Excerpt: Nenja

“I should be going,” she said at last. It seemed like the safest thing to say. She looked once more across the square. Three ghostly figures still stood, awaiting their judgment.

“Don’t you want to see what happens?” the woman asked. Green eyes upon Nenja once again, assessing her. Judging her.

Nenja’s mouth was as dry as the desert that surrounded the city. She paused, trying to come up with the right answer. And any hesitation was a sign of calculation; she might be lying. She was caught. The trap sprung.

The woman smiled.

“You work at the lower city west orphanage, don’t you?” she asked. Her smile warmed her whole face. She lit up like a star, green eyes no longer assessing, all open, warmth, friendliness.

Nenja felt stupid. She didn’t know what to do. All around them the crowd was shouting, calling for a confession, jeering and goading the prisoners. Once again she stared across the square, taking in each solemn countenance. She looked back to the woman in the white dress. Still smiling. Still friendly. Warm; open.

“Yes,” she said at last, relieved to have been able to give some kind of coherent answer to a straight question not weighted down with traitorous possibilities. “I should be getting back. I only came up to pick up material for sheets. I’d forgotten it was Denunciation Day.”

The woman in the white dress went on smiling. Her lips were soft, untouched by the dry, baking air that turned everybody’s mouths into ragged crests of chapped skin.

“Best to remember in future,” she said in a low voice. “They’re looking for new victims all the time.”

Nenja swallowed. Threat… or…

“The Amnari aren’t nearly as successful at getting recruits as everybody thinks,” the woman continued, still close enough to Nenja that she could smell her light, flowery perfume. Her hair had been washed that morning; she must live a life of luxury when not taunting the inhabitants of the lower city, Nenja thought dimly. The woman in the white dress lowered her voice still further. She looked deep into Nenja’s eyes, and her tone changed. “If we had half as many as they killed, all of this would be over by now.”

Shock trembled through Nenja’s body like an earthquake. Heart dropped, crashing through the floor of reason. She could only stare now, dumbfounded. Held in the woman’s emerald gaze, unable to break free, Nenja’s mouth was drier than dust, her brain past thinking. The calls of the crowd fell away and there was only she and the woman now, she and the woman, staring at each other in the shadows of a creaking, dilapidated hut in the middle of a market that would soon be consumed by the same forces wreaking havoc throughout Duum right now.

Here she stood, facing an Amnari for the first time in her life. Ethereal, tiny, surely one of what the Cabinet called an Ai Ta’Sifra. Deadly and powerful. Able to kill with a look.

Nenja was going to die. She hadn’t read the pamphlets from the government. The ones that told you what to do if you met an Amnari in the street. She remembered vague lessons in school, from long ago. Don’t approach. Don’t talk to them. Run straight to a guard. Tell the guard. The guard will deal with it.

The canvas roof of the hut beside which they stood fluttered. A breeze whipped through the square, touching the heads and faces of the stony prisoners, flitting between the laughing mob, the orator on his podium and the judge sitting on the chair at the very centre of it all. It tossed the veil of the woman in the white dress and she smiled, as though she could stop time if she wished, as though she could stop Nenja’s heart with a flick of one of her delicate little hands.

A crash hit the side of Nenja’s head and she buckled under the blow. The horizon tilted, tipped, and then the hard, packed stone of the square came up to meet her, sending lightning flashes and thunderous roars of pain through her skull and down her side, her arm, her spine. The world was suddenly chaotic, spun wildly out of control. Legs appeared before her, feet attached in ragged and broken leather shoes. Arms tore at her. She was engulfed. The air was thick with voices. Loud, shouting. Hands clawing, fingers ripping.

Her head on the hot stone ground. The dust in her mouth. Nothing made sense. She blinked, put her hands to her face, rolled over. Tried to find a way to get to her feet but she was knocked sideways. Somebody was shouting.