Apocalypse Nyx

by Kameron Hurley

  Khos slept out in the bakkie. He had rolled it away from the road, parked it behind some rock formations, and thrown sand on it for good measure.

  Nyx preferred him out there because she found him deeply distracting. The hedge witch sat with her outside the shack in the wee hours before dawn, mumbling over her wounds as she applied a sticky salve crawling with tiny worms that Nyx didn’t want to know the name of. The hedge witch was Hedian, and spoke in an accent that Nyx couldn’t parse, but her legs were feeling better. What she did understand was the hedge witch setting down a bottle of whisky in front of her and rubbing her thumb and fingers together. Extra, for the whisky. Nyx was happy to pay that, and tucked the bottle up between her feet.

  Anneke and Taite were passed out inside the ruin; Nyx heard Anneke’s snores. Rhys stood a few paces away, arms folded, staring at the blush blue on the eastern horizon. As the first of the suns crested the horizon, he rolled out his prayer rug. Nyx thought it was a little early for morning prayer, but who was she to judge?

  She paid the hedge witch, who totted off down the road, muttering things in Hedian that could be blessings or curses. Nyx figured she deserved a bit of both.

  She sat on a petrified log, leftover from some ancient forest long dead here in the desert, and watched Rhys pray.

  When he was done, the first blue sun had cleared the horizon, and it turned the whole world eerie and dreamlike. This was her favorite part of the day.

  Rhys caught her look and said, “Respite on the crossroads to Jannah? I know you’ve already chosen your path, but there are days I think I still have a chance to take a new direction.”

  She snorted. “Paradise is a pretty story, but just a story.”

  “One nice thing I say, after all that, and you just spout cynical brimstone and fire.”

  “There’s no paradise,” Nyx said. “No Jannah. No hell, either, before you get started on that shit, getting all mouthy with me. Just this. This.” She tapped the petrified log beside her. “We make of it what we will.”

  “And this is what you’ve chosen to make of it,” Rhys said, nodding at the ruined adobe. “You chose this tired little place, your ravaged body, your loose morals, your drunkenness. You chose to be alone, adrift, damned. This is the hell you made yourself. I’d ask what you have to punish yourself for, but I’ve already seen enough in my time with you to justify every bit of this.”

  “What about you?” Nyx said. She was tired, and not in the mood for his preaching. Maybe he had gotten his second wind; she wished for a first. “You’re not living in any paradise. Not one from the fucking Kitab, anyway. Maybe it’s different in Chenja, eh?”

  “Jannah is for believers,” Rhys said. “We make it there by dedicating our lives to the worship of God. This is my hell, yes. It’s the trial I must get through to Jannah. I reach many crossroads, and at each one, I must choose the path to Jannah.”

  “Well,” Nyx said, showing her teeth. “That’s something we have in common, then, isn’t it? We’re both living in our own little hell.”

  He shook his head. “I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” he said, and left her alone on the log. He passed into the ruined hut, into darkness.

  Nyx turned her face toward the horizon again, because it was the easier view, the beautiful view that she could understand. The air was still blissfully cool. The first sunrise had turned the horizon a fiery blue, and the second was making a violet line there where the desert touched the sky. She closed her eyes and felt the wind-borne sand caress her face. The smell of saffron rode in over the wind, faint, just a breath of it, like the scent of an old lover still lingering on one’s clothes. She yanked off the top of the whisky bottle with her teeth and spit out the cork. It skittered across the ground, leaving a wispy trail in the sand. The impression it left there put her in mind of a snake, and that made her hungry, so she drank instead because that was easier right now. She choked on the bitter fire in her throat and squeezed her eyes shut against the brightening sky. Her skin still tingled, sloughing off dead and dying layers. She was alive, alive, alive today; she was never so alive as the morning after cheating death.

  She opened her eyes. The sunrise was very beautiful.

  PAINT IT RED

  “We are they who painted the world scarlet with sins.”

  —Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

  NYX ENJOYED DRINKING more than fucking, because when she drank she didn’t have to worry about somebody else fucking up her enjoyment with all the gory fetishes and bleeding-heart confessions. She was deep in her latest bottle of whisky—something out of a backyard still on the coast—and whiling away the afternoon listening to some southern beat music, when Rhys pushed into her office waving green papers and using words that had a lot of syllables.

  It killed her buzz immediately.

  He was good at killing her buzz.

  Her com tech, Taite, was off visiting his sister. Khos, her resident shapeshifter, was sorting out some legal paperwork at the local shifter registration office. Anneke, her sniper and weapons tech, was currently thirteen hours into her allotted twenty-six of incarceration for a minor assault charge that involved a joke about someone’s mother. That left Nyx and her magician, Rhys, in what should have been relative quiet and comfort. But Rhys could never enjoy a single moment of downtime without inventing some morally compromising catastrophe.

  Nyx turned down the radio, if only because—paired with Rhys’s nattering—it was starting to give her a headache.

  “Slow down,” she said. “The fuck you say?”

  “Two bounties,” he said, thwacking the papers onto her desk with a dramatic flourish.

  “What about them?” she said. “We just turned in two. I’m drinking my share of it. Why don’t you go eat some gravy or buy a new Kitab or whatever it is you do with your cut?”

  “Did it occur to you that if we stopped living bounty to bounty and put something away for the rough times, we wouldn’t have to take on more dangerous jobs when we ran low on notes?”

  “Not once.”

  “You’re insufferable,” Rhys said. “Look these over and then—”

  She leaned over her desk and waved her half-empty glass at him. “You phrase that like you’re in charge,” she said. “You aren’t. I decide what we do and when you do it, and I’ve decided to take today off.”

  “Fine,” he said, “you sit here and drown.”

  “I intend to.”

  He huffed out of her study. She heard him knocking around in the keg—the workroom in the back. Nyx polished off her drink and grabbed the bottle. She ducked through the curtain into the keg and went after him. Rhys was in his little nook of a sleeping area, stuffing things into a rucksack.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

  “Leaving,” he said. “I can’t tolerate you another minute.”

  “Good,” she said. “Can’t wait to see what kind of a job you get, being a Chenjan man in Nasheen. They’ll eat you alive out there, and not in a good way. You’ll call me up all bloody and fucked-up and beg me to come back.”

  “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Because you’re monstrous and broken.”

  “Don’t forget ungodly, or whatever.”

  Rhys stormed past her. They were of a height, but he was leaner. She caught his arm. He tried to wrest it away, but she was stronger.

  “You listen here,” she said, “if you call me for help, I’m not coming for you. I’m leaving you to your stupid choices. Get that?”

  He yanked at his arm again, and she let him go. She expected a parting quip, but he went out the front door and slammed it behind him without another word.

  “Thanks!” she yelled at the door. “It’s about time I get some peace and quiet!”

  She expected he would go sulk at a teahouse or a mosque all afternoon and be back before dark. That’s usually what he did when he’d had enough, which had been at least a dozen times in the five years they had worked together.

 
Nyx slumped into her chair, put her dirty feet up on her desk, and took a slug from the bottle. Fuck him.

  She spent the next hour drinking and trying to cook plantains in hot oil, which didn’t turn out well. She got specks of hot oil all over her forearms; they made little red dots on her brown skin, a smattering of violent stars. Nyx was so engrossed in the project that she didn’t hear anyone come in until they were nearly on top of her.

  “Nyxnissa?”

  Nyx jerked away from the hot plate and came up with her mostly empty bottle in one hand and the pan of hot oil in the other, ready to dispatch one or both at her visitor.

  A lean woman half a hand shorter than Nyx stood a few paces away. She had her hands out, empty palms up; the hands and arms sticking out of her red burnous were crisscrossed in fine, pale scars. Her round face was slightly lopsided; the left eyelid drooped, and a corner of the mouth turned down, as if she had suffered some stroke.

  “You remember me?” the woman asked. “It’s been a while.”

  Nyx peered at her. Certainly there was something familiar about the woman’s voice and manner, but she could not place it. That drooping face should have been a tell, but she didn’t recall it. For a moment she thought the woman was a former bel dame, part of an independent group of government assassins that Nyx had been a part of a long time back. But that wasn’t right; often Nyx could get a sense of that in a few seconds, and this woman wasn’t holding herself right for that. No, it was likely she’d just been slapped back together or rebuilt a few times since last Nyx had seen her . . . if they had crossed paths at all. It wouldn’t be the first time someone pretended to know Nyx to try and get in some sob story about a job she should take on the cheap out of goodwill. Nyx didn’t have much of a soft spot when it came to money.

  “No idea,” Nyx said, “did we fuck once?”

  “Close,” the woman said, “we killed a man together.”

  “Shit,” Nyx said, “that list is even longer. I can recite the ninety-nine names of God and you can tell me when I get close.”

  “You owe me a death,” the woman said.

  Nyx held out the frying pan, still sizzling around the browned plantains. “Hungry?”

  “Got cold beer?”

  “Just the whisky.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Nyx set the pan on the workroom table, pushing away weapons parts and bullet casings made of bug secretions. Anneke liked to stamp her own bullets. Gave her better accuracy, she said. More reliable. No worries about them being underfilled or badly clipped, unless you put the things together drunk or stoned, which Anneke had been known to do. The smell of gun metal and lubricant mixed with the scent of hot oil and plantains.

  Nyx and the newcomer sat around the work table and fished the hot plantains out of the pan with their bare fingers. Nyx tapped out a dirty tea cup of Taite’s and poured two fingers of whisky into the bottom and passed it to the interloper. Nyx used the long silence of the slurping and munching to kick-start her sluggish memory. Nyx had been killing people since she went to the front at sixteen. She did her two years, got reconstituted, and gave up the military to become a bel dame. But she hadn’t been good at rules, and it wasn’t long before they put her in prison for a year and then kicked her out. Now she was almost thirty, which meant she had fifteen years of killing to wade through, searching for a woman’s face. Hard enough as it was, but Nyx had spent a lot of those fifteen years drunk or on regulation military-grade narcotics.

  “Mahir,” the woman said, lifting her glass. “That’s my name. I can see you searching for it. We were in prison together. Five years ago.”

  “Ah,” Nyx said. Her stomach churned, and she vomited a little in her mouth. Nyx reached for the whisky and took a long pull to wash down the taste of the past. As she did, she sized up the woman again, trying to fit her face to the one she remembered from her year in prison. The woman’s arms were covered above the elbows, so Nyx couldn’t match tattoos. But there was certainly only one woman from her prison days that Nyx owed a death to.

  “Who you want me to kill?” Nyx said.

  “Straight to the point,” Mahir said. “I always did love that about you.” She took up her glass and swirled the whisky at the bottom.

  “You did me a favor in prison,” Nyx said. “I clear my debts.”

  “I saved your life.”

  “Sounds like a favor, doesn’t it?”

  “Missed your sense of humor,” Mahir said, and leaned forward on her elbows. She clapped the glass back down on the table. Curled up the one corner of her mouth that could still curl. “Quick job, smash and grab. Can’t talk about it here, though.”

  “Just give me a name and I’ll—”

  “No,” Mahir said. “I need you to work a job with my team, tonight.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Yeah, you look it.”

  “Can’t just run off.”

  “Who’d miss you?”

  Nyx grimaced. “You’re just as to the point,” she said.

  “Quiet as death here, Nissa.”

  “Fuck, I hate that name. Don’t call me that.”

  Mahir tasted the lip of the glass, ran her tongue over her lower lip. “Bad whisky,” she said. “I figured you’d have better taste.”

  “Clearly not,” Nyx said, “I ran with you.”

  “I see you pushing at me,” Mahir said, “I don’t buy it. But that’s your game, so it’s as you like.” She stood, leaving most of the liquor in the glass. “My team’s around the back. Can you do it, or not?”

  “Can’t, I—”

  “Just lock up,” Mahir said. “It’s only for the night, and then you’re free of the debt. You always said how much you hated owing people. After tonight, you won’t owe me anymore.”

  Nyx clung to her bottle. “One night?”

  “I’ll have you back before morning prayer,” Mahir said. She put out her hand, palm up, like a bel dame. “Swear. I can tell your mother so.”

  “Fuck it,” Nyx said, because in truth, she knew exactly how tonight was going to turn out if she said no or put it off. She’d either spend the rest of the night passed out drunk, or have to deal with Mahir some other time. The first was way too predictable and the second would be insufferable.

  “That’s what I figured,” Mahir said. “Come on, Nissa. Grab my hand. One last time.”

  Nyx didn’t take her hand, but she got up and followed Mahir out the back. She didn’t even lock the front door. Whether that was her being drunk, or realistic about the odds she was going to bother coming back, she wasn’t sure. She did grab her sword from by the door, and sheathed it at her back, then pulled on her burnous and slipped on her sandals with the razorblades in the soles. When she reached for her scattergun, Mahir laughed and said, “We have better gear for you.”

  “Happier with my own, thanks,” Nyx said, and sheathed the scattergun behind her left hip, and her pistols on either side, and then she was following Mahir out the back door, into the alley behind the keg, and Nyx didn’t even care if it was a trap or not because whatever happened next was sure to be more interesting than a night getting drunk alone.

  A cat-pulled cart waited at the end of the alley. The two big cats were mangy, yowling things, each about as tall as Nyx’s shoulder. One had a puss-filled, half-closed eye, and the other was missing half an ear. That should have been a good indication of the sort of “team” Mahir had at her disposal for whatever flash-bang job she had in mind.

  The cart driver was a stocky little runt of woman who had to be at least forty, which was old as shit for a Nasheenian. Her dark hair was going to white, and most of her left arm was sheathed in the telltale green skin of an organic wrap, which meant the arm wasn’t her own, and had only recently been pulled off somebody else and stuck on her.

  “That’s Kasib,” Mahir said, and the stocky woman spit a gob of sen in reply. She didn’t even nod. “Good fighter, passable com tech. You might have fought on the same fronts together.”

 
“Looks like she was before my time,” Nyx said.

  Kasib showed her red-stained teeth. “I fought twenty years, you piece of shit,” she said. “You have the face of a woman who did her two and shit herself.”

  “Well,” Nyx said, “she’s salty. I’ll give you that.”

  Leaning up against the cart was a lean Mhorian, maybe a half-Mhorian, whose gender Nyx couldn’t guess with any certainty. Their most striking feature was the preponderance of dreaded brown hair, unbound, and the fact that they seemed a little young, maybe seventeen, if a day. Their hands and face were covered in blue tattoos, which were similar, but of course not identical, to Khos’s. The blue tattoos had something to do with familial lineages, though Nyx had never really gotten into that with Khos because the less she knew about her team’s past, the better. They wore a bulky burnous, far too bulky for the heat, which told Nyx that there were a good deal of weapons likely stowed beneath it.

  “That’s Eli,” Mahir said. “My sharpshooter and weapons specialist.”

  The last one was a plump woman with a pleasant face that put Nyx in mind of old radio shows about healthy living on the coast. She might have been twenty-five or so, old enough to have seen some shit, and young enough to still do something about it. She wore her black hair braided back and up, all knotted with purple embroidery thread. Nyx looked for scars or tattoos or piercings, anything to make that milk-fed face more normal, but didn’t see anything.

  “And my magician,” Mahir said, “Ada. You won’t find a better one working this side of the city.”

  Nyx noted that bit of praise was terribly specific. It likely only meant she was passably better than, say, Rhys.

  “Nice introduction,” Nyx said. “But I’m more interested in details on the job.”

  “Let’s go then,” Mahir said, motioning to the cart. “I’ll fill you in once we’re there.”

  The cart seemed particularly shabby for a bounty team. Good ones invested in a bakkie, even a shitty one. The state of the cart itself was as bad as the cats. Nyx noticed as she pulled herself into the cart that Kasib was barefoot. The soles of her feet were pitted and cracked, the nails overgrown, toes splayed. This was a hard-up team, and if Nyx weren’t so drunk, she supposed she might have misgivings about what desperate thing they were going to do for money. As it was, she slid into the cart, and Mahir got in next to her, and they headed out.