Mirage (Mirage #1)(12)

Her face was carefully blank, her footsteps precise, but her knuckles were white where she gripped her gown. She took a seat beside Nadine and gestured for me to stand.

“Your Highness,” I murmured. She did not reply.

When I hazarded a look, she was staring at me, as though she found me as alien as I found her.

“You’ve cleaned her,” she said at last and gestured me closer. When I knelt at her feet she gripped my chin, her manicured nails digging into my cheek. “The resemblance—”

I suppose with my hair combed back and draped in new and expensive fabric she could more clearly see the similarities between us.

Not similarities, I thought. We were nearly twins.

“What a barbaric practice,” she said, and I flinched. “I thought we had outlawed such things.”

“Among the nobility, we have,” Nadine said. “But we have little care for what savages get up to.” With shock, I realized she meant my daan.

Heat rose in my cheeks even as I struggled to keep my mouth shut. Her mother had borne such marks on her face proudly, as did her grandmother, the Dowager Sultana, who had survived the occupation but was now shut away from the world. They’d been outlawed among the makhzen, but they were a valued tribal custom, and not just among the Kushaila.

I wanted to ask her how she had come to hate half her lineage so. How had she become so fully and completely like her father?

“We will take care of her face, of course,” Nadine added.

Nausea swam up through me, quick and fast. I knew what they intended.

“You can’t,” I said, and hated the waver in my voice.

Maram didn’t respond, though her gaze didn’t waver from the ink on my cheeks. She looked almost serene now, despite planning to take the one thing that was truly mine. My daan were everything—my family, my faith, my inheritance.

This was it, then: I was to be taken, reshaped in the image of my master, stripped of one of the only things that separated me from Maram. I knew so little of the Imperial princess—but I knew she was half Kushaila, and that her fiancé was Kushaila. Had she no love of them, or sympathy?

“I’m begging you,” I whispered as her grip tightened around my face.

“Oh,” she said, and in that single breath I heard the hard edge of her voice, her loathing. “You should never beg.”

I wanted to scream, I wanted the whole palace to know what it was that she was doing to me. But then there was a pinch at the base of my throat. I looked down to see a tiny, spider-like machine scurrying down my skirt.

The last thing I saw was Maram, her face still carefully blank, one white-knuckled hand fisted in the folds of her gown, watching as I toppled over.

*

I slept, or thought I slept, and was plagued with nightmares. A great laser coming closer to my face. Insect-shaped droids creeping over me, cutting into bone. The raw hum of a small saw. Heat as they shaved down my cheekbones and rounded my jaw.

I floated into consciousness slowly. The closer I came to the surface, the darker the world seemed to feel. I was standing on the edge of terror, crying out in my mind, and perhaps in real life. No one came to comfort me. I remained suspended in a nightmare, until, finally, I woke up.

I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the interlocking stars in the wood paneling to come into focus. My body felt heavy as lead. The bed was piled high with covers, and the curtains that separated the room from the rest of the suite were drawn shut.

I struggled to sit up.

There was a moment of complete serenity in that disorientation. I could not remember how I’d gotten back to my room, what had passed in the time since my last lesson.

And then, I lifted my hands to my face, and felt bandages.

The sound that tore itself out of my throat was broken. I felt—I could not feel betrayed, and yet I did. I curled up in my bed, with my bandaged face pressed against my knees, and sobbed. Great heaving sobs that shook my whole body and rang out against the stone floors of my suite. I knew without checking that the new scar on my back was gone, the skin smoothed to match Maram’s. I had lost a battle I’d never been equipped to fight. I’d been stripped of all things that were meant to be mine, that Dihya had blessed me with, and now— How could I keep myself, preserve myself, if I had none of myself left?

If all I had was Maram?

I thought of my mother’s voice, of her brushing my hair, tucking my curls behind my ear. I thought of her hard at work, her thin face grim, as though she were prepared to wage her own little war in the kitchen. I had inherited far more of my father’s whimsy, and less of my mother’s strength. Now I wanted nothing more than for her to appear and hold me, to somehow pass some of her iron will on to me through her touch.

I wanted to see my family again. My mother and father, my brothers, the old women in my village whom I had called khaltou since I was small. I wanted to never dream of droids or the Ziyaana again. I wanted open skies and mountain air. I wanted to know my family was safe, that Khadija was unharmed, that Husnain lived. More than anything, I wanted to write my own story, free from Vathek intervention.

But there was no end to these days in sight. I would rise every day, a prisoner of the Ziyaana, at the mercy of Nadine and other High Vath like her. And no matter what I did, how well I succeeded, the chances of my seeing my family again were low. Would I ever be allowed to go back to Cadiz? Would I see my parents or my brothers again? Would I even know if they were alive or not?