The Body Project

by Kameron Hurley

  “They never are,” Almira said. “Go peacefully with God, Nyx.”

  “I’ll go drunkenly, how’s that?”

  “Whatever pleases you.”

  “You put in a good word with my bel dame sisters,” Nyx said.

  “We’re not your sisters anymore, Nyx,” Almira said.

  Nyx watched Almira walk out of the train station where Dahab and three more red-clad bel dames met her. Nyx saw the delight in their faces. Lots of grinning, back slapping. They’d go out for drinks, later, fruity ones with little mango wedges. She wondered if Almira liked whiskey. Realized she was never going to find out.

  Rhys came up behind her. “You really miss being one of those?”

  “No,” she lied. “Let’s go get drunk.”

  “You get drunk,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “Home, or into a wall?”

  “Let’s not ruin the surprise,” he said, and moved away from her.

  She watched him go, admiring the outline of his form in the long tunic he wore. It was going to be a long night. Maybe a longer year.

  #

  They met at a cantina on the outskirts of Bahora, near the contaminated zone. It had a good view of the ruined mosque from the front bank of windows. Nyx was three whiskies in when Rhys finally gave in to the urging of two young, conservatively dressed magicians to dance.

  Nyx had seen him dance before, back in the magicians’ boxing gym where she recruited him. Watching him stirred something she preferred left dead, though. She decided she wasn’t drunk enough to watch Rhys dance, so switched chairs so she was facing Anneke, her back to Rhys. Taite was sidled up with a young man on the other side of the bar, another Ras Tiegan, from the look of him. No matter how far into the interior they went, Taite always managed to find a sloe-eyed young man to talk to.

  Anneke snickered into her own whiskey. “Can see why you keep Rhys on. What the fuck kind of name is that, though? That’s fucking Heidian, not Chenjan.”

  “Planning on dissolving his contract, actually,” Nyx said.

  “Why, you want to fuck him?”

  Nyx took a drink to disguise her discomfort. Was she that fucking obvious? “Do you?”

  Anneke grimaced, like she’d eaten bad fish. “My fucking is my business.”

  “So’s mine,” Nyx said. “One rule on this team. We keep it business. I don’t question your past. You don’t question mine. We let shit lie. I expect you weren’t born with the name Anneke any more than Rhys was born Rhys.”

  “Who says I’m staying?”

  “What, you think you’ll get a better offer?”

  “Always better offers.”

  “How about this… I get you a bigger gun. Biggest you can carry.”

  Anneke raised her glass. “To bigger guns, then.”

  Nyx stood. “Going to get some air.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  Nyx walked up through the back of the cantina and out onto the roof. The air smelled like burnt raspberries. There had been another air raid after evening prayer. Now it was nearly midnight, and she already felt hung over.

  She heard someone behind her, and turned.

  Rhys strode over, mopping at his brow with his sleeve. She noted his other hand, bandaged neatly. “Plotting?” he asked.

  “You know me well enough to know I don’t think any of this shit through beforehand.”

  “So what do you think?” He leaned up against the edge of the roof beside her.

  “About what?”

  “About me on your team.”

  She shrugged. Tried to be nonchalant. “You signed a contract. You can walk any time. Didn’t promise you this would be cheery. Wish you’d actually kill people with that aim. You’re a better shooter than you are a magician.”

  “I signed with you for protection, Nyx. You almost let me die today.”

  “You don’t look dead to me.”

  “The contract is a year,” he said. “I can see it through, but only if you don’t stab me in the back.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  He gazed across the city at the last gasp of the blue sun as it turned the horizon violet-topaz. “Just the way you’ve been looking at me.”

  “I don’t look at you.”

  “You look like you’re disappointed in how things went today.”

  “That’s… not what that look means.”

  “What is it, then?” He leaned closer.

  Nyx took a breath. Wasn’t sure if she was going to reach for him, or another drink.

  The drink, she knew, would be safer.

  The muezzin sounded the call to midnight prayer, a sweet, lyrical call in the old prayer language that was both comforting and oddly mournful. The call brought her up short. She let out her breath and looked toward the old broken mosque.

  “Let it be known that I bear witness: there is none worthy of worship but God, lord of all the worlds.”

  Nyx remembered sitting on the roof in the farm town she grew up in, Mushirah, listening to the faint sound of those words coming in from the mosque in the town center, so far away. She thought maybe someday she’d live there, become a muezzin herself. She liked to sing, though she wasn’t much good at it. Simple path. Simple life. God carved it all out for you, everyone said. One’s purpose in life was to worship and honor God. Five prayers a day, which God deigned to count as the prescribed fifty, if performed correctly. And the sixth prayer, Umayma’s prayer, the prayer God required of those spared from whatever horror the first people of Umayma had fled from in the black void of the stars. Midnight prayer, to remind them all of who their bodies belonged to, birth to death. Reminded them of their unique purpose.

  But it wasn’t so simple.

  There was the war. The Tirhanis. The Chenjans. The Ras Tiegans. The Mhorians. The world.

  The war had remade her. Reshaped her purpose. Why couldn’t she unmake it again?

  “Better go,” Nyx said, pulling away. “Ablution takes a while.”

  He paused a long moment, then, “I could wait.”

  An invitation. Open palm. Rebuild. She heard it and feared it.

  “There’s no water strong enough to get me to a state of purification,” Nyx said.

  “Then I need to go to prayer.”

  “And I need to pack up a body.”

  But they lingered there all the same, until the last note of the muezzin faded, and Bahora’s sea of faithful moved across the city as one to bend their bodies in prayer.

  Nyx tried to remember the words to the opening surah of midnight prayer, but realized she had forgotten it, somewhere between the front and the rebuild tank. They could rebuild all these bodies, here, every last one of them, but the lives, what came before – all ashes.

  “I’m going, Nyx,” Rhys said.

  “Yeah.”

  When he left, she tossed her empty glass over the edge of the roof, into the contaminated sand on the other side, and yelled “Fuck!” at the sky.

  She clasped her own empty hands in front of her. Held on tight. Every dawn was a chance to start over. Rebuild. Every day was another body.

  END