But what information? About Nikodem and the boxing? They’d know about that. Rasheeda didn’t want Nikodem anyway. Their goal was to keep her away from Nikodem, wasn’t it? Or were they using her to find Nikodem? What was this, another intimidation game?
She waited. Her body stiffened. She tried flexing her arms, her back, her shoulders, her legs. She was going to start losing feeling in her limbs if she didn’t find a way to move.
Nyx finally managed to get a look at her legs. Bloody wounds crisscrossed her flesh. The lines moved and wriggled. Alive.
They’d stuffed her wounds with bloodworms.
Her gut roiled. She looked up again. Something moved in the far dark corner of the room in the broken masonry. She briefly saw the shiny head of a giant centipede peek through. The pain would kick in soon—maybe another couple hours—when the bloodworms had excreted enough poison into her skin to start the slow burn. Her lower limbs already tingled.
She avoided thinking about her team. She didn’t think about the interrogation, about what she’d seen Rasheeda do to people. Instead, she thought about the black sand of Tirhan, the kind she’d spun stories about back in Mushirah. She thought about sitting on a deck under a couple of broad-leafed palm trees surrounded in dark green foliage, sipping cool coconut drinks spiked with vodka.
She thought about counting stars with Tej, and she remembered the good nights with that girl, what was her name? Radeyah, yes. Radeyah, with the kind eyes and quick tongue who’d told her they’d spend a lifetime growing old together in the same bed in a little beach house in Tirhan, though all that water in one place scared the shit out of Nyx. But Radeyah’s boy lover had come back from the front—most of him—and dreams of Tirhan and vodka and a lifetime of Radeyah’s sweet tongue and soft hands had ended.
She had told that story again, though, wrapped in bed with another sort of woman, a desperate outrider. Told her all about Tirhani beaches she had never been to and never wanted to see—“Don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you…”—but Nyx had lied and whispered to her Radeyah’s dream, not her own, because Jaks loved the sea, dreamed of the sea. Nyx had learned that from one of Jaks’s house sisters, the one who told her about Arran.
Arran. The note that killed Tej.
Nyx used them all to get to somebody else, to pick up some other note. It was her job. It’s what she did.
The door opened.
Nyx raised her head.
Rasheeda walked in, wearing loose trousers and a short coat. Her black hair was pulled back from her cool, flawless face, and she was grinning. Her eyes were flat and black and, paired with the grin, she looked like some kind of demon, something come up straight from hell to inhabit a soulless body. She carried a bag and a stool.
Behind her was Fatima.
Nyx wasn’t surprised. This was the sort of job Fatima would pull. Fatima was skinny—skinnier than Nyx had ever seen her—and her dark hair was shot through with white; very becoming on a Nasheenian woman. Fatima fixed a hard look on Nyx, then shut the door. Nyx hadn’t seen Fatima since she sent Nyx to prison.
Rasheeda snickered and set the stool in front of Nyx, just far enough away so Nyx couldn’t bite her nose off.
Fatima sat as Rasheeda unpacked her instruments from her bag.
“You look terrible,” Fatima said.
Nyx only looked at her.
Fatima’s mouth quirked up at the corners, not a smile. “You were much more difficult to track when you worked alone.”
Fatima waited a bare moment, glancing over at Rasheeda as the other bel dame laid out a series of scalpels and straight pins and blinking syringes on a scarlet-colored length of silk.
“You were told to stay off this note,” Fatima said. “Rasheeda and Luce were clear, as I understand it. Yet here you are, far from Nasheen, looking up an off-worlder. Where are Kine’s papers? I searched your safe house. Are they in the country? Who else knows about them?”
Nyx clenched her teeth.
“Your team’s dead,” Fatima said.
“You’re a bad liar,” Nyx said. “If you toasted my team you’d have told me all about the street they were on and the way you killed them. You wouldn’t stop with half-assed declarations. You’re a bel dame.”
Fatima’s mouth quirked again. “You think so? If you leave this place alive, perhaps we’ll see.”
Nyx grunted.
“We know you were at Kine’s,” Fatima said. “Did you speak to her before her death? What do you know about her work?”
Kine and her goddamn papers.
Nyx shifted a little in her chair. If she started talking, she’d be in trouble. She could make up stories, sure, but she didn’t trust that after several days of torture, she’d be able to keep the stories straight. But silence implied submission, and she wasn’t keen on submitting to anyone—not Fatima, not the magicians, not the queen, not God.
“I have no wish to send you home in pieces,” Fatima said.
Rasheeda squatted next to the instruments, giggling.
“Tell me,” Nyx said, “what do bel dames want with information from the compounds? Thought you would be on good terms with their security.”
“I want to know what you know about Kine.”
“What do you know about Kine?”
“Oh, stop it,” Fatima said, and her expression got ugly. “You want us to chop you up and leave you here?”
“You should have asked my team before you killed them,” Nyx said. “They’d have known just as much about Kine as I do.” Burning the pages had been a good idea. If the bel dames wanted the papers and wanted to keep Nyx off the note, it meant they were probably working with Nikodem. They wanted her to stay hidden. In Chenja.
Sweet fuck, Nyx thought are the bel dames working with the Chenjans? Were they working some kind of deal together to topple the monarchy?
“I don’t have any patience this afternoon, Nyxnissa.”
Nyx tacked that down. Afternoon. Not of the same day she was brought in, though, right? So she’d lost a day?
“You never did have much patience, sister-mine,” Nyx said, “and I don’t have much patience for traitors. When did you all decide to sell out Nasheen?”
“Rasheeda?”
Rasheeda grabbed the back of Nyx’s chair and tilted it. She turned Nyx around so she could see the tub of water behind her. A thin layer of ice coated the surface. The tub was padded around the base by a band of insulation that hummed.
“Those are expensive bugs,” Nyx said.
Rasheeda pushed Nyx over.
Nyx went into the water face first. The lip of the tub caught her in the gut. Her head banged the bottom of the tub.
Cold hit her like a fist to the face.
The first time under, she didn’t thrash, just shut her eyes and felt the cold eat into her bones.
Rasheeda pulled her back up. Nyx gasped and went back under, banging her head on the bottom again.
The third time under, she started to struggle, but Rasheeda had the advantage, and the cold was starting to muddle Nyx’s head. Black ate away at her thoughts. It felt like descending into the bowels of Umayma. She opened her mouth to breathe, and sucked in cold water instead.
It went on for a long time. They hauled her out fully once or twice, left her gasping in the chair like a spent swimmer, asked her some questions that didn’t make sense anymore, and then forced her back under.
Finally, Rasheeda got tired, or Fatima got tired. Probably Fatima.
Rasheeda hauled Nyx out of the water and let her chair fall sideways onto the floor, so Nyx had a watery view of Fatima’s sandaled feet.
“Kine’s papers,” Fatima said. “I want them. Where are they? They belong in Nasheen, not here. You’ve run black work before. You think I’m a fool? Who did you sell them to?”
Rasheeda bent over and gazed into Nyx’s face, blotting out the light. Nyx coughed up cold water. She shivered uncontrollably.
Fatima wrinkled her nose, said to Rasheeda. “Give me a couple
of her fingers.”
Rasheeda licked her lips. “I want her eyes.”
Nyx’s thoughts were dark and sticky. Fatima thinks I killed my sister. But Rasheeda killed my sister. Why doesn’t Fatima know that Rasheeda killed my sister? Why was Rasheeda only slowing me down, but Dahab wanted to stop me?
Sticky thoughts. Black thoughts.
Something congealed. Rasheeda had slowed her down so she could kill Kine before Nyx got there. Rasheeda didn’t have leave from the council to kill Nyx. Rasheeda was running something on her own. Fatima was doing clean bel dame work, retrieving stolen Nasheenian information she thought Nyx had. Fatima had no idea Rasheeda was running black.
“Let’s save the eyes for later,” Fatima said. She pointed. “Give me those two fingers.”
Rasheeda set Nyx’s chair upright. The wire had dug into Nyx’s flesh now, drawn blood. She couldn’t feel it, though, just pressure. What she did feel were the bloodworms boring into her flesh. Her legs were on fire, and the rest of her was numb.
Rasheeda picked up a cleaver. She pressed the heel of her palm onto the back of Nyx’s right hand, made her splay her fingers across the armrest.
They’re just fingers, Nyx thought. She brought her head up so she could look Fatima in the face.
“I didn’t kill my sister,” Nyx slurred.
Rasheeda brought the knife down on her ring and little fingers. Nyx felt pressure, heard the crunch. Pain. Just pain. Pain is a message. That’s all.
Fatima flinched.
Nyx didn’t.
Rasheeda hacked at Nyx’s hand again. She hadn’t made a clean cut.
Nyx kept her breathing steady, not looking at her hand. Her fingers—or where she was supposed to have fingers—ached. She coughed up more water. She wanted to claw at her burning legs. She wished it was her legs they cut off.
Rasheeda wiped something onto the floor with the knife. Nyx heard a dull thumping sound. Her fingers hitting the gritty floor.
Rasheeda licked the knife.
“Kine’s papers. Or should I take the whole hand?” Fatima asked. “Another day or two and the worms will have your legs…”
The first time Nyx was tortured, Raine had done it.
She had been doing her own side work, her first contract with a gene pirate. She hadn’t known what the woman was, at first, just knew she was paying well for an easy job—plug some organic material into Nyx’s body and have Nyx drive it over to some shady dealer in a border town. The dealer had cut it out, no problem, and suddenly she had more money in her account than she’d ever seen in her life.
Raine had figured it out. How, Nyx never knew. Maybe he kept tabs on her account. He had beat her bloody, called her a traitor to her own country. He’d bound her and left her.
When he came back for her a day later, she lay in the dark, in a pool of her own piss, hungry and dehydrated. He had loomed over her and cut off her ear with one quick slice of a sharp knife.
“A souvenir,” he’d said, holding her bloody flesh in his hand.
He kept a collection of ears in his freezer from every bounty he took. She had thought the collection was funny, until he’d added a piece of her to it, like she was just another thing to be used and discarded. Another body. Like a boy at the front.
He had expected her to stay on with his crew. It was just a little discipline, he’d said, nothing worse than what had happened to her at the front, right?
She had bided her time for three days, then went into his room in the middle of the night after a long, heavy day of footwork and drinking; a coward’s fight. She’d trussed him up and cut off his cock. She considered the act her formal resignation.
“Just a little souvenir,” she’d told him while he screamed and strained against his bonds.
The first notes she’d taken as a bel dame were for his sons. They had deserted from the front, following their father’s radical politics. She had sent their ears to Raine.
Nyx was not a nice woman. She knew she didn’t deal with nice women. But she also knew the worst sorts of things these women could do to her, and there was comfort in that.
There would be no surprises.
“You can take what you want,” Nyx said, “but remember what I took from Raine. I’ll take everything from you, Fatima. Your face, your license, your lover, your daughters.”
Rasheeda snickered. “Such a funny woman! And what will you take from me, eh? Sitting there bleeding in your little chair!”
“Oh,” Nyx said. “I’m going to kill you.”
Rasheeda snorted.
“Bind her fingers,” Fatima said, and stood. “Tomorrow we want Kine’s papers. Or we take your hands. Then your eyes. Think about that. And the loss of your legs in thirty-six hours.”
Fatima walked out. Rasheeda bound up Nyx’s hand, then beat her until her face swelled and her ribs ached and she hacked up blood. Rasheeda left her, bruised and bleeding.
When the door closed, Nyx murmured, “Kine, you bitch.”
She drooled blood and saliva into her lap and let her head hang. Telling them about Kine’s papers meant telling them where Taite was. If they’d killed her team—and she had an image of the whole garret burning, of Khos cut into pieces, Anneke’s face blown away, Rhys… she could at least keep them from Taite for a while. Just a little while.
21
Taite listened to the results of the vote come in over the com. He ate from a carton of take-out food, spicy even for his taste, a Nasheenian imitation of Ras Tiegan food.
All the news was bad.
As the provinces reported in, his hopes sank. Eighty-seven percent of Abyyad district in favor of drafting half-breeds. Sixty-eight percent in favor. Ninety-eight percent in favor. Ninety-eight percent? That was from a district out on the coast, where they’d never even seen a male over the age of six, let alone a half-breed. What did they care if he got blown up at the front?
Taite was getting sick. He turned off the com.
Taite had gone through Kine’s collection and gotten rid of everything but three recordings, which turned out to be her dictation sessions. It took a couple of days to break her personal security code, but once he mastered that, it was easy to loop them into the com and read them back. He was only fifteen minutes in, but the voting numbers had gotten to him, and he had opened up his bankbook instead of listening to transcriptions.
The only way to make it work was to move Inaya to one of the factory compounds in Basmah and have her keep her job there. It meant no recovery time after the baby came. It also meant living dormitory-style with no security. She wasn’t going to be happy, but unless they collected this bounty soon, he was out of extravagant options. Mahdesh had already loaned him more money than Taite knew how to pay back, and though Mahdesh asked for nothing in return, Taite worried over it—spending his lover’s money to help the sister who would burn them both if she knew.
He heard someone coming up the stairs and stopped his work. He grabbed his pistol.
Whoever it was knocked three times.
“It’s Husayn.”
He stood, and opened the door. Husayn had a haggard, wide-eyed look, as if death itself had clawed at her from the desert.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Someone’s here, says she’s your sister.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Half-breed, like you. Pale. Pregnant. Real, real upset.”
“Send her up.”
Husayn walked back down.
Taite put the gun in his belt. He’d told her not to come unless it was urgent. Had something happened, or was she still angry at being roomed with whores? She couldn’t stay here. There was no way to get her to work from Aludra.
He went to the covered window and peeked out. It was dark outside. At least she’d waited for dark.
He heard her huffing up the stairs and ran back to the doorway.
Sweat pouring down her face, she stumbled on the last step, and he caught her.
She was crying.
They both sagged to the floor. He held her as she sobbed and clutched at him.
“What happened? Did somebody do something to you? Inaya?” If they’d touched her, if anyone had touched her—
“Raine is looking for you,” she said.
“What?”
“He came to the brothel. I don’t know how he found me. The mistress screamed at him, and he shot her. He shot her in the head!”
“What happened?”
“He said he’d take you in pieces, Tatite. He said… he said terrible things. I thought he’d cut me. I thought—”
“What did you say to him?” Taite started looking around the room for what he could grab and run.
“I said I didn’t know where you were. I swear, I said it.”
“Inaya,” Taite said gently. He took her by her wrists and pulled her off him, looked into her red-rimmed eyes. “Inaya, thank you for that. But, Inaya, you’ve led him here.” The sister he’d known in Ras Tieg would never have been so careless. What had become of her? Who had she become back in Ras Tieg, casting votes the way her husband told her to, turning away from her own kind, damning her own parents? He could understand her desire for protection. He could understand turning away from the movement that had cost them everything, but where was the woman he remembered, the one who could hack a com and retrofit a gun, the woman who had helped wash and soothe their mother after the worst of the attacks?
Her eyes widened. She looked over her shoulder at the door.
“We have to move,” he said.
“He said he wanted you to tell him where Nyx was. He said… he said….”
Taite grabbed his pack, threw in some bursts, his wallet, and his bank book. He grabbed a couple of transceivers from the com and threw in Kine’s dictation sessions.
He took Inaya’s hand. “There’s a back stair. Please, please hurry.”
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