Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  Nyx’s gaze followed Binyamin as she turned and sauntered out, hips swaying beneath the long dress. When she came to the door, she became a black silhouette again, just another shadow, another woman with a dirty job that needed doing, and joined the bustling crowd on the street.

  Nyx eyed the beetle. Gave it a little tap with her index finger. “Not falling for it,” she said, but of course she was.

  She always did.

  The sign in the window of Nyx’s cramped, battered storefront said, Odd jobs and body reclamation, which was a fair summation of what she did these days. She had been banned from one place already the year before when she found out a client’s dead girlfriend wasn’t dead after all. For the record, she preferred hunting down dead people or people she could legally make dead. The living were just too much trouble. She was best at killing, which is what made it so ironic that even the military had hastily discharged her after her two years at the front and never asked her to re-up. She’d always been a problem, far more hot-headed than any conscripted boy doing his thirty years of service and better at her job than even the most ruthless woman doing her own two years. Her reconstitution after she got blown up out there was part of her permanent file now, and it had been expensive. They didn’t want to risk her doing some other dumb thing on their money. So instead she was here, trying to build a team of hard-bitten mercenaries that was now bickering like a bunch of fucking compound babies as she pushed inside.

  Taite, her com tech, sat in the back at his console, arguing with Anneke, her hired gun. Anneke had a big shotgun hitched up over one shoulder; the gun was half as big as she was. Wiry, spry, and mouthy as hell, Anneke had her feet planted firmly in front of Taite, and though she did not unshoulder the gun, the flustered look on Taite’s face told Nyx he fully expected her to at any moment.

  Behind them, Rhys was hunched over his work table, probably dissecting some bug or some other thing that bug magicians did.

  Nyx instinctively touched Binyamin’s green beetle that she’d put in her tunic pocket. She considered breaking up the argument, but went to her office and rummaged around in the drawer for a bottle and a glass instead, only to find that the bottle only contained a few drops of liquor. She sucked on the bottle, long and slow, considering.

  Taite peeked in. Raised his brows at her suckling. “I miss something salacious?”

  Nyx wiped her mouth. “You wish.”

  Taite was in his late teens, spotty and scrawny, but good at hacking into transmissions and ensuring their internal com network wasn’t hacked by some other com tech’s buggy aerial concoctions. She didn’t pretend to know all the particulars of what he did; it was good enough for her to know that she could communicate to her team on a job without somebody else listening in. She had added him to her team just after Rhys and Anneke, and he’d only been around six months, but she’d known him before then, when he worked for her former boss, Raine. She enjoyed taking Raine’s employees away from him. Made her feel warm all over.

  “Got a job for you,” she said. “Need you to track down a woman named Binyamin. Her family owns chemical plants in the south, probably near Alabbas. See if she’s got sisters, and tell me what happened to them.”

  “That all you got?” he said.

  She pulled the beetle out of her pocket. “She gave me this to use to contact her. Can you tell me where it’s tailored to report to?”

  He took the beetle gently into his palms and peered at it. “I’ll see what I can do. Rhys could probably figure it out.”

  “Work together then,” she said. “Sooner the better.”

  “This a paying job?”

  “Think of it like a job screening,” she said.

  He nodded. “There are some new jobs on the boards,” he said. “Left it on your desk.” He ducked out of the room.

  Nyx sat hard in her chair and sighed, staring at the empty bottle. She had spent a couple hours at the gym, and the rest of the day loomed ahead of her, long and hot and dusty as her parched throat.

  She cast about for the job letters Taite had pulled from the bounty boards, and found them under a pair of specs. She didn’t much care for reading, and hadn’t managed to wean Taite and Rhys off handing her reams of expensive paper that she was just going to feed to the bugs anyway. Rhys had a decent memory and recall, but Taite needed the paper. There were bounties out on two organ harvesters, a shifter who’d murdered and eaten her own mother, and two young indentured runaways, thirteen-year-old twins. She had asked Taite to stop pulling runaway kids, but there was a high price on these ones—double the usual. She turned the order over and found that the issuing authority wasn’t the government, but the kids’ own mother. That was new. Most mothers weren’t shitty enough to formally indenture their own kids when they hauled them out of the compounds. If you were going to do that, better to leave them to be raised by the state. But she supposed some people got off on that—cheap labor, power delusions, that sort of thing.

  She looked up from the paperwork and caught a glimpse of the call box in the foyer. She had to admit that reading about well-meaning but shitty family members just doing what they thought God wanted them to put her in mind of her sister.

  But she’d need a few more drinks for that.

  So she told the team she was going out to run reconnaissance. Which she did, a bit, in a cantina at the north end of Punjai where southerners and the occasional Drucian showed up to swill. She considered the drinks a business expense, especially the ones she bought for the grimy one-armed former chemical factory worker who had all sorts of things to say about working at a plant burned out six years before.

  “There are two families that used to own the south,” the woman said, knee pressing Nyx’s. “The Yazeeds and the Muhktars. But last dozen years, there’s these upstarts rolling in from northern Druce, half-breeds, mixed, you know, not real Nasheenians, even though they have Nasheenian names. And they started buying things up. Accidents started happening.” She pointed the stump of her arm at Nyx, leaned in. “Got a lot of places shut down just cause of accidents. Bought them cheap, after. Some they bought just to close down. Fucking foreigners.”

  Nyx considered making out with her, but she wasn’t really Nyx’s type. When the woman’s girlfriend showed up to retrieve her, Nyx was almost relieved, right up until she realized it left her alone in her own head again.

  So she drank some more, drank so much she hoped she’d forget about her shitty mother and her shitty sister and her shitty military career and her shitty life.

  When she stumbled back into the storefront, long after dark, she knocked her head on the door while trying to close it, and nearly tripped over her own feet. The only sound she heard was Rhys, back in his room, reciting midnight prayer. It was the call to prayer that had sent her home from the cantina. It hurt her head.

  Nyx went right for the call box. Picked up the receiver. She knew her sister Kine would be awake because she, too, would be observing midnight prayer. She dialed Kine’s pattern. When there was no answer, she dialed it again. And again.

  At some point, Kine picked up.

  “Who is this?” Kine asked; suspicious, guarded, as if expecting some sexual deviant or male deserter looking for refuge on the other end.

  “I’m your fucking sister,” Nyx said.

  “Indeed,” Kine said. “That hasn’t changed.”

  Nyx leaned her head against the call box. Her stomach churned. She had no idea anymore why she’d wanted to call her sister. Maybe if she just waited here awhile, she’d remember.

  “Nyxnissa, are you drunk?” Kine said. Nyx would say Kine sounded like their mother, but honestly Nyx couldn’t much remember what their mother sounded like anymore. Their mother had taken up working at the birthing compounds for cash after getting kicked out of some government job. She’d died of yellow fever not long after Nyx’s brothers died at the front.

  “You think you look out for me,” Nyx said. “But I look out for you.”

  Silence. Bloody sil
ence. Nyx pounded the receiver on the wall and put it to her ear again. “You listen,” Nyx said, “you never had to take care of me.”

  “Clearly,” Kine said, coolly, “you give every appearance of taking such wonderful care of yourself.”

  “Listen—”

  “I have dug you out of too many ditches, Nyxnissa. Carried you out of too many bars and brothels and butchers. Sleep this off and call me in the morning with what you have to say.”

  “Too late,” Nyx said. “It’ll be too late . . . Hey . . . you’re on the coast. The south coast. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to call about. See . . . you know about . . . southern families? Rich ones . . . the Yazeeds or . . . Makatar . . . Muktarata . . .”

  “The Muhktars,” Kine said stiffly. “What are you doing asking about them? What are you mixed up with?”

  “Nyx?” Rhys’s voice.

  Nyx started. Dropped the receiver. She leaned her head against the wall. She must have lost some time, because the next thing she knew, Rhys was shaking her shoulder, repeating her name.

  “Can you hear me?” Rhys said. He put the receiver back on the hook. “Nyx?”

  She mumbled something and shuffled back toward her office. He followed her, but she paid him no mind.

  “Gonna quit drinking at thirty,” she said.

  “Something tells me that’s what you said at twenty-five.”

  She crawled underneath her desk, wrapped her arms around herself, and settled in to pass out.

  “Nyx?”

  She cracked open an eye and saw Rhys squatting before her.

  “Too pretty for your own good,” she said, and closed her eye again.

  He sighed. “You haven’t overdosed on liquor yet,” he said. “God willing, your luck holds.”

  “God has nothing to do with it,” Nyx said, and finally, blissfully, passed out.

  “Report on the woman you asked about,” Taite said, handing Nyx more slick green paper.

  Nyx sat on the roof of their storefront under a tattered awning, wincing as the long wail of the midday muezzin rolled out over the desert. She wore smoked goggles and was swilling buni spiked with whisky. Anneke sat opposite her, feet on top of a bloody head in a sack, explaining why she needed more cash for bigger guns. Nyx had been setting up supply caches across the country the last couple of years, insurance for bad days. But stockpiling that many goods and weapons was expensive. Anneke had brought in a head from the boards the week before; easy sniper job on a prison escapee, she’d said, and it had paid off.

  Nyx took the report and waved a hand at Anneke to still the weapons talk. “Just give me the summary,” Nyx said to Taite.

  “I’m giving you a good summary, boss,” Anneke said. “Just half the money from this one for the X32Z10 sand spitter and I’ll—”

  “Fine, yes,” Nyx said. “Anneke, go buy something.”

  “Hell damn!” Anneke said, slapping her knobby knee. She threw the bloody sack over her shoulder and bounded for the roof hatch so fast Nyx suspected she feared Nyx would change her mind.

  “Binyamin is the daughter of a family originally from Hafthah,” Taite said. “Called the so Mahasin.”

  “Not Yazeed or Muhktar? Not a Drucian name either, maybe?”

  “No, it’s so Mahasin.”

  “Not just Mahasin?”

  Taite peered at her. “How hung over are you?” he said.

  “Still drunk,” she said.

  “It’s so Mahasin,” he said, “definitely a compound name. I checked twice to make sure I wasn’t mixing them up with someone else. Rhys did the first research pass. I verified all of it.”

  “Strange to keep a breeding compound name over multiple generations,” Nyx said, pouring more whisky into her buni. “Thought they would have dropped the middle part to hide that they all grew up in government care. Government kids are war fodder. If they wanted to build wealth and get investments, they should have dropped the ‘so’ part.”

  “Apparently the grandmother made her fortune treating compound diseases,” Taite said. “She was the last compound kid in the family. The rest—the daughters, the grandchildren, were all raised at home.”

  “Looking to remember where she came from,” Nyx said. “So they own these chemical plants like she says?”

  “Six of them,” Taite said. “Two were blown up in the last four months. Investigations pending, but they weren’t categorized as terrorist attacks, so they’re low on the list for the order keepers. Order keeper reports think it was an inside job. No footage of anyone going in or out of the plant within twelve hours of the blast. No human residue on the bomb.”

  “They haven’t heard of gloves?”

  Taite shrugged. “Report says this type of explosive required an organic trigger. But there was no record of human blood codes on the device at all.”

  “Shit,” Nyx said, and now she opened the report: “They used organic burst triggers, then? Those are at least forty years old. Used mostly for mining.”

  “Why mining?”

  “Something gets blown up that’s not supposed to, it was useful to know which worker fucked up,” Nyx said. “Also prevented them being stolen. Who’d want to leave their blood code all over it unless it was a suicide mission?”

  “Looks like somebody figured out how to use them without bleeding all over them.”

  Nyx verified the type of device in the order keeper report, and frowned. She had been a sapper in her former military life, and the sort of criminal who had the audacity to use one of these and get away with it intrigued her. As did the woman who wouldn’t put on boxing gloves, but walked onto the mat in a fighter’s stance. She couldn’t help but note that triggering a device like this remotely was nearly impossible unless it wasn’t humans doing the triggering. That left dogs, cats, ravens, parrots, or maybe foxes. A bug could probably do it, too. Any skilled magician could summon a hornet swarm to set off the explosion. But again—every device would have had to be reprogrammed to trigger on contact with that particular organism. It would take a lot of skill to customize every device to react to something other than a human.

  “You asked about sisters,” Taite said, pointing to another section of the report. “Here’s where things get good.”

  “They weren’t fun before?”

  “There are seven sisters,” Taite said. “There’s two compound breeders, both dead of yellow fever. One died in prison four years ago. Three dead at the front. That just leaves the one.”

  “Binyamin?”

  “No,” Taite said. “There was a Binyamin, but she was the one who died in prison.”

  “So we got a job from a dead woman,” Nyx said. “That’s a first.” But not unexpected. She looked at the prison dates for Binyamin, the dead one, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The prison listed was in Batul. It was the same prison Nyx had spent a year in when she was convicted of doing black work—selling zygotes for cash.

  “The living sister was—”

  “An apprentice bel dame,” Nyx said.

  “Yeah. Good guess. Did I write that down?”

  “No,” Nyx said. She’d seen it when the woman who called herself Binyamin flinched when Nyx tried to hit her. Resisting the urge to block the blow would have been tough for a bel dame apprentice trained to defend herself. And a bel dame apprentice would slide easily and unconsciously into a fighting stance, too.

  “So this woman who gave us the job and told us her name is Binyamin is a liar,” Taite said. “Thing is, we don’t have a name for the bel dame apprentice. It got scourged from the record when she enlisted. So whoever you dealt with is some nameless person.”

  “But she shares the surname?”

  “Maybe,” Taite said. “Seventh sister is adopted. So could be a so Mahasin, or not.”

  “Well shit,” Nyx said.

  “Maybe we should pass on this one. Feels weird, you know?”

  “You have that bug I gave you from her?” Nyx asked.

  “Downstairs.”

  “
Tell it to go ping its owner,” Nyx said. “We’ll take the job.”

  Taite blinked at her. “Uh . . . really?”

  “Did I stutter?”

  “No, no,” he said. “I just . . . I mean, why do all this work to figure out if the job is dodgy and then take it knowing it’s dodgy?”

  “’Cause I’m the boss,” Nyx said.

  She told herself she was taking it because of the type of device and the intrigue of an inside job perpetuated by a woman who had the gall to pretend she was someone she wasn’t. It wasn’t about her own sister, and doing something worth a damn for what remained of her toxic, fucked-up family. It wasn’t because she understood vengeance, because any woman trying to fool Nyx into thinking she was someone else probably had a personal issue with something Nyx had done in her past. And it was a very long past.

  Nyx closed the report.

  As Taite turned to go, a low, mournful wail started up from the west. For a half moment she thought it was the call to prayer coming at some off time, but it came again, louder, and she recognized the whine of a burst siren.

  “This fucking day,” Nyx muttered. She heaved herself out of her seat and trotted down to the basement, passing Rhys at his workbench while he packed up his bugs. “They’ll be fine,” she told him, but he secreted them away into various pockets in his burnous regardless. Bugs were expensive, and she supposed he knew she wasn’t going to spend more if they got bombed out.

  When she went into the basement, ducking because of the low ceiling, Taite was already there, messing with the radio.

  “Hopefully the burst siren is a false positive,” he said. “Com chatter upstairs said there was heavy fighting in Aludra today, so there might be some miasma blowing in triggering the sirens. Oh, I sent your bug off to its owner already.”

  Nyx stuffed herself into a ratty overstuffed divan. It sat up against the wall of the big freezer where they kept bodies chilled on days the bounty reclamation office was closed. She rummaged in the cushions for a bottle. Found nothing. She pulled off her goggles and flung them beside her. The radio belched out a misty orange haze that began to solidify into some talking head from the local news.