Rapture

by Kameron Hurley

  “Come!” Abhinava said, and held out his arm. “We need your pistols.”

  Rhys ran after him.

  More figures poured in from the desert. He had assumed the dozen were all they had, but a dozen more appeared every time their comrades were felled. Rhys took cover behind a cart with Abhinava and several other men. They had rounded up the others into just two carts.

  “This is where we stand,” Abhinava said, as another wave came in from the desert.

  Rhys aimed to incapacitate the women, taking them each in the legs, with a preference for the knee, when he could manage it. He had not killed a man in a long time, and he preferred to keep it that way.

  “What are they coming for?” Rhys asked. He saw more sand caterpillars reticulating out across the desert.

  “They want the goods,” Abhinava said, “and the caterpillars.”

  “Let them have them!”

  “Are you mad?”

  Rhys wondered why these people objected to the caravans so strongly. Wouldn’t they appreciate trade and commerce in this blasted wasteland?

  The smell of smoke pulled his attention from the raiders. He looked back and saw that the nearest cart was on fire.

  Rhys broke away from the others, running across the sand. He saw more carts on fire, spewing smoke into the cool night air. He coughed and choked as he rolled down to the other side of camp. When he looked up, one of the desert women stood over him, serrated blade raised.

  He fired.

  She dropped.

  Rhys scrambled to his feet. He saw a single sand caterpillar squirming at the edge of camp, its tawny, nearly hairless skin blending easily into sand. It was hitched to a small chariot used by the caravan leader.

  He strode toward the abandoned chariot. His hands began to shake as he untangled the caterpillar’s lead from its hitch. He leapt into the cart and pushed out into the desert, beyond the circle of the caravan. He kicked at the supplies in the chariot, and noted that he did not have much water. He needed to go back the way they had come and tell someone what had happened. He needed to get back to Tejal, to find Elahyiah and his children. But the wind had started up, smearing the caravan’s tracks across the desert, blowing more smoke. He was bitterly cold. Above him, the sky was alive with purple fire.

  He turned back once. The caravan was some ways distant. No one was following him. He heard screaming, then Khairian singing. The trembling got worse. He was tired of killing for lost causes. He closed his eyes, and tried to still his racing heart with the memory of why he had come to this Godforsaken place.

  The night the bel dame assassins came for him and his family in Tirhan, they had taken his hands, nearly drowned his wife, and killed his daughters. They found Souri’s body that night, but not his elder daughter, Laleh. He had searched for her body, and had the well dredged, and put in a report with the Tirhani order police. Elahyiah told him he was obsessed about a ghost, and after two years he let it rest. He had tried to rebuild his life, his family, even though he had failed to protect them that night, when the bel dames burned the world down around them.

  So many failures. He no longer wondered what God would say to him at his death. He no longer anticipated paradise. He was a deserter and a coward. And a killer. What was one more body now that he had failed at everything else?

  He was already damned. But he could not fail his family again.

  Rhys huddled in his burnous against the chill and prayed for a warm dawn. A new day. A clean beginning.

  But as the caravan burned behind him, he admitted to himself that there was no starting over.

  Just running. Endless, mindless running across the desert, into a future much bleaker than the past.

  11.

  Inaya knelt at the foot of Saint Mhari, murmuring a prayer of safekeeping she had intoned since her childhood, long before she understood the words. It was an hour after midnight mass, when only the most desperate and downtrodden still walked the dim passages and knelt in the narrow prayer niches of the church, seeking solace from lesser saints whose concerns, they hoped, were easier to bear than God’s, and so could afford to pay them more attention. It was her mother who first took her here to these lesser spaces; the small, secret spaces.

  “It is not the shouting that God cares for,” her mother told her. “He rewards the obedient, the pious, the meek. What meek woman has the pride to speak directly to God? That is not our place. It is Mhari who will carry our prayers to Him. Mhari who protects us.”

  Inaya placed her fingers on the worn base of the idol, and peered into the inscrutable face. Her personal prayers were too private to say aloud, not here, not anywhere. But she knew Mhari would hear them. Knew they would find their way to God’s ear, even if He didn’t answer. He never answered.

  Behind her, she heard Michel’s familiar shuffling walk. She rose, but did not turn. He moved within a pace of her, then stopped.

  “Mhari,” he murmured. “Not the most inconspicuous place to meet.”

  “It’s no fault of mine that you are not a woman.”

  “Mhari is the saint of martyrs and victims,” he said. “That is not what we are.”

  “Mhari is the saint of women.”

  “As I said. Isn’t it time we embrace our true power?”

  Inaya watched the flickering light of the bugs in glass above them playing off Mhari’s smooth, featureless face. Inaya wanted to see her weep blood, or morph into some base beetle. They were the sort of tangible miracles that could give her hope that some tiny portion of her time spent here was not time spent simply speaking to herself. The times she knew God, when she felt closest to Him, were when she shifted, when she gave in to her body’s deep need to cut loose, cut free, slough off her skin and become something else, something more, everything. A piece of everything. Did God feel like that? she wondered. Was that why she felt so close to Him then? All the more reason they hate us, Inaya thought. We know more of God than his priests.

  “Did you find her?” Inaya asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She went to Nasheen. I followed her across the border, and to the boy. She chose to stay with him.”

  Inaya’s chest tightened. “In Nasheen?”

  “Yes.”

  “You permitted her to do that?”

  “I could not persuade her to return. I told you there was a danger in putting them together. Young love—”

  Inaya’s laugh was soft, rueful. She wanted to sink into the stones at his feet and slowly suffocate him in molten rock. Her body fairly vibrated with anticipation. She took a deep breath. It had been easier to control herself when she believed she had no choices, when life was something that simply happened to her. She had done all the correct things. Married sensible men, raised children, kept a good house. She was dutiful and obedient and pious. She was all of those things because she believed there was no other way to be. Knowing there was something different was a blessing and curse. And it hurt her now. It made her… less predictable.

  She knew better than to use Isabet’s name out loud, not here. “She was our best piece,” Inaya said carefully.

  “She was a diplomatic solution to a situation for which the time for diplomacy has expired.”

  “Your actions were unwise.”

  “It was her decision. Our people have lived as slaves for too long. I would not force her to do anything against her will. She wanted to stay with that boy. Let her stay. I’m sure they will be back in a week or two when they have… tired.”

  Inaya felt the heat in her face. She flexed her toes, an invisible gesture of frustration that she had perfected during her first marriage. When you had to smile and bow your head and stare at the ground every time someone disrespected you, you found ways to channel frustration. She hadn’t even noticed she did it until she came back to Ras Tieg.

  “That was irresponsible of you,” she said.

  “We should look ahead.”

  “To what? War?”

  “A show of
force. That is all.” He moved a step closer—too close for decency. She felt the heat of him behind her. “We are powerful. And you are the most powerful of all, bound by no set form. If we show them our true power, they cannot help but take us seriously.”

  Inaya had watched God’s Angels put black bags over the heads of her fellow shifters—old women and children, young men and teenaged girls—most of her life. It had only gotten worse now as the people they took away were her own operatives. She had made the same mistake with each of them, in the beginning, as she had made with Eshe—treating them like her own family, her own children. Every one of them had disappeared into some smoked-glass bakkie. No one saw them alive again.

  “I believe they take us seriously enough already,” Inaya said. “It is not their minds we must change. It is the people’s minds. So long as they hate and fear us, we will not earn our place as human beings. And if we attack what they hold most dear, we simply affirm what our enemies say about us.”

  “It sounds cowardly to me.”

  “Let me tell you about cowards,” Inaya said. “Let me tell you about the cowardice I saw among you when I first came to Ras Tieg.”

  That, at least, gave him pause. For a few moments they stood in silence, two renegade shape shifters in the last place any of God’s Angels would think to look for them. What foolish animal crept into its enemy’s house to hide?

  “Tell me,” Inaya said softly, “how many more have come over to our cause since I joined you?”

  “Impossible to say.”

  “And who brought us the girl?”

  “I still think—”

  “I have not asked your opinion of my methods. Not in some time. Yet you still continue to offer up the same tired strategies. The same ones that nearly brought you to your knees before I joined you. I am done arguing with you on our path. It has been decided. Fly back to Nasheen tonight and bring her back.”

  “This is a foolish course.”

  “Do it, or don’t bother coming back,” Inaya said. She turned, and made to move past him, gaze lowered.

  He grabbed her arm, jerked her toward him, made her look up. The space was narrow, and she did not have enough clearance to pull away.

  She met his gaze. It was what he wanted, of course. Some acknowledgement of their intimacy. But there was no smile for him, no bowed head, no words to soothe his bruised ego. He was a grown man, and she would treat him like one.

  “You were nothing before I found you,” he said, biting. “How long would it have been before you and the boy took to whoring yourselves out? He was a thieving cur, and you his little bitch.”

  “How quickly your words curdle when you no longer have power,” Inaya said. Her skin prickled, and she felt a subtle ripple slide across her skin; her body’s desperate desire to be free. She was not a fool. She had been raised in Ras Tieg. When Michel followed Eshe back to the alley they shared in their first days in exile in Ras Tieg, she expected the worst. But he had remembered her from a diplomatic dinner in Tirhan, where he had posed as a servant in order to gain access. She thought him sly and moppish then—not trustworthy. Someone—her old contact, Elodie, perhaps—had told him she was a sympathizer. When he discovered who they were, when he understood exactly how they could be used, he invited them to join the resistance in Ras Tieg, the Fourré. She was under no illusions that he offered his hand in selfless friendship. They could eat and sleep there so long as they were useful. But one night, all of that changed, and in the morning, she was the leader, and he was second.

  Until this moment, she had not realized that he believed that shift had been made in name only. He still thought she was the puppet, he the master.

  Inaya let go.

  It was a painful, delightful feeling, like giving in to the euphoric exhaustion at the end of a long labor. She took him by the shoulders—he was not a slim man—and let her arms melt across his torso, coating him in a shiny straightjacket of organic resin that roughly approximated the chitinous sludge of the bug secretions that made up the city’s foundations.

  Her body trembled, and sweat beaded her upper lip. She felt the stitch in the world open, ready to accept those pieces of her she did not use during the transformation. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to unmake her entire body into acidic mucus and devour him whole. She breathed deeply. Her sleeves hung, limp, against the narrow bands of resin where her arms had been, which now connected her to Michel. His face was pale, with the barest hint of a quiver. He had seen what she could do, certainly, but never had it directed at him.

  “If you touch me again unasked,” she murmured, “I will reach into your chest and stop your heart. Do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  Inaya pulled away from him as her body began to reknit itself. Organic sludge became human body, became tendons, sinew, tissue, skin. She dropped her pale arms so the sleeves covered them over before the stubs of her reformed fingers regenerated the nails. Her arms and fingers were sticky with mucus. The stitch in the world closed. And then the disappointment came over her. It happened each time she shifted back to human form, as if her body had half hoped she would never return to this soft shell.

  “Come back with the girl,” she said. “Or leave the movement. We have no need of you.”

  She moved past him, into the open ambulatory of the church. Three women sat in a pew at the front, weeping. Two priests with swords stood to either side of the massive altar, nearly fifty paces distant. The church was an organic monster, the largest thing in the city, built on the old bones of some dead ship and crafted skyward, with an open ceiling that protected them from the elements with nothing more than a custom filter. Expensive, considering Ras Tieg’s lack of magicians, but most churches had them, so God could gaze down upon them. To remind them of where they came from. Of where, one day, God might return them.

  Inaya spared a glance upward as she walked. Inside, the light of the lamps along the aisles was low, so above, the stars were visible. This far south, the sky was as crowded as it ever got, with bold pinpricks of light from far-off places. She wondered, sometimes, what would happen if she truly let go. Just how far and fast she could travel when she broke her body down to its smallest parts. What were all of them, really, but bits of something else? Bits of stars?

  She wanted to build a better world. So why did so many others want to keep it just the same?

  She stepped into the humid night air. A drizzling rain fell, and scattered clumps of rotten leaves clotted the drains along either side of the cobbled way. Two more priests with drawn swords stood outside. As she passed, both murmured, “Go with God.”

  “God bless,” she said. She closed her long coat over her habit, tightly binding her body against the rain, and the stares from passersby, and stepped out onto the muddy street, alone.

  12.

  Nyx dreamed of bloody bel dames storming her seaside compound in Druce. She saw Anneke’s children’s faces mutilated, Anneke’s twisted body broken in the courtyard, and a blood-spattered trail leading upstairs, to Nyx’s bedroom. And there, at the top of the stairs, lay not the body of her lover, not the woman she had kept from Mercia and the bel dames, not the woman she was murdering blameless bodyguards to protect—the woman who loved the sea and tolerated Nyx and her monstrous history—but beautiful Rhys, his handless arms reaching out to her, the expression on his face a strange mix of horror and recognition.

  “You can’t hide from them. They’ll come for everything you love,” he said. “The way they came for me.”

  And she woke up.

  The world was still dark. It was at least an hour from morning prayer. She was covered in a thin film of sweat, and every part of her body was taut, alert, flooded with adrenaline. There would be no more sleep for her.

  You’re a bloody fucking fool, she thought. The world will trash everything you care about. She had to let them go. The way she’d let everything else go. The way she’d let Rhys go.

  Nyx rolled off the cot she
kept in her office and walked into the back where Eshe had his pallet. He was still there, sleeping soundly, one arm thrown over his face. But the pallet opposite him—Ahmed’s place—was empty.

  Nyx found Ahmed in the kitchen, already awake, his com gear carefully laid out on a blanket on the floor. He was packing each item neatly into his pack.

  “Thought you might be gone,” she said.

  “Where would I go?”

  “Right,” Nyx said.

  “Is everything… all right?”

  “Of course,” Nyx said. The dream was fading, but the feeling it left her with was still there—a terrible premonition. She went to the sink and washed her face and hands.

  “That new beggar is still there,” Ahmed said.

  “I expected he would be.”

  “How do you want to deal with it?”

  “I don’t,” Nyx said. “Let them come.”

  It was the anticipation that nagged at her most. She didn’t know how to solve anything unless she had the option of putting a bullet in it.

  Fatima’s little spies showed up after dawn prayer.

  Both women were young and scrappy, and there was something about the way they stood that made Nyx wonder if they were sisters or lovers. Whichever it was, they had known each other a long time.

  The magician came in first, thrusting a scrap of paper at her that Nyx assumed was supposed to be a voucher from Fatima.

  Nyx sized her up. She was a small woman, mid-twenties, with thick, dark hair tangled back with a frayed ribbon. Most of the flesh of her face seemed to have been packed into her cheeks, giving her a warmer, rounder appearance than her figure warranted. Her face was clean, but her clothes were grimy and tattered. She wore male garb—long khameez and trousers and somber colors—but her old burnous was a faded scarlet red.

  The bel dame shadowed her. She was a head taller than her companion, wiry where the magician was skinny. She wore a sturdy pack and sensible boots. In the harsh light of dawn, the left side of her cheek and neck was a pocked ruin, as if flesh beetles had gnawed on the twisted face of some terrible demon. She turned her furrowed face to Nyx and said nothing. What was she, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Hard to tell with a face like that.