“I was rebuilt,” Nyx said. “I can start over.”
“I don’t think it’s me you’re trying to convince,” he said.
She pulled her hand away.
Meiret bhin Heshel waited under the broad awning of a wait station for the local train shuttle. Luck was with Nyx on this one—transportation hubs and waiting areas always had some kind of surveillance, and Taite had found Meiret easily after hacking into the delicate code that bound her government residency files.
Meiret probably wasn’t a day over twenty. She was soft and plump like her mother, but Nyx knew well enough that looks could be deceiving, especially when it came to Mhorians. Fat meant rich. Fat meant status, power. They weren’t from Ras Tieg, where the rich sought to starve themselves to corporeal perfection to make up for their worldly wealth. More telling was Meiret’s expression, which was pinched in fear and worry. She kept looking at the great face of the water clock in the public square. She carried a shaved ice cone in one hand, slathered in blue syrup, and a large carpet bag in the other.
Nyx strode across the square alone. It was mid-afternoon prayer, and the streets were mostly empty. Unfortunately, it meant Rhys and Anneke were both unavailable for half an hour, since both did the full ablution beforehand, and Nyx wasn’t going to risk Meiret stepping on that shuttle amid the crush of after-prayer bodies flooding the streets.
Meiret spotted her when she was still forty paces from the platform, and froze. Nyx wasn’t good at making nonthreatening faces. She tried looking away.
Meiret dropped the shaved ice and bolted.
Nyx ran after her.
Meiret might have been younger, but Nyx boxed in her spare time, which meant putting in a fair amount of running every day. Hung over, sure, but running. She slammed into Meiret. The girl went reeling.
Nyx pinned her to the street. Meiret wailed.
Another sound cut through the thump of their bodies—the mournful melody of the burst sirens. Nyx dug her knee into Meiret’s sternum, pinning her to the ground.
Meiret squealed. “Please! The sirens.”
Nyx leaned over her. Gritted her teeth. “Then the Chenjans will blow us both to hell.”
The burst sirens wailed.
“Please,” Meiret said. “We need to get inside.”
“I need answers.” Nyx pressed harder. “About Jahar.”
Meiret gasped. A blue blast of color burned overhead—Chenjan aerial bursts. Nyx listened to the whump-whump of the anti-burst guns. Nyx heard those sirens a lot in the border towns, less on the interior. But Meiret looked terrified.
“It was Harun!” Meiret said.
“Who?”
“Harun of Family Sharaset. Please let me get inside.”
“Who the fuck is Harun?”
“Jahar worked for her. She came for documents he had in his safe. I hid. I watched her kill him!”
“Where can I find her?”
Meiret choked on a laugh. “You can’t hurt her. She’s First Family. Jahar took the fall for her work.”
“And how did you know this?”
“Jahar and I were involved.”
Nyx recoiled. “You?”
“He was very charming. I knew he was a deserter. I didn’t care. Your war is a blemish.”
“Encouraged by fat little countries like yours,” Nyx said. “Don’t shit me. You were doing black market rebuilds and you killed him to keep it quiet.”
“We didn’t. He worked for Harun. Please. I loved him.”
Nyx yanked her up, stared into her wet eyes. Fear, love, terror? It often looked the same, to her. “You have proof?”
“No, I . . . yes. Harun has it. Please.” She clutched her big carpet bag to her chest. “We have a list of reassignments at our center, if you want to see them, everyone Jahar referred to us. I know it’s illegal. That’s why I need to leave. But I just did what Harun asked. She’s a First Family. You can’t say no to a First Family in Nasheen.”
“I’ve said no plenty,” Nyx said.
“Then you’re a fool.”
“Don’t leave town. We have you locked in.”
“Who are you?”
“Not somebody you want to piss off,” Nyx said. She stood, releasing Meiret. A bright red burst popped in the sky behind her. The sirens howled. “If you lied, you’re fucked.”
“I’m done anyway,” Meiret said.
Nyx grabbed her by the collar and pulled her up. “Get inside.”
Meiret ran across the street to the burst shelter, marked with double green triangles.
Nyx walked back to the shuttle station. She kicked away the largest of the bugs that had swarmed the overturned shaved ice cone, and picked it up. Sat on the cold stone bench. She gazed at the sky. Blue, amber, and green bursts spilled across the air, blown apart by the anti-burst guns. She took a mouthful of the slushy ice. Hooked her free arm over the back of the bench.
“Fuck of a thing,” she muttered. A poor interrogation, but under the circumstances, she’d take it. Prayer would be over soon, and this air raid wouldn’t last much longer.
She finished the shaved ice and strode across the square, making her way to the mosque where Anneke and Rhys would pour back out into the world, into the deep afternoon light; peaceful and pious, perfect.
Someone had to be imperfect, or there was nothing to strive for in that big worshipful love letter to God.
Nyx didn’t mind being the broken piece.
Harun’s family house stood on a craggy hilltop at the center of Bahora in a part of town so nice that Nyx suspected their bakkie already had a wasp swarm attached to it as surveillance, on suspicion they were casing a house.
“This is their local residence,” Taite said from the passenger side of the bakkie. “They have a big family place in Mushtallah, of course, but this one is pretty much what you’d expect. Security’s impossible.”
Nyx didn’t believe in impossible. “Anneke, Rhys, you get out here like we discussed. Good?”
Anneke muttered something about catshit.
“Tell me when Harun’s in residence, and Taite will pop the alarm.”
“You really think the bel dames aren’t right behind us?” Rhys asked.
“Bel dames would shoot themselves before stalking a First Family,” Nyx said. “They run the fucking country, no matter what the Queen says.”
“Perhaps there’s a lesson in that?” Rhys suggested.
“Like, let’s not mess with First Families?” Taite said.
Nyx leaned back and opened the rear bakkie door from her place at the wheel. “Out,” she said.
Rhys sighed and exited. Anneke slid after him. She came up to the driver’s side window: “If we’re just bait—”
Nyx pulled on her smoked driving goggles. The contaminated grit from the road burned her eyes. “Let’s see how it rolls, all right? You get in the shit, well, you’re skinny enough to hide in a ventilation grate, right?”
“One job, Nyx.”
“One job.”
Nyx accelerated away from the curb, blowing dust and dead beetles behind her.
Taite sat up front with her, playing with the misty blue projections coming from the radio. Images of First Family high council members droned on about rationing and Ras Tiegan refugees and recommendations on increased border security. Taite tuned the dial to a more upbeat station—northern dance music set to foggy green images of women hanging out the windows of their bakkies in a drifting street race.
“Can you trigger that house alarm from here?” she asked.
“You didn’t hire me for my looks.”
“Got any boyfriends you need to say goodbye to?”
“That would be telling.”
They drove around the corner and parked. Taite reached under the seat and pulled out a bulky transponder. The under casing sloshed with blue bioluminescent worms strung together with silvery tapeworms, each as long as a string of intestines. Taite flipped open the top, revealing a little shelf of tiny bug and scent jars.
/> Com techs tended to have some minor ability with controlling bugs tailored for engineering and communication uses. Unlike magicians, they couldn’t create new strains of bugs, or control those not created expressly for communication and engineering purposes, but they could sense and control lower-level transmissions meant for directing the tiny mites that carried most audio and image data.
Taite popped open the transponder’s reservoir and reached for one of the jars.
Nyx caught a flash of movement from the corner of her eye. She glanced at the rearview mirror. Saw two women quickly approaching. They wore long trousers and short coats. Their faces were smooth and lovely, heads wrapped in red scarves. They bore pistols on their hips; both carried large truncheons with angry red glowing ends—the charge from those sticks could put down a two-hundred-kilo person with ease. They were the weapons of personal security officers for the Firsts, not order keepers.
“Taite, drive.” Nyx popped open the bakkie’s door and climbed out. She pulled her scattergun.
“What?”
“Break, go! Drive!”
Nyx slammed the door as Taite dropped his transponder and slid over into the driver’s seat.
Nyx showed her teeth at the women, gun pointed at the ground, still hopeful she could talk her way out. “Can I help—” she began.
The woman on her left shoved her truncheon forward, just as the bakkie peeled away from the curb.
Nyx dodged the thrust. Shot the second woman in the gut, then flipped her scattergun around and bashed the first woman in the face with it. Both women went down neatly. Nyx quickly stowed the gun and pulled her burnous more closely around her, to hide her prickling cache of weapons.
She took the corner wide—there was a vast spread of garden here, with tall trees and hedges that blocked her view of traffic—and had just enough time to see six more security women rushing out the front gate of Harun’s estate.
How many security people did one First Family member need? Nyx tried to casually cross the street, but they spotted her. No random security check, this. They knew who she was, if not why she was there. Had Meiret tipped them off?
Nyx looked for an alley, but this part of town was too nice for dirty, close quarters. The sidewalks were broad and the buildings spaced too far apart for adequate cover.
In truth, she wasn’t worried so much about her odds as she was about the number of bodies she’d leave on the street. Bodies meant questions from order keepers about why the bel dame council had stripped her of her title instead of killing her. She’d like to know the answer to that, too.
She saw a slick, smoked-glass bakkie rolling toward her, and timed her move.
When the bakkie passed her, Nyx turned. Scattergun out.
The first two security techs were twenty paces away, so she had a fighting chance of hitting something. She fired three times and rolled behind the bakkie. Yanked out a pistol. Keeping her head low, she dashed for the other side, using the pistol to put down cover fire.
She darted around another corner, now visibly armed and undoubtedly dangerous. A hornet swarm moved past her. She saw six locusts take flight from a nearby residence. Most locusts were surveillance drones.
Nyx pressed herself against the big security fence of the residence behind her and waited for the pack of women.
Four took the corner wide. She shot two.
Two more came around from the other side of the residence—they’d been smart enough to break up and try to flank her. She shot one in the face with her pistol; the other pistol rounds went wide.
Their sticks were out. The fact that they weren’t shooting her was . . . troubling. This wasn’t the way she wanted to get inside Harun’s place.
The three she hadn’t hit moved in with their sticks. She blocked with the scattergun. Struck another in the face with her pistol. A swarm of locusts passed directly overhead.
Nyx broke someone’s arm. The woman shrieked and backed off. Then the others pulled away, as if on a single command. Nyx kept her back to the fence.
“Shit,” she said, and looked up.
The locust swarm massed by a second time; this time they sprayed her with a fine yellow mist of sticky, tannin-tasting liquid.
Nyx gagged and stumbled forward.
The liquid burned her eyes, throat, and nostrils. A heady black wave of nausea filled her. She vomited.
The security techs moved in again. Nyx emptied her scattergun clip. Drooled yellow bile.
Hands gripped her. Nyx bit their fingers bloody.
“Spray her the fuck again!” somebody yelled.
They zapped her with their truncheons.
Nyx clawed forward a full pace before losing all feeling in her fingers. The numbness suffused her body, fingertips to arms. Her head felt full of gauze.
Voices murmured around her, like ghosts from another country, “That was like trying to put down a fucking freight train.”
“You know what we do here, darling?”
Nyx tried to focus. She was bound at the feet and wrists with sticky organic bands. Her mouth felt dry and swollen and tasted of acorns. Slowly, she made out the form of a set of bare brown feet a few paces from her. The skin was smooth and unblemished. That alone told her it was a First Family woman, not a security tech. The floor was warm tile, and oddly pleasant. Nyx wanted to take a nap on it. She followed the feet up to the ankles, then up the long white muslin tunic the woman wore.
The woman was broad, regal, with a spill of black hair that artfully escaped the back of her white head scarf. Her face was unlined, and so beautiful it made Nyx wince. She didn’t trust pretty people. It meant they had enough money to spend a lot of time inside, behind the sun filters, plotting and politicking.
“You must be Harun,” Nyx said.
“And you’re the fool who took something that belongs to me,” Harun said.
“Don’t think so . . .” Nyx said. Her tongue felt heavy. She slurred, drooling.
Harun paced. Clasped her delicate fingers behind her back. Nyx tried to figure out where they were. It was an open room, supported by arches. She craned her neck and looked up into open sky, protected by a shimmering organic filter. Anything trying to get in or out that way would get eaten by the filter. She saw security techs near the archways—counted eight. Hadn’t she shot them? Yes, those were familiar faces. She’d blown those faces apart. Only a bel dame could come back from a grievous wound like that, and no bel dame came back so fast.
The heavy fog in Nyx’s head began to lift. She struggled.
Harun shook her head. “I wouldn’t try,” she said. “My people are far more difficult to kill than even you. You can slow them, certainly. But they’ll come back. They self-repair. No need for Plague Sisters or magicians or tubs full of bug goo.”
“What are they?” Nyx said.
Harun leaned over her. “They are the end result of a great deal of hard work, work that needs to stay in Nasheen. Where are Jahar’s files?”
“He another tool, like these?”
“Every one of you colonials is a tool,” Harun said. “You provide a service.”
“And Jahar?”
“Provided a service.”
“But he overstretched, didn’t he?”
“She was a better woman than either of us.”
“And you let him be whatever he wanted.”
“Jahar was always Jahar, no matter the skin or the pronoun. But he overstepped. Jahar started giving boys new faces. Not just the ones we approved for new identities or reassignments for my security detail, but friends of his. Deserters. Terrorists, even. That had to stop.”
“And all record of your involvement purged.”
Harun sighed. “Where’s the information from the safe, Nyx?”
“I tell you and you kill me.”
“I kill you regardless.”
“Then I’ll die knowing I pissed you off.”
Harun made a noncommittal noise. Nodded to her security staff. “Get her up. Bring her to the tan
k.”
Four women hauled Nyx to her feet and half-dragged her through the courtyard. Nyx let them carry her full weight—it slowed them down and she needed the time to fully recover her muddled head. Nyx couldn’t recall ever being inside a First Family’s house, even if it was just a second or third residence. Most First Families lived in Nasheen’s capital, Mushtallah, in the hills overlooking the city, ringed in layers and layers of security. In Mushtallah, she wouldn’t have even been able to get into the First Family district without spending several days hacking through or blowing up two tiers of organic filters and eight security points. Harun was operating outside Mushtallah; Nyx suspected Bahora’s tolerance for dicey illegal human experiments was higher than the capital’s. She’d sold enough of herself to butchers in border towns like Punjai to know you could get away with just about anything.
As long as it wasn’t with the body of one of Nyx’s people.
They brought her down a sinuous hallway lined in tiled mosaics—passages from the Kitab, lovingly detailed and painted over in silver and gold gilt.
“My people tell me you’re a hard woman to break,” Harun said, “so I’m skipping to the end.”
Harun unlocked a door at the far end of the house and opened the portal wide. A massive stone cistern dominated the room, ringed in jars of insects suspended in fluid, much like the ones at the rebuild tank in Henye’s shop, only on a much grander scale.
“Planning a party?” Nyx asked.
Harun flashed a smile. Nyx was dazzled by how white her teeth were. “Of a sort,” she said. She beckoned for the security techs to bring Nyx to the edge of the cistern.
For a moment, Nyx thought Harun meant to rebuild her into some kind of brain-addled monster. She looked over the rim of the cistern and found that most of it was actually underground—it must have been a good ten paces in depth.
And there, chained to a large ring suspended over the basin, was Rhys.
He looked up at her with his big dark eyes, and for a moment Nyx thought he looked terribly like Jahar. On seeing her, there was hope in that gaze. The same hopeful look Jahar gave her when she took him to bed. The look that said, “You’ve found me. You’ll protect me. You’ll never leave me.”
It scared the shit out of her, because she was not here to save him.
Apocalypse Nyx Page 4
