Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  “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.

  THE HEART IS EATEN LAST

  “Above all else, guard your heart,

  for everything you do flows from it.”

  —Proverbs 4:23

  THE SABOTEURS FLED the bombed-out wreckage of the smoking chemical plant like roaches from a burning cane field. Black smoke clotted the air. The toxic bloom unfurled across the desert sky outside Alabbas like some black portent. It rolled over the fleeing insurgents, covering their escape into the warren of workers’ houses and tumbledown ruins from the last time someone tried to build something worth a damn out here on the edge of the southern desert.

  Nyxnissa so Dasheem—bounty hunter, mercenary, and former government agent—watched the explosion from the hot rooftop of an abandoned mosque half a kilometer away. She pulled on a respirator without taking her eyes from the specs that gave her a keen view of the action. Behind her, her magician, Rhys, was crouched against a nearby minaret, arms over his head, yelling about the end of the world.

  Typical day, really.

  “Put on your respirator,” she said around hers.

  “As if that makes a difference,” he said. “That cloud will eat us down to bones in an hour. Why did you take this awful job? Why are we still here when we know what’s really happening?”

  Nyx adjusted her respirator and stuffed a pinch of sen into her mouth and sucked at it, considering the cloud. “Wind’s the wrong way,” she said. “It’s heading out over the desert.”

  “Why didn’t we stop them, Nyx?” Rhys said. “If nothing else we’ve done out here is worth anything, at least we could have stopped that.”

  Nyx watched the toxic cloud shift with the wind that now blew against her back, pushing the worst of the fallout in the other direction. Lucky break, that. Satisfied, she shoved the specs in her pack, pulled out the respirator, and spit bloody red sen on the sandy rooftop.

  “No one’s dead down there yet,” she said. “We’ll get to that next. Sometimes you got to let them burn and follow them back.”

  Rhys huffed out a breath. He was a handful of years younger than her, which put him in his early twenties. He had been on her bounty hunting team two years, though he insisted every six months that he was going to leave and find some new job, and this time he seemed to mean it. He was pretty enough, for a Chenjan, and she liked his eyes and his hands. But the complaining she couldn’t stand, especially because it all came out in his terrible Chenjan accent. The accent reminded her she was supposed to be killing people like him on the other side of the border, not consorting with them. The accent took her back to the warfront.

  She regretted taking this job, then. But the only time she didn’t regret taking a job was when she was drinking the money it earned her. Every other moment was stuffed with poisonous doubt. Served her right. She was a sucker for pretty boys and plain-faced girls, and the girl who had given her this job had been tough to refuse. What surprised Nyx was that even after saying yes, and finding out what she’d really been hired for, Nyx was still here anyway. Girls with silvery tongues had secrets, and Nyx couldn’t help but try and fish them out. It was all too irresistible.

  “Let’s go start the cleanup,” Nyx said.

  “We’re bringing the saboteurs in, then?” Rhys said. Hopeful. “I knew you would see sense!”

  “We’re finishing the job,” Nyx said. She picked up her scattergun, and pointed it at his chest.

  The day the girl with the job had walked into Nyx’s gym in Punjai, Nyx was sitting at the front with the gym owner, Husayn, and nursing her usual morning hangover. Nyx dredged a hunk of stale bread into a cup of thick, dark buni so strong just the smell of it made her feel sober. Buni was the kind of thick, sludgy coffee that she had dreamed about often at the front.

  Husayn sat opposite her, unwrapping her own hands after teaching an early morning class of eager young women how to throw punches. It had gone well enough until two of them got into a brawl over some slight, and one bit the ear off the other. The front of Husayn’s breast binding was spattered in blood.

  “What you teaching these girls?” Nyx said, nodding to the bloody floor. The class had cleared out, and old Marise, the Ras Tiegan cut woman, was mopping the concrete floor.

  “I don’t have any control over what they bring into the gym,” Husayn said. She sniffed at Nyx’s buni. “Shouldn’t eat right before a workout. Or are you just here to socialize?”

  Nyx shrugged. “Bit of both.”

  “Avoiding that Chenjan at your office more like,” Husayn said.

  Nyx slurped her buni.

  Husayn guffawed. “You never did take it well, not getting what you want.”

  “Got him on my team,
didn’t I?” Nyx said. “Can’t imagine what else I’d want from a man like that.”

  A shadow fluttered in the open doorway, and Nyx squinted into the light; a shapely silhouette moved into the gym. Nyx sat up a little straighter.

  The silhouette resolved itself into a thin-lipped woman in her early thirties. Her broad face was too smooth to be lower class, too marked to be First Family. Nyx guessed she was the daughter of some merchant family selling weapons or bugs; maybe landowners. Nyx had known farmers with plantations so large that they didn’t bother working the land themselves, and it kept them out of the cancerous suns. Why bother when there was cheap refugee labor? Nyx flexed her own fingers, remembering the repetitive work involved in harvesting sugar cane and rye on her mother’s farm. This woman didn’t have the face or hands of someone who’d worked a day in her life.

  The woman wore a long wrap of a dress, not trousers and certainly not a dhoti like Nyx’s, and that was odd. That was a southern look, meant for impressing foreigners in cooler climates like the prudish, idol-worshipping Ras Tiegans. In Punjai nobody much cared about covering up in fear of cancers. This close to the contested border with Chenja, everyone figured a bullet or a burst would get them long before cancer from the blazing suns and toxic air. It was too hot, and life too short, to worry about it.

  “You lost?” Nyx said, ripping off a hunk of bread with her teeth. She imagined doing the same to the woman’s dress.

  The woman narrowed her eyes at Nyx. She had gloriously shiny dark hair rolled up against her scalp—also a rural southern style. Nyx was leaning more and more toward thinking she was a land owner. There was a little scar on her upper lip; she’d clearly been born with a cleft palate, and been rich enough to get it fixed but not rich enough to remove the scar. She had a nose bold enough to be Chenjan, though her complexion was Nasheenian, and the thin lips and long face put Nyx in mind of some southern people like the Ras Tiegans or Drucians. In Nyx’s line of work, it paid to pay attention to the cut of a woman’s face. Could save you a whole lot of trouble.

  “I’m looking for Nyxnissa so Dasheem,” the woman said.

  Nyx leaned forward while tucking her left hand behind her, closer to the scattergun stowed at her back. “That so?”

  The woman held up her hands. She had long, slender fingers that Nyx imagined would feel delightful wrapped around her thighs. “I’m not armed,” the woman said.

  “Need a room?” Husayn said, snorting.

  “I came to discuss a job,” the woman said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem?” She was looking at Husayn.

  Husayn laughed, and Nyx relaxed. An assassin would have moved already. And been better at making her.

  “Get her some buni,” Nyx said.

  “I’m not a fucking bartender,” Husayn said. “I’m going to have a rub down.” She left them with her bloody hand wraps on the counter.

  Nyx patted the stool next to her. “I don’t bite unless you ask,” Nyx said.

  The woman looked visibly flustered at that, which Nyx found endearing. It had been some time since she had made a woman blush. Southern country kids, new to the city, were rarities this close to the border after a few hundred years of war. Only crazy kids and refugees came out here. Nyx supposed she herself was a bit of both.

  “You have a name?” Nyx asked. She finished the bread and licked her fingers.

  “Binyamin.”

  “That all? One name?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “Huh,” Nyx said. She held out her hand. Binyamin just stared at it. Nyx laughed. “You were brave enough to come out here, but too scared to play nice?”

  Binyamin cleared her throat. “I have concerns about . . . disease. You spent a year in prison, didn’t you?”

  “Couple years ago,” Nyx said. She wondered why that was relevant. “No more diseased in prison than anywhere else.”

  “I just thought that meant you’d look a little older, like your friend.”

  Nyx raised her brows. “I’m twenty-seven,” Nyx said. “Husayn’s thirty-two. Not a huge leap.”

  “I’ve known too many women like you and her,” she said. “My mother says she can read faces like yours the way hedge witches read palms. But I’m not as good at that.”

  “I find it hard to believe you’ve ever met anyone like me,” Nyx said, “on some southern plantation.”

  “How did . . .” She patted the rolls of her hair. “Ah, I suppose it’s obvious.”

  “So what are you here for, southern girl? The killing will cost you, but there’s plenty more that we could do for free.”

  “This is a serious matter.”

  Nyx stared into her cup and sighed. “Always is.”

  “There have been a series of explosions at weapons plants in the south. I’d like you to bring the saboteurs to justice.”

  “Nasheenian justice,” Nyx said, “is a head in a bag. Why should I care about the south? Stuff blows up every day. Not my job to handle that shit. That’s what bel dames and order keepers are for.”

  “It’s . . . a domestic problem. Not a terrorist problem. If we thought it was Chenjans we would use more orthodox methods.”

  “These are your family’s plants, then?”

  She nodded. “It could be any number of people,” she said, “but we have had some concerns with bel dames. That’s our worst fear, that it may be a bel dame. You know that these former government assassins don’t even answer to the government, once they are let loose.”

  “Then you should talk to the bel dame council. Only bel dames hunt down other bel dames. They exist as their own independent entity. They govern themselves.”

  “I went to them first,” she said. “But they told me she was just an apprentice, and never finished the training. That is close enough to a bel dame, to me, but not to them. They told me to speak to order keepers.” She made a sound of distress, deep in her throat. “As if order keepers would make a difference.”

  “But I would?”

  “You used to be a bel dame,” she said. “Most die in service, but you served your time in prison and survived.”

  “So who is this bel dame apprentice?” Nyx said.

  “My sister.”

  “Terrorism and family problems,” Nyx said. “I’m not in the mood for either today.” What Nyx wanted was a good fuck and a whisky tonight, not trouble with the bel dame council. She finished her buni. “I’m here to work out. You should go.” She grabbed her gloves off the counter as she slid off her seat.

  The woman flinched. “I can give you more than money,” she said. “You’ll have a favor from a very powerful family. We aren’t First Family, but when it comes to wealth and influence, we may as well be. Isn’t that something?”

  “A favor? Like what?”

  “Anything within . . . reason.”

  “Pardons for crimes?”

  “Only the Queen can grant that. But we have other types of influence. Land grants, political pull with the high and low councils, contacts in land management—”

  “What would I do with land?”

  “There’s a contested piece of property in Mushirah,” Binyamin said. “Your mother owned it. She was Bakira so Dasheem, am I right? You see, we know something about you.”

  Nyx wrinkled her nose. “My mother granted that land to my sister,” she said. Spit it, really, because she knew where this was going, and she really didn’t want to be interested. A soft country girl was one thing; a manipulative, wealthy, chemical weapons scoundrel who had done her homework was another. Now that Nyx was pushing thirty, she was trying to think with her head more often. So far that hadn’t been working out very well.

  “And your sister Kine has been stuck in a legal battle over it with the government for almost ten years. I can make that go away.”

  “What makes you think I give a shit about my sister, or that shitty plot of land?”

  “Everyone cares about something.”

  “Not me,” Nyx said. />
  Binyamin cut a sidelong look at her; big dark eyes, firm mouth, long, sad face. The sadness, the need, made Nyx hotter than she would admit. She wanted to bundle this woman up in her arms and save her—from what, she didn’t know. Everyone needed to be saved from something.

  Nyx slid her gloves across the table. “I’ll take it if you spar with me,” she said.

  Binyamin looked at the gloves as if they were some dangerous insect. “I don’t know how to box.”

  “Then I’ll show you,” Nyx said. She walked behind the counter and pulled out an extra set of gloves. “How serious are you?”

  “Very serious.”

  “Then put on some gloves.”

  Binyamin looked at Nyx’s wrapped hands. “Do I need that, the wrappings?”

  “Not with how hard you’re likely to hit,” Nyx said. She pulled on her own gloves and danced out to the center of the gym, motioning Binyamin to follow her.

  Binyamin went reluctantly after her, frowning at her gloves. “Shouldn’t someone tie these?”

  “Only if you intend to hit hard, like I said. You going to hit me, or what?”

  Binyamin rubbed the worn leather of one of the gloves with her thumb. Shook her head. “I am not here to play games.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Nyx said. She lunged forward to tap Binyamin’s face with her left hand.

  Binyamin flinched; her right shoulder came up, ever so slightly, and her fingers tightened on the gloves. She let Nyx tap her cheek, though, and it was the “letting” part that Nyx filed away for later.

  Nyx rolled back on her heels and cocked her head at the little southern woman. She spared a glance for Binyamin’s feet, and noted that she had slid into a right-handed woman’s fighter’s stance: right leg forward, left leg back.

  She was not the soft southern woman she pretended to be, then.

  “I’ll think about taking the job,” Nyx said. “You should go. I’ll be in touch after I look into some things.”

  Binyamin hesitated a moment longer, then moved out of her stance and put the gloves back on the counter. She touched the jeweled beetle at her throat. It shifted to her finger. She placed it on the long table. “If you change your mind, you just tell her to find me,” she said. The beetle scuttled to the edge of Nyx’s empty buni cup and clung there, a shiny bauble.