Rapture

by Kameron Hurley

  “One condition in all this,” Nyx said to Safiyah. “You can have Alharazad, but I do what I want with Fatima. Understood?”

  Safiyah shrugged. “I never developed much of a taste for politicians. The bloodletters were always far tastier.”

  Nyx didn’t believe in martyrs, because she’d been one. It was easy to become disillusioned with something others thought she was. She knew the rot at her core. It was good to know what you were before you acted foolishly. It kept things in perspective.

  The first thing Nyx did when they clawed their way back into Nasheen was buy a wad of sen from a street vendor in Amtullah. Nyx got Ahmed settled back into the storefront and had him contact Mercia. Nyx preferred an area of operations far from the bloodshed. She didn’t expect to come back from it. She gave Ahmed a list of people to call, and took care of some quick legal business, then locked it all away in a coded lockbox.

  “I’m not back in two days,” she told Ahmed, “here’s the pattern for the lockbox. Take what you want and get out.”

  She figured he would take it long before that, but didn’t mention it. With just one team member left, she could actually afford to pay him for the months he traveled with her.

  “Anything else before you get started?” Ahmed said.

  “Just one,” Nyx said. “No matter what happens, try to keep that pretty little face of yours intact.”

  Nyx chewed sen as she and Safiyah approached Blood Hill. The bel dame novice at the gate asked their business. Nyx said, “Tell Fatima Kosan I’ve brought in Raine al Alharazad.”

  The filter admitted them almost immediately. They were led to Fatima’s quarters on Blood Hill by no fewer than a dozen bel dames. Nyx thought that very complimentary.

  The bel dames announced them. Nyx pushed past them before they’d finished.

  And there Fatima sat behind her bel dame council desk, wearing her high council finery. Next to her, as Safiyah had promised, was Raine’s mother, and the most notorious bel dame in Nasheen, the one that nobody in the country had the stomach or the skill to bring in—Alharazad.

  “Where is he?” Alharazad said.

  “So you figured that he’d told me you were in on this,” Nyx said. “So you showed up to confirm I had him.”

  “Obviously,” Alharazad said. “Where is he?” She spit sen on the floor. On the whole, she was much improved from the last time Nyx saw her. Her eyes were still a little bloodshot, nestled in a haggard face, but she had cleaned up quite a bit, cropped her white hair, and washed. She dressed in rather expensive maroon trousers and matching tunic with silver stitching. She had a pistol at either hip and a dagger lashed to one thigh.

  Fatima set aside a ledger she had been consulting and pressed her hands to the table. An old bel dame show of respect, that—showing the person you were with that you were unarmed and come to parley in peace.

  “I brought Raine home like you asked,” Nyx said.

  Fatima’s eyes widened. “Not to Nasheen?”

  “That’s where I was supposed to bring him, right?”

  Fatima glanced to Alharazad. Alharazad shook her head.

  “He’s not in Nasheen,” Alharazad said.

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “Because we would all be dead,” Alharazad said.

  Inaya watched as Raine’s body began to burst apart. There was something… leaking from him. Not bugs or bile or blood but… sand. Gray sand.

  “What did you do?” Inaya said.

  Isabet was crying. She dropped the bloody dagger, and pressed her filthy hand to her face. “I’m not Genevieve’s daughter,” she said. “I’m one of her handmaidens.”

  “My God.”

  Inaya stepped back into the doorway.

  Isabet stretched her bloody hand skyward. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I am the last. Only I could do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “She says you’re an abomination. They infected all of us and brought us north. One of the girls refused. They had her dig her own grave with her hands, then cut off her hands and buried her there. I escaped, but they found me. They had another use for me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I didn’t do this I’d be dead with the others in the desert. Eshe, I’m so sorry.”

  “Isabet, why didn’t you—”

  “It’s my burden. If I didn’t kill him, what’s inside me would fester eventually. It’d kill me. I had to, Inaya. I’m sorry.”

  The sand slithered from Raine’s body like a living creature. As Inaya watched, it leapt forward, adhering to Isabet’s body. The blood on her hand disappeared. Isabet began to scream. Blood appeared at her eyes, her mouth.

  Inaya ran.

  “Get out!” Inaya yelled. “Get out! Out, all of you!” She sprinted down the hall, crying out at the last of her people remaining in the old headquarters. As she ran, she heard more cries behind her. And then a hissing, spitting sound, growing louder and louder.

  Inaya herded the cook up. She grabbed Adeliz by the arm and pushed her toward the stairs. She glanced back once. The gray sand had become a tide, multiplied. It overwhelmed one of her clerks. He screamed. It rushed into his mouth. His body seemed to burst, then disintegrate.

  Inaya yelled at Adeliz to run.

  They went up two flights and surged into the open air. The rain had let up. Inaya ran ahead. Her people had darted off into different directions. She stared at the rooftops. “Up!” she yelled after them. “Find high ground!”

  The door behind her burst open. A rolling stir of gray sand poured out after her. She took off again, running for the church. It was the tallest building in Inoublie. Her skin prickled, then roiled, and as she ran, she simply let go and burst apart into a misty green cloud, pouring forward as fast as the wind could carry her. All around her, she saw more shifters transforming themselves into their alternate forms ahead of the gray tide.

  Inaya reached the parapet of the church and found a safe place to reform. She pulled herself back together, painfully, and shook off long strings of mucus, coughing black beetles. The air was bitterly cold against her slimy, naked skin, but she ignored it, and stared, instead, at the tide of gray flowing out along the streets. With every person it devoured, it seemed to grow larger, stronger; a gray ocean come to eat the entire city.

  She saw Adeliz across the street on the opposite roof, standing with two parrots and a raven. Below, those unable to flee fast enough screamed and disintegrated under the onslaught.

  Inaya stared at the wave, wondering if it would ever crest. Surely it would run out of organic matter to eat? It couldn’t keep getting larger, could it? And what had Isabet meant, that this was all for her? Then she heard a terrible crackling sound, and gazed back to the factory. The sand had devoured the base of the structure, the bug secretions that had bound the base of the building together.

  It didn’t just eat people. It ate everything organic. Inaya raised her head and gazed out past the filter, to the lush, wild jungle that surrounded Inoublie.

  “My God,” she said, because Nyx had delivered them a plague after all.

  “Well, you’re mistaken about that,” Nyx said. “He’s in Nasheen, and he’s very much alive.”

  Alharazad laughed. “Don’t try and bluff me, girl. Raine isn’t coming home alive. We made certain of that.”

  “Why did you send me after him if you never meant him to come home alive?”

  “It was because we didn’t want him coming back alive that we sent you, you fool,” Alharazad said. “I sent you after him because you were the only bel dame we had with the guts to murder him where he stood, and you’d do it without getting the order.”

  “So that’s why you wanted me to be a bel dame,” Nyx said. “So I’d kill him for you. What purpose does that serve?”

  Fatima sighed. “Nyx, you are sadly behind the times.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Nyx was aware of Safiyah beside her, fairly humming with anticipation. This was the deal. It was Nyx who wanted the an
swers this time. Safiyah was ready to burn the place down around them. Nyx wondered how that would go, with over a thousand bel dames on Blood Hill. But then, she didn’t expect to make it out of this interview.

  “There’s no room for bel dames in the new world, Nyx,” Alharazad said. “I didn’t believe it, not until Fatima came to me about it. If we want power in the new order, we need to be something else.”

  “‘We’? You mean you and her.”

  Nasheen was about power. Having it. Wanting it. Killing for it. Without power you weren’t anything. And when you saw power shifting, you either fought for the old way or you blazed a new one. Alharazad and Fatima had decided to burn it all down behind them. And murder Nyx and Khatijah and all the rest of their bel dame sisters behind them. Nyx should have figured that.

  “We need what those aliens have,” Alharazad said. “The First Families would have them shot out of the fucking sky. But let me tell you what a stronger leadership would do. One led by Fatima and myself. With the aliens’ help, we finish Chenja. We end the war properly. That’s all any of us ever wanted.”

  “This is all very unfortunate,” Fatima said. “You really need to tell us where Raine is. When a man like Raine has been lost, the Queen has only one choice to avoid civil war, and that’s to disband the order that took him out.”

  “How many women will die for his death? I assume you’ll blame more than just me.”

  “We’ve chosen a suitable number,” Alharazad said.

  “Tell me this, then,” Nyx said. “Since I’m such a fucking idiot. Why did you take Raine to Ras Tieg? The Queen’s cousin? What was that about?”

  Fatima said, “That was not our call.”

  “That was done at the Queen’s request.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “When she found out he was still alive, she asked that he be moved there to assist in taking care of their shifter problem,” Fatima said. “Two problems settled with one piece. There’s a rebellion there, you know. She requested that he be left there for you to dispose of. And if you didn’t, well… we had an agent in place to act if you didn’t.”

  “I—hold on. What?”

  “Raine was never meant to come home,” Alharazad said. “We told him he couldn’t come home so he’d convince you to let him stay in Ras Tieg. You forget, Nyxnissa. I was a bel dame long before you. And a far better one. We played you from the start. And you sang beautifully.”

  “What agent?” Nyx said, and then she knew. “The fucking Ras Tiegan girl.”

  Alharazad grinned. “Not so slow after all.”

  Inaya paced the parapet as the tide of sand lapped at the base of the church. There were hundreds of people up on the roofs now, watching as the sand bled the streets dry. The public buildings went down first. Inaya watched over a dozen people devoured as it succumbed.

  She looked again to the jungle. It would spread without end, eat the entirety of Ras Tieg. And then what? The world? She knew there were contagions bred to engulf certain people, or certain areas. Had this been tailored to the city, the country, or the world?

  “Mother Mhari, full of grace,” she muttered. She got down on her naked knees and prayed. She thought of God’s Angels, mutant shifters like her who had been trained only to hurt and destroy. She thought of her husband, Khos, and her children. She had told them she would make a better world. And instead, she had brought some spider into her house and now everything was disintegrating around her. She gazed up at the cloudy sky. No light, no signs, no miracles. Just her, naked on a roof in a tiny town at the edge of everything, with a choice to make.

  She got to her feet. When she shifted, she was able to move the matter she was not using… somewhere else. It was how she moved organic and inorganic objects… like a bakkie that she needed to get across a border. She didn’t know where the bits of her went when she did not need them, but she knew she could recall them at will. Or leave them, if she chose.

  Now she must do something very terrible, something that could upset everything, because though she was able to put pieces of herself into that other place, she had no idea what would happen if she tried to put something like… this there.

  Inaya drew a deep breath—

  and broke apart.

  “We’ll do with politics what we tried to do with blood,” Alharazad said. “You’ll see. Where’s Raine?”

  “You should know better, Alharazad. Nasheenian politics will always be full of blood,” Nyx said. “And Ras Tieg, too, it looks like.”

  Fatima sighed. “The girl was just one of Genevieve Leichner’s virgin maids. I’m astounded you didn’t see her for what she was immediately.”

  No, Nyx admitted, she always overlooked people who played at being weak. She’d made the same mistake with Inaya, way back when.

  “They were dispatched to infiltrate the Fourré some time ago,” Fatima said. “It’s not my pet project, but the Queen was very hopeful about the outcome. I told you we have been working closely with her on this. Ras Tieg has been highly unstable since the rise of the Fourré. Before then they were not much of anything. But when the Queen realized a simple trade could help us solidify our relations with Ras Tieg, she agreed.”

  “She traded them Raine for political stability?”

  “Where do you think she’s retiring once she steps down?” Alharazad said. “Not the fuck anywhere here. She’s not going to be popular much longer.”

  “I’m sorry we kept you out of much of this, Nyx, but you understand the necessity,” Fatima said. “You would have done the same.”

  Nyx felt numb. It was all so big that she had trouble getting her head around it. She had been used. Thoroughly, totally, and completely. She had given up everything—her home, and Anneke, Radeyah; and lost an entire team, lost Eshe—for what?

  Alharazad laughed. “You look so confused. It’s all right. Are you really the last one standing?”

  “Can’t be,” Fatima said. “You’d have to have gone through the tunnels to get back so quickly. Is this your new magician?”

  “Indeed,” Safiyah said. It was the first time she’d spoken.

  “And what are you called? Need a job?” Alharazad said, and laughed.

  “I am on a job, actually,” Safiyah said lightly. “Perhaps you remember me, Alharazad. Surely you of all people remember my name, and how you angered my Family when you murdered our brothers.”

  For a moment, Nyx didn’t register the look of horror on Alharazad’s face. She thought it was just gas.

  But as Alharazad’s mouth began to work, Nyx realized it was more than just some passing bodily discomfort.

  “You,” Alharazad said.

  Safiyah grinned. “Me,” she said.

  Inaya tore herself into a billion pieces. It was freedom. Complete, utter, perfect freedom. When she tore herself, she tore part of the world. Something folded. But instead of letting that piece of the world close back up, she kept it open. She bent the spaces around the tide of sand, and began to funnel it to the place where she kept herself.

  There was a moment of deep resistance. Then the sand, too, began to break down, break apart. She transformed it. One moment, seething gray death. The next, inert matter broken up into its basic parts, perfectly packaged for storage in the twist she had made in the world.

  She broke the weapon apart bit by bit, even as more people screamed and died around her, and the flow of sand gushed toward the edges of the filter. She began to spread herself thinner and thinner, blanketing the town, the world. She heard the caw of a raven.

  As she spread apart, she was less and less aware of herself. The matter broke beneath her. She broke against it. She was losing. Something was being lost.

  Safiyah gazed upon the face she first saw in the palms of her handler, several months past. She had enjoyed her sojourn in the desert, tracking down the one woman sure to draw this one out of hiding.

  Alharazad was not an easy woman to find, or to fool. Not unless she wanted to be found. And Nyx was the sort of w
oman that Alharazad delighted in underestimating. Safiyah knew, because she hadn’t thought much of her either, in the beginning. The colonial was slow, uneducated, and very dirty. But resilient. Terribly resilient.

  Safiyah said, “What, no greeting?”

  “You know each other?” Nyx said.

  “In passing,” Safiyah said. “It took me a time to remember your face. You were much younger when you visited me, weren’t you?”

  “Who let you out?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to tell you everything now. Why would I do that? Simply congratulate me on finding you, and die gracefully.”

  The old woman tried to bolt. The bel dames around them surged.

  Nyx drew her blade, and stepped further into the room. She prepared for a good fight. A final fight. Safiyah could see it in her face, and thought it very cute.

  Safiyah called the ravenous swarm of flesh beetles she had kept on call in anticipation of just such an event.

  The screaming was perfectly lovely. The councilwoman even retched. Any day Safiyah could make a bel dame retch was a fine day indeed.

  And the troublesome retinue of armed bel dames? Well, that only took a few moments longer.

  Somedays Safiyah truly loved what she was.

  In some other life, there was a woman named Inaya il Parait. She married a man named Khos. Khos loved her all his life, but she did not love him. She loved her children. She loved her freedom. She loved the idea of being normal, and leading a normal life.

  But she had never been ordinary.

  And now, she was coming apart.

  Inaya watched the world from the sky. She was all-seeing, all-knowing. She wondered if this is what it felt like to be God. To see all the joy and horror at once, to pick up grains of sand one by one while a great tide of destruction threatened the world. She was just one entity. Her against the world felt like too much.

  She knew she was breaking further and further apart, knew that she was fading, knew that with each grain she removed from the world, it was one less piece of her that she would have the strength to pull back.