Rapture

by Kameron Hurley

  “You hate everything I am,” Nyx said softly. “But you’re still out here with me. Is that it?” She kept her tone low, the way she would if she was trying to lure some skittish bug, a shiny green beetle. “Is it that you have to take care of her out there? But out here—” she carefully moved her hand to his neck, lightly, as if by accident. It was freeing, really. She figured they’d all be dead by morning. “Out here I take care of you.”

  Rhys averted his eyes and stood. He put out the cigarette.

  “That it?” Nyx said. “Rhys, hold on.” She stood and went after him, took his arm. “Hey, listen. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s not anything. I’m just really fucking tired.”

  “You have no idea what you’re doing,” Rhys said. He sounded out of breath.

  “I’m just playing around, Rhys.”

  His face was stricken. “That’s the problem. To you this is all just some game. A fun way to pass the time. But for me, this is about my personal integrity. Honor. You understand honor? You became a bel dame because it gained you honor, is that right? Being a man who can protect the honor of his own family is all I wanted. I was supposed to keep them safe, Nyx. I failed them. I failed God and my father when I did not go to the front. And I failed God again when I permitted those bel dames to do what they did. They took everything from me, Nyx. They took everything I was. And… fucking you in the woods is not how a moral man would conduct himself. I know what I am, Nyx. I’ve struggled with it, I won’t pretend. But do you know who I am?”

  “I think if you relaxed you’d be a better man,” Nyx said.

  “Elahyiah left me,” Rhys said. “She took the children.”

  Nyx caught her breath. She wanted to fuck him there, and realized, too late, that it wasn’t the right response.

  She reached for him. He pushed her away.

  “That’s it, then?” she said.

  “That has always been it. What does it matter?” He sighed heavily and rubbed at his shaggy head. “If we fucked now, what would it be like in the morning? Would you be done? And if not tomorrow, what about the next day? The next year? A decade from now? I don’t fornicate with women for fun, Nyx. It means far more than that to me. Everything you touch turns to ash. And when things are bad, I always know who you will look out for. You will sacrifice every person in this world for whatever foolish goal you have. Every person here. Even Eshe. Even me.”

  “Don’t bring up Eshe.”

  “Why, because it’s true? He was the closest thing you had to a child, and you killed him over this.”

  “Fuck you, Rhys. I never sacrificed you for anything.”

  “No,” he said. “Just my family. That’s what you don’t understand, Nyx. They are me.” He seemed to be searching for more words.

  Nyx let him chew on them. She was tired of talking. She wanted to walk off into the jungle and not look back. She had nothing to go back to.

  “When I’m with you, Nyx, I don’t have to try and be a better man,” Rhys said. “I can uphold the barest level of decency and look like the son of the prophet by contrast.”

  “So stick around.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t… have to be strong when I’m with you. I don’t have to be good. But Nyx, I have to be a better man. That’s what life is. It’s striving to be peaceful, worthy before God. And when I’m with you, my relationship with God is much different. Do you understand?”

  Nyx shook her head.

  He sighed. “Think of it this way. There are two roads. A morally high road, clear and free of obstacles. And there is a lower road, filled with brambles and contaminants and festering insects. At the end of the high road is a safe but unfulfilling life. It is the life I must present before God at the end of all things and say, ‘Yes, because I lived this easy life and submitted to your will in all things, I am worthy of paradise.’ And that is when he says, ‘How can you come before me and insist on paradise when your faith in me was never tested? Never wavered?’ Then there is the darker road, the one full of obstacles and terror. The one that tests my faith. That challenges me to question God, and His will. The one that requires me to be a better man at the end than the beginning. To fight. And at the end of that road, when God welcomes me, and I prostrate myself before Him, He will see the road I chose to travel. He will see I chose not ease and comfort, but the path that challenged me to become a better man. I have committed many terrible acts, Nyx. God may forgive, but He does not forget. I will account for all my crimes. There will be a reckoning. All that remains now is to choose how I will redeem myself before the end days.”

  He took a breath. She still wanted to kiss him.

  Rhys turned from her, and trudged back to camp to join the others.

  Nyx watched after him for some time, watched him roll himself up in his burnous and turn his back to her. She wondered what it was like to live in a world where your children were something more than just fodder for a war. His old family in Chenja was rich, back when he went by some other name. They wouldn’t have had to sacrifice as much. She wondered if that was what love was, knowing there was someone in your life who most likely wouldn’t get torn apart.

  She saw Eshe again, eight years old, his hand in her pocket; a fistful of notes. He had looked up at her with big, dark eyes in an unremarkable face, and in that moment, she had imagined him blown apart by some mine, or gunned down by a Chenjan, or poisoned by hornets. He was just a child, just a boy. But boys always met bad ends. It was the first thing she thought of—his mangled body sacrificed to a perpetual war for a God she didn’t even believe in anymore.

  It took a powerful belief in God to pretend that your children were not destined for something else in Nasheen. She had almost convinced herself that Eshe would live, that she had saved him from the fate she saw for him. But no, it came for them all the same, certain as a swarm of locusts in the dry season. How long had it been since she had faith in anything? Not since she burned it all away at the front.

  Isabet woke Ahmed well before his watch.

  “I know where we are,” she said.

  Her face had mostly healed, though he still caught her putting unguent on it every morning. She had wept over Eshe’s death, and confessed at least a dozen things in Ras Tiegan, so quickly, and sobbing so hard, they he could barely keep up. Somehow, she was pregnant, though he couldn’t imagine when it was she and Eshe would have had time to fuck. Maybe the same way Eshe and I did, he had thought, and gnawed on that all over again.

  She had clung to him the way she clung to Eshe, and he was annoyed by it. He missed Kage’s easy silence. He would even have taken Khatijah’s curt attitude over Isabet’s terrified neediness.

  “Where are we, then?” he asked. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. It was still a long time until dawn, but Nyx would have them moving again soon. If Raine and his captors were still sleeping, it gave them time to catch up.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “This is Inoublie. I think I know where they’re taking him.”

  “What?”

  “There is a man here who collects shifters. Eshe and I were tracking him.”

  “How does a man who tracks shifters—”

  “Just listen. I’m not stupid. You all keep treating me as if I’m stupid. The reason the government never moved against him is because he’s cousin to the Queen of Nasheen. She is half-Ras Tiegan. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your politician is being brought to Inoublie where he lives.”

  “Are you sure about this? You know where he lives?”

  “No, but I know someone who does.”

  “Who?”

  Isabet glanced over at Nyx. “She’s not going to like it,” Isabet said.

  41.

  Inaya blew into her headquarters as a sea-green gale, stirring dog hair and feathers, sending coded papers and discarded napkins flying off desks and tables. The halls were filled with the dead and dying, the partially shifted, the mangled, the bloody, the mad. Inaya took them all in as she passed. Her anger
mounted.

  She slid under the door of the communications room, and found Michel and Gabrielle in a heated discussion with two local cell leaders. The rear door was open, so their bickering was on display for half the desperate people in the hall.

  Inaya recalled herself. She pulled her disparate elements back together, and reformed there in the room, vomiting flies and red beetles.

  She didn’t even bother to wait until her transformation was complete before she slogged to the table on half-formed legs, trailing long strings of mucus.

  She put her hands on the table and waited for her tongue and throat and lungs to come back into form.

  Then she said, “What the fuck have you all done?”

  “Inaya!” Gabrielle said.

  “What are you doing here?” Inaya said. “You should be in Montmare. Who’s running things there?”

  “I had to evacuate. There have been repercussions. We expected—”

  “We?” She rounded on Michel. “This was not the course of action I directed.”

  “Let me get you a habit,” Michel said. “You should cover up.”

  “Move another step and I will unmake you where you stand. Our people are dying in the hall, and you care about my nudity? Are you a madman?”

  Michel went very still.

  “I want a status update,” Inaya said.

  “We have riots in all the major cities,” Gabrielle said quickly. She tapped up a map of Ras Tieg on the slide. “As you instructed, we carried out operations in—”

  “My instructions?”

  Gabrielle glanced at Michel. “Yes, your instructions. Michel—”

  “Tell me what my instructions were, Michel,” Inaya said.

  The two cell leaders, Alix and Juste, hovered in the door. More curious operatives peered in.

  Michel cleared his throat. “This was an operation in planning for some time,” he said. “You and I discussed it before—”

  “Before I told you that violence would simply confirm to this country’s citizens that we are dangerous animals that should be put down.”

  “Strength!” Michel said, and his face flushed. “We must show strength or be put down like animals. You think simply showing them our numbers would make an impression? You know what these people find very impressive? Strength. And we have shown them that.”

  “Indeed,” Inaya said. “And now half our movement’s leaders are foolishly holed up in the same space as the noose grows tighter and tighter. How long do you think it will be before they find us? If they have not been tipped off already when they followed these three?”

  “Inaya,” Gabrielle said softly. “I don’t understand. Was this not done at your direction?”

  Inaya’s gaze never left Michel. “I have been in prison for many, many weeks.”

  “That’s impossible,” Alix said. “I received word from you just last week.”

  “Michel said you had simply gone underground,” Gabrielle said.

  “Oh, I was underground,” Inaya said. “Yes. He ensured that. Didn’t you, Michel?”

  He shifted. It was not a quick process, not even for an experienced shifter. She, however, had more freedom and forms than he would ever have. She transformed her arm into the ridged leg of some massive insect, and stabbed him in the thigh with it. The shock to his body halted the shift. He collapsed, grabbing at his bloody leg with skinny arms that had just begun to sprout stubby feathers.

  “Alix, get me Romaire and Aslain from security. I want Michel confined,” Inaya said.

  Alix ran off. Michel swore at her.

  “As for the rest of you, tell me what we’re going to do to fix this bloody mess.”

  Inaya had been awake for nearly forty hours. Each time she thought she could not stay awake another moment, some other bit of terrible news came in. Three cell leaders, including Hynri, had been detained. Six detention centers had been overrun by her people, and most of the raiders and the inmates killed. There was mass looting and destruction across seven major cities. An entire district in Montmare had been burned to the ground.

  She had dispatched Alix and Juste to separate safe houses far outside Inoublie. Whether or not they would get there safely, she had no idea, but it was far better than keeping them all here. As for her headquarters, she had given orders that it was to be packed, moved, and purged immediately. If the detention centers had cell leaders, it was only a matter of time before one of them gave up this place.

  Her retreat was fast, but calculated. She had put this plan into place the year before. She knew where they needed to go. How she would build anything positive from the madness, she did not know. Right now, she just needed to salvage as much as possible before they were all burned out.

  She was sitting at the stove in her room, burning stacks of correspondence, when Adeliz appeared.

  “There’s someone here to see you,” Adeliz said.

  “They will need to wait. Our timeline cannot be altered.”

  “All right,” Adeliz said. She turned away.

  “Wait,” Inaya said. She held one of Eshe’s reports in her hand, one of the first he had brought her, before Inaya insisted on sending them on undocumented. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It’s Isabet Softel,” Adeliz said.

  “Oh, my God,” Inaya said. “Take me to her.”

  She followed Adeliz up and into the secure reception room. Inaya strode confidently after her. Perhaps something could be salvaged, she thought. If Isabet was alive, almost anything was possible. What she and Eshe had done was of no concern. All that mattered was that they were back, precisely when she needed them.

  Inaya stepped into the reception room—and stopped short.

  Isabet was not alone.

  Inaya had expected Isabet and Eshe, looking like children caught dressing up in their parents’ clothes. She intended to pat Eshe on the shoulder and scold Isabet lightly, and then put them to work helping her pack. She believed God had answered all the prayers she sent to him through Mhari during her long confinement.

  The last thing she expected to see was Nyxnissa so Dasheem standing next to Isabet Softel.

  Inaya was speechless.

  Isabet was filthy. Inaya realized, with a start, that the girl’s left arm had been severed at the elbow. Her hair was a matted tangle, pulled back from a scarred, reddened face that was barely recognizable. And Nyx—Nyx was unmistakable, though the years had been especially unkind to her, and the last several—weeks? Months?—even less so. She saw fresh wounds, scars, bruises on her hands and face. She, too, was filthy. Inaya could smell them even from three paces away. And they were not alone. Behind them were a Chenjan man and a Nasheenian man, as well as a strikingly lovely woman who stood out all the more because she appeared to be the cleanest of them.

  It took a full breath before she realized the Chenjan man was Rhys. That, too, was shocking. Her mind began to work, preparing her for the worst. Nyx only showed up when things were very, very bad. Inaya worried because she could not conceive of anything worse than her current situation. It spoke of a lack of imagination on her part, and right now, that could prove dangerous.

  Inaya went forward. She took Isabet by her good arm and asked, “What has she done to you?”

  “Eshe is dead,” Isabet said, and her eyes filled.

  “I’m sorry,” Inaya said. She swallowed a spasm of grief. But what did she expect? Nyx had gotten involved. The fact that Isabet and Rhys and these others still lived was miracle enough.

  Inaya pulled her away from the others. “Go with Adeliz and get cleaned up. Let me speak with Nyx.”

  Isabet slipped past her. Adeliz took her hand and led her back into the maze of rooms beneath them.

  “You look good,” Nyx said, in Nasheenian.

  “How is it you took up with her again?” Inaya asked Rhys.

  “I haven’t,” he said. “It’s all very complicated.”

  “I can imagine,” Inaya said. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I beli
eve you owe me a favor,” Nyx said.

  “A… what?”

  Nyx folded her arms. “I have it on good authority that girl’s not just some minor operative.”

  “And who told you that?”

  Nyx looked back at the Nasheenian man behind her. “Let’s just say I know a guy who’s good at eavesdropping.”

  Inaya glanced behind her, to ensure no one was in the hall. Few of her people spoke Nasheenian, but she had not come this far for lack of caution.

  “She’s an oracle,” Inaya said.

  “An oracle?”

  “Daughter to a living saint, a saint reborn.”

  “Is this some Ras Tiegan thing? I don’t follow.”

  “We have saints.”

  “Yeah, your minor gods.”

  “Saints,” Inaya said. “They speak directly to God, and have been chosen, touched by Him in some way. Many have been known to perform miracles. Her mother is a living saint, a woman known to perform miracles. She can cure illness, yet has no magical skill. There are… other things. And Isabet is her only daughter. The others died in the womb.

  “So people listen to her? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “People believe she speaks directly to God.”

  “I don’t get it. Nobody’s recognized her?”

  “She is a virgin, and daughter to a living saint. She only ever went out veiled. No one knew who she was.”

  “But you did.”

  “I… it was in our best interests to find a powerful religious or political figure we could align ourselves with.”

  “And she was young. Impressionable.”

  Inaya pursed her mouth.

  “Oh, I get it,” Nyx said. “And now you owe me a favor, right?”

  “Nyx, this is not the time—”

  “I can see that,” Nyx said. “In a hurry, right?”

  Inaya closed her eyes. God had a very grim sense of humor. “What do you want?”

  “I need to get into Jolique’s house. He’s cousin to the Queen of Nasheen I hear.”