The sun was too low and bright to make out much of anything on the other side of the city, so Nyx looked behind her for the filter. She had to rub at her eyes a couple times, but yes, there it was; the filter that kept out the worst of Chenja’s munitions and mutant bug swarms. They hadn’t taken that out, at least.
“That’s bad, isn’t it?” Eshe said, pointing.
Nyx looked.
If she squinted, a thread of smoke was just visible at the city center, a soft tail curling above Mushtallah’s central hill.
The Queen’s palace.
Nyx saw the tail of smoke grow wider and darken into a blue-black plume. Something was licking around the palace compound and surrounding hillside, alive.
“Hand me the specs,” she said.
Eshe unpacked a pair of specs and tossed them to her.
Nyx pinched the specs to the bridge of her nose. The palace compound jumped into sharp, magnified relief. Too magnified. A blaze of white fire filled Nyx’s vision. She squinted twice to zoom out. The center of the palace compound was a fiery, white-hot ruin. A black plague was crawling from the center of the wound and enveloping the palace grounds.
Nyx pulled off the specs. She knew what that was.
“What?” Eshe asked.
Nyx jumped into the bakkie and started it up. The bakkie belched and coughed. “Let’s go!”
Eshe threw the rifles in front and squeezed into the jump seat.
Nyx yanked her transceiver out from under the dash. She put the bakkie in reverse and hit the quick button pattern for the hub. The connection opened.
“Checking in. We’re in one piece,” Nyx said.
“I’m headed to the keg now. No idea of the damage,” Suha said. “I have the radio on, but I’m not getting any news. How big was the hit?”
“It’s a scalper bug burst, a pretty fucking big one, on Palace Hill.”
“Direct hit?”
“Dead center. It’s on the move. Could contaminate the whole city in less than an hour.”
“Where are you?”
“About half a kilometer from the train station. I’m getting us out before the filter freezes up. You have an out?”
“Always. I’ll meet you at the safe house.”
“Go,” Nyx said, and tucked the transceiver into the top of her breast binding.
Nyx switched pedals and swung the wheel; the bakkie sent up a stir of dust and sand. She hit the far left pedal and they blew back down the sandy road toward the refueling station. It was going to be tight, getting through that filter, but they had less chance of survival if they were locked in the city with the burst.
“What’s going on?” Eshe asked. His voice cracked. “We’re not leaving Suha are we?”
“In about a quarter hour that scalper burst is going to burrow into the palace security system and release a virus that’ll eat all the blood codes authorized for entry into the city,” Nyx said. She had watched it happen before on a much smaller scale, when she planted a scalper burst at a Chenjan security outpost at the front, a lifetime ago. “When that happens, anybody trying to get in or out is going to get eaten alive by the filter and trapped inside with the plague. You ever seen somebody get eaten by a filter? You ever had the black plague?”
“What about the rest of the palace? What about the Queen, and the magicians?” Eshe asked.
“How the hell would I know?” Nyx said. “Maybe she got out, maybe she didn’t.” And if she hadn’t, there was a whole bigger brew of trouble on the stove. “Let’s make sure we do. I don’t want to be stuck inside a filtered city with scalper bursts.”
“Should we call Yahfia?” Eshe asked.
Nyx tried to concentrate on the road. Her vision was blurring again. “Yahfia left Mushtallah yesterday,” she said. A magician in a plagued city had a far higher chance of survival than a teenage shape shifter and washed-up mercenary anyway.
Nyx switched pedals again as they hit the flatland and sped toward the filmy curtain of the filter. Off to her right she saw the metal tanks and steam towers of the refueling station. On the other side of the filter was the train station.
“What’s your passkey say, Eshe?” Nyx asked.
Eshe stuck his arm out between the front seats, wrist bared. Beneath the tawny skin of his inner arm was a raised disk; his coded passkey into the city.
His passkey was a forgery that gave his birthplace as Heidia, but it got him in and out of the interior cities just fine. The city had switched from customs-stamped passbooks to embedded passkeys five years before. When she was a bel dame, Nyx had been inoculated against the city’s filter, which meant none of her blood codes were on record in Mushtallah. By law, none of her organic material could be kept on file in a government-owned system. The bel dame council restricted access to the blood stamp information of their members; cataloguing all of that information into the imperial system would have given the Queen a logbook of bel dame blood codes, allowing her magicians to create viruses tailored to remove troublesome bel dames. In any case, it meant Nyx didn’t have a key. She probably wouldn’t die. But Eshe might.
“Still orange,” Eshe said. “How do we know the virus hasn’t spread yet?”
“You’ll know,” Nyx said.
“How?”
“Filter goes black,” she said.
Nyx switched pedals again. The bakkie sped up. The filter loomed closer. The slow, somber howl of the city’s emergency sirens filled the air.
“Don’t the sirens mean we should stay in the city?” Eshe asked.
Nyx kept her eye on the filter. A dying beetle escaped through a leak in the hoses beneath her feet and flitted against her ankle.
“Sirens mean they’re going to shut the filter down,” Nyx said.
Shutting down the filter was an attempt to save the blood banks from contagion. They would do by default what the contagion was tailored to do: make it impossible for anyone to get in or out of the city alive until the filter’s access to the blood banks was restored by a team of magicians.
They were within three hundred yards of the filter.
Nyx had seen scalper bursts at work back when they were short-range, highly temperamental bursts. Nobody would have used them on a whole city back then.
They were within a hundred yards of the filter. The curtain ahead of them wavered.
“Status, Eshe!”
“I’m orange,” he said.
“We’re good then,” Nyx said.
Nyx pulled the clutch and shifted pedals. The bakkie leapt forward. Eshe slammed into the seat behind her.
“Hold on,” Nyx said.
The bakkie hit the filter. An oily film of black spilled from the faux stone pillars along the filter perimeter.
Nyx held her breath. The filter crackled. The hairs on the back of her arms stood on end. Something inside the bakkie hissed and spat like scarabs on a griddle. The bakkie shuddered and spun. The hood flew open. A cloud of steam and the gray, wispy remains of the red roaches that had powered the bakkie burst out of the engine’s cistern.
Nyx jerked in her restraints, and though she didn’t smash her sternum against the steering wheel, the force that launched her against her restraints took the breath from her.
The world wavered, then slowed. When the bakkie stopped moving, Nyx raised her head and looked out at the open hood, the filmy detritus of red roaches and beetles smearing the windshield. There was sand on the hood, inside the cab.
“Eshe?” Nyx asked.
No answer.
Nyx fumbled with her restraints. She got herself loose and twisted around to peer into the jump seat. Through the back window, she saw the glistening black sheen of the filter about ten or twenty feet distant.
“Eshe?” she asked.
He lay hunkered in the back, head bowed. She smelled vomit. She touched the side of his face. When he didn’t respond she grabbed him roughly by the chin.
“Answer me, you little fuck,” she said.
Eshe’s eyelids flickered.
&
nbsp; “You with me?” she said.
“I threw up,” he said.
Nyx saw the pool of bile at the boy’s feet.
“It means you’re alive,” she said. “Are you hurt? You broken? Come on, the bakkie’s done.”
He suddenly jerked in his seat and began to thrash and claw at his arm. He started screaming; a terrible, high-pitched screeching that tore at her gut.
Nyx saw the thumbprint of the passkey on the inside of his arm glowing bright red beneath his skin. She pulled out the dagger strapped to her thigh and popped out the viral passkey. Eshe howled and clutched at the wound. The passkey dropped into the pool of bile. Hissed.
Nyx’s heart thudded loud and fast in her chest. The filter behind her began to spit and crackle. They were well clear of it, but she was worried about airborne contamination, about secondary blasts and filter breaches in addition to the weird thing with the passkeys. What if this was part of a larger assault? Was there a Chenjan ground force on the way?
Nyx struggled out of the bakkie and onto solid ground.
“We need gear,” Eshe muttered, and stumbled toward the rear of the bakkie. Blood trickled down his arm.
Nyx helped him pack water and weapons. They brought it all to the train platform, and set the gear under a triangle of shade cast by the big cranes used to heft fuel cylinders onto freight cars.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Some conductors owe me favors.”
He was already sweating heavily. His hair was plastered to his face. He hadn’t covered up since prayer on the hill.
“Put your burnous on,” she said. Her chest hurt, and her legs were wobbly. The sun was too high now for them to stay out very long safely. Not that that had stopped her before.
After downing some water and spending a few minutes collecting themselves, Nyx moved all their stuff further up the platform under the awning. The train wasn’t due until dusk—if it came at all, now that the city had been attacked. It was a long time to go without water.
Eshe rested beside Nyx, his back against the faux stone of the station. There was an attendant shelter on the platform, but it was empty. There would be a water tap inside. Luckily, Nyx knew how to bleed a lock, even without a magician.
“That was a fucked up exit,” Eshe said.
“You should see my entrances.”
“Will the burst take out the whole city?”
Nyx gazed out at the black filter and ruined bakkie. She would need a good tissue mechanic to replace the entirety of the bakkie guts, and maybe the blown-out cistern…. If somebody didn’t salvage it first. The filter ate everything organic that it wasn’t coded to accept—and that included the bug juice and roach colony that powered a bakkie. There were a lot of scavengers living outside Mushtallah looking for somebody desperate or stupid enough to drive through a filter.
“I don’t know,” Nyx said. “Magicians are coming up with weirder and weirder shit all the time.”
She didn’t like the idea that there were truckloads of bursts on both sides of the border that she didn’t know anything about anymore. Suha might have a broader knowledge of current tech, but the best gear and munitions specialist Nyx had ever had retired to the coast six years before to raise munitions-savvy babies.
Eshe leaned against her, let his head drop onto her shoulder. Nyx stiffened, tried to relax. He scared her when he acted like a kid. She didn’t like to treat him like one.
He closed his eyes.
“You need to stay awake. I don’t want you slipping into any coma,” Nyx said, and shrugged his head off her shoulder. She handed him a water bulb and made him drink.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“We’re going to regroup.” She bunched her hands into fists, watched the muscles and tendons working beneath the skin. “Then we’re going to find out who lived through that burst.”
6.
When Khos came home, he smelled of liquor and opium and… the woman.
Inaya lay still in the room opposite his, listening to the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. Even with her back turned, she could smell the other woman. He was a shifter himself; he would know what she could and could not see, hear, or smell. But he padded about the house as if his other wife was a large secret, large enough to fill the house.
He stumbled around the other room, throwing off clothes as he went. She heard them pool onto the floor, settle over the door of the wardrobe. He banged against something in the other room, and swore in Mhorian.
Some days she wished the house was bigger. She wanted a whole wing of it to herself, not just one small room. No, that wasn’t right. She wanted a house. A full house on her own salary, a whole life to herself.
And then what would become of you? she thought. A divorced foreign woman in Tirhan? They would deport her, and Khos would get the children. No, marriage was about endurance. About enduring far more than you thought you could possibly bear.
She heard him run the water in the tub down the hall. She finally opened her eyes and stared out the open window onto the street. When they first moved to Tirhan, she had kept all the upstairs windows shut. They were opaque and filtered, but still, she closed them. She feared swarms, religious police, but mostly she feared the prying eyes of these black foreigners.
It took her months to admit that she, the tawny Ras Tiegan with the pale Mhorian shifter husband, was the foreign one.
The sound of the water stopped. Inaya closed her eyes again, kept her breathing even, and willed him to pass out. Preferably on the floor. In the other room.
But he came to her, as was also his custom on the nights he visited his other wife.
He sat next to her on the bed. The bed creaked under his weight. When he touched her, she wanted to melt into the bed, become one with the soft mattress, the bed feet, and deeper, down into the bones of the house. It was a sinful feeling, the kind that made her feel unclean, but she felt it nonetheless. In another life, perhaps, she could allow herself to do what her body desired. But not in this one.
Khos shook her gently. She turned to face him.
He was a big man, and self-conscious of it. He sat with shoulders hunched, head bowed. She had never seen him stand up straight.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he said softly, and he placed his hand on her head and stroked her gently.
It was the gentleness that had convinced her to marry him. The gentleness and the Tirhani visa.
+
Inaya pulled herself out of the tub the next morning and showered with lavender soap. Lavender. It was a scent she could never get in Nasheen, but the Tirhanis loved it. They had shelves and shelves of heavily scented products. Soaps and lotions and perfumes. Smell did not trigger old memories in war veterans, was not blamed for shooting deaths in the marketplace.
Someday, she too would escape those dark triggers, the part of her that wanted to break away from the world, tug free, merge with everything else. Become someone, something, else.
Someday.
Not today.
She dressed and walked downstairs. The floor was made of soft organic matting that clung gently to the bottoms of her sandals as she walked. She stepped across the courtyard at the center of the house and through the airy archway into the amber-colored kitchen. The soft susurrus of the water moving through the walls to cool the house comforted her. There are worse fates, she thought, than being the first wife of a shifter… in Tirhan, at least.
The housekeeper had already taken the children to school, and left out breakfast for her and Khos at the stone table. Khos stood at the radio table at the center of the room, pulling information from the radio onto his personal slide. She watched him scroll through old recordings of council meetings and mullahs’ speeches.
“Something in there you miss?” Inaya asked lightly.
“Possibly. They’ve started a dig on the north shore. It’s looking like a Mhorian settlement that predates the one along the coast. I needed something on the geography of the regio
n, but there’s nothing here in the archives.” He wiped his hand over the counter, and the bugs inside ceased their glow and transmission. The counter went blank.
“I haven’t been able to find lizard eggs in a week,” Inaya said, hovering over the toast and fried grub spread the housekeeper had laid out.
“I’m not hungry.”
She rolled that idea around for a long moment before answering. “I’ll be late tonight.”
“I will too. I need to stop by the archives.”
He did not, in fact, need to stop by the archives. Inaya had learned years ago what that shorthand meant. She knew he kept his other wife in the Mhorian district, a buxom woman with hair the color of dark honey. So far as Inaya knew, there was only the one Other. Tirhan permitted him four, but he had never spoken to Inaya about the other marriage. She had deduced that on her own when the local magistrate had come by for his signature. He’d signed the paperwork and said nothing to her. In fact, it was not the idea of another wife that bothered her. It was his assumption that she did not and would never know, as if she were a stupid child, a gross appendage. What bothered her was her continued complicity in pretending she did not know.
But then, there was much about her that he did not know. Perhaps there was some fairness to that. A house built on lies. It was all very Tirhani.
“You’ll be at the embassy?” Khos asked.
“I’m running errands for the Minister. There’s a dinner with the Mhorian ambassador and his delegation in a few days. She’d like us both to come.”
Khos made a face. “I have no interest in making nice among Mhorians. You know how they are.”
You can’t make nice for Mhorians and the Ras Tiegan ambassador, but you have no trouble fucking your fat Mhorian wife on the other side of the district whenever it pleases you, she thought. She held her tongue. Old hurts. Dwelling on them didn’t change anything.
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