle as if curious. Dolma’s body trembles, just slightly, and then her shadow peels.

  Not fully—nothing so clean—but enough that the outline of something else flickers above her shoulders: a second face, a second posture, a spirit-form trying to turn away and slip back into the palace walls.

  Dolma’s mouth opens wider, voice now layered—hers and not-hers. “No,” she hisses, suddenly angry. “Not you. Not here.”

  Lanau’s voice drops into a chant that sounds like wind going through teeth. The braid on the floor shivers. The beads click, like tiny bones applauding.

  Fol moves behind Dolma’s body and clamps his arms around her shoulders, pinning her upright. Dolma’s skin is cold through the fabric, cold in a way that isn’t natural. Jinhuang steps in on the other side, blade hovering near Dolma’s throat. Lizi circles, knife ready, eyes darting to the corners as if expecting the room itself to lunge.

  Dolma’s spirit jerks, trying to rip away. The brazier flares. Lanau’s hair lifts as if underwater. Her face tightens with effort, sweat beading at her temples.

  Lanau’s fingers dig into the braid. Her knuckles whiten. Her teeth bare in a grin that is half prayer, half threat.

  Holding her real body in place, Lanau pulls her spirit from the desert back where it belongs.