Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  “You ever been in love?” Taite asked Rhys.

  Rhys rolled up his prayer rug, considering both the question and who was asking it. “With God, certainly,” Rhys said.

  “Everyone loves God,” Taite said, “and God loves most of us back. But what about people? That’s tougher.”

  “I suppose it is,” Rhys said. “I put my trust in God for that.”

  Anneke pushed open the front door, arms brimming with packages that no doubt carried more weaponry than was needed for eight armies. Rhys went over to the hatch leading into the basement and pulled it open for her. She grunted and dropped her packages there, then started running them down to the basement one at a time.

  “There’s no rules to it, love,” Taite said while two women declared their undying affection on the radio. “No sense. At least with God, you know what to do to keep his love, to make sure you’re on his good side.”

  “You’re too young for love anyhow,” Rhys said. “A young man like you—”

  “You aren’t that much older,” Taite said. “And anyway, in Ras Tieg I’d be married by now.”

  “Marriage and love can be different things.”

  Anneke popped her head up from the basement. “Sounds like something you read from a book,” she said.

  “Spare us your own treatise on love,” Rhys said. “I expect you learned it from Nyx, and that means you’ll turn something sacred into something—”

  “Nyx would tell you love is wanting to fuck someone you can’t,” Anneke said.

  “—coarse,” Rhys finished, and grimaced.

  Taite said, “Well, that explains why you don’t have a lot of dates, Anneke.”

  “What do you know?” Anneke said. “Here’s some advice Nyx gave me early on. I’ll give it to you, kids. As long as you’re in this business, don’t fall for anyone. The more you care about a thing, the more it can be used against you. That counts for when you get out, too. People keep grudges a long time in this business.”

  Rhys said, “Well, I don’t intend to do this long.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” Anneke said. She shrugged. “No offense.”

  “I’m not like you,” Rhys said. “I’m going to have a family someday, and a respectable job again. This is temporary. We aren’t all like you and Nyx.”

  “I’d like to be more like Nyx,” Anneke said, “But I ain’t. She may not live long, but she’ll live good.”

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “I’ll get it,” Rhys said quickly. He was ready to exit the conversation.

  He opened the door just in time to see a blue-burnoused woman scuttle off down the street. A brown-papered package lay on the stoop.

  Rhys bent to take the package. A thin, humming whine filled his head and thrummed deep within his bones. He froze.

  “Don’t move!” Anneke said.

  He was half bent over, arm extended toward the package. The paper trembled. He let out a long, slow breath.

  Anneke came up behind him, padding softly along the floor. She let out a low whistle. “You are so fucked,” she said.

  When Nyx got back from lunch, still snarling and spitting at some stupid thing Kine had said about modesty, only a little tipsy from a couple of beers, she found Rhys bowing over a bomb and a Nasheenian woman fighting off two dogs on the stoop. The scene was so strange that Nyx actually hesitated mid-step while her brain tried to put the scene together into a story that made sense.

  In that moment of hesitation, she gave in and chose action over reason.

  Nyx pulled her pistol and shot at the dogs. She didn’t hit them, but the noise was enough to scare them off. The Nasheenian woman saw her with the pistol and reached for something. Nyx front kicked her in the chest. The woman was about Nyx’s size, and she stumbled, but didn’t go over.

  “You stand down,” Nyx said. “Don’t cause trouble. I won’t hurt you. Rhys! Don’t you move.”

  She turned to Rhys while keeping the woman in her peripheral vision.

  Big drops of sweat trickled from Rhys’s face and plopped on the package below him.

  She set her gun down on her right—far from the woman—and flattened herself on the ground in front of the package. She felt the twinge in the air, the same feeling that had probably saved Rhys from getting his face blown off. He wasn’t a sapper, but any magician with half a brain would recognize the dissonance as some bug-triggered device.

  Rhys was pretty, yes, but not stupid. “How long you been like this?” she said.

  “An hour!” Anneke said from inside. “Sent Taite to get you.”

  “Didn’t see him,” Nyx said. She blew a bit of air at the underside of the package. Dust clung to the shiny resin that escaped the seams of the paper.

  She tugged one of the needles from her hair—she kept three poisoned needles secured there as a matter of course—and used it to work the paper loose. A bead of Rhys’s sweat plopped onto the paper above. She felt his breath. An hour in a bowed position like that was an impressive feat. She didn’t consider how much longer he could hold it.

  Nyx worked the paper back and peered inside. For once, no one was saying anything, and she found that very soothing.

  The guts of the bomb were familiar: a cube of resin covered over in paper, and inside the resin, a series of organic filaments connected by orange thorn bugs engineered for exactly this purpose. Too much movement would trigger the filaments, which would cause the bugs to explode, throwing poisonous, buggy shrapnel for about ten paces in every direction.

  She pushed the needle deep into the package and touched its poison tip to the little filaments, just enough to spread the poison from the needle to the filament. The organic tissue sucked it up. She waited, counting her breaths. If the bomb was made with the right mix of organics, the poison should do its job breaking down the filaments connecting the bugs in about fifty seconds. But that was a big if. She hadn’t dealt with one of these in a while.

  Nyx counted to sixty, then levered herself up slowly onto her hands and eased her body up over the package. She rolled her eyes at Rhys and said. “Straighten up and stand back.”

  If it went off, her body would take the brunt of it.

  Rhys let out his breath and levered himself back. His whole body shook. How he’d held that position so long, she wasn’t certain. He’d have done well under torture conditions.

  Nyx waited, but felt no humming in the air, no taut snap that told her the mechanism inside had sensed any further movement. She sat back on her knees and picked up the package. Shook it.

  Rhys and Anneke flinched inside the doorway.

  “We’re good,” Nyx said. She pulled off her burnous and wrapped it around the package. It would need to be properly taken apart and disposed of. She glanced over at the Nasheenian woman who’d been tangling with the dogs. “So who the hell are you?”

  “I’m here from Hadjara,” she said. “You called her last night and she sent me.”

  Kine said, “Just how many people did you call when you were drunk last night, Nyxnissa?”

  “I don’t remember calling Hadjara,” Nyx said.

  The woman handed her a piece of paper, its edges already starting to flake away. Nyx opened it and read an address for a brothel on the other side of the city and a time listed that would put her there just after dark. At the bottom it read: I have information about that apprentice you asked about. As she finished reading it, the paper disintegrated more rapidly. She shook it, and it burst into a confetti of tattered brown fragments.

  “I’m off,” the woman said, eying Nyx’s package.

  “What?” Nyx said, hefting it at her. “You had enough fun?”

  “Plenty, thank you,” she said. “Call off those dogs next time.”

  “They aren’t mine,” Nyx said.

  “Regardless,” the woman said. She pulled up her hood and ducked back down the alley.

  “Is this a usual practice?” Kine said. “Bombs on your doorstep, strange women arriving from alleys to ba
ttle with dogs?”

  “Pretty much,” Nyx said. “Let’s get this sorted.” She pushed inside. Rhys was already in the back, presumably sitting down or praying or whatever it was Rhys did after almost getting blown up. “It’s gotten hot here,” she said to Anneke as she walked to her office. “Let’s pack up.”

  “Where?” she said.

  “Right where they don’t want us,” Nyx said. “We’re going to Binyamin’s happy home in Alabbas. You got the address from examining the beetle, right?”

  “But, uh, didn’t they just try and kill us, boss?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Nyx said. “I have an idea she was gunning for all of you more than me.”

  Anneke said, “You think she was going to blow us up and frame you?”

  “I’m thinking a lot of things right now,” Nyx said. “And if she wants to fuck with us, I’m going to go fuck with her family.”

  “Nyxnissa,” Kine said from the door of the office. “It sounds as if this is becoming a personal vendetta. Might I remind you this is just work. As you told me, it’s not even work for a powerful family. Why not let it go?”

  “She’s trying to do me in,” Nyx said. “You’d rather I sit here and get drunk?”

  Kine pursed her mouth.

  “Yeah,” Nyx said. “Fuck these people. You know what happens when you get a reputation for getting walked over, Kine? No, you fucking don’t. I do. Somebody fucks with you and your people, you fuck them up, or they will come at you again, and then your enemies hear about it, and then you’ve got a hundred other bounty hunters and women with grudges and dead brothers you brought in, and you’re fucked. What protects me and my people is reputation. This is about reputation.”

  Nyx was shaking, and she paused to get control over herself. She knew this game. This was the prison game, and it had followed her own here now with Binyamin’s sister whatever-her-name-was. She had fucked somebody up in prison, and now their family was trying to fuck up Nyx.

  “Why not give it up?” Kine said. “Surely I can find you a position on the coast, perhaps as a janitor—”

  “Fuck you,” Nyx said. “A fucking janitor? Go fuck yourself. This is what I’m good at. You go home, Kine. Anneke, go find Taite and tell him we’re moving out. I’ll go shake Rhys out of his catshit mood and get him moving.”

  “Nyx—” Anneke said.

  “You want another job? Another employer? I’ll break your contract right now.”

  “Uh, no, boss,” Anneke said. “Like you said, we need a shifter on the team first. Before Alabbas. Because, the dogs, you know.”

  “Fuck!” Nyx said.

  Anneke held up her hands. “Don’t blame me!”

  Nyx knew the brothel address well, from the paper Hadjara had sent, because she used to do some black work for the women and men who worked there back in her pre-prison days, when she was ferrying stuff inside her womb from Punjai to Faleen and back.

  She had dismantled the bomb and sent it to a friend from processing to see if she could find out who’d made it. Bomb-making was still a specialized profession, and sometimes bomb makers’ styles were so distinctive that every bomb acted like a signature. Nyx had hesitated at the threshold to Rhys’s room before she left, and decided not to go in. Let him cool off awhile. Taite had returned, and was on board with running a check-up on the bakkie and getting their supplies packed up.

  “Remember to get Anneke to pack food,” Nyx had told him, “not just guns.”

  Kine was tougher to get rid of. She’d ranted more about the powerful families of Alabbas until Nyx threatened to call in order keepers and tell them Kine was trespassing. That had earned Nyx a dark look, and she suspected Kine wasn’t going to talk to her for a long time after this.

  But there was more important shit on the line than her sister’s approval. So now she trudged alone through the dark toward the warm, rosy glow of the brothel. She used the long walk—paired with a quick rickshaw ride that she haggled down to a reasonable fare—to try and remember when she had called Hadjara. She hadn’t made many friends back when she was a bel dame. She’d tell anyone who asked that she hadn’t fucking been there to make friends, but Hadjara had been young and funny and tolerant of Nyx’s grim humor. It helped that Hadjara was just a clerk working in the bel dame offices, not a bel dame or apprentice. Nyx had found talking to her to be a useful palate cleanser after a long day of serious talk about the best way to bleed out a body. Sometimes you forgot you were a human when you were a bel dame.

  Nyx knocked at the door at the top of the stairs. A slit in the door opened, and Nyx saw one grizzled old eye peering out.

  “Fuck me,” the woman on the other side said, and the door opened. A skinny, hunched old woman with a tangle of white hair stood on the other side. She carried a cane with a big red polished rock on the end and held up her arms to Nyx. “Thought you were long dead,” the woman said.

  “I’m tough to kill, Morda,” Nyx said. “Is Hadjara here?”

  “Sure,” Morda said. “Come on in. Best place to find a woman to talk politics at without getting a bullet between the eyes.” She pointed a finger at her own forehead. “In, in, let’s go.”

  Nyx followed her inside.

  The evening was still early, and there were only a few women at the bar. A young, beautiful Nasheenian man tended bar. He was most assuredly over sixteen, which raised Nyx’s brows. She turned to look at Morda, who waved her fingers at Nyx. “Not full Nasheenian,” Morda said. “He’s a half-breed. I have papers. All very legal.”

  “Sure,” Nyx said. “Whatever. I don’t do that sort of work anymore anyway.”

  “Not unless contracted, eh?” Morda said. “Have a drink on us. I will get Hadjara.”

  Nyx ordered whisky from the boy at the bar. He had the sense to give her a double take. “Not here for you,” she assured him. She could not help looking like what she was, or perhaps like what she had been. Boys always sensed it. It was why she so often had to go through their female kin to get to them back when she was a bel dame hunting down deserters like this one. Morda had good forgeries—she’d seen some of them—and she suspected this boy’s was on par with that.

  A man came in from the hall; a big Mhorian man with a mane of yellow dreadlocks and spidery blue tattoos running across his face. For a half moment Nyx wondered if he worked there, because it had been a long time since she took a man that big to bed, but he was shabbily dressed and didn’t set his attention on her immediately. A patron, then.

  She went back to her drink and was surprised when he sat down next to her instead of slinking out the back like most foreign men did at brothels, like talking and fucking was shameful.

  “I heard you were looking for a shifter,” he said. His accent was thick. If she had to guess, he hadn’t been in Nasheen long.

  “My shit isn’t your business.”

  “I’m looking for work,” he said. “I remember you from the shifter licensing office. Morda said you were all right.”

  She sized him up again. “Go to the storefront like anybody else if you want to interview for a job. The fuck you doing at a brothel?”

  “I do work for Morda,” he said. “She had me run an errand for Hadjara. She will give you a reference.”

  “You apply like anybody else,” she said. “You ain’t special.”

  He drank his beer all in one go. She watched him glug it down, imagined gripping that wide neck. She shook her head. She needed a fuck like she needed water right now, and fucking anyone would do, wouldn’t it?

  “I’m Khos,” he said.

  “I don’t give a shit,” she said.

  His expression was oddly pained, but he shrugged and stood. He lumbered out the door, and she relaxed a little. Strange men soliciting work in brothels was the last thing she needed right now. But he was a shifter, yeah, and if Morda spoke for him he might be a good quick fix for Alabbas.

  Morda came out with Hadjara, and Nyx stood. Hadjara had grown out her dark hair since Nyx had last seen her.
It was braided close against her scalp. She was older, too; over thirty now, probably. Age suited her; the fine lines and deeper frown and harder edges that came with seeing too much shit under two suns gave her some character. She was a little too pretty for Nyx’s taste, and a little too upbeat, but Nyx was reconsidering.

  “Thanks, Morda,” Hadjara said. “You want to find a room, Nyx? Had one set aside. Bar tab’s on me.”

  “All right,” Nyx said. The vibe in the brothel wasn’t bad, but she was still concerned about her lack of memory.

  “You know that shifter?” she asked Morda, jabbing her finger at the door. “The Mhorian?”

  “Khos?” Morda said. “Yes, he does odd work for us. He was here to run a message for Hadjara. I told him to speak to you. Was that all right?”

  “Might give me some warning.”

  Morda showed her teeth. “Don’t tell me he intimidated you, Nyx.”

  “Not a fan of big men,” Nyx said.

  “I can attest that this particular man is well-equipped for a number of useful jobs,” Morda said, and cackled. “From the look on your face, you could use more than talk tonight.”

  “Another time,” Nyx said.

  Nyx followed Hadjara to a private room at the back, equipped with plush divans, a big bed, open shower, and closet stuffed with illegal pamphlets and manifestos. Brothels were a hotbed of political activity in Nasheen, and more political parties and revolution-mongering probably went on there than fucking. Morda had told her a while back that early laws related to brothels made them exempt from government surveillance—an early attempt to curb a very lucrative bribery ring that had targeted male politicians before the war. No one had bothered to change the law in all that time—everyone being busy with other shit—and so brothels had become one of the safer places to talk about what sort of shit one was going to put down or blow up.