Outside, the blue-tinged cargo bakkie they had been waiting for all day finally rolled up outside the security gates of the building.
“You realize we need to get inside,” Taite said, face inches away from the beating wings of the beetles.
“Why?” Rhys said. “The name of the place is on the trunk. We’ll look them up at the public com.” He let out a little wisp of a command to the beetles to slow their wings. Simple tasks with common bugs weren’t easy for him, but they were possible, and it did amuse him to see the look on Taite’s face.
Taite shook the cage of beetles. “I think they’re broken,” he said. He raised his head and met Rhys’s look.
Rhys burst out laughing.
“You shit,” Taite said, and grinned back. He huffed the cage at Rhys.
Rhys caught it. He waved his hand over the cage, sending out a little threaded signal to the bugs, and they began their fanning once again. “It does give me an idea,” Rhys said, “if you want to get inside and impress Nyx with all your fancy investigative work.”
“Something even you can do?” Taite said.
“Indeed,” Rhys said, “even I can do it.”
Rhys exited the stifling bakkie and opened up the trunk where they kept weapons and gear like specs, cooling blankets, water, food, and antidotes to common contagions. Taite joined him, rubbing his hands together.
“Are we going to stage a break-in?”
Rhys raised a brow. “I’m not Nyx.” He picked up a pair of specs. “We’re going to be an honest pair of com tech repair people. You’ve done it before, right?”
“I’ve contracted at places like this, sure,” Taite said. “Let’s do it.”
Taite piled cooling blankets into Rhys’s arms and put the cage of beetles on top. He grabbed a mess of identification papers from a locked box under the trunk liner, and pulled out one of his old batches from his time, as he put it, “honing my skills under some tables.”
Rhys sent a quick communication to Nyx via a red beetle swarm to let her know they were proceeding inside. He decided it was best not to wait for an answer and hear all about her thoughts on their plan’s success.
They strode up to the front doors of the facility, which bore a great flickering sign composed entirely of red midges:
ARWA WAR BONDS
Taite wandered up to the front counter. The sound of trickling water filled the space; water moved through the walls, cooling the whole building. Rhys wasn’t able to hear what Taite said because a massive woman was making her way toward him, and he responded by making his way as quickly as possible away from her.
“You, hey!” she said, and that’s when Rhys started to run. He couldn’t say why he ran. He was conditioned to it, now. When women in Nasheen went after you, you ran until your legs gave out or your lungs burst.
“Rhys!” Taite yelled, bolting after him.
Rhys ran up the great stone stairwell, pushing past women in white-and-yellow outfits and perfectly folded hijabs. He sprinted down a long hallway.
Taite barreled after him, breath coming hard and fast, already winded. “Where the fuck—” Taite began.
Rhys followed the pull of the insects. Insects crowded in a few places, but the one he was looking for was . . . there. He pushed up a panel in the wall, and a malodorous stench wafted out, part dog shit, part vomit, part death. Garbage left the building. Garbage would get him out.
“Go,” Rhys said, gesturing to the pit of stench.
Taite gazed back at the corridor. The big woman was getting closer, and she had brought friends. “I should have just stolen the leg,” he said, and jumped into the garbage chute.
Rhys tumbled after him, regretting it even as he hauled himself inside. He slammed the chute shut behind him and lost his grip, falling after Taite into the darkness. He landed with a soft, wet plop and promptly began to sink into the filth, like quicksand.
“This is shit!” Taite said. “Waste of time, again. Nyx is going to have it out with us over this.” The darkness was absolute. Rhys batted his hand in the direction of Taite’s voice, but only smacked his hand against soiled papers and refuse and old, melting furniture made of bug secretions that was slowly being reclaimed by the mire.
Rhys searched for a swarm. He sensed one flying midge, a handful of cockroaches, mayflies, lice, gnats, flies, and smaller, stranger things. Finally he locked on a small swarm of red beetles, one just released from a communication, and called them.
They buzzed just overhead. Rhys gasped at them, “Garbage chute. Follow the swarm back. Haste?” And let them go.
Rhys waited awhile before trying to make his own way up, but the chute was too slippery. Sitting at the end of it did get him out of the pit, but that was a temporary respite. Everything stank.
“Found some other chutes over here!” Taite said. They mucked about in the darkness for some time, but there was no way back up.
After a while, tired and hungry and thirsty, they both went quiet.
“She won’t come,” Rhys said, finally.
“She will,” Taite said, “but only because you’re here.”
A shaft of light appeared at the far end of the pit. Rhys squinted, shielding his eyes. A rope tumbled down.
“Hey down there!” Anneke’s voice.
Rhys followed Taite up to the edge of the chute, navigating the churn. Taite grabbed the rope, went up first, then Rhys. When Rhys broke the surface, he found that they were outside the walls of the compound, in some kind of courtyard. Nyx and Anneke stood there wearing the white-and-yellow uniforms of the facility, complete with hijabs.
“Should have thought of that,” Rhys said.
“Should have,” Nyx said, spitting sen. Her teeth were blood-red with it. “You’d look pretty in a hijab.” She wrinkled her nose, and said to Taite, “You got no excuse not to take a wash, now. Shit, kids.”
Nyx stood out on the sidewalk of her storefront, waiting for Anneke. Rhys was next to her, smelling sweet as a spring breeze on the interior. He had a massive map tucked under one arm, and he still would not look at her after his rescue from the garbage.
“I can’t imagine it’s so easy to hijack a cargo bakkie,” he said, with a little sniff.
“Certainly tougher than getting the name off of one,” Nyx said, “but the complexity of a task really depends on who’s doing it, right?”
“Fuck you, Nyx,” Taite said from behind her, and she grinned.
Her Mhorian shapeshifter, Khos, sat in a bakkie idling in the street, smoking from an oversize pipe. It was a habit he had picked up at some tea house, and whatever it was he smoked had a bitter, acrid tang to it that hurt her eyes. He had tied up his mass of yellow dreads with a red scarf, a style she found even more conspicuous than the Mhorian dreads alone. He dressed like a practical Nasheenian, at least, in a dhoti and burnous, a couple of bandoliers around his neck, a pistol at his hip. He was a big man: big head, big hands, and as Nyx knew, lots of other important things, too. She was musing about that as Anneke drove up in the blue-banded cargo bakkie, honking the horn like a fucking maniac.
Anneke leaned out the side of the cargo bakkie, shotgun first, and Nyx had to just take a minute and rub her own head at the crazy of her team. At least Anneke got things done, even if they were often done extravagantly.
Anneke parked and jumped out of the cab. She was little and lean, wiry, all muscle and reflex, nearly as dark as a Chenjan. She had hacked her hair short, and it stuck out in all directions, obscuring her face and hampering her vision, so she nearly knocked into Nyx with her gun.
“Good, great,” Nyx said, batting away the stock of the shotgun. “Let’s all get the fuck in before we wake up half the neighborhood.”
They all piled into the back of the cargo carrier, just a framed hauling bed that had been tented over in muslin and painted and waterproofed. The tented roof would be shit in an accident, but it shielded them and their cargo from prying eyes. Anneke had kept the existing data canister pickups in the back, and acquired
two uniforms. Nyx didn’t ask what had happened to the people who’d had the uniforms before her. Maybe she’d swiped them from a laundry somewhere. Anneke was resourceful.
Nyx peeled off her clothes and yanked on one of the blue-and-yellow uniforms. It was too small in the ass and the hips. She kept on her own sandals, not only because nobody they would encounter was likely to see her feet, but also because she kept razor blades hidden in the soles of them.
Taite, too, dressed in a uniform, which was too long and baggy on him, and slipped up front into the passenger seat. A Nasheenian woman and a foreign man driving one of these cargo bakkies wouldn’t be questioned. Anyone else on the team, and they were inviting way too many extra stops.
Nyx settled in up front and waved back at Khos. He tapped the horn, and Nyx turned on the juice to the bug cistern and cranked them back out of the alley and onto the deserted street.
Anneke peeked in from the back, parting the muslin curtain that shielded the back from the cab. Her face and the barrel of her gun were lined up side by side. She was grinning like a fucking maniac.
“Super excited about this one, boss,” she said. “Never been to a data lake. Should I bring some swimming gear?”
“Too late to go back for it,” Nyx said. “Rhys!”
“North until Adnan Street!” he yelled from the back.
“Good!” Nyx said. “You cozy back there?”
“No!” he said.
“Good!” she said, and grinned. She liked it when her plans panned out.
The security detail stopped them twelve miles from the location of the data lake facility.
Nyx slowed down when she saw the traffic ahead of them queuing up at the checkpoint. “I need a way around!” she yelled at Rhys.
“There’s no way around,” he said, and poked his head through the curtain. His eyes widened at the checkpoint. “This is . . . not optimal.”
“Not at all,” Nyx said. “Any ideas, Taite?”
Taite shifted in his seat. “Our papers aren’t going to stand up to close scrutiny,” he said.
“It’s not military,” Nyx said, squinting. “Looks like order keepers. Routine, then.”
“I don’t like this, boss,” Anneke said.
When Nyx glanced back, Anneke wasn’t visible, but the barrel of the gun was. “Goddammit, Anneke, put that shit away,” Nyx said.
“What are you going to do?” Taite said, quietly.
“Let me think,” Nyx said. They rolled forward with the queue as the bakkies ahead of them were released.
“Are they searching any?” Anneke said.
“One of them,” Nyx said. It was hot up in the cab now that they weren’t moving fast. The air was dead still. She watched the order keepers direct three women from a bakkie two up from them and pop open the trunk. One rolled under the bakkie. She didn’t see any magicians helping out. It had to be routine. What a fucking time to get caught in some random security check. She had bad papers, a stolen cargo bakkie, a Chenjan in the back, and a half-Chenjan woman with a shotgun, too, and some half–Ras Tiegan with a questionable record when it came to com hacking. There were lots of cards she could play with them—they were just order keepers, not bel dames, not military—but that also meant it would take longer to get through the protocols with them. Order keepers didn’t know her the way bel dames or military did. Order keepers hated people like her.
“Boss,” Anneke whispered.
“Shut up,” Nyx said. “I’m thinking.”
The bakkie ahead of them moved up alongside the two order keepers. The driver held out her papers. She was waved through fast, long before Nyx had any sort of real plan in place. Faintly, Nyx heard Anneke muttering something in the back.
Nyx pulled up alongside the order keepers. They were lean women, both in their early thirties, hair shorn short. The one nearest the cab door looked tired and bored, but the one behind her was clearly fired up on her own importance. Anneke’s muttering had gotten louder, and Nyx prepared to drown it out by bellowing.
Nyx fixed both order keepers with a broad grin and handed them her forged passbook for the rig and her identity. “Hot as hell out here, eh?” Nyx said. “Sorry they got you doing this shit. You come down from the north? Know how the weather is up there? Roads further north?”
“I don’t,” the woman with Nyx’s papers said, peering at them. The sun rode high over the woman’s shoulder.
Nyx persisted. “Back behind us, the road was washed out. Saw some folks who—”
“What are you carrying?” the woman asked.
A yell from the back, more muttering, louder this time. Goddammit Anneke, Nyx thought. Keep your goddamn cool. Had Anneke taken a stimulant or something?
“Huh? Oh, recycling data casings. Anwar. The war bonds place. Confidential stuff headed to a data lake.”
“Open up the back, please,” the woman said, handing Nyx back the passbook.
Nyx forced her grin into a grimace. “Oh sure, sure, just have to check with the boss. Confidential stuff.”
“Open it,” the woman behind said, and she pulled her pistol.
Nyx held up her hands. “Sure, sure, we’ll open the back. No problem. No—”
The shotgun blast was deafening. A wave of sound cracked the air, right behind Nyx’s head. Her ears rang, the tinkling of a bell tone, high and warbling.
Screaming, behind her, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Fuuuuuuuck.”
Nyx stared at where the woman with the pistol had been. She was on the ground now, a pile of muddy meat, and there was coppery wetness all over Nyx’s face; she tasted it on her lips, rolled her tongue over it.
The other order keeper was fumbling at her belt for her own pistol, panic-stricken face fixed on Nyx.
“Don’t pull,” Nyx said, and her own voice sounded muted, far away. “Don’t pull it. Stand down.”
Nyx opened the cab door, huffing herself out. She stumbled over the body of the order keeper. She reached for the other one, but the panicked order keeper was getting her bearings now, her resolve hardening, and Nyx knew, knew then, and in that moment, the woman didn’t look thirty, but twenty, and it was all over, it was all about to be over. Coppery blood. Taste of death.
“Hush,” Nyx said, as the pistol came up. Nyx neatly relieved her of it, yanking it cleanly from her hands, turning her own pistol back on her. “Hush now,” Nyx said. “Over now,” and Nyx pulled the trigger. Clean shot through the head, tiny hole in the front, splattering out the back.
“Hush now,” Nyx said, and then muted stillness, the high ringing in her ears, the tone.
“Nyx! Nyx!” Her name.
She turned, pistol up, finger on the trigger, aiming to fire. She squeezed.
“Fuck!” Khos yelled.
He had run out from the bakkie, leaving it idling behind them. The bullet missed him; Nyx wasn’t a great shot at range, and went clean through the tented backing of the cargo bed.
Khos had his arms over his head, for all the good that would do, Nyx thought, and dropped the pistol.
She moved automatically. Hit him on the shoulder. “Get in. Follow,” she said, yelling because she couldn’t hear anything properly, still. “Gotta dump the cargo bakkie.”
She turned, then looked back, said, “The bodies. Keep the bodies.” She always needed bodies. Might as well take these, too.
There were two more bakkies coming down the road, hurtling toward the checkpoint. They didn’t have much time. It was possible they had already been seen.
Nyx and Khos loaded both bodies into the trunk of the bakkie. Nyx kicked through the checkpoint until she found the fat round form of a dragonfly. It tried to fly away, but she mashed it with her fist and threw it in the trunk with the rest. It was the only recording bug she found. It was possible it had already sent the images it had seen somewhere else, but these were usually only pulled up after the fact.
Nyx slid into the driver’s seat. Everyone inside was yelling. Anneke was screaming in the back, wailing like she was dying, “Let
me up! Let me up! I didn’t mean to! I’m all right!”
Taite was talking, too fast, too low, she didn’t catch the words. She turned up the juice to the cistern and drove.
Nyx drove and drove, turning down little-used roads, country highways, dusty backwaters, until they came to some burnt-out wreck of what had once been a waystation. The others had calmed down by then, silent and numb, and some of her hearing was back. The first sun had already gone down, so they were bathed only in the deep blue light of the second sun, already headed back under the horizon with its sister.
Nyx got out of the cab. “Wipe it down,” she said. “No blood. No hair. Nothing. Keep the uniforms, our gear. Get into the bakkie. We’ll have to dump the bakkie, too, eventually.”
“We need to do something,” Taite said. “Those were order keepers.” He hunched next to the side of the cargo tent, right near the bullet hole. “They didn’t do anything to us. That was murder, Nyx.”
“Fuck you!” Anneke said. She pushed more sen into her mouth, though it was clear she already had a lot of it.
“We’re not sending Anneke back to prison,” Nyx said. “Shit happens.”
Khos kicked at the dirt. “Nyx, I—”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Nyx said.
Rhys, softly, “Is this data worth innocent people’s lives?”
“Is living worth your life? Is dying? Life doesn’t mean anything,” Nyx said.
“This is catshit,” Taite said.
“Suck it up,” Nyx said. “We dump the cargo bakkie here. Get real friendly again, folks, because we need to share our own bakkie until we can dump that somewhere, too.”
Khos drove this time. Nyx rode up front with him, and Rhys, Taite, and Anneke sat in the back. Nyx had taken away Anneke’s shotgun and put it in the trunk with the bodies. Whatever Anneke had been on, she was coming down from; she had the shakes bad, and they had to stop twice to let her vomit.
The road was soothing in the dark, and Nyx took some pleasure from that. The air cooled fast at night in the desert, and it felt good after the cloying heat of the day. They holed up at a falling-down way house across from a battered cantina, both of which smelled like urine, but they were the only buildings for as far as any of them could see, and that was something.
Apocalypse Nyx Page 18
