Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “We can’t take her to Yah Tayyib,” Khos said. “His place is right downtown. God and everyone will see us there.”

  “My place,” Behdis said.

  Rhys looked over at her.

  “I got a place,” she insisted. “Got what we need there, too. Two more phials of biotics, yeah? We can get that.”

  Rhys exchanged a look with Khos.

  “I’m not putting her up with my children. Not risking that. It’s her they’re after. I won’t put my kids in danger.”

  “We’ve come too far to let her die on the table,” Rhys said.

  “I’ll tell her you said that,” Suha said, walking in. Eshe perched on her shoulder. Her gun was in her hand.

  “We’re going to take her into town,” Rhys said. “We need to keep her breathing until then. We’ll shoot her full of antibiotics and leave it to God.”

  “I don’t leave shit to God,” Suha said. “I can carry her.”

  Suha and Khos carried Nyx outside while Inaya and Rhys woke Elahyiah.

  She stirred, still groggy with thorn juice, and clung to him. “Love,” she murmured, “I had a terrible dream.”

  “Come now,” he said. “We’re going back to town.”

  “Home?” she asked.

  “Soon,” he said.

  He led her into the yard. Suha was wiping her hands on her trousers. “Body’s in the trunk. One of you has to ride sitting on the others in the back. Keep your heads down.”

  Eshe the raven cawed and made a low, lazy circle above her head before perching on her shoulder.

  Suha absently stroked his head. “You coming or not? Let’s go.”

  Rhys helped his wife into the back. He stared a long moment at the trunk, then looked back to the tangled ruin of the mausoleum.

  He straightened and asked Khos, “Is leaving the safe house really such a good idea?”

  “You got a better one?

  “No,” Rhys said.

  “Then let’s get the fuck out of here before Inaya changes her mind.”

  31.

  They drove to the other side of the city. Inaya watched the tangle of the twisted green countryside spill over into shantytowns and hill houses. Behdis brought them to a pit of a hovel at the edge of the Ras Tiegan district. Inaya would not have let a roach live there, let alone a human being. But this was where Suha stopped.

  The house, such as it was, was so small that Inaya and Khos had to sleep out in the yard on tatty old burnouses from the magician’s days back in Nasheen. It was a dirty, refuse-filled yard, just like the house, but it was fenced, and there was a tattered awning.

  Inaya sat awake with the shotgun on her chest, one hand on the barrel. She stared up at the big black patch of nothing above her, that patch of the sky they called the Void where no stars were visible, listening to Elahyiah and Rhys speaking inside. The sound of Elahyiah crying. She wanted to cry, too, but she didn’t have the strength.

  She remembered her mother fucking dogs in the street. Her father’s desperation. She remembered her brother Taite running away after their mother was taken. Inaya had found him hiding underneath the house eating mayflies, the ones that tasted like strawberries. He hadn’t spoken for nearly a year after that. It’s what made him turn to the guts and tubes and bugs of their parents’ com unit. It was when Inaya started covering her hair and dressing like a martyr’s wife. She would not be like her mother. She would not be Other, a monster. She would be just another standard, another good Ras Tiegan matron. So she accepted her first marriage proposal, from a man twice her age with three other wives who had no shifters in his family. His uncle was in politics. He had two nephews working for the police. It was a political family who had hated and despised her for what her mother was, but a standard family nonetheless.

  She had tried to bend the world, and change what all of them were. It’s not us who are sick, she thought—stirred by the memory of a woman beating her mother with a stick on the street—it’s the world that’s wrong. The contaminated world they built.

  Her children, though… Could they really just keep running? Run to Ras Tieg where she and Khos and Tatie would be hunted like animals? And what of Isfahan? How much longer until she, too, began to show the talent? Inaya had known the risks of having children. Known and done it anyway. And God, she loved them. Her breath, her soul made flesh. It made her heart ache.

  Khos shifted in his sleep, and began to snore softly.

  She could do nothing, she supposed.

  But doing nothing… that made her as bad at the woman who used to beat her mother in the street. It made her as bad as all the others in Ras Tieg—the ones who passed casually by while shifter children were dragged into smoked-glass bakkies.

  Inaya stared up into the night sky.

  “I will build a better world for you,” she whispered.

  She closed her eyes. God, how her heart ached.

  +

  In the morning, Inaya woke with the dawn and prayed to Mhari for strength in the days to come, and thanked God for all she still possessed.

  Inside, Rhys sat them all around Behdis’s little table.

  “Where’s Elahyiah?” Inaya asked.

  “I took her home,” Rhys said.

  “Not your house?”

  “To her father. It’s what she wanted. It was Rasheeda who tried to kill us, and… that other one who pulled her out. I don’t expect it’s Elahyiah who’s in danger.”

  Eshe sat next to him, back in human form. His eyes were ringed in dark circles. He sat hunched at the table, squeezed next to Suha. His hands looked stiff, curled into claws.

  Inaya rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. He jerked his head up to look at her.

  “I’m pleased to see you in human form again,” she said.

  He frowned.

  Khos leaned up against the wall near the back door, arms crossed.

  “I wanted to get us all together while Behdis was out,” Rhys said. “She has six hours at the gym today.”

  “Where’s Nyx?” Khos asked.

  “She was… lucid, last night,” Rhys said. “Behdis and I pumped her full of antibiotics and cleaned her up. She started screaming at me, but…”

  Khos grunted. “She must be better then.”

  Rhys’s face softened. “She hasn’t said a word since then. She went back under this morning. I called Yah Tayyib to take another look at her, but I don’t know if he’ll come. I wanted to bring everyone together to figure out what it is we want to do.”

  “You want to kill her,” Eshe said. His voice was oddly monotone. Inaya wrinkled her brow.

  “I mean us,” Rhys said. “I want to know what we’ll do. If you and Suha want to keep Nyx, maybe that’s best. I want… I don’t know if…” He sighed.

  “You want to know if we’re keeping her note or keeping her?” Suha said.

  “I think the two of you should go back to Nasheen with her,” Rhys said.

  “Fuck you,” Suha said. “There’s a note on her head. She forget to tell you that?”

  “Shit,” Khos said. “When were you going to mention that?”

  “It just came up on the boards,” Eshe said. “I found out last night.”

  Inaya started. “You flew back to Nasheen?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Eshe said. “I called one of Suha’s friends.”

  “We do got those, you know,” Suha said, and spit sen on the filthy floor.

  Rhys put his new hands around his cup. Inaya wondered if they would always look that ugly. “There’s a bel dame coup. Nyx is supposed to bring in the woman at the head of it. But that’s not all.”

  “It never is,” Khos muttered.

  “The rogue bel dames are negotiating with Tirhan as if they already run the country. They have a very dangerous weapon, a type of flesh eating sand that they want to give to them in return for their support of their coup.”

  “You acted as translator, didn’t you?” Inaya said.

  Rhys nodded.

  “You could hav
e told us. You could have warned us there were bel dames in Tirhan,” she said.

  “I didn’t know that meant Nyx would be here too,” he said.

  “She does always seem to be the catalyst,” Khos said.

  “You all weren’t prepared,” Suha said. “That was your fucking problem. Not Nyx’s.”

  “Fuck you,” Khos said.

  “Why should we be prepared?” Inaya said. “It’s not us they were after. Nyx brings nothing but blood with her.”

  “Yeah,” Suha said, and Inaya watched a petulant smile creep across her face. “’Cause none of you got blood on your hands.”

  “Regardless,” Rhys said. “There’s very little we can do about it.”

  “Wrong.”

  Inaya looked. They all looked.

  Nyx stood at the curtain that portioned off the main sleeping area. She was tall and still frighteningly thin. But the eyes were not as Rhys had said. The eyes were hard, glassy, and very much alive.

  “There’s a lot we can do about it,” Nyx said.

  Eshe jumped up from the table and ran to her. He flung his arms around her so forcefully that she stumbled back.

  “I need a bath and a piss,” Nyx said. “But first I need you to tell me where the fuck we are.”

  32.

  "We needed a safe house they didn’t know about,” Suha said.

  Nyx squatted over a pot in the curtained off bedroom while Suha leaned against the wall. The world looked remarkably clear. Rhys and Khos had gone out to pick up some food while Inaya pulled together clean clothes out back.

  Eshe banged around in the kitchen and brought her a cold roti and a basin of water.

  “Thanks,” Nyx said. She tousled Eshe’s dark, unkempt hair.

  He raised his head to look at her with his black eyes. Yawned. Terrible breath. He needed a cut and a wash.

  “You were dead,” he said.

  “So I heard.”

  Suha leaned forward. “We need to get out of Tirhan. And this house,” she said, low.

  “I know.” Nyx patted Eshe’s head again and dipped her hands into the water. It was warm and clear. She stared into it a long minute. God, her head felt clear. Everything looked so much cleaner. Sharper. Like waking up with a new body. But her poorly matched skin looked just the same, and the reflection staring back at her was as hideous as ever.

  “You call Yah Tayyib to bring me back?” she asked. She knew his work.

  “Rhys found him. Said he’s been carrying on with him for years.”

  “Fucker,” Nyx muttered. She washed her face.

  She stripped off her dhoti and breast binding and washed. The water turned brown and crimson. Her hands began to tremble. She had to stop, take a deep breath.

  “You need help?” Suha asked.

  “No,” Nyx said. Her skin felt good. Limber. God, her head was so clear.

  “How’d he do it?” Eshe asked. “I couldn’t figure it out. I know it’s hard to kill bel dames, but you were dead a long time.”

  “Got a bug in my head,” Nyx said. “When I die, it shuts everything down and seals it all up. Have some time to bring me back so long as everything’s sealed up.” And whatever way it brought her back, it had scrubbed her good with adrenaline and immune boosters. She should have seen the Plague Sisters after the contagion took her skin. They’d have cleared her up with a bug like this. Saved a lot of pain and misery.

  But that’s what living is, isn’t it? Nyx thought, and grimaced. She moved her hand to her throat. Traced the jagged scar. If she’d looked like death before, she looked like a proper corpse now. Her jaw felt a little off, and ached. She wondered if it was healing straight.

  “I don’t trust these people,” Eshe said. “They all wanted you to die.”

  “They all say a lot of things. What they do and what they say are different things. I wouldn’t be alive, otherwise.”

  “I don’t trust the magician, either,” Suha said.

  “Rhys?”

  “He’s really fucked up.”

  “And we’re not?”

  “Don’t know,” Suha said, and peered at her sharply. “That other magician, the old one. He said you might be kinda fucked in the head. Said we may not have woke you up in time.”

  “Maybe so,” Nyx said. Mainly, she was thirsty. Pissing out all the shit Tayyib had pumped her full of. And she knew there was some absence. God, what was the absence? Was there something she was forgetting? Something important? Her memory was muddled. Long stretches of blackness. Some things were… gone. Others, frighteningly clear. She knew why they were in Tirhan. She knew the bel dames had succeeded in killing her. She knew she needed to return the favor.

  “Catch me up,” Nyx said. “Need to know what you got up to when I got my head chopped off.”

  Suha and Eshe filled her in. Nyx tried to eat the cold roti. Her jaw clicked and ached. What she managed to choke down didn’t settle right. She drank a bunch more water, and the nausea passed.

  Inaya showed up a little later with a clean tunic and trousers and long Ras Tiegan coat.

  “Thought you’d hand me an abaya,” Nyx said.

  “Since when have you presented yourself as a real woman?” Inaya said.

  “Good point.”

  As Nyx pulled on the clothes, she heard Rhys and Khos return. Her mind was tick-ticking away, sorting out what Eshe and Suha had told her. They were a wild, raving bunch without somebody to tell them where to land. And I’m shitty at it, she thought, but we’re all dead in an hour if we don’t move.

  “Get everybody in here,” Nyx said, and pushed past the curtain and into the main room. Her hands were trembling. The trousers had pockets, so she stuffed her hands in them.

  Khos and Rhys were putting take-out curry containers and wrapped rotis on the table.

  “Bad house choice,” Nyx said. Rhys raised his head. He had dark circles under his eyes, but what she noticed in that moment was not his weariness but his strange, ugly hands gripping one of the curry boxes. She opened her mouth to say something. Saw the raised pinkish scars around the wrists. Stubby fingers, fat thumbs, wide palms. Not Rhys’s hands at all.

  “I’ve made a lot of bad choices recently,” Rhys said coolly.

  “I want to know how soft you all got, taking us to a safe house with a magician who’s likely got bel dames outside right now.”

  “I can’t believe that’s the first thing out of your mouth,” Rhys said. “Would you rather we left you in that ditch?”

  Nyx didn’t meet his look.

  “Behdis is an addict,” Suha said. “She works for the drip. She hasn’t come to us with anything from bel dames. She went in to work.”

  “She go in today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with her?” Eshe asked.

  “It took me a while to sort out,” Nyx said. “Suha and Eshe told me what happened. They hit Khos’s house first, they said. But how’d they know where it was?

  “Fuck,” Suha said. “Goddammit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?” Khos said.

  “I gave Behdis your address as a contact for messages. Just tie a string on the gate, then we go find her and pick up her message.”

  “You bitch,” Inaya said softly.

  “Real easy way to find out who she was working for,” Nyx said.

  “And sacrifice my family to do it? You fucking bitch!” Inaya jumped at her.

  Eshe stepped between them. Nyx stood a little straighter. Inside her pockets, she had bunched her fists, tried to still the trembling. Her legs weren’t the steadiest either, but none of them knew that. “You’ve fought me before, Inaya. This one will end the same.”

  “Fuck you!” Inaya said, and stormed out into the yard.

  Khos shook his head. “You didn’t even warn us.”

  “The way you didn’t warn me when you betrayed me in Chenja? We would have gotten out of there, Khos. You know what they did to me
? What they did to Rhys?”

  “You nearly cost us everything.”

  “I cost you nothing. Your marriage was shitty before that.”

  “Is this your day to burn bridges? After we brought you back from the dead?” Khos said.

  “All I asked from you was loyalty. You get what you give. Could have been she wasn’t working for them, and you’d still have a house. Didn’t turn out that way, that’s all.”

  Khos folded his arms. Nyx was aware of the sheer bulk of him, but her clear head and scrubbed body made her feel powerful for the first time in a year. Let him take a swing. Let him fight her. She was itching for a fight. So long as he didn’t hit her in the jaw, or try and knock her off her feet, or… well, she’d be fine.

  No, you won’t, she thought. Her jaw hurt.

  “You risked all of us for that fucking magician,” Khos said. “You’re always risking everything for that fucking magician. What was I supposed to do? Risk Inaya and me and Anneke and all the rest?”

  “You left me and Anneke.”

  “You let Taite die!”

  “People die in this business. Or didn’t you notice?” Nyx gestured angrily at her neck.

  “Inaya wanted you to live, did you know that? I sure as fuck didn’t. Rhys didn’t. Nobody wanted you back. Because of this. Because you’re like this about it. You can’t even thank us.”

  Nyx shot a look at Rhys. He turned away.

  “Fuck that,” Suha said. “I would have hauled her out the back if you hadn’t gotten your guts together.”

  “This is stupid,” Eshe said.

  “The only one you ever gave a shit about is Rhys, and it’s his kids you killed and his hands you took.” Khos said. “You guys should fuck over the corpses and be done with it.”

  “That’s enough,” Rhys said softly. He was staring at his hands.

  “It’s not enough!” Khos said. He crossed the room.

  Nyx rolled reflexively into a fighting stance. A shot of adrenaline coursed through her, and the trembling in her hands ceased. She felt… more grounded. Suha’s hands hovered at the hilts of her pistols. Eshe took a step back and moved to flank Khos.

  Khos stopped within her reach and pointed a finger at her. His face was flush. “It was running off like some love struck cunt that got you killed in the first place.”