1: The Wasila

Every drop of power in the Hundred Mouths was distilled from a girl who died believing.

The Wasl takes one woman a year. They feed her, bathe her, sing to her, and teach her to want God more than she wants to live. Then they render her bones into attar — an oil that compels devotion in anyone who breathes it, and has held one family on the delta for four hundred years.

Shefali volunteered.

She is the finest candidate the order has selected in four centuries, and she has never once reached union. Eight years of counterfeiting rapture for examiners who wrote it down and believed her. She came to Meherghat because dying is the one moment she cannot possibly stay conscious through.

Ilyas has done this nine times. He is unhurried, exact, and tender with what he takes apart, and he has not permitted himself to be touched in ten years.

Then the house cuts her calendar by a season. Seven months to reach, for real, the thing she has been faking since she was fourteen.

The first time it happens, it happens in his hands.

She will find a way to live through this. It will cost her the only thing she has ever loved.