Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  The Muhktars were indeed a powerful family. They paid her and had the land grant notarized the next day. The money was far more than Nyx had expected, and she divided it up among the team that night over fried rotis and sugar soda two towns over where the air was clearer.

  Anneke whooped and hollered at her cut and stuffed it into her breast binding and rocketed off to the nearest card hall.

  “We leave at dawn!” Nyx said, and Anneke waved at her.

  Taite went up to bed at the hotel. “Might as well get some sleep before she comes back,” he said.

  Nyx had gotten three rooms again, and she left Khos and Rhys at the café downstairs to be grumpy by themselves. She was tired of their moods. Men were so emotional.

  She bathed and threw herself into bed, but every time she closed her eyes, she saw that beating heart in Rhys’s hands, and she remembered that it had been far too large for a dog’s heart, and it had not tasted like a dog’s heart at all.

  She remembered holding her knife to Rhys’s throat for no reason. She remembered losing her shit at them in some hot, stifling silo that felt like the desert. The whole world felt like the front. She could never scrub away the front. It followed her, buried deep in her heart.

  “That woman was going to kill me,” Khos said.

  Rhys stared into his bowl of gravied yams. The first big sun was setting, and he closed his eyes and tried to enjoy the last of its heat on his face. Life always felt more precious right after you almost lost it. “Nyx kills a lot of people,” Rhys said.

  Khos leaned toward him, bushy brows furrowed. “Why did you speak for me?” Khos said. “Is it really because you’re Chenjan, because this would help the war?”

  “Why does everyone think I do things because I’m Chenjan?” Rhys said. “Did you trust that Hadjara woman because you’re Mhorian?”

  Khos straightened. “Well, yes,” he said. “Women only lie about politics.” He poked at his food. “I didn’t realize this was so political.”

  “You have a lot to learn about Nasheen,” Rhys said.

  “I am new here, that’s true,” Khos said.

  Rhys considered asking him what he was running from, but that would end with Khos asking Rhys the same question, and he didn’t want to answer that. He was starting to understand why Nyx didn’t ask her team a lot of questions.

  “No matter what Nyx says or does,” Rhys said, “just remember she’s always out for herself. If you remember she’s always thinking about herself, you can convince her to act morally, sometimes.”

  “She really was going to kill me.”

  “She’ll do anything to finish a job,” Rhys said. “We’re all expendable.”

  Khos sipped his tea. The way he held the cup was surprisingly delicate, for such a large man. Rhys wasn’t sure why he expected a man that size to go around crushing things, but he did. Maybe it had been so long since he saw a man who clearly wasn’t starving or mistreated or broken that he’d forgotten what was possible.

  “I will consider all you’ve said,” Khos said.

  Back at the storefront in Punjai, Nyx sat up on the roof with Anneke drinking whisky and throwing rocks at parrots. The little parrots were commonly used as spies by those too cheap to buy bugs.

  “Too many men on this team,” Anneke said, pouring herself another glass. The day was just starting to cool as the first sun rode low over the horizon, burning it a rapturous orange. “Shit gets too emotional. Wah-wah, I don’t eat meat. Wah-wah, don’t cut out my heart.”

  Nyx shrugged. “Cheaper than hiring women.”

  “True, true,” Anneke said. “I sure ain’t cheap.”

  “War’s not going to go well for Nasheen next few years,” Nyx said.

  “What, ’cause of the factories?” Anneke said, and snorted. “Filthy Tirhanis will be happy to fill more orders. Southern factories mostly supply Ras Tieg.”

  “What’s Ras Tieg have to fight?” Nyx said.

  Anneke peered at her. “You ever talk to Taite?”

  “No,” Nyx said.

  “They don’t like shifters there,” Anneke said. “Some kind of religious war over it. So in the end we put more money in Tirhani pockets, and saved some Ras Tiegan shifters, maybe. Or maybe they were supplying the other side there? Who knows? What I’m saying is, I don’t stay up at night thinking about it.”

  “You think I do?”

  Anneke shrugged. “You say you don’t, but you piss a lot about it. It was a bad job. I like to just forget about bad jobs.”

  “Pour me another drink.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  Nyx threw a rock at a parrot, and missed. “Goddamn, I can’t even fucking throw straight.”

  “We ain’t none of us perfect,” Anneke said. She sucked at her drink. “You think that Chenjan will stay?”

  “Rhys can come or go, I don’t fucking care. He can’t fucking make up his mind.”

  “Someday you’re going to kill that Chenjan,” Anneke said, “and it’ll be meaner’n what you do to all those other people you fuck.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Nyx said. “Someday I’ll just eat him right up, and we’ll get over it. He’ll leave then for sure.”

  “You be nice now,” Anneke said, slyly. “You take out his heart first.”

  “No,” Nyx said finishing her drink. “I’ll eat his heart last.”

  A few hours later, drunk and thinking far too much about fucking, Nyx knocked on Rhys’s door.

  She wasn’t exactly sure what she was going to ask him for. Reading, maybe? He hadn’t read to her in a while. Reading that would lead to fucking. Fucking, then reading. Then he could leave the team. After she fucked him. Like normal people did.

  When he didn’t answer, she knocked again. “Hey, open up!” she said.

  The door opened. She found herself staring at a broad, pale chest crisscrossed in blue tattoos. She followed the map of the muscled chest up and up to Khos’s broad face and grinned.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. He held a bottle of beer in one hand, and she saw a box of empties by his bed.

  “You . . . up to anything?” she said.

  “You came here for a drink?” he said. “You seem to have had some already.”

  “Oh, I had my eye on coming down here before the drinking,” she said. “You?”

  “You did promise the fucking would come later.”

  “Could come a few times, really,” Nyx said.

  He opened the door wider. She took the beer from his hand and kicked the door closed behind them.

  It had been far too fucking long since she fucked someone.

  She finished the beer and tossed the bottle into the box with the others and pulled at his trousers. He took her face in his hands and kissed her so passionately that a wave of desire shook her body. She wrapped her legs around him and he carried her to the bed where they proceeded to fuck like two very drunk and very hungry people.

  He was warm and tasted good and kissed her like a man who breathed women, dreamed of women, found bliss in the arms of women. And for Nyx, who had never known bliss or surrender with or toward anyone or anything, seeing him submit to sensation—to lust, desire—was one of the most intensely erotic things she had ever witnessed.

  She had been only half joking about coming a few times, especially considering how drunk she was, but he was eager and perfectly skillful, and the second time she came she thought she was dreaming this whole thing because she wasn’t stupid enough to fuck anyone on her team, was she? And wasn’t she looking for Rhys?

  They lay tangled together in the sheets, sweaty and semi-delirious with drink and sated lust, and she traced the fine blue tattoos running up his legs.

  “You want to know about them?” he asked softly as he tangled his fingers in her unraveling braids.

  The fear started then, riding up over her satisfaction, sinking deep in the pit of her stomach. She drew her hand away. “No,” she said.

  Nyx slid out of bed.

>   “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “You were fine.”

  “Is this about him?”

  “Who?”

  “You certainly know who.”

  She pulled on her dhoti and braided back her mussed hair. She either wanted more to drink or wanted to get to bed. Probably both. Stupid mistake, fucking a guy she’d signed a contract with.

  “You should see the way you two look at each other,” Khos said.

  “We don’t look at each other,” Nyx said. “He’s just a kid.”

  “A pretty kid, by anybody’s standard. And if even I can see that, I imagine you sure can.”

  “Well, no amount of looking is going to make any difference. He’s still God full. And I’m still godless.”

  “Maybe you should find God again.”

  “Maybe he should become godless.”

  “You compromise for no one.”

  “No.”

  “That’s a lonely place to be.”

  “You trying to open me up? You’re nobody special.”

  “Haven’t I already opened you up?” he said, and she hated the way he said it, propped up there on one elbow, because he was gentle and beautiful and he had also been a dog runner who now had bomb codes wrapped around his heart, and she broke everything she touched, even things that were already broken.

  “The cunt is not the heart,” she said, standing, “though a lot of people get the two confused.”

  She went to the door and yanked it open.

  Rhys resolved to find Nyx and say his peace. If he was leaving, he wanted her to know why. He wanted her to know that if she really cared about him like she pretended, then they shouldn’t work for each other. They should figure something else out. Maybe there was something to work out.

  He found Anneke passed out in her room, and Taite listening to the radio. “You know where Nyx is?” Rhys asked.

  “Probably ask Khos,” Taite said.

  Rhys didn’t ask why it was Khos would know. He went right to Khos’s door, which had led to a storage closet not long before. Everything that used to be in the closet was still stacked outside of it.

  Rhys heard voices inside. He raised his hand to knock.

  The door opened, and Nyx stood in front of him, braids tangled, tunic in hand, wearing only her dhoti and breast binding. Beside her, Khos sat on his bed, naked.

  Rhys opened his mouth, unsure of what to say.

  “The fuck?” Nyx said.

  They stared at each other. Rhys tried not to stare at Khos. He stared at Nyx’s bared abdomen instead. “I . . .” Rhys began. He dropped his hand. “I was . . . looking for you. Thought . . . Khos had seen you, maybe.”

  “Well, you were right,” Nyx said. Her face flushed, or it looked like it did. The light was dim, and he couldn’t be sure. She shut the door behind her. “What did you want?”

  Rhys cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he said.

  “It had to be something. You didn’t come all the way down here for nothing.”

  “Just . . .” He gazed at the door again. He was a fool, in fact. A fool to think she was anything but what she said she was. “Nothing, just wanted you to know I was staying on the team,” he said. “I talked with Anneke and she thinks the government job might be dodgy. Something to lure foreign men to the interior.”

  “I’m sure she’s right,” Nyx said. “You’re staying, then.”

  “Yes,” he said, “why not? Nothing has changed.” He turned to go.

  “Rhys?”

  He did not look back at her, but he stopped, listening.

  She came up beside him. “Early day tomorrow. Back to work, all right?” she said. “Need to meet you in the bakkie at the second dawn, and we’ll head over to the Cage to pick up some jobs, sound good?”

  “Good, all right,” Rhys said. He went back to his room and shut the door. Pulled off his burnous. His shoes. His tunic. Unbuckled his guns. Took off his belt. Stripped to his small-clothes, and then he just lay there in bed alone, remembering when she took his hand. Remembering how she had fired that gun into his chest. Remembered how he had felt when he was with her, despite or because of all that, and tried to imagine how he would feel without that sense of being safe and protected, even in the company of a woman willing to break his ribs to serve her own ends.

  He didn’t know why he stayed. Didn’t know why he couldn’t go. He put his hand over his heart, and wished he could tear it out.

  The next morning, Nyx left the storefront to see Rhys waiting for her in the bakkie as the big orange demon of the second sun lit up over the horizon. Nyx had swilled half a carafe of buni—no whisky—after getting out of bed. Now she slid into the seat up front next to him. When he glanced at her, it was with contempt and disgust, and she was all right with that. She knew what to do with it. It was the needy, heartfelt kind of emotion like the looks Khos had given her after they fucked that left her cold. It made her want to run. Maybe it made Rhys want to run, too, which is why he wasn’t now. He hated her enough to stay. So she would take his contempt and his disgust, and bundle it up tight and close.

  He gazed out over the hazy city, contemplating the world outside his window. The world without her face in it.

  “Finally ready?” he said.

  “Born that way,” Nyx said.

  “Born drunk, more likely.”

  “You can be both,” she said.

  She started up the bakkie. It coughed yellow smoke and beetles out its back end. Nyx turned on the juice. “These fucking beetles are starving.”

  “Heart full of beetles,” he said.

  “If only,” she said, and drove them to their next job.

  SOULBOUND

  “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

  —Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a

  NYX HAD BEEN FALLING APART since the magicians put her back together again sometime after the war. Now, at thirty, staring down the barrel of an acid gun, she figured she was about to break apart for good. She’d heard that lots of people found God again when looking that hard at death, but mostly she felt relief. At thirty, Nyx was lucky to be alive, let alone facing a messy death at the end of a gun.

  The kid holding the gun was fresh from the front, so fresh it looked like she still had all of her original fingers. The dusty corridor of the hotel was tight. The girl had swung up the gun just as Nyx came up from murdering one of the hotel’s security guards. Nyx let her gaze tarry on those smooth fingers, fascinated with the final details of her own death.

  But the fingers gave the girl away: too straight, unblemished, not a callous or crack or dirty fingernail. Those weren’t the hands of a kid who’d spent time with weapons in trenches. They weren’t the hands of a kid who knew how to handle a big girl gun. Nyx followed the line of the fingers up to the trigger device, and the little round safety plug that was still inserted just behind it.

  “Bloody amateur,” Nyx said, and lunged.

  The girl fumbled with the gun, frantically clicking the locked trigger. Nyx ripped the weapon away and bashed her on the side of the head with it. The girl stumbled against the bullet-riddled wall of the hallway and sat hard on her rump.

  The door to the stairwell behind the girl popped open. Anneke burst in, rifle first. She brought with her the stink of gun oil and citronella. Anneke was a wiry, fearsome little woman with a face like a hammer. She was nearly as dark as a Chenjan, but far less modest, geared up in her dhoti and breast binding—though she really didn’t need one—and little else. Her lips were smeared red with sen, and when she spoke, she showed crimson-stained teeth, like some demon from a Chenjan parable.

  “Lotta fucking stairs, boss,” Anneke said, huffing hard.

  “You seen any more of her team down there?” Nyx asked. “We’ve got four more notes to fill.”

  “Naw, just the one in the morgue.”

  “Where’s Kh
os?”

  “Got tied up at the morgue with Rhys.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Rhys said, uh, autopsies take time.”

  “She had a gun at my head.”

  “Bad place for it,” Anneke said, “hardest place on the skull, there.” Anneke spit on the floor next to the girl. The sputum was bloody red with sen. She nudged the girl with her boot. The girl squinted up at Anneke, vomited, and promptly passed out.

  Nyx might have hit her too hard. Could have been Nyx down there on the floor, bloody and vomiting her guts out. If only.

  “You sure this is the girl on the note?” Anneke said, picking at her teeth. “Real raw to pull a gun and not a swarm, you know? I mean, if she’s a magician like she’s supposed to be.”

  Nyx knelt beside the girl and pulled up the sleeves of her tunic. Both forearms bore thorny black tattoos that marked her as a member of the rogue Death Magicians. Nyx pushed back the dark mat of hair on the girl’s head and found the shiny scar on her forehead where she must have had the other marks removed.

  “Didn’t have much time for conversation,” Nyx said, “but the markings are right.”

  “Let’s throw her in the trunk and eat,” Anneke said. “I’m starving.”

  “Morgue first, then food.”

  “Story of my life, boss.” Anneke slung her rifle over her shoulder and moved to do the same with the girl, but Nyx stopped her.

  “Let me search her,” Nyx said. She rifled through the woman’s burnous and came out with a couple of notes, two death beetle larvae in matchboxes, and a pamphlet advertising the theatrical production of The Horned Magician in Mushtallah at the brothel next door. Nyx pocketed the cash and frowned at the rest. Part of her wanted to know what the kid was up to, but most of her just wanted to get paid and move on. She wasn’t being paid to solve some mystery. She was being paid for a head. Several of them.

  The girl was still out. Nyx figured any brain injury wouldn’t be permanent. Probably. Once she turned the girl over, the junk in her pockets was somebody else’s concern.