Kasib kept the cart to the alleyways, which would have been harder with a bakkie; a bakkie would have been noisier, too. Nyx started slotting all those details into place even before Mahir handed her a bladder of water.
“It’ll help you sober up,” Mahir said.
Nyx drank, wincing at the rusty taste of the water, and watched the city slide past. Shadows played across the angles of the buildings, making spidery shapes as the suns moved into late afternoon. The worst of the day’s heat was just about over, but all the bugs were still sheltering under awnings and behind trash bins, skittering around in the shadows. People, too, were lazy this time of day. They were nearly the only ones out; most folks hung around on balconies or in doorways. A few sat out under awnings at the tea shops and local taverns, but work, such as it was, had lulled for a few hours while the heat passed.
Mahir didn’t talk during the ride out. She kept a pistol in her lap and her gaze on the alleys and side streets. Behind them, Eli and Ada were similarly wary. Eli had pulled a big shotgun from the back and kept it on their lap in plain view to anyone who gazed after the cart, which would certainly deter ordinary criminals and petty thieves, but Nyx suspected they were alert to more than that. Who had Mahir gotten herself into trouble with, then? Somebody pretty bad, to risk looking Nyx up after all this time.
Nyx didn’t start to get concerned until they left the city and headed north. Bakkies passed, honking and spitting dead beetles at them. They crept up on little broken settlements, a few scattered houses here, some there, many just burned-out wrecks from the last time the Chenjans invaded and briefly occupied this part of Nasheen. Contaminated desert rolled out in all directions. The others placed kerchiefs, scarves, or burnouses over their noses and mouths, and Nyx wrapped her burnous up over hers, wishing she had brought her goggles. The sand and chemicals irritated her eyes, which started to water badly. She turned her tear-streaked face out to the rolling, ragged desert, noting the broken stands of contagion sensors, and the one lonely anti-burst station that still looked like it had a little pluck left in it.
For all the apparent desolation, there was life out here. Giant, many-legged centipedes as long as her arm burrowed in the sand, scuttling across the road ahead as they approached. There were children, too, watching them from atop nearby dunes. The kids were dirty, wearing ragged clothes and cracked goggles. As the cart got close, they ran back down the dune toward a little bristling farm. A patch of green lit up the desert there, surrounded by a fuzzy filter that protected the whole homestead, which had what appeared to be the only working contagion sensor for miles jutting up from behind the low house, still winking green. The dwelling itself was half-covered in sand, purposely, Nyx guessed, with the windows facing south. Nyx wondered how long they had been out here. A few years, no more. Since the last Chenjan incursion. They wouldn’t last when another one came. Dumb, hopeful little family. Hope could kill, out here. Nyx had seen it.
“We usually work out of Mushtallah,” Mahir said suddenly. The voice, after so many kilometers of silence, startled Nyx. “Lot more work down there.”
Nyx was sobering up. The call to afternoon prayer had sounded just as they left the city, and it was getting up toward dusk. She drank more water and spit some of it out along the road. Little burrowing beetles and centipedes emerged from the sand and eagerly sucked up the precious moisture.
“Where the hell we going out here?” Nyx said. “There’s not shit here.”
“Parrot Temple,” Mahir said. “This is where we start. Hopefully where we end, too.”
“There ain’t nothing out here,” Nyx said. “What kind of a job folks do in the wasteland?”
“Eli’s sister is one of the temple zealots,” Mahir said, as if Nyx hadn’t spoken. “She was hard to turn back to sense, but we had some help. We’re coming up on it now.”
Sure enough, as they came around a massive sand dune crawling with fingernail-sized sand mites, a craggy red spire came into view. Nyx had a moment of dissonance as her mind tried to make sense of the structure. Certainly it was some type of mud-brick, but that didn’t seem right. Then she noted the pillars of red stone jutting up from the sand all across the desert here; the sands broke around them, like buoys at sea. While none were more than a few hands high—at least what was peeking out of the ground—the temple had certainly begun as a very massive red stone pillar like these, and the mud-brick compound had been built all around it. The spires were oddly delicate, twining around one another like clasped fingers. While the bulk of the compound still bore the red of the stones, the spires and the tops of the walls were chalky white. Nyx didn’t have to ask why. The colorful forms of thousands of parrots clustered on the spires or took wing in great flocks. The flocks engaged in the eerie swarming behavior that herded and trapped insects, making them easier prey.
Nyx expected them to drive right up to the front gates if Eli knew somebody inside, but no. As dusk bled over the desert and the air cooled down, they trotted out around the back side of the Parrot Temple to a tiny, bullet-riddled door.
Mahir jumped out, and Nyx followed. Eli sauntered up to the door and gave a little knock, like maybe they were expected, which sort of made sense if they had recruited a zealot. Nyx was liking this whole thing less and less, but then, she hadn’t liked it in the first place. Ada, the magician, kept watch at their backs, scanning the skies for bugs or . . . what? Who knew.
After a few minutes, the door creaked open. The hinges, Nyx saw, were real metal. Expensive stuff, but corroded as much of the metal was in Nasheen. A little wizened woman peered at them from behind the door. If this was Eli’s “sister,” then Nyx was a fucking mullah.
Eli slapped a hand on the woman’s shoulder, though, and leaned in and murmured something to her. The woman stepped out and limped past them. Nyx saw that she had been hobbled in some way. The woman climbed up alone into the cat-pulled cart. As she did, her skirt rode up, and Nyx saw that her left knee was a twisted wreck. Around her right ankle was a twisted bit of studded wire that her skin was already growing over. Nyx hoped she clipped that shit off on the outside before it took off her whole foot. What the fuck was going on inside this place?
Eli entered the temple first as the woman headed out on their cart. Nyx thought to ask what the fuck they were going to do for a getaway, but hell, this whole thing was so weird she was beyond caring. Kasib and Ada followed Eli. Mahir waited outside for Nyx.
“Come on,” Mahir said. “We don’t have much time.”
“Who the fuck was that woman?”
“I told you.”
“What the hell job is this?”
“Inside,” Mahir said. “Pistols out. Shoot anyone who resists.”
“Are you serious? These people are religious zealots. What are they going to do, have their birds shit on us?”
“They’re here to protect something we’re contracted to pick up,” Mahir said.
“Fucking great,” Nyx muttered, and pulled her scattergun.
They made their way down the flickering corridor. The halls were close and dark as a fucking tunnel. Mahir and Kasib led, Nyx and Eli were squeezed into the middle, and Ada took up the rear. Nyx would have put the magician in the middle, to make it easier for her to see and counter any bugs, but she knew nothing about this place or its problems. Maybe bugs here only bit you from behind. She sure as fuck didn’t know. Her skin crawled with all she didn’t know, but there was a thrill in it, too. On her worst days, dying seemed like a great adventure. The last one.
Glow worms shifted in the lanterns along the hallways, emitting soft orange light that played across the gritty stones. The team’s feet scuffed against the floor; and the wind keened through the pits and cracks and seams in the walls. But those sounds were muted by the caw of parrots, the flutter of wings. The stench of bird shit was strong. Nyx caught sight of several colorful birds flitting down intersecting hallways. The team passed one room crawling with the goddamn things. Nyx glanced in and up; the door opened into a lit
tle courtyard open to the sky, and parrots wound all the way up the walls, bickering in nest boxes carved into the walls.
“Why do they stay in form?” Nyx said.
Eli tugged at her sleeve, encouraging her to get away from the courtyard. “Many prefer it,” Eli said. “Stay a parrot, you get endless food and drink, and nobody asks you to fight in the war.”
“They can’t keep all these people from fighting,” Nyx said. “There’s a draft on everyone, especially shifters.”
“Can’t force them back into form,” Eli said. “They’re deserters, sure, but lots of Ras Tiegans and Mhorians, too. Easier life, being fed and cared for here, safe from the war, worshipped by some cult.”
“Sounds like its own kind of prison,” Nyx said. “What the fuck is here that’s worth anything?”
Mahir hushed them, and Eli shut their mouth and moved away, gesturing with their shotgun for Nyx to follow.
A figure moved ahead of them, coming around a bend in the corridor. Mahir fired; her gun made a sharp, muffled pop that Nyx recognized as a bug-laced bullet. The bullets were quieter than many alternatives, and once they struck flesh, burst apart and flooded bodies with toxic chemicals.
Mahir hurried toward the figure as it went down. Nyx caught up and saw it was a young woman wearing a shimmering purple burnous and wide, skirted dress that covered her from neck to ankle and up both wrists. Blood leaked from the wound in her gut. She clawed at her stomach, moaning; little bubbles of blood formed around her nose, and a seam of red dribbled from her mouth.
“Stash her, Eli,” Mahir said. “Rest of you, keep going.” Mahir waved Nyx ahead with Kasib, and Ada picked up her pace and joined them.
Nyx cast one look back at the young woman bleeding out on the floor, and remembered when it was her lying on the ground, bound and beaten bloody by a gang of twelve women in prison. None were bel dames, but they were all war vets—everyone in Nasheen was, barring some First Family cowards—and they hated bel dames. Bel dames hunted down deserters, which sounded fine on paper, but in practice meant hunting down women’s brothers, friends, and colleagues on the field. Folks tired of the war were tired of people like her enforcing it. They had broken her face, dislocated one of her vertebrae, cracked another one, and broken six of her ribs. The pain had been among the worst she’d experienced in her life, and as a woman who’d set herself on fire and been reconstituted and totally rebuilt, that was saying something.
What Mahir saw then in her bloodied, broken body, Nyx was unsure. Maybe she saw this: a chance to own a tool, a weapon. Because though Nyx had done a lot of dumb shit in her time, her biggest weakness was always in her word. When Mahir and her gang rolled up out of the showers and encountered the ones beating up Nyx, Mahir had saved her life. Nyx had taken her hand and said, “I don’t take charity,” and Mahir said, “I don’t give it.”
Nyx joined Mahir’s gang, and they beat the shit out of a lot of people together, and even killed a man one dark night in a scheme she was sure would catch up to her someday. But this part, the debt—Nyx would clear the debt tonight, or die trying. She fucking hated owing anyone a favor. Debts of personal obligation were far worse than money debts. They cost you more, and resulted in a lot more problems.
At the end of the hall was a door lined in jittering green beetles. Ada ran up to coax the bugs away from the door they were guarding. Someone had raised an alarm, though, because above the flapping and squawking of the parrots and keening of the wind, Nyx heard more zealots moving in on them from the hall behind and the corridor to their left. There was no corridor to the right, which meant they had to fight them here or get the door open, because there was no other way through.
Eli got into a crouch, leveled their shotgun, and waited. Kasib pressed her bulky body flat against the corridor behind them and took aim in that direction. Nyx sighed and aimed her scattergun as well. She was too sober for this shit.
Whirling figures appeared from both corridors. A hail of sharp projectiles snapped ahead of them. One landed in Nyx’s forearm. She swore and yanked it out. It was a serrated spine from some insect. If it was poisonous, she was fucked. The others didn’t bother yanking. They fired into a collection of women coming at them as the women danced and flung their spiny weapons.
Nyx waited until they were in range, then fired her scattergun. It was the most appropriate firearm for fighting this close, and it hammered the nearest woman hard, taking her off her feet. That made the others hesitate. Nyx fired again and again as the little spines burrowed into her cheeks and chest. Most of the women were down now, a good nine or ten of them, all soaking in blood and loose spines. It wasn’t until Nyx gazed at their sprawled forms and saw the spiny ridges on their arms that she realized they had been pulling the projectiles out of their own bodies and using them as weapons. She made a face at that.
“They’ll send another wave,” Mahir said.
“Got it open!” Ada said.
“Move, move,” Mahir said.
The bugs that had guarded the door lay dead on their backs, little legs curled skyward. Nyx crunched across them and into the blackness. Cold, damp air wafted out of the dark. She nearly tripped on a step, and grabbed Mahir’s shoulder.
“Watch it,” Mahir said. “Going down. Ada, lock that behind us!”
The others crowded behind Nyx. She holstered her scattergun and put out her arms until she touched either side of the cool stone walls. Ada muttered something behind her, but Nyx didn’t pay attention; she had heard nagging magicians before, and she knew the tone well enough to get the gist of it.
Mahir took a glow globe from under her burnous and shook it until the worms began to shift, spilling sickly orange light. They were older worms, which meant the light was bad; like light coming through deep water.
“You going to tell me what this is about?” Nyx said.
“Almost ready for your part,” Mahir said. “You’ll see it up here.”
At the bottom of the stairs, the corridor spilled out into a massive half-circle of a room lined in glow globes as weak as the one Mahir held aloft. Sand had piled up over and around dozens of small red and black pebbles scattered across the floor. On the other side of the half-circle was another door, this one bristling with a more diverse web of bugs: spiders, mostly, big as Nyx’s fist, as well as cicadas, roaches, and thorn bugs. She grimaced.
Mahir stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Nyx started to go ahead of her, but Mahir pulled her back. “Ah, no,” Mahir said. “It’s mined.”
“Where?” Nyx said.
“The whole room,” Mahir said. “We need you to clear a path to the door there on the other side.”
“The fuck? You said this was a simple smash and grab.”
“It is,” Mahir said. “What we’re contracted for is behind that door. We smash it open, we grab it. We go.”
“You could have fucking said. I’d have brought tools.”
“Eli has tools.”
“Not my fucking tools,” Nyx said. “Shit, what a burst-fuck. You realize clearing a whole path could take hours?”
“We have all night,” Mahir said.
Nyx swore; her rant echoed around the room.
“Stop being so dramatic,” Ada said. “I can use bacteria to detect the actual mines. You just need to disarm them.” Ada pulled a jar out of her robe and emptied what appeared to be regular dirt onto the floor. But as she raised her arms, the little bits whirled across the floor. They began to coalesce in round patches, covering large spots on the floor, where they began to glow. Nyx had seen magicians deploy those bomb-glowing bacteria in the field, and it was always both exhilarating and depressing. She had spent way too much of her time on the front in danger, detecting mines with trained hornets and dogs, when some magician could just walk in and basically take a shit and get it done.
Seeing the extent of the job, Nyx understood why they had brought her. The circles on the floor were massive, at least as big around as Nyx could spread her arms, and they were so close t
ogether that none of them would even be able to get a foot in between them. Nyx’s only bit of luck was that the size of the mines meant there were only about ten that she needed to disarm, between her and the other side of the room, to get them across. Only ten ways to die! Luxury.
Nyx held out her hand to Eli. Eli put a demining probe in her hand, an expensive piece of titanium with a pointed head that looked fairly new. It had a protective round hilt meant to shield the hand from a blast, but Nyx had seen a lot of friends lose hands despite them. She figured they were just there to make people feel better.
“That it?” Nyx said. “Really?”
Eli grinned. “Kidding.” They reached under their bulky burnous and pulled free a full demining tool kit, all rolled up like a set of painting brushes. Demining kits were expensive stuff because a lot of it was metal fused with bug secretions. Somebody had given them that kit, or they’d stolen it.
Nyx resigned herself to her life for the next few hours—if she made it that long—and waved them all back. “Have a shit and a snack,” she said. “This will take a while.”
She lay flat on her belly at the bottom of the steps and began working at the first mine, using the probe to determine the actual edges, then brushing away loose soil with one of the brushes from the tool kit. People died a lot using the trowels and even the probes: they tended to get the tools up under the lip of a mine and yank open the casing by accident. Always bad.
Sweat formed on her brow as she worked the dirt and rocks clear of the mine. Little droplets wet the dirt. When the sand was clear, she could make out the type of mine; it was desperately old shit, something she had seen briefly in some lecture back in her early military training. It had to date back at least a century. Old didn’t mean easy, though. She hadn’t encountered one of these, and though she knew the basics of demining, most of what she learned on was new stuff.
Apocalypse Nyx Page 21
