Juon handed the letter to Shajin.
Shajin handed it to Nyx.
Nyx’s fingers trembled. She took the letter and tucked it carefully into the top of her dhoti. A pardon from the Queen? Back to bel dame work? Back to prison? Had she fucked anything up recently?
“Thanks,” she said. “They’ve been giving them out to the top hunters,” Shajin said. “Must be somebody pretty important.”
“Oh,” Nyx said. Not a pardon, then. “If it’s that important, they’d give it to the bel dames, not the hunters.”
Shajin shrugged. “I don’t make policy. Come now, you’re holding up the line, my woman.”
Nyx pushed away from the counter. She waited for Anneke and Khos, and when they returned with the bounty money, she tucked that, too, into her dhoti and told Khos to drive.
Nyx rode shotgun. She pulled out the red letter. Khos looked at her as he started the bakkie.
It took a long time to read the letter. If she went too fast she got the characters backward. By the time they reached the keg, she’d read it twice.
The letter read:
We, God’s Imam, Queen Zaynab sa Boliard so Amtullah, on the forty-eighth day of the Sahfar in the year nine hundred eighty-nine, hereby summon God’s servant Nyxnissa so Dasheem to the Al-Ahnsalus Palace at Mushtallah on behalf of Almighty God and the people of the Holy Empire of Nasheen.
In view of the authority conferred to us by God, and to further the glory of God and His servant Nasheen, we seek the covert recovery of a fugitive, to be apprehended by God’s servant Nyxnissa so Dasheem and whose recovery will be rewarded most graciously.
God’s servant may exchange this imperial summons at the nearest train repository for complementary roundtrip tickets to God’s seat, Mushtallah.
Someone had written in, at the bottom, using the same pen stroke as the queen’s signature:
Recompense for the apprehension of the agent is negotiable. Details forthcoming when you arrive. Discretion advised.
The second part was a lot easier to read, and much more Nyx’s style. It made her wonder how much of her file they’d read before sending the summons.
Back at the keg, Nyx handed Rhys the red letter.
“This for real?” she asked.
He ran his hands over it. “It appears genuine,” he said.
“Best you can tell, right?” she said.
He grimaced. “You pay me for an acceptable level of talent. You get what you pay for.”
“I want you to go with me,” she said.
His dark eyes widened—pretty eyes with long lashes. There were days when she couldn’t get enough of them, and days she wanted to cut them out for the same reason.
“The Nasheenian court? Palace Hill? You must be joking,” he said.
“Listen. I take Anneke or Khos with me, they don’t speak very good, all right? I take Taite, and you know he gets sick when he’s nervous. I want you there.”
“Nyx, I—”
“Thanks,” she said. “Just don’t worry about it.” She turned away from him before he said any more. She needed Rhys, her mediocre magician. There were other things he was good at: well-read, well-spoken, well-mannered. He was Chenjan, sure, but she didn’t know anybody else around with his manners. He never missed a prayer; he talked about God all the time and drank tea instead of whiskey. He made her look good. He made the whole team look good.
Nyx walked into her office and dumped her gear onto her desk. As she saw Khos walk in to the keg she hollered that she wanted to talk to him. Rhys was still standing near the door, at the ablution bowl she had set out for those who wanted to wash themselves before and after they spoke to her. Her business had that effect on people. Rhys had his hands in the water, sleeves up.
She turned back in to her spare office, kicking her chair away. It wasn’t even noon, so the light coming through the latticed windows was low. She climbed up on to her battered desk and propped open the old entrance in the ceiling.
Better.
Khos knocked on the open door.
“Get in here,” Nyx said.
She climbed down from the desk as Khos came through the doorway. He needed a wash.
“Funniest thing,” Nyx said. “I had a body in my trunk this morning.”
“Yeah.”
“Sit.”
Khos lumbered over to one of the backless chairs in front of her desk. They were mismatched chairs, trash she and Taite had picked up years before when they moved out of their firebombed storefront in the Chenjan district and onto the east side. He’d been allergic to the original upholstery, and she’d had to redo most of it herself.
Nyx took off her burnous and draped it over her chair. She removed the most extraneous of her weapons and piled them up next to her for cleaning.
“You want to step away from the crew?” Nyx asked.
If Taite was a good but fragile kid, Khos was like the kid’s lumbering, towheaded older brother. Nyx had picked up Khos Khadija at a brothel outside Aludra three years before. They were both there to see the same girl and had bumped into each other on the stairs. When she found out he was Raine’s new shifter, she hired him at twice the cut Raine was giving him. She’d been very drunk. She’d also been very drunk later, when she slept with him. She didn’t like big men all that much, but it had been a hot fuck for all that. She knew it had been a while since she’d been to bed with anybody at all, because right about now he was starting to look half good again.
Khos shrugged. If the seat had a back, he would have slumped.
“It was side work. I forgot about it.”
She climbed into her chair and perched up on the back, her feet on the seat. She leaned forward.
“You were supposed to wait on me and Rhys. Instead, you panicked and moved too soon, and we lost our take.”
“I told you, Raine showed up and they were heading out. We would have lost all of them if I hadn’t gone in when I did.”
“So instead, all three of them lit out the back window, right into Raine’s ambush, and we ended up with some dumb kid who was worth more alive than dead.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Is this your crew? Did I sign a contract of yours, or did you sign one of mine?”
He grimaced.
“Answer me.”
“No, it’s not my crew.”
“You know how many hunts me and Anneke have been on? A hell of a lot. There’s nothing we haven’t seen.”
“Nyx—”
“I don’t want to hear about Mhorian chivalry. You don’t like working with women, you shouldn’t be in Nasheen. As I heard it, it’s your love of women that got you here in the first place. Women can fight as well as fuck, you know it?”
He shifted in his seat, looking toward the window. She knew he hated it when she swore. Mhorians were a strange bunch of refugees, a late addition to Umayma. They’d been given some of the shittiest, least developed land in the world, and the vast majority of them had died within the first year of landing. A thousand years worth of hard living had made them a prickly, stubborn sort of people. Most of them were religious zealots, worse than any Chenjan, obsessed with laws and prescriptions about marital relations and the segregation of men and women. A full three-quarters of their Book dealt with rules about marriage, sex, and birth. Nyx had been with Khos the first time he saw a topless woman on the streets of Nasheen, burning an effigy of the Queen in protest of some new regulation about births completed off-compound. The look on his face had been worth a thousand notes.
Mhorian women also cost money, like bugs. Nyx supposed that in a society where most of you were dying and you didn’t have much initial bug tech, women’s wombs would go for more. Khos had lit out of Mhoria looking for a good wife he didn’t have to pay for, and he hadn’t had much luck in Nasheen. Who wanted to shack up with some Mhorian shifter and push out useless half-breed babies? Half-breeds didn’t get free government inoculations. The vast majority died within the first three years as a result. Nyx figured i
t was why Khos spent most of his time in brothels. Maybe he thought those women were hard up? What he didn’t seem to get was that women in Nasheen who made a living as prostitutes were usually doing so for political reasons, not because they were desperate for money or anxious about having husbands. Women in Nasheen didn’t grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory.
“I need to know you’ll follow the plan,” Nyx said. “If I can’t count on that, I cancel your contract. I can get another shifter, you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Go sit with the others in the keg. We’ve got to prep for another pickup.”
He heaved himself out of his seat, and shut the door softly behind him. For a man his size, he moved with surprising quiet.
She took a deep breath, exhaled, and pulled the letter out of her dhoti.
Recompense for the apprehension of the terrorist is negotiable.
She closed her eyes. She was thirty-two years old, and every bone in her body hurt, every joint, every muscle. Some mornings, she woke up so stiff she had to roll herself out of bed and stretch for a quarter-hour just so she could stand without pain.
Nyx sat on the edge of the desk. She didn’t have the money to replace any more body parts, and she wasn’t so sure that any magician could tell her what needed replacing even if she could afford it. Yah Tayyib once told her she needed a new heart.
She’d thought he was serious.
This bounty wouldn’t buy her a new heart. It wouldn’t fix anything she’d broken. But it might get her out of this hole and working closer to the wealthy Orrizo district in Mushtallah, dressing real fine, getting patched up by the best, and getting all the good notes. My life for a thousand.
She wanted a new life: a life she could trade for something more worthwhile than twenty bloody notes and the contempt of a bunch of refugees.
7
At dawn, Nyx made Khos drive her and Rhys out to the central train station in Basmah, following the long scar of the elevated tracks the whole way. The local, intercity trains didn’t run anymore, and hadn’t in about three years. The Chenjans had taken out the main line between Punjai and Basmah so many times that the Transit Authority had stopped sending out tissue mechanics to fix it. They used to come back at least one woman short after every run. Most of the busted tracks were planted with mines and bursts now.
The threat of Chenjan terrorism kept train tickets on the working long-distance lines exorbitant. Nyx had ridden the train only twice in her life—to and from the front.
Khos got them within a hundred yards of the station before the crowd of bakkies, rickshaws, and pedestrians brought them to a standstill. Half a dozen security techs dressed in red burnouses prowled the station with enormous sand cats on heavy chains.
Nyx shouldered her pack and slammed the door. She said to Khos through the open window, “Don’t give Anneke any shit. Taite’s in charge. If he says fuck off, you do it.”
“He knows where to find me,” Khos said, and grinned. He and Taite were fast friends, disparate brothers from foreign countries who went to mixed brothels together, back before Taite had a boyfriend. Nyx wasn’t sure why the friendship annoyed her. Maybe because she didn’t understand it. When had she ever had a friend close enough to go to brothels with? Not since grade school.
“Just don’t blow all your money on girls and wine. I need you to keep your head clear for whatever I bring back. Don’t throw it all away on some green girl.”
“I like them green.”
“Virgins are boring,” Nyx said. “What is it with Mhorians and virgins?”
She caught Khos blushing before he turned away. It was remarkable how red he could get. Nyx waved him off. He gave a blast of the horn and backed away from the station. She watched him go. She was worried about what all that time at the brothels meant. She was worried, too, about the team, about how long she could keep them working for so little. It had been a long time.
Nyx turned and saw Rhys standing at the edge of the crowd. They didn’t give him much space. He kept a firm footing, though creepers bumped into him with their nets and at least one child spit at him. He was the only black man in view for as far as Nyx could see—a black roach skittering along a sea of sand.
The station reared up behind him, gold-colored stone perched on a series of pointed arches that the bustling mob slowly pushed through on their way to the platforms and ticket desk.
Nyx elbowed her way into the swarm and looked back once to make sure Rhys was following unmolested. The arches leading into the station were plastered with martyrs’ letters from women who’d volunteered for the front. A couple of pushy women dressed in the prophet’s green were handing out copies of the latest propaganda sheets and shiny carcasses of pretty holiday beetles, insects known for their cowardly aversion to loud noises.
Nyx shouldered past, and the look she gave the green-clad women was enough to make both of them jerk their hands away from her, withdrawing their insulting little beetles.
Once inside the station, Nyx found some room by the empty fountain and shuffled around the tickets.
Rhys looked at her dubiously. “You do know how to use those, right?” he asked.
Nyx turned the tickets over a couple more times until she matched the gate numbers at the station to the ones on her card.
“Fuck off,” she said.
They got lost on one of the platforms and had to double back. Once they were on the right platform, Rhys bought himself a purified water. Nyx bought a whiskey, straight.
Rhys watched her take a swig with his usual distasteful eye.
“I can get you a soda,” he said.
“I’ve had enough of soda,” Nyx said. She wanted to be drunk by the time the train arrived in Mushtallah. She knew Mushtallah. She had done all of her bel dame training there. Most magicians and bel dames worked out of the capital, and she expected she was going to run into a lot of women she knew. In the border towns she was somebody to fear, to loathe—a former bel dame who brought in every bounty with the same determination and brutality she’d taken in her bel dame notes. But in Mushtallah, she was just another criminal. Nobody. Nothing. Just like she’d been when they threw her in prison.
Rhys pulled out a slim volume of what looked like poetry from his robe.
A voice came on over the platform radio, and a misty woman’s head came into view just over the train tracks.
“There will be a slight delay due to unrest along the Bushair line running north-northwest. This will affect lines Zubair, Mushmura, and Kondija. Thank you for your patience.”
Somebody had blown up another track along the Bushair line, then. Nyx allowed herself a minute to wonder how many people had died. She wondered if it mattered.
She sipped her drink and watched Rhys while he read.
“Would you mind reading out loud?” she asked, hoping she sounded nonchalant. It felt too much like she needed something.
He raised his gaze above the ends of the pages and looked at her.
Nyx kept staring at the tracks. She wanted to do something with her hands.
“You nervous?” he asked.
“I’m never nervous.”
“Of course not,” he said. “This is Petal Dancing.”
“Oh, God, this isn’t something soft, is it?”
“Not everything that’s beautiful is weak.”
“No, it just makes you that way.”
He smiled. “We disagree, then.”
“We do,” she said.
Nyx cupped her glass in both hands. Rhys began to read, in that voice that could calm her during the worst days—days when bugs got into the money bin and bodies piled up in the freezer like cheap popsicles. Time stretched. His accent had gotten better since she’d started asking him to read out loud. It had been a couple years now, she supposed. She insisted he read in Nasheenian, not so much to improve the accent but because hearing him speak Chenjan—heari
ng him speak the same language as the people she’d spent two years throwing bursts at on the front felt obscene, and there wasn’t much anymore that made her feel so fucked up down to her bones.
After a time, Nyx stopped her fidgeting. She let herself forget some of the worst of the fear. Another announcement came on over the station radio. The delay had been extended.
She finished her drink.
They boarded the train two hours later and found their way to a private first-class cabin whose bench seats were nonetheless so close that if they sat directly across from each other, their knees touched. They didn’t sit that way.
Rhys opened his copy of the Kitab, and Nyx fixed herself at the window and watched the Nasheenian desert roll past them in a blur of umber brown and violet blue. The sky was a pale amethyst today, bruised purple along the western horizon, the direction of the front.
“How fast do you think these go?” she asked.
“A hundred, hundred and twenty kilometers an hour,” Rhys said.
“Huh,” Nyx said. She wasn’t going to argue. “You know anything about courts and royalty?” she said.
He did not raise his eyes from the Kitab. “I thought bel dames held intimate soirees with queens and politicians all the time. You should be an old hand at this.”
“We don’t flirt and whore ourselves out like dancers,” she said. He flinched. Why did she always want to twist the knife with him?
“Just make it look good, all right? It’s bad enough you’re Chenjan.”
“I didn’t ask to go along. If you take offense at the—”
“It’s your fucking accent I can’t stand.” Something roiled up in her, something old and twisted. She hated it even as the words slipped out. She pressed her fist to her belly.
He shut his book and stood. “Excuse me.”
“Sit down.”
“I signed an employment contract with you,” he snapped. “You did not obtain a writ of sale. I’ll be in the dining car.” He rolled open the door. It banged behind him.
Nyx rubbed at her face. The worst of her troubles always started with what came out of her mouth.
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