Inaya was still sobbing. “I can’t. I can’t get up. I’m so tired.”
“You can. Come here. Get up.”
Taite lifted her. He didn’t know how he did it, picking up his older sister, this towering figure he had so admired before his exile. The strong one. The shifter. He dragged Inaya toward the hidden door at the back, opened it. He heard someone else on the stairs behind them. A lot of someones.
He was fucked.
He looked into Inaya’s tear-stained face and took it into his hands. “Go to Nyx,” he said. “She’s in a garret in Dadfar, in the Rihaada district on Lower Maida and Seventh. Are you listening to me? You need to cross the border. Do you understand? You need to cross the border.”
“I can’t go to Chenja! They’ll kill me on sight, the bursts—”
“You can,” Taite said. He kissed her forehead, her lips, her eyelids. He had a memory of his mother doing the same to him, the last he ever saw of her. He could not remember her face. “You can… A bird can fly across a border.”
“Don’t ask me to do that. Never ask me to do that!”
He shook her. “Then you’ll die here with me, do you understand?” He shouted at her, and his gut churned as he shouted. He sounded like their father. He threw his pack at her. “Take that. There’s water in Husayn’s bakkie, and a couple bucks in change in my pack. Get the fuck out of here! Right now. Right now!”
“Taite!”
He prodded her into the dark stairwell and shut the door behind her.
He pulled out his pistol and crept behind the com. In the sudden silence, the quiet dim, he looked up at his little saint, at Baldomerus, and he prayed.
When they walked in, Taite started shooting.
22
Nyx faded in and out of awareness. For a time, she thought she heard voices outside the door. The sound of moist clicking, the shuffle of insectile legs, roused her.
When she looked down, she saw a giant centipede gnawing at her left leg with its finger-long pincers. She yelled and jerked in the chair, scaring it back into its hole in the masonry. Her body was instantly covered in a sheen of cold sweat. She fought to stay conscious.
When she next came to, Luce was standing over her.
“Doesn’t look like so much now, does she?” Luce said. She took Nyx by the hair and searched her face.
Nyx faded again.
She dreamed of water. Cool, suffocating water. She swam in a great lake so clear and blue she could see the ruins of old cities below. And then she was drowning in it, drowning in cold, pulled down toward the dead cities, cities full of sand. So cold.
Someone dumped a bucket of water over her. She came to with a start.
“You stink,” Luce said, and set the bucket next to her.
Fatima was closing the door.
They had left the chair from their last visit, and Fatima sat in it again.
“Good morning, Nyxnissa,” Fatima said.
Nyx licked at the moisture on her lips. Her hands had gone numb. She tried to flex them—the fingers she had and the fingers she thought she had. Her whole body was stiff and growing increasingly unresponsive. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She peered at the bel dames and wondered where Rasheeda was.
“I believe I was asking you yesterday where Kine’s papers were,” Fatima said. “I think it’s an easy question. One answer and we give you some water. What do you think of that?”
What Nyx thought was that her throat was so dry she couldn’t speak. But she was no good to them dead.
She moved her mouth but didn’t let any sound out.
“What’s that?” Fatima said, leaning toward her. She gestured irritably at Luce.
Luce walked out and came back with a water bulb. She held it to Nyx’s lips and let her drink.
Nyx gulped it all down, licked her lips again. She tried to grin, but it hurt to move her face.
“Kine’s papers,” Fatima said.
“I didn’t kill her,” Nyx rasped.
A sound came from outside the door, muffled.
“What was that?” Fatima said.
“Sounds like a dog,” Luce said. “I’ll check it out, but the filters are up. No shifter is getting through that filter.”
Luce opened the door. She didn’t close it, and Nyx heard her heading upstairs. From the open door came the unmistakable sound of a barking dog.
“Why bother holding out now, sister-mine?” Fatima said, and her voice softened. “There’s no one in this world who will know or care if you live or die. I am your sister. This time next year, I’ll be on the bel dame council. You understand that? Why not tell me what I need and we’ll welcome you back, sister. Isn’t that what you wanted? Kine’s papers, and all’s forgiven. Do you hear me, Nyxnissa? I have the power to make you a bel dame again. No one else would give you that.”
Nyx was drooling on herself again. She blinked a few times and raised her head. “You think I’m fucking stupid?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Fatima said, and her tone flattened again.
“Teams are replaceable,” Nyx said. “I’ll get another team. You want your seat on the council, you’ll have to torture something useful out of some other woman.”
“Your sisters were all you had, Nyxnissa, and in your greed you lost us. I’ve never met a woman so despised.”
“Yes, you have.”
“Is that so? I have three daughters and a son at the front,” Fatima said. “My lover is descended from the First Families. You? You have nothing. No one.”
Nyx heard a soft clicking from outside the door. She raised her head an inch, just an inch, and saw a fist-size black roach skitter into the room.
Nyx shut her eyes.
There was a pop and a flash that Nyx could see even from behind her eyelids. Flash bug.
Fatima cried out.
A gun went off. Fatima screeched again. Noise and movement.
Nyx opened her eyes.
Khos stood next to her, naked, and covered in mucus, still shaking off the last of his dog hair. Anneke was in the doorway. She threw him a pair of cutters.
He bent and worked at Nyx’s bonds.
Fatima was crawling toward one corner of the room, clutching at her bleeding face.
Nyx looked down dumbly at her own ruined, swollen hand as Khos worked.
“Go, go! Hurry up!” Anneke said.
A swarm of locusts burst through the door, throwing it wide, and circled the room.
Nyx heard Rhys’s voice then, from outside. “The other rooms are clear, but Rasheeda’s heading back this way.”
“Do we have another exit?” Anneke asked.
Khos cut the last of the wire from Nyx’s elbows and started on her legs. Nyx tried flexing her fingers. Everything was numb. Even her legs now. She leaned over and coughed up blood.
Khos finished with her legs.
She tried to push herself up, tried to stand. Her whole body shook. Pain blazed up her legs as circulation returned. She looked down and saw blood leaking from the wide, wriggling wounds. If she let go of the armrest, her legs would buckle.
Khos scooped her into his arms. She had forgotten how big he was. She looped her bad arm around his neck and tangled the fingers of her other hand into his dreads.
He carried her outside the little room and up the stairs. They were in some kind of busted-out tenement building. It stank of piss and dogs and human shit. Anneke yelled something at Khos. Rhys was at the top of the stairs. A halo of dragonflies circled his head. He was very beautiful.
“Out,” Rhys said. “Right now. She’s coming in the back.”
They barreled out the front of the building. Khos set Nyx in the back of the bakkie as if she were made of glass. Blood smeared the seat. Khos started the bakkie, and Anneke slung into the front. Rhys climbed in next to Nyx and held her.
It was strange, being held.
Anneke had her rifle pointed out the window. “Go! Go!” she yelled. She fired.
Nyx heard something scream.
Anneke fired again.
“What the fuck was that?” Khos said.
Anneke spit out the window. “It ain’t illegal to kill bel dames in Chenja.”
“Is anything broken?” Rhys asked Nyx as he ran his hands over her. “You know what day it is?”
She named a date, two days after her market trip with Anneke.
“That’s about right,” he said. He pushed her cropped hair out of her bruised face. “Did they break anything?”
“Been coughing up blood,” she murmured.
“All right,” he said. He touched her bandaged hand. “They put anything on this?”
“No.”
“All right. I can put something on it. You’ll lose the whole hand if it goes gangrenous.” He passed his hand over her legs, and she felt a nasty prickling. The worms writhed.
Rhys knit his brows, splayed his fingers, and as the minutes slid by, the worms began to drop off, one by one.
My magician, she thought.
“Where are we going?” Nyx asked.
“I have a place,” Khos said. “Don’t worry about it. They’ll give us harbor as long as we need it. We cleared out after you went missing. Before they searched the safehouse.”
“Yes,” Nyx said.
“They told you about that?” Rhys asked.
“They said you were all dead.”
“We don’t go down that easy,” Anneke said.
“No,” Nyx said as the lights outside blurred past, as Rhys sat with one arm holding her to him as Anneke kept watch at the windows, her rifle out, and as Khos drove to someplace she’d never been, in a foreign country that hated her and her people almost as much as she hated them. Her head felt like someone else’s. Someone else’s broken body. She had been here before.
“That’s all right,” she said.
“You need anything?” Khos asked. “You need some water? I’ve got some up front.”
“No, no,” Nyx said, “but I could use a whiskey.”
She rolled her head against Rhys’s shoulder and passed out.
23
Khos had spent his teenage years on the streets of Mhoria. He had spent one too many nights on the other side of the great divide that separated men’s and women’s worlds, and the priests—the rhabbams—had cast him out of polite society for it. So Khos had made his way as a petty thief and errand runner for a while, and had gotten into his fair share of fistfights. He had seen a lot of maggoty wounds, of bodies devoured by bugs and dogs. On Nyx’s crew, he had seen and done worse. But he had never seen it or done it to anyone on his team.
Nyx looked horrible. He sat at her bedside and tried to tell himself it was her own fucking fault. She was the most Nasheenian woman he knew, and that made her headstrong and arrogant and skilled enough to cut his head off if it caught her fancy.
“How did you find me?” Nyx asked. He and Rhys had gotten her to take in some water, a little food. Rhys had done some bug work on her face and cleaned up her legs, but they had to hire a local hedge witch to do the rest, which Rhys seemed to find embarrassing. Useless fucking magician, Khos thought. He never understood why Nyx kept him on the team. He wished she’d fuck the little prick and get it over with.
She lay behind a gauzy curtain in a discrete room. He’d shown her the lock on the door, and told her she was at the top of the house. There was a narrow grill far up on the wall. He could hear the splash of the fountain in the courtyard.
“I tracked your scent,” Khos said. There were no chairs in the room. The mattress sagged under his weight. “From where Anneke said she lost you. I could only keep up until the edge of the city. After that, Rhys sent out some bugs.”
“So what’s this place? You just on good terms with every brothel mistress in three countries?”
“No,” he said, and hesitated. Then, “All right, it’s a brothel, yes, but it’s also a safe house we use for the underground.”
“We?”
It was stupid to keep her in the dark about it now, but it had become habit over the years. Nyx was a dangerous woman. The people on her team knew that better than anyone, and everyone else she met had a pretty good idea. If she took issue with who he helped, who he betrayed, and the laws he broke, she would murder him for it. He had seen her kill people. It was never pretty.
“I’ve been helping the local whores in Nasheen smuggle their boys out for the last three years,” he said, all in a rush, as if he’d opened a vein.
“Oh, you fuckers,” Nyx said. She put a hand over her eyes. “I used to cut off the heads of men like you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Who else is here?”
“We’re all here. They agreed to take all of us.”
“And of course it’s a brothel.” Nyx crinkled her mouth. It looked like it hurt. “You must have gotten a lot of grateful women into bed.”
“Only the ones who were interested.” But none of them was you, Khos thought. He’d had his one night with her in Punjai, early on, before either of them knew who or what the other really was.
She grunted. “Can the underground do anything to help us?”
“You mean besides giving us a safe house where we can help you recover your ass?”
“You know what I mean. I have a great ass.”
“You do have a great ass,” Khos said. He’d spent a lot of time looking at it over the years, and one night with his hands on it. “Yeah, they’ll put us up, and, yeah, they can point us to the waterworks where we can check out fighters. The whores go with patrons to the matches.”
“Are any of these whores Nasheenian?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Nyx, but you couldn’t pass for a Chenjan whore. Trust me.”
“Not me. You should take Anneke.”
“Anneke couldn’t play a whore to save her life. In Chenja, she couldn’t even pass for a woman if she tried. Rhys and I will go.” He hesitated, added, “As men.”
“All right. Where’s Rhys?”
“He’s all right.”
“Good.” She was fading. They’d pumped her with some local drug Rhys had, but she didn’t talk or act like a woman who wasn’t in pain. She’d rebound, though, he knew. She’d rebound and forget the whole mess, go back to swaggering around. For one sharp moment, he realized he liked her this way, mostly helpless and incredibly vulnerable. But knowing that he was that type of man, that he liked her this way, frightened him. He looked away from her.
“You call a magician?” she asked, moving her maimed hand a bit. “I mean, a real one.”
“They’re hard to come by, and expensive.” Khos paused again. Repairing Nyx’s hand was delicate work, and they needed someone far more skilled than a hedge witch. “We don’t have the cash.”
“Who said that?”
“Rhys.”
“Can’t I sell something? A kidney? My liver?”
“I think you’ll need your liver.”
“Maybe a lung. I don’t have to run fast.”
“I’m not bringing a butcher in here, and a butcher is all we could afford.”
“You could just find my fingers and stick them back on.”
“You need some sleep, I think.”
Nyx tossed her head. “That little dancer will kill me yet.”
“I’ll have one of the women bring you something to help you sleep,” Khos said, and stood.
“At least it was my right hand,” Nyx said. Her eyelids began to close. “Rasheeda never could remember I’m a southpaw.”
Khos stood over her, and watched her mouth go slack, watched her drift. Half dead and mutilated, and she was already thinking about her next fight.
24
Rhys waited for Khos outside Nyx’s room, pacing the hallway. Rhys had done everything he could, called up every bug he had the capacity to control, and it hadn’t been enough. Every time he ran his hands over her, the severity of her injuries made him tremble. For all his talk of her godlessness, of God abandoning her, he had never expected this.
<
br /> I never wanted this.
“How is she?” Rhys asked as Khos came out into the hall. Khos shut the door behind him and gestured for Rhys to follow him back into their shared room.
Inside, Khos said, “She’s ready and willing to sell off her body parts for bread, so about as expected.” He sat on the bed and stretched out his long legs. “She’s the most stubborn bitch I know. She’ll be all right. Not for a while, but she’ll be all right.”
“Did you tell her we haven’t been able to get a hold of Taite?”
“No, and she didn’t ask about him, praise be. Still nothing?”
“Nothing.” Rhys pulled on his burnous. It was almost dawn. None of them had slept, but he wanted to stop at the local mosque and pray before going to clean out the rest of their things from the garret. Khos had warned him that the bel dames had likely blown the place wide open by now, but Rhys needed to check. He had left the stash of Kine’s papers back at the garret, and he didn’t want the bel dames to find them. If they hadn’t already.
Khos stood as well. “I’ll drive you,” he said.
They’d spent a couple of hours repainting the bakkie with some borrowed paint from the brothel mistress and replacing the tags. Rhys had balked at Khos’s choice of safe house. Nasheenian brothels might have been places of political protest and intrigue, but in Chenja they were just brothels. They sold sex and liquor and little else. The whole house smelled of cheap jasmine perfume, liberally applied; it muted but did not cover up the smells of sex and bile and sticky opium.
But they were out of places to go on such short notice. Rhys had no contacts here, and Anneke said her friend’s teahouse was too conspicuous.
So it was sex and jasmine.
“Are we going to scout out other rooms?” Rhys asked.
“Once Nyx is up for it,” Khos said. “She’ll want a say. She gets jumpy when she’s not in a place she chooses.”
They walked down and got into the bakkie. Khos dropped Rhys at the mosque and pulled out a cigar.
It was the best part of being in Chenja, perhaps the only part that made any of it worth it: There was a mosque at every corner, a call to prayer in every city.
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