“Why didn’t you do the same?”
“Me? Ah, doll.” Yah Reza spit on the floor, and a dozen blue beetles scurried out from under the end table and lapped at the crimson wad of spittle. “More death doesn’t cure the war, eh? Just makes it drag on awhile longer. Yah Tayyib, yes, he would do whatever it took to end the war. He would end it one Chenjan at a time. But then, so would most men. Women too. That’s why this war never ends. Nobody lets go.”
“You’re letting go?”
“Completely? Ah, no. Maybe one Chenjan at a time.”
He leaned toward her. “Then let me go.”
She gave him a sloppy smile. “You aren’t a prisoner.” She stood, and the cicadas flew back up into her sleeves. “Go see Nasheen. But don’t expect it to love you.”
Yah Reza set him up with his passbook and paid his train fare to Amtullah. The interior. He did not use the space-twisting magicians’ gyms to travel. He had wanted to see the country, to be on his own. If he’d made himself an exile, he needed to live as one.
When he arrived in the city, he set up several interviews with merchants looking for magicians to accompany their caravans north, through the wastelands.
During the day, Amtullah was a raucous mass of humanity, full of half-breeds and chained cats and corrupt order keepers and organ hawkers and gene pirates. He had trouble following the accented Nasheenian of the interior, and the fees for everything—from food and lodging to transit—were far higher than he’d anticipated. At night, the sky above Amtullah lit up with the occasional violet or green burst, remnants of a border barrage that managed to get through the anti-burst guns. The sound of sirens sent him to bed most nights, as regular as evening prayer.
But when he went to his interviews, he was cast off the porch or stoop or simply turned away at the gate more often than not. His color was enough. They did not wait to hear his accent. A little more talent, perhaps, and he could have perfected a version of Yah Reza’s illusory eyes to mask the obvious physical evidence of his heritage. As it was, he kept his burnous up and his hands covered when he traveled, and spoke only when he had to. It saved him harassment on the street, but not from his potential employers.
He spent many months in Amtullah getting thrown off doorsteps and turned away from tissue mechanic shops. Hunger made him take up employment as a dishwasher at a Heidian restaurant in one of the seedier parts of Amtullah, the sort of place he did not like walking around in at night and liked living in even less. He worked fourteen-hour days, six days a week, and came back to the buggy room he rented smelling of sour cabbage and vinegar. The other three days of the week he spent at the local boxing gym looking for real work—magician’s work—something that made his blood sing.
And every day, six times a day, he prayed. He submitted all that he was, this life, everything, to God.
He was pinched and spit on at work and on the street. His overseers were Heidian women, mostly indifferent, but the patrons were a mixed group, largely Nasheenian, and when he walked among them uncovered he was jostled and cursed and jeered. Retaliation would have meant the loss of his job. A few women, it was true, were disinterested—some were even kind—but the daily indignities of being a Chenjan man in Nasheen began to wear him down. He spent less time at the boxing gyms looking for work. He spent most nights with his forehead and palms pressed to the floor, wondering if his father had cursed him not to death but to hell.
One late night, he decided to walk home from work down a street that would take him to the local mosque in time for midnight prayer. The streets were quiet that night, and the air tasted metallic, like rain. Or blood.
A group of four or five women walked toward him on the other side of the street. He paid them no attention until they crossed over to his side of the empty road and called out to him.
“You have the time?” one of them asked, and as they neared he could smell the liquor on them. They were young women.
“I’m sorry, I do not,” he said. “It is near evening prayer.”
“The fuck’s that accent?” one of them said.
Rhys picked up his pace.
“Hey, man, I said, what’s that accent?”
The tallest girl pulled at his burnous. She was stronger than she looked. The tattered clasp of his burnous snapped, and it pulled his hood free. He staggered.
“Fuck, you’re kidding me!” the tall one said.
They started to crowd him. Like all Nasheenian women, they seemed suddenly larger there together, in the dark along the empty street. And they spoke in loud voices. Always too loud. Overwhelming.
“That’s a fucking Chenjan!”
“Smells like a pisser, though. You a cabbage-eater, Chenjan man?”
“Look at that face! Not a day at the fucking front.”
He made to push through them, but their hands were on him now, and their liquored breaths were in his face. He raised one arm to call a swarm of wasps. One of the girls grabbed his arm, twisted it behind him. The pain blinded him.
“Where you going, black man?”
“You know what Chenjans do in the street after dark?”
“Fucking terrorist.”
He didn’t know which of them threw the first punch. Despite their belligerence, he hadn’t expected it. He never expected violence from women, even after all this time in Nasheen.
She caught him on the side of the head, and a burst of blackness jarred his vision. He stumbled. Someone else hit him and he was on the ground, curled up like a child while they kicked him.
“Turn him over!”
“Get that off!”
One of them had a knife, and they cut his clothes from him. They cut a good deal more of him.
The midnight call to prayer sounded across Amtullah.
Rhys recited the ninety-nine names of God.
Rhys took what was left of his money and his ravaged body and shared a bakkie with eight other hard-luck passengers to Rioja, a northern city, closer to the sea. Towering above Rioja was the Alhambra, a fortress of steel, stone, and ancient organic matting built at the top of a jagged thrust of rock of the same name. Rhys painted portraits in the cobbled square that lay in the shadow of the Alhambra. He sold them for ten cents apiece. At night, he slept in the steep, narrow streets among creepers, black market grocers, and junk dealers. When he was cold, he called swarms of roaches and scarab beetles to cover him. When he ran out of money for canvas and paint, he sold bugs to creepers and the local magicians’ gym. And when he was too poor to eat—or the creepers were no longer buying—he ate the bugs that made his blood sing, the bugs that tied him to the world.
He dreamed of his father. Of his house in Chenja. The smell of oranges.
A woman threw a coin at him one morning while he sat huddled in a doorway in his stained, tattered burnous.
“Find yourself a woman,” she said. She wore sandals and loose trousers, and her face had the smooth, well-fed look of the rich.
“I used to dance for Chenjan mullahs,” Rhys said.
The woman paused. The morning was cool and misty; winter in Rioja. Damp wet her face, beaded her dark hair. He suddenly wanted this strong, capable woman to hold him, Nasheenian or not. He wanted her strength, her certainty.
“But you don’t dance for them anymore,” the woman said. “Let me tell you, boy: Whatever you were in your past life, you aren’t that any longer.”
She continued up the narrow street.
In the end, it was not so hard to return to Yah Reza.
Rhys walked to the magicians’ gym in Rioja and asked for her at the door. He waited on the street in front of the dark doorway for some time while they found her there, somewhere within the bowels of the twisted magicians’ quarters, the world with so many doors.
When she entered the doorway, she was wearing her yellow trousers and chewing sen, unchanged though it had been well over a year since he last saw her.
“Hello, baby doll,” Yah Reza said.
“Sanctuary,” Rhys said.
Yah Reza smiled and spit. “I put on some tea for you.”
She gave him some tea and sent him to Yah Tayyib.
Yah Tayyib dewormed him and cut out the old scars from his assault in Amtullah. He did not ask about what had happened.
“I have seen far worse,” Yah Tayyib told him. “You were lucky they just cut flesh and not entire body parts—though I have plenty of those to spare as well.”
Rhys ate his grubs and gravy. After a time, he no longer urinated blood, and his persistent cough eased. One morning he found himself in the locker room the outriders used, and he stood there in the doorway thinking about the little dog-faced girl and her beautiful, imperfect hands. The old stale smell of sweat and leather filled the room.
Soon he would go back to teaching magic to Nasheenian children. He would lose himself again to the dark bowels of this prison. Hell on Umayma. But was it any worse than the hell outside these walls?
“Rhys?” Yah Tayyib asked.
Rhys turned and saw the old man approaching from the direction of the gym.
“I need you to wrap a woman for me.”
“You don’t wish to do it?”
Yah Tayyib pinched his mouth in distaste. “I have no time for her.”
Rhys walked out into the boxing gym. He saw Husayn in the ring, surely on her last legs as a magician-sponsored fighter. The last year had not been kind to her either. She was well past thirty, too old to make much more money for the magicians. She was gloved and warming up.
It was the other woman who caught his attention. She stood in the near corner of the ring, and she turned as he entered. She was as tall as he was, broad in the shoulders, and heavy in the chest and hips. She wore a breast binding, loose trousers, and sandals. Her hair was jet black, braided, and belled. It hung down her back in one long, knotted tail. She put both hands on the ropes and leaned forward, looking him straight in the face. The boldness of the look stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t know if she wanted to cut him or kiss him.
“I know you,” she said.
“You’re a bel dame,” he said. He knew it the same way he’d known the dog-faced girl had a bad hand, the way he knew a magician or a shifter by sight on the street.
“Was,” she said. “Not anymore. I’m Nyx.”
Husayn bounced over to the former bel dame’s side and punched her on one of her substantial shoulders. “Let’s go, huh?” Husayn said.
“You’re a dancer,” Nyx said.
“Was,” he said.
Nyx let go of the ropes. She looked out behind him, toward the entrance to the magicians’ quarters. Rhys followed her gaze and saw Yah Tayyib in the doorway, watching her with black eyes.
A broad smile lit up Nyx’s face. It made her almost handsome. “You need a job?” she asked Rhys.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Bugs,” Nyx said. “It’s what you can do, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. He’d discovered that he could do little else. “I’m not the most skilled, but… I’ve been told it’s enough for petty employment.”
“I’m a hunter. I need a team. Magicians get ten percent.”
“On a two-person team? No less than twenty-five.”
“There’s three of us for now, but it’ll be five, eventually. Fifteen.”
“Five ways is twenty.”
“That assumes we’re all equal. Nasheen’s not a democracy, and neither’s my team.”
“Fifteen. I won’t kill anyone for you.”
“Fifteen, you don’t kill anybody, and you sign a contract today.”
Rhys turned again to look at Yah Tayyib. The old magician moved out of the doorway, back into the darkness.
“Yes,” Rhys said.
She squatted and reached through the ropes for him. He started, expecting violence. Instead, she clasped his elbow. He recovered quickly and clasped hers in turn. And in that one moment, that brief embrace, he felt safe for the first time in more than a year.
“You’ll do all right with me,” Nyx said, straightening.
“You think so?”
She grinned again. Her whole face lit up. It was dynamic. “If you don’t, I’ll cut your fucking head off. It’s what I’m good at.”
“Not so good as all that, if you aren’t a bel dame anymore.”
She caught hold of the ropes and leaned back, still grinning. “A shitty magician and a shitty bel dame. We’re two of a kind, then, aren’t we?”
He wasn’t sure what scared him most: that she was right, or that she was now his employer.
PART TWO
IN THE DESERT
5
Nyx came out of her year in prison with all of her limbs and organs intact, though she had a new appreciation for open sky and food that hadn’t been grown in a jar. After that, time licked by in a blur of boys and blood. Seven years of putting together a crackerjack bounty hunting team, starting with Taite, her com tech, then her Chenjan magician. Seven years of boys and blood—girls too. Bounty hunters took up notes on girls and women, and that’s all she had a license to be anymore, just another body hacker. Another organ stealer. In Nasheen you hacked out a living or spent your last days hacking out your lungs.
She knew which she preferred.
The war still raged along the ever-changing border with Chenja. Nyx started up her storefront with the dancer and com tech in Punjai, a border city at the heart of the bounty-hunting business. While she was in prison, Punjai had been swallowed by Chenja for six months, then “liberated” by a couple of brilliant Nasheenian magicians and an elite terrorist-removal unit. Chenjan corpses burned for days. All of the city’s prayer wheels were burned and the old street signs were put back up. There had been air raids and rationing and a couple more poisoned waterworks, but, as ever, the war was just life, just how things clicked along—one exhausting burst and bloated body at a time.
It was a fitting way to look at time, Nyx figured, as she opened up her trunk one hazy morning while the yeasty stink of bursts blew in on the wind. She and her team were still three bounties short of rent.
She found a headless body inside the trunk.
“You should have put some towels down,” Rhys said. It had been worth the look on Yah Tayyib’s face the day she signed Rhys, though his cut was still substantially more than anybody else’s on the team.
And she liked his hands.
There had been dog carcasses in the alley behind her storefront this morning, fat rats squealing over tidbits, old women netting roaches for stews. The accumulated filth of rotting tissue, blood, sand, and the stench of human excrement had sent Rhys out onto the veldt for dawn prayer, and Nyx had grudgingly agreed to take the bakkie out to pick him up. She made sure to arrive well after the end of prayer, because watching Rhys praying was about as uncomfortable as the idea of catching him masturbating—if he even did that sort of thing.
In any case, she hadn’t thought to check the trunk.
“Whose is it?” Nyx asked. She was due to pick up a bounty in a quarter of an hour. She needed the trunk space.
The body was draped in the white burnous of a clerk, gold tassels and all. The feet were bare. Though he had no head, a red newsboy cap was cradled under the left arm.
Nice touch, that.
“Khos’s,” Rhys said.
She should have recognized his work.
Nyx glanced over at Rhys, trying to read him. His dark face was pinched and drawn.
She watched him gather his gear. “I’ll put this in the cab. I forgot about the body,” he said.
“Khos won’t get anything without the head.”
“He says the body’s got a birthmark.”
“Khos is an idiot.” Khos, her big Mhorian shifter. Substantial in so many ways. She teased that thought back out of her mind. Shit, it had been a while.
Rhys pinched his mouth. Nyx waited for a word of affirmation, but he said only, “Khos said this one was on the boards for black work. He had me open a file.”
Nyx shut the tr
unk.
“Somebody’s going to revoke my hunter’s license ’cause Khos can’t burn his bodies,” she said. It wouldn’t be the first time. She’d had her bounty hunter’s license revoked twice in her seven years as a hunter—once for accidentally shooting a diplomat’s assistant, who’d been within range of her actual target, and again for employing Khos without a shifter’s license. Shifters were expensive.
Nyx moved around to the cab of the little bakkie, kicked the latch loose, and propped open the door. She took the driver’s seat, adjusted the sword strapped to her back to make it easier to sit, and pumped the ignition pedal. A growl came from under the hood. She’d gotten the bakkie off a hedge witch working in the fleshpots on the Tirhani border. Nyx knew all about what it was like to be hard up for bugs and bread.
“Hit the grille,” Nyx said. Sometimes you had to get the beetles riled up before they’d feed.
Rhys banged the flat of his hand on the grille. Not much weight behind it. Fucking dancers.
While she waited, Nyx watched a burst from the front ignite across the sky over Punjai. One of the anti-burst guns stowed in the minarets along the perimeter fired. The heavy whump-whump of the guns made her ears pop. The burst burned up over the city. Bursts were a lot prettier from a distance.
“Would you put some shit behind it?” Nyx yelled. “You want to go back to whoring-out portraits?”
Rhys kicked the grille. Better.
The bugs hissed, and something inside the semi-organic cistern belched.
“In, in, let’s go!” Nyx called.
Rhys leapt in as the bakkie began rolling down the dusty hill toward Punjai.
There was a hot desert wind blowing in from the western waste, pushing out the city’s black shroud of smog and settling a misty cloud of red silt over the cityscape. The double dawn had risen; the orange sun overpowered the wan light of the blue sun, and the silt-filtered light caught the world on fire.
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