“Your sins don’t make you cleaner than I, Nyxnissa. I kill for the good of Nasheen, but you kill indiscriminately, with malice. That is the difference between us. Now I ask you to think of our country, our boys. Think of ending the war.”
The particles making up the image began to come apart and diffused through the room until nothing was left of Raine’s message but the smell of burned lemon.
“How the fuck did he know we had her?” Khos said.
Nyx threw the empty newsroll across the room. “Because our fucking transceivers are hackable,” she spat. “Anneke, pack up. Now.”
“But, boss—”
“Now.”
“Boss, we ain’t going to trade, are we? Taite’s dead. Rhys’s dead too, wager. I worked for Raine. That old man—”
“You think he hurt—” Khos began.
“Don’t think about Rhys,” Nyx said, and something came into her voice, something that twisted Khos’s gut, because it sounded like fear. “Pack. Both of you. We’re going to Bahreha. Anneke, did you pack my sword?”
“I wasn’t thinking about Rhys,” Khos said. “I was thinking about Mahrokh and her house.”
“Don’t worry about the whores.”
“I got it wrapped up in the back, boss. You want it?”
“Yeah. You got the baldric too?”
Khos gritted his teeth. He walked past Taite’s rotting head to get his rifle. Anneke shot past him, stuffing extra transceivers into a gunnysack.
“If he knows where we are, he’ll have the place staked out,” Khos said. “Why didn’t he take Inaya?”
Nyx didn’t look at Inaya. She took the bundle Anneke handed her and unwrapped her sword and baldric. “Because she isn’t worth anything. Anneke, pack the bakkie. Go. Now. We don’t need those.”
“Boss, this is the biggest gun we’ve—”
“Leave it. Downstairs. Now.” Nyx tightened her baldric and turned to Inaya. “Are you coming or not?”
Inaya looked back at the box containing her brother’s head. From the other room, her son still cried.
“I’m better off here,” Inaya said.
“You’re not,” Khos said. He strode up to her, despite Nyx’s look, and pressed his hand to her shoulder. He didn’t care, in that moment, if she hit him. “Come with us, or he’ll kill you. If he doesn’t, Nyx’s sisters will. You’re tied to her now, and if you’re tied to Nyx, you’re dead without her. We all learned that a long time ago.”
“I don’t belong to her,” Inaya spit.
“I don’t either,” Khos said, “but if you have to choose sides, choosing Nyx might keep you alive awhile longer.”
“Like it kept Taite alive?”
“He wouldn’t have made it this far without her. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Come on, get up.”
“Leave her,” Nyx said. She was pulling loops of bullet rounds over her head. She had a scattergun in one hand.
Khos ignored her, kept his attention on Inaya. She was far too pale, her eyes hollowed. It was as if someone had pulled something from her, drained her dry of blood and passion. He remembered Taite telling him stories of his brash, arrogant sister, the one who had once driven in from town with a stolen bakkie she had cut up and rewired, her hair butchered because women weren’t allowed to drive. In her haste, it was the only way she could think of to pass for a boy. In the back seat of the stolen bakkie was a dying shifter who’d been stoned in the street.
“She cried,” Taite had said. “She cried and cried, but she saved that woman’s life.”
But this Inaya would not look at him. This Inaya said, “Take my son. Your women will get him a place.”
Khos took her by the arm, a surprisingly small arm, and pulled her—not ungently—to her feet. “Stand,” he said softly. “Your son is yours, no one else’s. Don’t deprive him of a mother because you’re too scared to stand.”
“We’re going!” Nyx shouted from the door. “Grab Nikodem!”
“We ain’t all gonna fit in the bakkie, boss.”
“You ride up top,” Nyx said. Anneke was already pounding down the steps. Nyx hesitated in the doorway, turning back to look at Khos and Inaya.
Khos met Nyx’s gaze, and for a long moment they stared at each other. Her burnous was tied only at the neck and hung behind her like a cape, so he saw her without any pretense, any added bulk, no deception. Her eyes were hard and black, and she looked at him the way she looked at everything else in her life—with cold determination, a willingness to part with whatever she knew, she saw, she had, to accomplish whatever she set herself to. She would leave him. She would leave Inaya. The wounds snaking up her legs were almost healed. He noted the missing fingers on the hand that clutched the scattergun, and the worn hilt of the sword sticking through the slit in her burnous. The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.
“Yes or no?” Nyx said. “It’s a long drive.”
Inaya gazed up at Khos, her face a mask of mourning. Her son cried.
“Yes,” Khos said.
Nyx started down the stairs.
“Get your son,” Khos said.
Inaya went back to her room, and Khos helped her pack her carpetbag. She put her son into a sling and held him to her.
Khos herded her and her son down the stairs. “I’ll be right behind you,” he said.
Inaya stumbled downstairs.
Khos walked over to the box containing Taite’s head. Nyx couldn’t protect them. She had lost Taite, and she would lose Rhys.
Khos had promised to look after Inaya.
Damn him and his bloody fucking promises.
He pulled the transceiver out of his burnous pocket and called Haj.
“What do you have for me?” she said.
“Everything,” Khos said, and put the lid back on the box.
Something inside of him hurt, and he thought about why he’d come to Nasheen four years before. He thought about the question Nyx had asked him when she interviewed him in that cramped little storefront in downtown Punjai.
“Why leave a peaceful country and come out here to wallow in all this war and shit?” she’d asked.
“I wanted to go somewhere where the pain outside matched what I felt, here,” he’d said, and touched his heart, and thought of his son. “A country at war with itself seemed like the best option.”
32
Nyx drove them out of Dadfar and into the desert. A fine dust coated the interior of the bakkie and the seams of their skin. She wore a pair of goggles and a scarf tied over her butchered hair. Nyx left a long trail of dead and dying beetles in her wake and tried not to think too much about a dancer on the other side of Bahreha.
Inaya sat next to her, her little body tense, clutching her baby to her breast. She stared out across the flat plain of the desert, the monotonous line of the road, and said nothing.
Sitting next to the door, Khos kept his rifle in his lap and his elbow jutting out the open window.
Anneke tapped on the windshield when the heat got too bad, and they stopped to wait out the worst of the day at a little roadside oasis.
The place was empty except for a couple of stray cats and some black tumbleweeds rolling through the empty courtyard of a long-abandoned market. Nyx knew Bahreha. In the spring, this whole blasted desert heath turned green. She had laid mines just north of the city and dug trenches out here, somewhere real close. The whole place looked different in the summer. It was like she was traveling on some long road, headed full circle.
Nyx popped the trunk and pulled off the cooling tarp she’d thrown over Nikodem. Despite the tarp, Nikodem was sweating a lot, too much. Her face was swollen, and when the tarp came up, she didn’t do much more than loll her head back and squint. Her eyes looked funny.
Nyx pulled her out and hauled her over to the relative shade
of the massive stone arches bordering the courtyard. A couple of mangy palm trees jutted up from the sandy ground near the fountain. She saw some termite mounds in the far distance, but no trace of acid sprayers or centipedes. Inaya moved after them to stand in the shade. Khos shadowed her.
Anneke trudged up to the fountain and returned with a half-filled bucket of brackish water. Nyx doused Nikodem in it. Anneke went back for more, and the two of them wet Nikodem through until the off-worlder shivered and her eyes started to focus again.
“What did you give her?” Anneke asked.
“Nothing. She’s overheated,” Nyx said.
“Fool,” Nikodem murmured, and her speech was slurred. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Nyx said.
Nikodem firmed up her mouth.
Nyx slapped her.
Nikodem slobbered all over herself and started shaking. “Oh, it’s much better than you could imagine,” Nikodem said, and grinned a stupid grin, then winced. Her lip was split and bloody. She was brutally heat sick.
“You wanted to play Nasheen and Chenja for fools, and now you’ll die for it,” Nyx said. “I’m not the one looking the fool here.”
“I’ve created whole armies on our world, the real world,” Nikodem said. “Dumb beasts. I could create armies here. Different sorts of beasts, beasts you could never imagine. Your magicians and shifters…. You have no idea of their potential. We just need to understand… The Chenjans are more advanced than you are, did you know it? All that holds them back is their religion. They fear God’s wrath. But I could breed you the sorts of creatures you couldn’t even imagine. Armies. I can breed them full-formed, like baby foals.”
Nyx had no idea what a foal was, but it didn’t sound good. “Anneke,” Nyx said, “more water.” The water would keep her talking.
Anneke walked back to the fountain. Khos stood by, watching Inaya more than the road. Nyx didn’t like the way they looked at each other. She didn’t like a whole lot of things right now.
Nyx crouched next to Nikodem but kept one eye on the road.
“Listen, woman, listen,” Nikodem said. “No longer will you have to see your sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, dying at the front. You can manufacture these beasts and send them out in your stead. Let God decide.”
“Beasts?” Nyx grimaced. “Shifters aren’t beasts. What do you and the Kinaanites get out of this?”
Nikodem turned her head away again. Nyx punched her this time. Closed fist.
Nikodem hiccupped and shook. She bared her bloody teeth and spat. “You’ll find that ours is the only way to understand God. There was only one prophet, one Son of God, and He bled and died for us! Yours was a warmonger, just as you are, and you will fight your war unto death. You say you are people of the Book, but your religion is black, corrupted.”
“Yeah, your Prophet’s such a pacifist he sends you to other worlds for weapons and tells you to keep us fighting each other? Fuck that, you hypocrite alien.”
Nikodem coughed and hacked. “We have a war to fight. You don’t understand. We fight in God’s name.”
“I understand just fine,” Nyx said.
Nikodem rattled off something that sounded like a curse. “With shifters and magicians, we could pound our enemies into submission. We can do much, blending your genes with ours.”
So Nikodem was just another gene pirate, a fucking interstellar gene pirate, manufacturing weapons for her own God’s war, calling Nasheenians and Chenjans dung beetles, like some holier-than-thou Tirhani.
“I should cut your head off right now,” Nyx said.
Anneke returned with more water. Nyx dumped it over Nikodem’s head.
The woman shivered, then spat, “Oh, what do you know? You’re just an uneducated bloodletter. What do you know about God’s plan, about the salvation of your soul?”
“No more than a butcher,” Nyx said. “But a butcher knows how to serve it halal.” She stood. “Anneke, put her back in the trunk.”
Two-faced, two sides, like Rasheeda.
It all made her head hurt. She had one good solution to this problem, the same old solution, but Raine wanted Nikodem alive. Nyx could kill her later.
After Anneke dragged Nikodem back into the trunk, Nyx turned to her and Khos. “Khos, I’m going to need your shot. It’s not as good as Rhys’s, but it’ll do. Can you work your way around from the other side of the hills? I want you to fire on Raine if he pulls first.”
“And if he doesn’t pull?”
“We walk away.”
“And leave Nikodem?” Khos said, and she heard the surprise in his voice.
“When we walk away, I want you to shoot her.”
“I won’t do that.”
“I’m a bad shot, Khos. I can’t do point.”
“I’ll do it, boss,” Anneke said. “I’m a better shot than the old dog anyway.”
“Fine.” Nyx pulled a ball of sen out of her pocket, rolled it between her fingers. “He’ll have his own shooter up there. You take that one out. When me and Khos are clear, I need you to shoot Nikodem.”
“And Raine?”
“You leave Raine to me.”
“You know he travels with a magician,” Khos said.
“We’ll have ours there.”
“He’ll be drugged,” Khos said. “And he’s hardly a magician even when he’s sober.”
Nyx pocketed the sen. “I’ve got some unguent in the back. We’ll slather ourselves with it before we go in. It’ll slow the bugs down, at least. Confuse their sense of smell.
“Keep your transceiver on you. If the plan changes, I’ll let you know,” Nyx said. “When we have Rhys—after we get some distance—you take Nikodem out. Or, if Raine tries to pull when we back up, you shoot whoever pulls the weapon. You can try shooting at the magician, but she’ll likely have some defenses up. Lay down some cover fire, and I’ll deal with Raine. Me and Khos can take Nikodem’s head and wrap it in the organic burnous. Then we get the fuck out of here and go home and collect our money.”
“Sounds thin,” Anneke said.
“Sounds like all we’ve got,” Khos said, and pulled up the hood of his burnous. “Can we go now?”
They drove out past the shrine marking the sandy road that headed up toward the hills. Nyx dropped Anneke off with a good burnous and a bag of water, and Anneke loped off toward the hills with her rifle slung over her shoulder.
Nyx looked over at Inaya and her kid, at Khos. He was staring out the window. “You ready?” she asked.
“Let’s get it over with,” he said. Inaya’s kid started crying again.
“Give Anneke a minute to set up,” Nyx said. She got out of the bakkie and walked around the shrine. She needed some space.
Nyx sat down on the other side of the shrine, in the shadow of the great curved slab, and watched a couple lizards scuttle away from her. She took a deep breath and clenched and unclenched her hands, taking a good look at them. She thought about Raine. Tried not to think about Rhys, about what Raine had done to him.
Raine knew her, knew how she worked. He’d taught her how to work that way. He knew all about Bahreha. It was why he asked her out here.
She rubbed at her eyes with her palms.
“Nyx,” Khos said.
She looked up. He stood over her, too tall and too broad, a foreign man in a foreign country. But, then, here in the Chenjan desert, she was a foreigner too. And an infidel. An enemy.
“Anneke’s reached the top,” he said.
“Yeah. All right.”
She pulled out the unguent from one of the gear bags. They wiped themselves down with it and then got into the bakkie and drove out to the base of the hills, until the road got too rocky to drive on.
Nyx parked, and Khos helped her move some stones behind the back tires.
“I want you to stay here, Inaya,” Nyx said. “When you see us heading back, I want you to take the stones out from behind the tires and start the bakkie. Understan
d?”
“Yes,” Inaya said.
Nyx checked all of her gear and cleaned her pistols. Khos cleaned his own. They did not speak. She nodded at him when he was done, and Khos popped the trunk and pulled Nikodem out. Nyx gave her some water, but the alien could barely keep her feet.
Nyx and Khos got Nikodem to walk by holding her up between them.
They stumbled through some low-lying scrub and into a rocky gully. The hills reared up on either side of them, a pair of heavy breasts that Nyx might have found comforting under different circumstances.
“Let’s keep out of the gully,” she said. The sky was clear above them, but there were dark clouds just north, and that meant it was raining up in the mountains. Gullies filled up hard and fast in the desert. The water might be coming their way already. She didn’t trust the weather. She didn’t trust much of anything.
They killed a couple of acid-spraying chiggers along the way and surprised a centipede eating what looked like a sand cat kitten, but they were all wild bugs—nothing Raine had thrown at them.
Nyx and Khos—with Nikodem still between them—skirted the edge of the gully, which meant treading through waist-high brush. Long scratches lined Nyx’s already scarred legs, and a flurry of biting bugs rose in soft clouds around them.
They cleared the scrub and rounded a bend in the path along the gully, giving Nyx a clear view past the base of the hill. She saw a tall, solitary figure wearing yellow robes. Bugs crawled along the hem of the robe. Magician.
Nyx told Khos to hold up.
Nikodem sagged between them. Nyx left her in Khos’s grasp and stepped forward to the lip of the gully. Sand and stones tumbled down the soft slope and into the ditch below.
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