Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  Rhys stood beside her, so close she could feel the heat of him. She wanted to take his arm and bury her face in his chest and breathe in the scent of him for the rest of the night. “I couldn’t believe what I heard in there,” he said.

  “Yeah, djinn are real,” Nyx said. “So were the Seven Sleepers, and also that guy with the green teeth I dreamed about last night.”

  “Were you trying to soothe her? ‘Maybe the soul’s just somewhere else’? Really? You?” His tone was far too full of mirth.

  “I don’t believe anymore, Rhys. Big empty place where God used to be—in me and in the world. But I remember what it was like. Not my place to take it away from some kid. The world does that well enough on its own.”

  “God doesn’t go away,” Rhys said, “even if you do.”

  “Oh, spare me the shit,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “You wouldn’t take God from her, but you try and take him from me?”

  “Rhys,” she said, and she turned so their arms touched. “I take the piss with you, but when have I ever told you to leave God like I did?”

  He stared at her with his big, dark eyes, and for a long moment she let herself get lost there. Then the fear cut through her. The fear that if she didn’t look away now, and shit on him, that he’d look at her the way Khos did, and then she really would have to leave him and his God in a ditch somewhere the same way she was willing to leave Khos. And then how would Rhys look at her, after she let him think she had a soul and then broke his heart?

  So she looked away. The evening was cool and dry, and Nyx felt invincible. The world felt a little brighter. She stepped lighter, here. Breathed deeper. Fuck, she felt so good after a close job where she’d almost bitten it. So fucking alive.

  The call to prayer sounded. She shifted away from Rhys, so she could no longer feel his heat.

  Saved by prayer. Always, prayer.

  Nyx left Rhys at prayer and went to join Taite out in the back where he sat hunched up on a tattered wicker chair as the bloody purple-red of the day’s first sunset smeared the sky. He turned one of his little saint statues over and over in his hands. Nyx didn’t know which one it was—they all looked the same to her.

  Nyx slumped into the seat next to him as the call to evening prayer sounded across the valley below. She tucked a little sen into her mouth from the bag at her hip. She still needed a fucking bath.

  “Solid job,” she said. “They’re sending in somebody to pick up those bodies tonight. Get rid of that smell. I’ll have Anneke wash out the bakkie in the morning. You’ll get a good cut for this job.”

  “Every day we don’t die is good I guess.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  He rubbed the saint’s face; the features had been smoothed into obscurity some time ago. To her eye, the head was a lumpy yam. “We all know Rhys is the only person on this team you give a shit about,” he said.

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “I tell myself that’s all right,” he said. He kept his gaze fixed on the sky, and spit the words like he was at some Ras Tiegan confession. “It’s all right because shit, when I worked for your old boss there wasn’t a single one of us he’d sacrifice anything for. We were all alike, to a guy like that. But I won’t lie, Nyx. It gets to me. It gets to me that I could live with you all these years like we’re some fucked-up family and you’d just leave me to die on some rooftop somewhere if you thought I’d inconvenience a job.”

  “Never pretended to be anything but what I am,” Nyx said. And she wanted to add, “not like you,” but that felt too much like digging into his past, and she’d sworn not to do that with anyone on her team. She cast about for some whisky, but it was all still inside, and she’d have to get up and miss the bleeding sunset. “We’re all mercenaries,” Nyx said, instead. “You just as much as anyone.” Then, before he could whine anymore, she yelled, “Anneke!” back into the house. “Get me a drink!”

  Taite finally turned to her. “She’s at the shooting range,” he said. “You can’t just drink everything away.”

  She pointed at his little statue. “You numb all this catshit with your little toys. I numb it with booze. No different.”

  “Whatever, Nyx,” Taite said. He stood. “I wish . . . No, never mind. I just. I get what Rhys has against you, sometimes. I mean, I like my job. But . . . I get it.”

  Taite pushed inside.

  “Fuck you, too,” Nyx said, softly. To herself. To the wind. To a world that didn’t fucking care.

  Nyx was already drunk by the time she stumbled down the low hill behind the storefront and joined Anneke at the shooting range. It was almost midnight prayer. The whisky bottle between them was three-quarters empty. Anneke was still putting pithy little holes in the targets at the other end of the field while Nyx shot off her pistols wildly, hooting and hollering, stomping at the ground like a woman on fire. Maybe she was.

  Anneke shot off another round. Nyx snatched up the bottle and threw herself on the cool ground, and gazed up into the black patch in the sky, the great darkness of the celestial plain where no stars were visible. She drank, and gritted her teeth, and wondered at the fact that she was still alive. It felt so fucking good.

  “I don’t think I have a soul,” Nyx said.

  “Eh?” Anneke said. Another shot, two more, then six in quick succession.

  “No soul,” Nyx said. “I got rebuilt, after the front. You know that. The magicians rebuilt me.”

  “Sure,” Anneke said.

  “Catshit. You didn’t.”

  “Sure I did,” Anneke said. “Your eyes are off.”

  “What?”

  “Your eyes are two different colors,” Anneke said. “I mean, other shit, too. You’re mean and crazy. But mostly, you got two eyes it’s clear ain’t yours. Other parts, too.”

  “You say that like you ain’t mean and crazy, too.”

  “Didn’t say I ain’t.”

  “You get rebuilt?”

  “Naw,” Anneke said. She brought her gun over to a stone slab near the little gun house. Far off, a brilliant amber burst went off. Some skirmish at the front. But the booze had numbed up Nyx enough that she barely registered it. “But I get what you mean, about having no soul. The war steals a little from all of us, you know. Leaves that big patch of empty.”

  Nyx pointed up at the darkness. “Like that.”

  “Sure,” Anneke said. “Like that. You gonna shoot, or you gonna drink?”

  “Both,” Nyx said. She closed her eyes and soaked in the heat still lingering on the sand. “Ain’t nothing like the feeling of being alive after you almost died, you know?”

  “I know,” Anneke said. “You get addicted to it.”

  “That why you run with me? You sick on it, too?”

  “Why you even need to ask, boss? Sounds pretty close to asking about dead shit.”

  “No dead shit,” Nyx said, and pushed herself up. She took a slug from the bottle, then handed it back to Anneke. Nyx pulled her pistol again and took another couple wild shots at the sandbag targets out there.

  “Someday I’m going to teach you to shoot,” Anneke said.

  “What’d be the fun in that?” Nyx said. “I can’t be fucking perfect at everything.”

  Anneke cackled like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Nyx couldn’t imagine why.

  Another burst broke along the horizon—deep purple, tinged in orange stars. It was beautiful. Everything was so goddamn beautiful, with or without a soul, with or without God at your hip.

  Nyx took another shot.

  CROSSROADS AT JANNAH

  “The world is a prison for the believer and a paradise for the unbeliever.”

  —Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim2956

  THE FIGURE IN THE DOORWAY was missing half her face and most of her left arm, which had been replaced with a green glowing claw with a texture and sheen that reminded Nyx of a scorpion. More impressive was the bowed length of metal that served as the woman’s left leg.
What made it impressive was the fact that the woman hadn’t been jumped in the street while she waited in the doorway, and been divested of her conspicuous wealth. No doubt anyone who considered stealing the pure metal had second thoughts on seeing the woman’s shredded face. Nyx certainly wouldn’t have tangled with her, and Nyx had been hunting down deserters, wrangling with gene pirates, and boxing with mullahs for half of her life. The one remaining eye that the woman turned upon Nyx was steely, cold, set back in the ravaged flesh of the face.

  “You’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem,” the woman said.

  “That’s what the sign says.”

  “Not technically, no,” the woman said, and sat down on the rickety chair across from Nyx’s desk. The day was hot, and she was perspiring heavily. She pulled out a sweat rag and wiped it across her face, then tucked it back into her burnous. She wore a breast binding and loose pair of trousers. Her gut was the sort acquired over long nights of drinking to excess, which paired well with the broken veins across her nose.

  Nyx took the hint and pulled out a bottle of whisky from the drawer at her left and poured them both a drink.

  “Ah!” the woman said, smacking her lips. “I am Hafeez Arwa. You come well recommended as a woman good at finding things.”

  “Folks with problems always seem to find me.”

  “You do run a problem-solving business.”

  “Never thought of it as anything so refined.”

  “It’s all in how you spin it,” she said, polished off the drink.

  Nyx capped the bottle and cocked her head at Hafeez. “Let’s talk business before you polish off the rest.”

  “I need to find a data lake,” Hafeez said.

  Nyx let that idea roll around in her head a minute. Maybe the heat was getting to her, too. Her magician, Rhys, and her com tech, Taite, had retreated into the basement to escape the heat. She was starting to wonder if she should have done the same. She’d have missed this visitor, and her drink would be a lot colder. “A lake . . .” Nyx said, testing it out, “full of data. Right.”

  Hafeez plumbed the depths of one of her burnous pockets with her pincer arm and came up with a handful of beetle casings. She spilled them onto the table like dice. “I get you’re used to finding bodies,” Hafeez said. “This time, the bodies are the bugs that used to store information.”

  Nyx picked up one of the transparent rectangular cases. Inside was a shiny yellow beetle surrounded by threads of silky organic filament. “I know what they are,” she said. “My com tech stores all recorded conversations on them. And I’ve seen them plenty in interrogation rooms when we’re pulling up recordings.”

  “Ever wonder what happens to them when they’re no longer needed?”

  Nyx snorted. “Not once.”

  Hafeez said, “Most are destroyed properly, put in bins of acid that dissolve the casing and everything inside. But that’s expensive. Others simply feed them to bugs tailored to the purpose. They’re a form of flesh beetles, and they’ll simply consume and excrete what’s left.”

  “So what happens to the rest? Sticky fingers?”

  “Laziness,” Hafeez said. She tapped her glass on the table, but Nyx didn’t think it was a conscious gesture. “There are firms that say they will collect your old casings and destroy them en masse. They haul them out into the desert and bury them in acidic lakes. Because there are so many casings, it takes a long time for them to break down. There are people, like myself, who take advantage of this. We go data fishing, scooping up casings from this acidic slurry to see if they can be salvaged or repaired and the data subsequently retrieved.”

  “I take it this isn’t exactly legal.”

  “Ah, well,” Hafeez said, swiping her claw in front of her as if turning off a radio image, “is that enough for another drink?”

  Nyx obliged. She found the woman strangely likeable. Surprising, because Nyx didn’t like most people. Hafeez reminded her of an old commander of hers, from the front, right before she was blown up for the third and final time.

  “Good, good,” Hafeez said, smacking her lips. She went slower with the second drink. She collected up all of the casings and dumped them back into her pocket. Then she reached into her breast binding and pulled out a slippery casing, holding it out to Nyx. “Your people can use this to find the others from the same facility,” she said. “I know it can be done, as I have hired private contractors before who do such work. I’ve even done it myself, of course, but . . . I need you to go to the data lake and pull out everything that came from the same place this casing did, in whatever condition it’s in. Then return it to me.”

  Nyx took the casing from her. It was a pretty little thing, she supposed, a captured blue beetle suspended in fluid and trapped by a casing made of transparent bug secretions; little bubbles of air made dewy patterns on the beetle’s spidery legs, and beaded the looping threads of the yellow filament that encircled it.

  “You not going to tell me where it’s from?” Nyx asked.

  “Better you not know,” Hafeez said. “The less a contractor such as yourself knows, the better. All you need to know is that I want others from the same place. Easy enough. In and out.”

  “If it was easy, you wouldn’t hire me.”

  “Not so,” Hafeez said, and she smiled like a particularly pleased cat, “easy is fine, it’s the . . . questionable legality that isn’t.”

  “How much it pay?”

  Hafeez said, “A thousand notes.”

  “I could get more for that metal leg of yours.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” Hafeez said, and she chuckled, sending her belly rolling.

  “You serve at the front?” Nyx asked.

  “This?” Hafeez said, waving her claw at her mangled face. “Ho-ho, no, but that’s a pretty story, isn’t it? This was an occupational hazard. But it did keep me from the front lines. I pushed a lot of papers with this limb!” She chuckled some more.

  “I’ll talk to my com tech,” Nyx said. “If he can do what you think he can, then we’ll put something together, and I’ll have you sign a contract. I want half in advance. If he can’t do it, no deal. I don’t contract out anything on my team. I can tell you right now that he’s probably not going to like this job at all.”

  “Fair enough,” Hafeez said, “you can find me at that curry-stinking hotel, that Mont-plier place, until next week. The job must be done, the data turned over, before prayer day next week. Otherwise, I have no use for it, yes?”

  “Sure,” Nyx said.

  Hafeez stood. Her metal leg creaked.

  Nyx considered that leg for a long moment, wondering how spry this old woman really was. Hafeez caught her looking, and tapped at the leg. “You try me,” Hafeez said. “You’ll sleep better.”

  “I’ll sleep a long time,” Nyx said.

  “Exactly that.”

  “I love it!” Taite said.

  “Well, shit,” Nyx said.

  Taite bounced back on his heels. He was a spry, pockmarked kid, too young to go to the front even if they drafted half–Ras Tiegans like him, which they didn’t. His dark hair needed a cut, and hung into his face in greasy tangles. A cut and a wash, Nyx amended.

  She had joined him and her magician, Rhys, in the basement. Rhys was going through afternoon prayer, forehead to his prayer mat, murmuring his prayers to the north. Down here, the air certainly felt better, but smelled like a barracks. The freezer behind Taite’s workbench where they kept bodies they were bringing in on bounty was empty, and had been for three weeks.

  “We need the notes,” Nyx said, “so I guess I should be happy you can pull it off, eh?”

  “We’d make more money off that woman’s metal leg than the job,” Taite said.

  “You’re free to try and get it off her,” Nyx said. “I think she’d cut off your head, and she most certainly wouldn’t use my services anymore. Thing is, Taite, you go murdering your clients and word gets around and all the sudden you don’t have any clients anymore. Got that? Cause, eff
ect. You’re a com tech. You should get that.”

  “Sure, sure,” Taite said, rolling his eyes.

  “You roll those eyes at me again and I’ll cut them out,” Nyx said.

  “You say the nicest things,” Rhys said as he rolled up his prayer mat.

  “And then your tongue,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  Rhys stood, and she let herself watch him do it. He was a lean man, tall, about her height. The pretty in him was always tough to quantify; some combination of beauty and humility that was difficult to find. He shaved his head, which she hated, but it did emphasize his features: the pouty lower lip, the long, slender nose, the broad cheekbones, and the dark eyes that did not meet her gaze now, but remained on the floor, as they usually did when she wasn’t wearing anything but her breast binding and dhoti. Even her feet were bare.

  “If you can fish out what she needs,” Nyx said, “all I need to do is get us in there.”

  “Easier said than done,” Taite said. “Those data lakes are heavily monitored, even one that’s shabby.”

  “Let’s hope for a shabby one,” Nyx said. “It’s fasting season, you know, time of miracles.”

  “I don’t think that’s the expression I’d use,” Rhys said.

  Nyx ignored him; when it suited her, she pretended he was a buzzing insect without a stinger, which wasn’t far off from the truth, she supposed.

  Taite flipped the casing over in his hand. “I can figure out where the data was created using the com,” he said. “Once we know that, we’ll need to figure out where that place sends its casings to be destroyed. Then fish it out.”

  “Easy,” Nyx said, warming to the idea.

  Rhys shook his head. “Another easy little adventure, is it?”

  “Aren’t they always?” Nyx said.

  Rhys sweltered in the front seat of the bakkie, wondering how he’d gotten himself a starring role in yet another one of Nyx’s dangerous schemes. Taite sat next to him, tilting the buzzing fan of beetles that provided the only moving air in the bakkie closer to him. They had rolled down the windows, but the air outside was so still it put Rhys into a trance if he allowed himself to tune out to his surroundings for any length of time.