Rapture

by Kameron Hurley

  So Rhys waited. Payam kept grinning. Rhys began to feel uneasy. “Are you going to tell me about the job?” Rhys asked.

  “The pay is remarkable. It will solve all your little… problems. All four of them.” Payam winked. He was unmarried, by all counts, and spent far too much time harassing Khairian girls who came in with the caravans. But his time among the Khairians had tempered his speech, at least. He talked more like a Khairian than a Tirhani. Rhys found he appreciated the straightforward—though often pleasantly deceptive—speech to the Tirhani practice of false politeness.

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing what you do best. Translation work.”

  “Why does it pay so well?” Everyone in Khairi spoke four or five languages. That was the part Rhys had not counted on. There was little need for a translator if everyone spoke multiple languages.

  “Well, that’s the truly exciting part,” Payam said. He leaned closer. “It’s just a little further north. Fewer people up there know Chenjan or Nasheenian. You’re a much more prized property. And a man who has some talent with bugs! That goes a long way, too.”

  “How much further north? I have a family.”

  “It’s… not far. A few weeks’ travel. But you’ll have room and board and a fine salary. A signing bonus today and another the day of the journey if you agree. Something to tide you over. A taste of what’s to come.”

  “Who is this job for?”

  “A man you’ve not heard of. Has some renown further north, beyond the Wall. Doing a fine job bringing order to the nomads up there. Name of Hanife. He speaks Khairian all right, and whatever his bastard native tongue is, but nothing else. When I heard he needed somebody he could trust, I thought of you. Who better than a devoted Chenjan family man who has worked for the Tirhani government?”

  Rhys showed his teeth—more grimace than smile, but he had never seen a Khairian smile. Just the grimace. “How much?”

  “One thousand Tirhani notes. That’s three hundred now, and the seven hundred when you get there. Another five thousand at the end of the job.”

  The serving girl brought Rhys’s tea. He hardly noticed. He had never seen that much money in his life. “Is that with or without your commission?”

  Payam laughed. “My friend, I am pleased to tell you that that is after my commission.”

  Rhys felt the knot of anger and worry that he had been harboring all morning begin to ease. He did not trust the feeling, though, because he did not entirely trust Payam. For all he knew, it was one of Payam’s conquests that left her child to die in the privy in Rhys’s tenement. Such an immoral man could not be trusted.

  “Why didn’t anyone else take this job?”

  “I have four translators out on jobs. The other two don’t know Nasheenian. And he was very specific that the translator speak Nasheenian.”

  Rhys wrapped his hands around the teacup. The warmth was soothing, familiar. The last time someone wanted him to translate Nasheenian, bloody bel dames hacked off his hands and murdered his children. But the money…

  “Did he say why Nasheenian?”

  “He does dealings with them. Not sure if you’ve kept up with Nasheenian politics, but there’s a big rift over there. The Queen, First Families, bel dames, all looking to take over if it turns out the war’s really ending. But the magic has turned against them. His man tells me Hanife does quite a lot of black market business with Nasheenian First Families.”

  “First Families? Not bel dames?”

  Payam shrugged. “He said nothing to me of bel dames. Why? Have some trouble with them?”

  Rhys stared at his hands. The long sleeves of his burnous covered the scars at his wrists where he had lost his hands. The ones fixed to his body now were not his, but some dead laborer’s. Short, thick fingers. They had been rough and calloused when he first got them. He had not been able to touch his wife without cringing for more than a year.

  “Three hundred now?”

  “Yes. I know I have two-thirds of your mind. You’ll do it?”

  “You knew I would.” Payam also ran the local trading post. He would have seen how long Rhys’s credit list was, and how desperately his family needed to eat.

  Payam grinned. “Of course I knew you would. Have some more tea! This commission will finally send me on my haj to Chenja. Birthplace of the martyr, may she bless this transaction. A fine day for both of us!”

  Rhys stumbled outside into the warm dawn. The rest of the settlement was back from prayer, and the streets were alive with the hiss of cats and the song of Khairians. He had three hundred notes in his pocket. He went immediately to the trading post and paid two hundred and eighty five of it toward his tab, and used some of the rest to buy coconut milk, lizard eggs, protein cakes, rye flour, and a packet of sen-laced tobacco. He hid the tobacco deep in the pocket of his burnous and walked home.

  Inside, Nasrin played at the center of the main room with a dead grasshopper. He heard Elahyiah singing softly to Rahim in the other room. Mehry would be at school by now.

  “Da!” Nasrin said, and held out her arms. He stared blankly at her for a moment, because she suddenly reminded him so strongly of his dead daughter Souri that he experienced a moment of dissonance.

  His body went through the expected motions. He reached for his daughter. Picked her up. She patted his face with her little hand. But he was still numb. Disconnected.

  “Rhys?”

  He turned. Sometimes it surprised him how easily he answered to that name. It was not his given name, Rakhshan, the name that marked him as a Chenjan deserter. He wondered if he would ever hear his given name again.

  Elahyiah came to him. Her abaya was stained with spit up. She had a rag in one hand. Her skin was sallow, lusterless, and her tangle of dark hair was knotted back from her dark, gaunt face.

  “I brought groceries,” he said, setting Nasrin back down. The girl cried out in protest and waved her arms at him.

  “You received a job?”

  “Yes, of course.” He pulled back the curtain from the set of shelves they used as a makeshift pantry. Four cockroaches the size of his thumb dropped from the curtain to the floor.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a translation job. It’s not local, though. We’ll need to pack our things and go north with the next caravan.”

  He carefully put away all of the groceries. When he was finished, she still had not said anything.

  He turned.

  Elahyiah’s face was stricken, as if he’d just said that her father died. He watched her crumple. She leaned against the wall for support. She pressed the rag to her face and choked back a sob.

  “Elahyiah?” he said. He reached for her, but she smacked his hand away.

  “No,” she said. “No more. No more of this.”

  “It’s just one more move. A few weeks’ travel.”

  “A few weeks? Weeks? God be merciful, are you mad? Have you seen the state of your children? Have you seen me at all since we arrived here? We are in no state to go anywhere. We’re dying here, Rhys.”

  “The money is good, Elahyiah. It will get us all the way back to Tirhan, once the job is done.”

  “Good? For us? You mean for you. I don’t understand any of this. We were going to Chenja to do good work in this world, but I hardly have the energy to care for our children. We can afford no help. I miss my family. I miss the housekeeper. I cannot do this on my own, Rhys. Remember when we were partners? I have not felt that for some time.”

  “We’ll sort this out. You need to trust me, Elahyiah.”

  “Trust you? The way I trusted you to bring us out here? I have prayed long about this, Rhys. I am a good wife. A good mother. And I know my rights.”

  “I know it’s been very difficult…”

  “One year has turned into two, then three, now seven. And you keep turning away from me. We keep going farther and farther, and getting nowhere—”

  “Think this through.”

  “I have. I have asked God an
d prayed often. I am not a woman to forget my prayers. It’s my right to ask for a divorce, if I feel my husband is unworthy.”

  Rhys stumbled. He caught himself on the shelf behind him. It was like a blow—a blow he had known was coming. “Elahyiah, please,” he said. He pressed his hand to hers. “I know I’ve been a poor husband. I won’t pretend it’s been easy for any of us. But… not yet.”

  Elahyiah began to cry. “I’m sorry, but I cannot honor a man who cannot care for us. My father has agreed to help us get home. Me and the children.”

  “The children are mine.”

  “Rhys, please don’t—”

  But his resolve was firm. He knew his rights, too. “You take your right, Elahyiah, and I will take mine. I will take the children, and you’ll have nothing.”

  “Rhys, please—”

  “One chance,” Rhys said. He took her hands. “I can’t lose you all. Not now. Don’t let them take you from me now.”

  “It’s not the bel dames I fear anymore, Rhys,” his wife said. “It’s you.”

  From the next room, his son began to wail.

  4.

  Nasheen smelled different. It was the first thing Nyx noticed as they crossed the border. She expected to get a lungful of tar and ashes, even this far from the front, but instead the air had the tangy lemony flavor of some nearby red crix beetle colony, the same bug used in many com consoles to translate and transmit communications.

  They met the patrol escorting Mercia and her entourage just twenty kilometers out of Sameh. The three armored bakkies felt like overkill to Nyx, but then, she hadn’t been in Nasheen for a long time. Mercia assured her things were much changed. To Nyx, that sounded ominous.

  Nyx sat up front in the lead bakkie with the patrol leader and a driver. Mercia followed in the second bakkie with her bodyguards.

  “All this just to escort a diplomat?” Nyx asked. Not that she could judge. She wore a baldric bristling with weapons—a short sword sheathed at her back, the hilt sticking up through a slit in her burnous; a scattergun secured horizontally just beneath that; a pistol at her right hip and a dagger at her left thigh. She had also tucked three poisoned needles in her hair and slipped on a pair of sandals with razor blades in the soles. She hadn’t worn her old sandals in so long that she’d had to customize a new pair just for the trip.

  The driver spit sen out the window. Clouds of pale dust spewed behind them. “There are boys on these roads,” she said. She was narrow-waisted, slim in the hips, with a bony hacksaw of a face. Her wiry arms were visible—her black organic slick was cut off at the shoulder, and again at the calf.

  “There are…” Nyx tried rolling that around on her tongue, “boys on these roads?”

  “Yup.”

  “Since when are we afraid of boys?”

  “Since they came back from the front, woman. What, you think they all put down their guns for babies?”

  All the women in the caravan wore standard-issue military gear—organic black slicks and boots and utility belts. They were heavily armed for a patrol, too. Nyx had noted two side arms apiece, assault rifles, and acid rifles—the sort more often used to scare off bugs than melt people. It was gear she should have seen on folks at the front, not women patrolling Amtullah.

  “How long you been away from Nasheen?” the patrol leader asked. The leader sat in the back, a broad, muscular woman who wore the simple green stripe of an officer on her arm.

  “Six or seven years,” Nyx said. “Never thought stuff in Nasheen changed that fast.”

  “It’s been changing fast since the boys started coming home. Everything’s a big shit pile. The breeding compounds at the coast are the worst. Nobody’s sure what to do with them now that we’re not churning out a war. Can’t even fit what we’ve got in the cities, and there’s still more boys out there stationed in remote posts.”

  “You say there are all these boys,” Nyx said, “but where? I’ve been riding with you since the border, and I haven’t seen boys in the numbers you’re talking about.”

  The patrol leader regarded her coolly for a long minute, then looked back at the road, toward Amtullah. “You will.”

  When Nyx was growing up, people talked about Amtullah like it was a shining pillar of wisdom and learning, a haven for com technicians, hedge witches, and paltry magicians of all sorts with a desire to concoct potent war potions to decimate the Chenjans. Back then, it was a sprawling, well-kept city of organ galleries, state-sponsored theaters, historical facades, and the oldest mosque in the country. But over the years it had become a raucous mass of humanity, full of half-breeds and chained cats and corrupt order keepers and organ hawkers and gene pirates. It was also a hive of corrupted First Family heretics, half-breed laborers who barely spoke Nasheenian, and a peculiar native organic grit that ate the flesh between your toes if you didn’t clean up regular. That wasn’t to say the city wasn’t clean as a Tirhani kid’s ass, aesthetically speaking. The pretty streets in the good parts of town were impressive, as Nyx recalled—etched in geometric designs and prayer script. The gaudy theaters with their domed roofs took up a whole district, and most public buildings were still faced in detailed stained-glass windows that threw rainbows of light across the streets. Foolish, all those windows, but the interior could get away with having some finery on display. Nyx wondered how much of that had changed.

  As they approached in the darkness, Amtullah rose up from the hilly white plain like a thorny, blackened crown capped in a giant soap bubble that wavered and shimmered in the ruddy light of the moons. The filter went red, then pale purple, then black, colors mixing and swirling like a captured aurora.

  But it wasn’t the city itself that drew her attention. It was the conspicuously bright light in the sky. It did not shimmer like starlight, and it was no planet she recognized. No, this was something else. Something she generally only ever saw over Punjai.

  Stragglers appeared along the road as they got closer, long-legged boys and men swathed in turbans that covered their heads and faces. Most carried duffle packs and some still wore government-issue slicks. Two boys about Mercia’s age lunged at the caravan as they passed. One of the patrol women shot off a few rounds in their direction. Nyx was surprised the woman let the bullets go wide, then remembered these men weren’t deserters. They were, by rights, discharged and full citizens. Watching the boys spit and swear at them as the caravan coughed along, Nyx found the idea that these vagrant squatters now had full independent personhood and voting rights rather appalling.

  The entrance to the city was worse.

  Up close, the filter was a shimmering curtain. They pulled up at the bakkie barn outside the main entrance, the one opposite where the train pulled up, and it was teeming with dark figures. Asleep? Some of them. A few boys stirred and offered open hands. Others padded after the bakkie, pulling tattered coverings from baskets of bread or saffron or locusts for trade or sale. The cry and stink and closeness of the men made Nyx think of the front, and her nostrils were suddenly filled with the smell of lavender. She coughed.

  The patrol alighted from the caravan and took up an immediate defensive posture around Nyx and Mercia. Around them, the horde of boys stared back.

  “How bad is it inside?” Nyx asked the patrol leader.

  “It’s been worse,” she said. “First few weeks we thought they were going to riot. Once they coded the filter to keep boys out, though, it settled down. Some.”

  There were more enlisted women posted immediately outside the city’s filter, and some boys too, clad in full combat gear more appropriate to the front—shiny, body-hugging organic slicks, acid sprayers, fully automatic contagion guns, polished boots, and machetes. They held the line in groups of three and five, small but intimidating squads that gave Nyx the impression that there was some ravaging Chenjan horde waiting outside the gates, not a rag-tag stir of discharged Nasheenian boys.

  The squad ushered them to the edge of the filter. Nyx slid through. Her skin prickled. The dog-leather thong on h
er left wrist crackled and smoked. Sand fleas turned to gray dust and dropped off her flesh.

  They waited a few minutes for another bakkie, this one armed by a smaller patrol of three women.

  “We’ll be going to the diplomatic residences on the south side of the city,” Mercia said, “in Nafisa Square.”

  “Thought all the dips were living in Mushtallah,” Nyx said to Mercia as they waited. “You have places for them out here?” She had assumed Mercia was just renting a place near Fatima’s.

  “The bel dames made them,” she said. “They purchased some of the old Family houses.”

  “How’d the Families feel about that?”

  “They bought them legally. I’m not aware of any political motive.”

  Nyx doubted that.

  “How about that ship in the sky? You know anything about that?”

  “The aliens? No more than what I hear on the radio. They’ve come to parley with the Queen of Nasheen. What about, I’ve no idea. They have been here before, though. Have you heard of New Kinaan?”

  Nyx’s chest tightened. “Sure have,” she said. She stared up at the light, and wondered just what it was Fatima had in store for her this time.

  The new driver took them through a long, circuitous route across the darkened city. Inside the filter, the streets of Amtullah were paved in smooth, colored stones. It was quiet. Nyx had expected a young, drunk crowd of arty types or spoiled kids, but aside from the occasional creeper or order keeper patrol, there was nothing.

  “You put in a curfew?” Nyx asked.

  “Six weeks ago,” the driver said. “Had a lot of trouble with the boys who were let in early, after the ceasefire. Lots of rioting. Looting. There were too many to lock up all at once. It’s been quieter, last few weeks.”