Oh, God.
Everything was burning. She was burning in the desert.
Someone moved on the other side of the gully.
Dahab carried a rifle. Half her face was a mass of scar tissue and badly healed bone. One black eye, not her own, peered out from the wrecked half of her face.
Bel dames were hard to kill… especially when there was a magician just down the hall when they were shot.
Run, Nyx thought. Bloody fucking hell, why can’t I fucking run? She started to shake.
Rhys opened his eyes. They didn’t focus right. She wondered if he even saw her.
She wanted to say something stupid and profound.
But all she managed to say was “Don’t die.”
She choked on the rest.
They wouldn’t kill her, not yet.
Whoever wanted her wanted her alive.
Rasheeda flexed her fingers and licked her lips. She stopped three paces from them, one arm akimbo. “I missed you, sister,” she said.
Nyx heard another shot. Something hot and heavy slammed into her back. She lost her balance and tumbled, Rhys in her arms. She tasted dust. She writhed in the sand and reached toward Rhys. He tried to get up. The bel dames were laughing. Another gun went off.
She wanted to hold his hand.
33
Rhys lay on his side on a hard, gritty floor. The air was hot and oddly humid. His shattered hands were bound behind him, and they throbbed. Someone lay across from him. Shiny darkness pooled on the stones under her.
“Nyx?” he said. “Nyx?”
They were in some kind of cell. He saw pale orange light between him and Nyx, seeping from beneath the door. He thought it was Nyx. Was she dead? Had they killed her?
“Nyx,” he said.
The figure moved and moaned.
Nyx.
His hands bled pain, but he tried to move them anyhow. The knots were tight. His head still hurt. He closed his eyes and tried to find the bugs, tried to call out for something, anything. Some wasps or some pinchers, preferably roaches to gnaw through the sticky bands. But he met only a wall of blackness, emptiness. His whole world had gone silent.
“Nyx,” he said again.
She turned toward him. His eyes were adjusting to the low light coming in from under the door.
Her hands were bound too, but in front of her. She reached toward him.
“They shot me,” she said.
“You make a good target,” he said.
She made a strange hiccupping sound. It took him a moment to realize she was laughing.
“God, that hurts,” she said, and gasped.
“Where did they hit you?”
“You can’t feel it?”
“I’m blind like this.” How long ago had Raine drugged him? His head swam. Memory bit him, memories of blood and needles and the sound of bone crunching under boots. His hands twitched.
“It’s bad,” she said.
Fear choked him. Suddenly and completely. Nyx never said it was bad, even when it was. “How bad? Where is it?” he said.
“Where’s Anneke? Is she in here?”
“Where are you shot, Nyx?”
She reached out and grabbed him by the collar, pulled him close. They lay a breath apart on the dirty floor. There was something wet underneath him now. Her blood.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, stupidly. She was shivering.
He needed his hands. He twisted his wrists, tried to loosen the bands again. His hands throbbed. Pain blinded him.
“I can stop the bleeding,” he said. “I just need my hands. If I can—”
“My sandal,” she said.
“Did they—”
“It’s here.” She brought up her leg and kicked something from the sole of it. The razor blade. He heard it clink across the floor. “Lie on your belly. I can cut you out.”
He turned onto his stomach, and she cut his hands free from behind him.
Rhys tried to flex his ruined fingers. White pain shuddered through him. Something tapped at the corner of his mind. He heard a chittering sound—the delicate flutter of a moth’s wings. He closed his eyes and concentrated.
Where were they? It was like reaching through a dark gauze.
“I’m dying,” Nyx said.
“No,” he said. He put his hands on her. She rolled over onto her back. More blood escaped from beneath her. Too much blood.
“I fucked it up,” she said.
He couldn’t disagree with that. “Yes,” he said.
“I wanted to be brave,” Nyx said.
“Brave? I heard about the front. Did you forget I knew that? How much more brave—”
“That’s a lie,” she muttered.
“What?” He could almost feel the hurt in her. He closed his eyes again. If he just concentrated, just willed the drug out of him…
“I’m not a hero,” Nyx said. “I shouldn’t have been reconstituted. They should have buried me in the Orrizo. Fuck, I was stupid.”
Rhys opened his eyes. “What?”
She was still shivering.
“I was a sapper,” she said. “We went in and exploded bursts, cleared minefields. I told you I was too good to kill. I could cut out a mine and make four better ones from the guts. You give me a magician and some bug juice and I could take out half a city. And I did, you know, I did… I watched a lot of boys die. A lot of good boys. I killed a lot of good boys. Women, kids. Everyone.”
“It’s a war, Nyx. None of us did things we’re proud of.” Rhys caught himself.
“I was good at it. It made me somebody else, though. I didn’t like what it made me.”
He heard them, then. The bugs. Close. He needed more time. How much time did she have?
“Nyx, you can’t—”
“I was doing a sweep at the edge of some agricultural compound out here. Bahreha, back before I blew all these compounds. It didn’t used to be desert. Oh, I was so good. I took out whole cities, Rhys, whole cities full of your people, women and girls too. I was just doing some stupid job with my squad, clearing these flesh mines, and I fucked up.
“I set off a burst. Just one burst, clumsy, and when I did it I fucking froze, and then I just clawed past those boys in my squad, those boys I fought and bled with, and I didn’t even warn them. Didn’t even call out. Just ran.
“There was acid everywhere. My boys blew apart and melted. I crawled out with their bloody steaming guts all over me. When I got out, they had to spray me off with a neutralizer.
“What kind of a woman does that, Rhys? Lets boys die? We’re supposed to protect them. I let them die. I killed my own boys.”
She fell silent for a long time.
In the silence, Rhys heard the hiss of a nest of cockroaches. Then nothing. Only the labored sound of Nyx’s breathing. How badly was she hurt? He needed to know.
“I burned myself,” she said in the darkness. “I got drunk and went out into the fields. The moons were in progression back then, and, oh, they were so big and bloody and there was plenty of light. I dragged out a keg of fuel oil, the kind we used for fire bursts, and I set myself on fire. I just set myself on fire, Rhys—”
“Nyx—”
“I judged myself.”
“Judgment is God’s task, not yours.”
“I left God in Bahreha.”
Rhys heard footsteps outside the door. The light changed. Rhys fell back onto his side and tucked his hands behind him.
The door started to open.
Nyx used her thumb to push the razor blade under him.
A woman stood in the doorway, a black shadow.
“Get her up,” the woman said, and Rasheeda padded in behind her and took Nyx under the arms and hauled her out.
“What are you doing with her?” Rhys asked.
“That’s not your problem, kid,” the woman said. He knew her voice. Was she one of the bel dames? He squinted. There was something about her, something about her hands…
Rasheeda dragged Nyx out of the cell.
> “Where are you taking her?” he persisted.
“Don’t you worry,” the woman said, and when she turned into the light, he knew her. “We’ll come back for you soon enough.”
34
Khos’s father had been afraid of three things: dancing, women, and wine. He had told Khos that what made men from boys was a man’s ability to drive well, shoot straight, and tell the truth.
For thirty-four years, Khos had heeded that advice with a fervor he would call religious. He followed that creed long after he had violated every law in his country and some others besides and found himself pining after women with the sort of blind affection Mhorians were supposed to reserve for those of their own sex. Women were not the same people, his father and uncles said. They did not feel the same, did not love the same. They bled and gave birth and died according to their own rules. Their hearts were great deserts of secrets, and those deserts were not a place a man could ever hope to cross, let alone conquer.
When he shifted to human form in front of the bakkie, he paused only to kick out the rocks from behind the tires and pull on an extra burnous from the back.
Inaya was nursing her son, and she said nothing to him until the bakkie was belching and grinding down the barely passable road, toward the shrine.
“What happened?” she asked.
“They’re dead,” he lied, and the lie tasted bad, like blood.
“Where are we going?”
“Tirhan.”
“Tirhan? Are you mad? How will you get there?”
“I know some women who can get us there.” She would kill him if he asked her to shift. In any case, her son wouldn’t be able to shift at all, even if he’d been born with the talent. Most shifters didn’t get the knack of shifting until puberty, though there were exceptions.
“Where’s Nyx?”
“I told you.” He did not look at her. In her face, he saw too much of Taite. How would he tell Mahdesh? “We go on until dark. I have some money stowed in the back, some side work I’ve been doing. We’ll be safe in Tirhan. Your son will be safe in Tirhan.”
And mine, he thought. My son is safe in Tirhan.
The dust blew in from the road. He once heard that when the men at the front marched in formation, those at the center got dust in their nostrils, and their lungs started to seize. They started getting nosebleeds. It got so bad sometimes that the men just dropped out of formation and died there along the road, casualties not of the war but of the desert.
“Khos,” Inaya said.
“We’ll be all right if we can get in and out of Dadfar fast. We’ll need to pick up a few things, some supplies—”
“Khos?”
He hooked a right past the shrine and back onto the main road. Another bakkie screamed past him, spewing red beetles from its back end. There were armed women inside. He was glad they drove too fast for him to make out their faces. He kept his gaze on the road. The long, too-bright road.
“Once we’re packed, we can—”
“Khos, where’s Nyx?”
He chanced a look at her.
Inaya had pulled the baby from her breast. The boy whined in her lap. Her pale breast hung out the front of her robe. He had a sudden impulse to take the nipple into his own mouth, to close his eyes and ask for comfort.
He gazed back out at the road, shifted pedals.
“We were ambushed. She died.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Khos.”
“This was the only way,” he said. “They’re letting us go. They only wanted Nyx. I can get us out.” He spared a look at her again. Her face… there was something hard in her face, something unexpected. “Inaya, I can save you and your son. He can grow up in Tirhan. There’s no war in Tirhan. No mercenaries. No bel dames. No bounty hunters. You can wear a veil and live properly. You can live safe. You can—”
“Do you know where they’re taking her?”
“Who?”
“Nyx.”
“What?” This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.
“Where are they taking Nyx? Are they killing her or capturing her?”
“I—”
“You can’t just leave her back there.”
“What are you talking about? She let Taite die. She’d sacrifice me, you, your son, all of us. So long as we’re with Nyx, we’re dead. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
“I heard what that alien said. Nyx isn’t doing this for herself.”
“What?”
Inaya sighed heavily. She shifted her son in her arms, covered her breast. “You want to run away? Nyx believes that killing this Nikodem woman will stop something much worse. The sort of tech Nikodem has could exploit people like…”And Khos realized she was about to say “us.” Instead, Inaya pushed on. “What she’s doing won’t end with Chenja and Nasheen. Umayma is scarcely habitable. To stir up more bugs, more bursts, more hybrids, more… monsters, will upset everything. How long until it burns through Chenja and Nasheen and moves on? How long before Ras Tieg enslaves shifters and sends them to fight in Nasheen’s war? And Tirhan? Mhoria? How long do you intend to shield me? And how long do you think I’ll go on, after you’re dead?”
“Inaya, Taite—”
“Taite is dead,” she said, and he heard a finality in her voice. “I do not love Nyx, but Nikodem and her people are gene pirates, going planet to planet collecting pieces of what they want and need while dropping off reckless alien technology. Things that will destroy us.”
The words of his father and uncles came back to him. Unknowable. Irrational. And he remembered Taite’s story again, about Inaya driving a stolen bakkie from town, pulling a dying shifter from the backseat.
This Inaya.
“Inaya, Nyx isn’t going to save the world—”
“No, perhaps not, but neither are we, by running away from her and the rest. If she cannot succeed in killing the bearer of this knowledge, then one of us needs to. As far as I’m concerned, Nikodem is a gene pirate, and if that’s so, someone should stop her.”
“Inaya—”
“Do you know where they’re taking her?”
Khos tightened his grip on the wheel. “Yes,” he said.
“Take me there.”
“Inaya—”
“Take me there. Or is this a kidnapping? Don’t confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be rescued.”
He felt suddenly ridiculous, angry. “I’m doing this for Taite! And you!”
“Taite is dead. And I don’t want it. So who’s being served?”
“Fuck!” Khos yelled.
“Indeed,” Inaya said, and pulled her breast back out of her robe, drew her son to her chest.
Dust blew in from the road.
Khos drove.
35
Nyx had wanted to be the hero of her own life. Things hadn’t turned out that way. Sometimes she thought maybe she could just be the hero of someone else’s life, but there was no one who cared enough about her to keep her that close. Hell, there was nobody she’d let that close. No one wanted a hero who couldn’t even save herself.
Nyx opened her eyes, but everything was still dark. She heard people talking really close.
“With the information we’ve gotten from Nasheen and what you can get me from Chenja, all I need is to meld my work with what they’re doing in Tirhan, and we’ll have hacked this planet like a blood bank.”
“Don’t know why you had to do it all on the sly.”
“It wouldn’t be sporting to offer two sides of a holy war the same technology. I had to disappear. You and the magicians gave us that. How were we supposed to deal with Chenja when the only docking bays on the planet are in Nasheen? You know how long this has taken us? Decades.”
“Well, you take whatever you want. I give you your pieces of Chenja, and you give me Nyx. I’ve done work with pirates before. Just take your shit off the planet.”
“Our worlds have no shifters, no magicians. The sort of codes you offer us will transform our world. I�
��ve been fascinated by some of the mutations I’ve seen in Mhoria and Ras Tieg. I can’t imagine the wonders they’re keeping from us in Tirhan.”
“Well, you’re on your own with Tirhan and the red desert. Tomorrow you’ll get your access to the Chenjan compounds. The magicians will arrange it the same way they arranged your disappearance.”
Nyx knew one of the voices, the strange accent. She tried to squint. She wished for sight. A gray wash bled across her senses. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I am endlessly fascinated with Nasheenian magicians.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
Nikodem laughed. It was a big laugh, far bigger than should have come from the body of such a little woman. “We are even, you and I.”
Nyx opened her eyes.
Light flooded her vision. She squinted again. For a moment, everything was blurry light, too intense. Then she started to make out shapes and figures. The world smelled of damp concrete and ammonia.
Nyx struggled to sit up, but someone had bound her to a cold slab at the wrists and ankles.
“Here she is,” Nikodem said. She wore a black scarf over her hair, but instead of a robe, she wore loose trousers and a long tunic. She had two pistols belted at her hips.
Nikodem placed a hand on Nyx’s arm. Behind the alien, Nyx saw someone else, a tall, brown Nasheenian. White hair, lined face, and his hands… his magician’s hands.
Yah Tayyib.
So this was where everything met up. Yah Tayyib turned back into the shadows and left them before she could speak.
There were big lights overhead. Flies circled them.
Nyx was in some kind of converted storage room. Jars of organs lined the walls—jars covered in cooling bugs—and there were two giant, silvery vats against one wall whose sleek sides pulsed. A long table next to Nyx was covered in instruments. Some tendon worms writhed in a white bowl, trying to escape. She saw a com unit next to the shelving and a dozen bugs chattered in a cold glass case just above it.
Nikodem would keep a laboratory someplace safe. Somewhere magicians and bel dames wouldn’t look. Nyx amended that: where some magicians and some bel dames wouldn’t look.
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