This was good. I felt like there was some lack of character development in Tariq, and that Ruby's character wasn't very consistent. I feel like a lot of these feelings should either have been alluded to more instead of stated simply because there weren't enough pages to fully explore them; or this novella should have been a full novel. The dynamics between the characters were complex and interesting, but there were too many characters with too much going on between them for the whole thing to feel complete. There were also some typos? Which I thought was weird. Maybe I got my hands on an early version or something, I don't know.