Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “It’s possible, if the head is intact. Not terribly probable, but possible. I’ve brought back worse cases. Under better circumstances, but worse cases.”

  “Why bring her back?”

  “We are not even, she and I.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That is for her alone to know. God willing.”

  But Inaya knew better.

  God had nothing to do with it.

  29.

  Rhys woke alone.

  The light was a dull orange haze. His body was cold and stiff, a body on a slab. He tried to move. He saw someone’s hand on the end of his arm, neatly stapled to his wrist with insect mandibles. The name of the bug flitted through his mind. Flesh roaches. Not to be mistaken for flesh beetles, which repaired skin. He could feel those too, repairing the flesh that bound his new hands to his arms.

  They were ugly hands, not as dark as his own, short, stubby fingers. Calloused palms and fingers. Clumsy hands. A laborer’s hands.

  He tried to move the fingers into a fist. Watched them twitch in response. He let his arm drop. His head swam with the twitter, click, and chatter of bugs. His blood was singing with them. Tiny blood mites to clean the contagion from his blood and scrub the foreign blood from his foreign hands, speeding recovery. The flesh beetles, too small to see, stitching his new tendons and flesh together. And blood boosts—tiny organisms that allowed his blood to transport and his body to absorb a higher quantity of glucose to feed the bugs while they repaired him. He knew them all. They were all a part of him, until he bled or shit or vomited them out when their jobs were done.

  Then it came to him, again.

  Elahyiah.

  Rhys pushed himself up on the slab with his elbows. He stared at the back of the room. What was this place? He remembered seeing Yah Tayyib, Khos, and Inaya. And that woman of Nyx’s, Suha. Were any of them real?

  He carefully moved his legs off the slab. Where was Nyx? The sleeves of his bisht and khameez were cut, loose. This was Yah Tayyib’s work. Where was he?

  He turned.

  Inaya stood in the doorway behind him, shotgun over her shoulder. She was slim, pale, and in the dim light she looked a decade older, with a haunted face.

  “Can you move your fingers?”

  “Not my fingers. These are… Yah Tayyib was here?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did—”

  “You told us about him. We thought you were just feverish, but it turned out to be true.”

  He let his head hang. “I’m thirsty.” The well. The dark well. He started to cry. He didn’t know it until he saw the wet on the slab. “Oh God,” he said. His gorge rose. He wanted to vomit. “The girls… Elahyiah? Where is she?”

  “I’m here.”

  He looked up and saw his wife standing in the doorway. Hair uncovered, filthy. Her abaya was torn. He saw bloodstains, and long, scabbed marks on her hands. But it was Elahyiah all the same.

  “God is great,” he murmured.

  “The girls,” Elahyiah said, and her voice broke. “The girls are dead.”

  Rhys eased off the slab and moved toward her. She pulled away. He hesitated.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She put her arms around him.

  He pulled her to him, tried to flex his stiff, alien fingers. He still had little movement. He buried his face in her hair and tried to cling to her, to find comfort. But there was no comfort there, just terror. She shook and wept.

  “I’m sorry, Rhys.”

  He held her. Her hair smelled of bloody loam. He saw fragments of grass in her hair. Something inside of him went numb.

  Rhys turned to Inaya, said softly. “Your children?

  “Safe,” she said. “They’re… with a friend. I hid them in the well when the bel dames came.”

  “Bel dames?”

  “Yes. I… saw them coming.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Yes.” She would not look at him.

  “And Khos?”

  “He was out drinking. With Nyx.”

  Nyx.

  Rhys pulled away from Elahyiah. She clung to his bisht.

  “Where’s Nyx?”

  “Dead,” Inaya said.

  A stab of fear. “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “I saw her body in the park.”

  He felt winded again, as if a great weight had settled across his chest. He stared down at his new hands. He did not want to look at them, they were so ugly.

  “My girls?

  “I searched for them. We’ll need to call the city officials, tell them about… a contaminated well. You may… You may get the bodies back. For burning.”

  The bodies. His children.

  All that he had built. That they had built together. Elahyiah let out another low, long sob.

  “Do you think they meant to kill you?” he asked Inaya.

  “I don’t know. They didn’t kill you, either.”

  No, he thought, just my family. The ones who had nothing to do with this.

  “They must have had a reason,” he said.

  “They’re mad, Rhys. They don’t have reasons. Even Nyx didn’t have reasons.”

  He heard someone in the outer room, and looked over his shoulder. He expected Khos, or one of Nyx’s crew, but it was Yah Tayyib’s thin frame that cut the doorway.

  Elahyiah pulled herself closer to Rhys and touched her hair. He smoothed it back from her face.

  “Here,” Inaya said, taking her arm. “I have a hijab in the other room. Come with me.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Rhys said to Yah Tayyib as Inaya led Elahyiah into the other room.

  “Khos tells me I owe you for your silence.”

  Rhys shook his head. “You owe me nothing.”

  “Then perhaps you owe me something now.”

  “Who told you I wanted to come back?”

  Yah Tayyib smiled. He placed a long-fingered hand on Rhys’s naked arm. He leaned toward him. “Dead men are worth nothing. Living men take revenge.”

  “Do they?”

  “I came back from the front alive—”

  “For revenge?”

  “No. For the future. Because without living people to fight we have nothing but animals slaughtered at God’s altar.”

  “What do you know about these bel dames?”

  “I know they are the same ones who crossed me, and a good deal more besides. We’ll speak of it later. We have much to do tonight. I may need your hands for this, if we can’t find another magician.”

  “For what?”

  “They did not tell you?”

  “No.”

  Rhys heard voices from the other room.

  “What did she not tell me?” Rhys said.

  Khos’s voice, “In here. Watch this end, Suha!”

  Khos and Suha entered, carrying an enormous rolled up carpet between them. Someone else came in behind them, a scrawny old woman with a curved spine. A magician. He felt that immediately, though she was dressed like a pauper, and her face… her face looked like a battlefield.

  “Rhys, off!” Khos said.

  Rhys shuffled away from the slab. Yah Tayyib put a hand out to steady him.

  Suha grunted with the effort of pushing the carpet onto the slab.

  “What is this?” Rhys asked.

  Khos and Suha’s hands and faces were scratched, dirty. Suha’s elbow was bleeding. A raven—it must have been Nyx’s shifter—flew into the room and perched on one of the empty sconces.

  Khos pulled out a dagger and cut the carpet open.

  For a moment, a breathtaking, gut-wrenching moment, Rhys thought they had found one of the children. He gasped. He thought, Yah Tayyib will bring them back. He didn’t know how, not in that moment. But in that one knife-sharp moment he believed they had brought him his daughters.

  And then the carpet fell away, and the body was too big, coarse. A solid body, filthy, covered in dirt and loam and a burnous stiff with dried blood. It was a corpse. Not his
daughters’ corpses.

  “I need you to help me bring her back,” Yah Tayyib said.

  And Rhys knew her.

  “Fuck you,” Rhys said. “Fuck all of you.”

  He stumbled out of the room, past Inaya and his wife. He needed open air. He wanted the sky.

  Rhys tumbled out the front of the mausoleum, and fell knee deep in loam. He turned his face to the sky.

  “Damn you. And her. Damn her too.”

  He could not save his girls. Instead, they would bring her back.

  They always brought the monster back.

  30.

  She was in Yah Tayyib’s operating theater. He held a jar in his slender hands. Inside was a perfectly heart-shaped organ, two fallopian tubes floating out at the ends in the formaldehyde.

  “You’ll find the other one more useful,” Yah Tayyib said. “You wouldn’t have been able to carry anything in this one anyhow. Not useful to you, but prized among magicians for its deformity. Our organs grow in two identical halves, did you know that? Only sometimes the halves are not identical. Sometimes, as they grow, they do not fuse. This is what happened to your womb. Closed up too quickly. Not a perfect globe now, but a heart.”

  She had traded that first womb for twenty notes and a case of Ras Tiegan beer.

  The operating theater bled away, and Yah Tayyib’s face loomed over her. His beard was white now, like his hair. The eyes were cold and black, hooded. The man who had kept the secrets of a hundred bel dames and a thousand boxers. The man who had built her and betrayed her.

  “We are even now, you and I,” he said.

  +

  Rhys stood over Nyx’s body. The body was breathing now, warm to the touch, but she had not moved. Had not opened her eyes. Eshe the raven had curled up in the crook of her arm, despite Yah Tayyib’s protests. When Rhys had come back in and tried to get Suha to move the raven, she had just firmed up her mouth and turned away from him. It was her watch now, and that eased the tightness in his shoulders. Inaya and Khos were speaking in the front room, voices muted.

  Yah Tayyib squirted water over his hands from one of the water bulbs. Behdis lingered in the doorway. Rhys wondered, not for the first time, where Suha had dug up this crone.

  “Watch her carefully over the next few days,” Yah Tayyib said, and it took Rhys a moment to realize he was talking about Nyx, not Behdis. “If she comes back wrong, you’ll know it then.”

  Rhys turned. “Wrong?”

  “It’s not a perfect map. Sometimes parts of the brain rot, or are reconnected incorrectly.” He set the bulb on the other slab. “We brought her back at the far end of her expiration date. She may not wake at all. I’ve known bel dames who didn’t. If she does come back, watch her. She may be different. Dangerous.”

  Rhys barked out a laugh at that. “Dangerous? She was a kitten before?”

  “Just watch her.” Yah Tayyib placed a hand on Rhys’s shoulder. “It took a group of bel dames to kill her the first time. If she’s rotten, cut off the head this time and burn her.”

  He finished packing his things. Rhys watched him walk into the front of the mausoleum. Heard him talking with Khos and Inaya.

  Rhys looked down at the body again. The raven shivered there in the crook of her arm.

  “You want me to stay on, case she wakes up?” Behdis asked.

  Rhys hesitated. If Nyx turned, Khos’s strength and his paltry magician’s skills wouldn’t do much against her. At the same time, he didn’t like this hungry magician. “Can you stay until morning?”

  “Yeah, sure. Not long now.”

  Maybe four or five hours. Rhys supposed he could put up with her that long.

  “You want me to sit watch? Want to get some sleep?” Behdis asked eagerly. Her eyes shone.

  Rhys shook his head. Yes, he was tired. Bone tired. Yah Tayyib’s bugs had cleaned him out, physically, but the rest was still there, waiting. Rasheeda’s laughter. The sound of Shadha’s machete severing his hands at the wrist. His children’s screams. And Elahyiah. God, how would they put this all together again?

  “I’ll stay awake. I’ll call you when I’m ready,” he said. He started to rub his eyes, saw the new hands, shuddered, dropped them.

  He sat on the slab across from Nyx’s body. Behdis wandered into the front. Khos came in after her.

  “You holding up?” Khos asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Sorry. Elahyiah’s asleep. Inaya just gave her some thorn juice to put her out.”

  “And your children?”

  “I… they’re safe.”

  “Inaya said the same. You had a safe house?”

  “Something like that.”

  Rhys didn’t like the vague response. “You prepared for something like this?”

  “You didn’t?”

  Rhys grimaced.

  “You knew her better than anybody,” Khos said. “You knew she’d come back someday. You knew this was coming.”

  “I… stopped expecting her.”

  “You want me to send Inaya in with some thorn juice for you, too?”

  “You didn’t lose everything tonight, Khos.”

  “Best I can see, you still have a good wife and a roof over your head.”

  Then why do I feel so empty? Rhys thought. “You still have your hands. Your children. Your wife.”

  “Not my roof.”

  “Is this a contest?”

  Khos bared his teeth. “Always is, isn’t it? Get some sleep. I can take your watch.”

  “No, I… I will, soon.”

  Khos nodded. “You do that.” He thumped Rhys on the shoulder. When was the last time he’d done that?

  The others slept. Rhys swam in and out of wakefulness until the blue dawn. The first dawn was the last thing he remembered before succumbing to sleep.

  When he woke, someone was shaking him, and there were voices, loud voices, nearby.

  He opened his eyes and saw Inaya standing over him, shotgun over one shoulder, her other hand on him, shaking.

  “She’s gone,” Inaya said. There were dark circles under her eyes. There was bickering in the front room. Khos and Suha.

  Rhys pushed off the slab. His new hands ached, and he was incredibly thirsty. Nyx’s slab was empty. Only a smear of dirt and loam and dried blood remained, broken carapaces, some dead flesh beetles.

  The second sun had risen. It was well after morning prayer. I’ve forgotten prayer, Rhys thought, distantly.

  “We need to find her,” Rhys said. He pushed into the front where Suha and Khos were arguing. He turned to ensure that Elahyiah was still asleep, and saw her tossing and turning on the thin mattress. Behdis hovered in the main doorway, peering into the graveyard.

  Suha said, “Don’t go fucking it up. Eshe’s out now. He’ll find her.”

  “If she finds the road and hitches a ride, we’ve lost her,” Rhys said.

  “You hear me?” Suha said. “We all run off in five directions we won’t come together quick enough to bag her.” It was the most Rhys had ever heard her speak.

  “Who the fuck put you in charge?” Khos said.

  “Nyx did,” Suha said. “Last I heard, you family boys were all out of the covert recovery business.”

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t know our shit,” Khos said.

  “Then get your big head out of your big ass,” Suha said.

  Rhys searched for a wasp swarm, but either his senses were still off or there were none nearby. If I was weak before, he thought, I’m useless now.

  Eshe returned a quarter hour later. He led them north across the overgrown grounds of the graveyard. Khos and Inaya had chosen the safe house well. The grounds went on for at least two kilometers in every direction. It was a great place to lose somebody who was tracking you. Or just get lost.

  Rhys picked his way through the underbrush with his new hands. Biting insects swarmed them in clouds. Rhys kept them from feeding on their party, but controlling the flight of the swarms proved to be too much. His blood w
as still humming dully with the bugs in his body as they made the last of the repairs. He had pissed out beady little blood mites half a kilometer back.

  Eshe led them up a low rise, through a tangle of violet vines and hoarthorn. Rhys tripped into a small clearing.

  Nyx crouched there next to a half-buried headstone, her back to them. She had one filthy hand on the lip of the headstone.

  Rhys froze.

  Suha held up her hand, warned them back.

  “Nyx?” Suha said.

  Nyx hung her head. Her hair was a tangle of unraveling braids shot through with broken bits of sticks and leaves. A giant mantid clung to the hem of her trousers. Rhys saw blood running down one bare arm. A new injury? Or was her blood not clotting?

  Rhys reached once more to his hip-for a pistol he no longer carried.

  We’ve grown soft and stupid, he thought, and heard his children screaming again.

  “Nyx?” Suha said.

  Nyx turned.

  Her eyes were utterly vacant. No one looked back at them from those eyes. Sweat rolled down her face.

  “Nyx?” Rhys said.

  And then her arm slid off the headstone and she was on the ground. She started convulsing.

  “Fuck!” Khos said. He ran forward and picked her up.

  Rhys ran his hands over her. Bugs chittered and sang. He listened. There was something wrong with…. She’d caught something. The flesh beetles were in stasis while the blood mites fought it off.

  “She’s sick,” Rhys said. “But it feels… tailored.” My God, Rhys thought, did Yah Tayyib kill her after all?

  “That’s how she lost her skin,” Suha said. “The other magician couldn’t get rid of it either. The other magician said it was some tailored bug.”

  They hauled her through the bush and back to the slab. Rhys and Behdis shot her full of antibiotics with a live syringe Inaya had in her bag. Blood ran freely down Nyx’s arm, like liquid mercury. Pooled on the floor.

  She wavered in and out of consciousness. She slapped their hands away. At one point, she vomited, and Rhys and Behdis turned her over to keep her from choking on it.

  Rhys stood over her. She was slathered in sweat. The syringe wound wasn’t healing properly. It still oozed. “We’re losing her,” Rhys said.