Another woman walked into view from the shadows along the edges of the room. She wore loose trousers and a thigh-length tie-up tunic that she had failed to knot up top. Her small breasts were bound in purple silk. She was a lean, long-faced woman, with the dark circles under her eyes of a bleeder and the confident bouncing walk of a boxer.
Nyx thought the woman reminded her of someone but couldn’t place her.
The woman cocked her head at Nyx and grinned. “I can see you trying to figure it out,” the woman said.
The grin. Nyx knew that grin, the way it didn’t improve the face. There was less joy in it now.
“I know you,” Nyx said.
“You do,” the woman said.
But the first name Nyx said aloud was “Arran.”
The boy Tej had died for.
“You’re Jaks,” Nyx said. And some old wound throbbed. The old bullet wound in her hip. “Jaksdijah. The boxer. I killed your brother.”
“You remember.” She placed a rough hand on Nyx’s forehead, tenderly, though her eyes and teeth were predatory. She smoothed back Nyx’s hair.
“Nikodem had Yah Tayyib patch you all up, one last time,” Jaks said.
“For what?” Nyx said.
“For me,” Jaks said. “Then for your sisters. I’m told they’ll do far worse, but I wanted you first. It turns out someone on the bel dame council has wanted you for some time.”
Nyx grunted. “Who?”
“I’m just a businesswoman. Your sisters say someone on your council wants you. They said they’ll take you dead if they have to. I needed you alive, but I don’t need to deliver you that way.”
“You can’t do worse to me.” Nyx tried to think, tried to get her muddled brain to push back the gauze of sleep and drugs. She had the queen’s protection. Somebody on the council was going over the queen.
The council was split.
Jaks pulled her hand away, kept grinning. “I have your team,” Jaks said.
“Why should I care?” Nyx tried moving again. Flexed her remaining fingers. She ran through the inventory of her team. Rhys had been in the cell. She figured Khos took off with Inaya, Anneke had been in some firefight with the bel dames. Taite was dead. The only one she was certain they had was Rhys.
“Because I’m going to let you fight me for them.”
“What?”
Nikodem broke in. “You and that other hunter were the last I had to concern myself with. Your little magician had some transmission transcripts on him, I heard, and I needed those in order for my work to continue. Your queen is not as forthright with her information as she should be. I’d have preferred to get them myself. Rasheeda was assisting me.”
“Kine’s records,” Nyx said.
“On my world, you two would never have been called sisters. Impossible, with your differences in class. She wanted to make life. You want to destroy it.”
“You don’t know shit about either of us,” Nyx said.
“I know enough. You have an interesting past, Nyxnissa. It was fortunate that your past served me so well.”
“I’m half dead. You expect me to fight?” Nyx said.
“No,” Jaks said. “I want you dead. At my hand.”
“I have a good team,” Nyx said.
“For a woman who prides herself on her independence, you sure do rely a lot on a bunch of gutter trash,” Jaks said. “Let’s see how well you do without anyone to hide behind.”
“I did well enough with your brother.”
Jaks didn’t punch her; she smacked her, hard, across the face. Blood tickled Nyx’s nose. She sniffed.
Jaks leaned over her. “And what a noble, powerful woman you must be, with the strength and courage to murder a boy in his bed.”
“He was contaminated and he ran.”
“And you didn’t?” Jaks said. “Rasheeda, get her up and taped. I want my fight.” Jaks took Nyx by the chin. “Let’s see how well you do in a fair fight.”
Nyx put those names away in her head. Dahab and Rasheeda. Rasheeda and Luce had been the ones to warn her off the note back in Mushtallah. If they were telling the truth, it meant they’d come from the bel dame council. Fatima, Luce, and Rasheeda had tracked her down and tortured her, looking for Kine’s papers, but not to give them to Nikodem. They had said nothing about Nikodem. They’d said they needed to get the papers out of Chenja. So Luce and Fatima were working for the council members that wanted Nikodem back and Nasheen’s secrets safe, and Dahab was working for Nikodem and Chenja or whatever part of the council believed in whatever Nikodem was doing, and… Rasheeda was playing both sides.
Which was why Rasheeda played dumb when Fatima accused Nyx of killing her sister. Rasheeda had killed Kine for Nikodem, then turned around and played Fatima.
Well, fuck.
“Fair?” Nyx said. “I’m half a corpse.”
“Then all I need to do is kill the other half,” Jaks said.
Rasheeda and Dahab unstrapped Nyx from the table. Dahab glared at her with her new, foreign eye, a bland point of darkness.
Rasheeda was making strange chirping noises.
“I don’t want your squirts taping me up,” Nyx said. “Where’s Rhys?”
“You’ll see your magician soon enough,” Jaks said. She was already at the door.
“You want to fight me?” Nyx said. “Rhys knows how to tape hands. Your bel dames aren’t boxers. They’re bloodletters.” And Nikodem loved magicians.
Jaks paused.
Nyx waited.
Nikodem stood next to the slab, collecting what was left of the bands that had bound Nyx to the table. “Let her have him,” Nikodem said, turning to Jaks. “He’s been drugged.”
Jaks looked them both over with her black eyes, hesitated for a long moment. Cool air blew in from the doorway, oddly humid. The hall was dim.
“Sure,” Jaks said. “Dahab, you get him. And stay here with them. When you’re done, you and Rasheeda bring them both out to the ring. Got it?”
Dahab and Jaks walked off into the hall, leaving Nyx with Nikodem and Rasheeda.
Rasheeda found a chair, turned it backward, and straddled it, facing Nyx. “Long time, sister,” she said.
“Not really.”
“When we cut off your head, I’m going to eat your eyes,” Rasheeda said. “Like I ate your sister’s.”
“Must have been tasty, my sister.”
“Mmmmmm….” Rasheeda licked her lips.
“Not much you could get from her, though.”
“Protein.”
“Uh-huh.” Nyx kept her ace slack. Rasheeda could smell discomfort. Worse, she fed on fear. “Don’t know what the fuck a bunch of bel dames were doing casing the house of a government worker.”
“Mother’s orders,” Rasheeda said, and chirped. What was with the chirping? When did that start? “The papers were for Nikodem, but the blood was for you.”
“How thoughtful. How long have you been working both sides?”
Rasheeda snapped her teeth. “It keeps me honest,” she said.
Dahab walked back in, but the only thing she had a hold of was her gun. “Nikodem, his hands are broken. He can’t wrap shit.”
“Then get Tayyib to fix him,” Nikodem said.
“I don’t like magicians.”
“If he troubles you, sever his head,” Nikodem said. She gathered up some instruments lying next to the sink and put them into a black organic bag. “Come, I want this over with. I have things to do tonight.”
Dahab and Nikodem walked out.
Rasheeda continued to peer at Nyx.
“Your sister told us all about you,” Rasheeda said, leaning over the back of the chair. Her eyes were empty. “Died screaming in the end. She was a bloody fucking screamer. The worst kind.”
Nyx wanted to watch Rasheeda’s eyes bulge and pop out of her head, wanted to watch her face darken and her tongue hang out like a dog’s.
Instead, they waited for a long time, in silence.
Then Dahab’s voice from the hall:
“Here’s the wraps and tape. Come on, let’s go, black man.”
Rhys appeared in the doorway. Rasheeda snapped her teeth at him and uncurled from her seat. She sauntered back into the hall. They had stripped him of his tunic and burnous, and dark blood was still smeared across his bare chest. Nyx had never seen so much of him outside of an organics search before.
She looked at his hands. The fingers were straight, and he held two long lengths of cloth and a roll of tape. Fine red ants crawled along his knuckles, his wrists. As she watched, they began to drop to the floor.
His face was impossible to read—his jaw was set, and the dark gaze that met hers was fathomless.
But he was not broken. No, that look was not the look of a broken man.
He nodded at the operating slab.
Nyx sat up on the lip of it. Her body protested. She winced.
Rhys put the tape and wraps next to her. He did not look at her but started wrapping her right hand. He was slow, methodical, professional. How many hands had he wrapped when he worked with the magicians? How many fights had he prepared fighters for? Fights he never watched?
“You all right?” she said softly, and felt stupid for saying it. All right? What did that mean, here?
“When you fight her,” Rhys said low, not looking at her, “goad her into using her left. Let her hit that hard head of yours.”
And something clicked.
Yes, how many hands had he wrapped? Had he wrapped Jaks’s hands, that night in Faleen? Rhys knew hands.
“You trying to make me fall?” she said.
He raised his head and looked at her. “Do you trust me, Nyx?”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
Nyx met his look. His was a face she could gaze into forever. She knew it the night she watched him dance, the night her sisters pursued her and her womb bled—the night she reached the end of everything. She supposed she thought that if she could keep him close, she would be able to look at him forever and forget everything else. Sex with him, she could take or leave. But she wanted him. Wanted him in a way she couldn’t explain, and tried hard not to think about.
She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She’d never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women.
“You’re too thin,” he said. “You look hollow.”
He took her right fist in his palm and squeezed it. He leaned in to her.
“I have no love for you,” he said.
“I never asked you to.”
He took up her left hand and started wrapping. There was a noise in the doorway. Just behind him, Dahab turned. Roaches scuttled along the floor.
Dahab swore and stomped at them.
Rhys flicked his wrist toward the band of his trousers, and the razor blade Nyx had given him appeared in his hand. He tucked it between the middle and index fingers of her left hand. He looked only at her hands.
They said nothing more. He finished wrapping.
She made a fist to keep the blade in place, all but the barest hint of the edge hidden in her palm.
“You done, boy?” Dahab said.
Rhys squeezed Nyx’s left fist. “Done,” he said.
The bel dames escorted them out into the hall, up the stairs, and into the ring.
36
Sometime after Khos came on board with her team, Nyx had gotten drunk and fucked him. She hadn’t been to bed with a man in years, and though he was too big and coarse for her taste, when she was drunk, she didn’t care. He was warm and tasted good and kissed her like a man who breathed women, dreamed of women, found bliss in the arms of women. And for Nyx, who had never known bliss or surrender with or toward anyone or anything, seeing him submit to sensation—to lust, desire—was one of the most intensely erotic things she had ever witnessed.
After, while she pulled on her dhoti and braided back her mussed hair, he had asked her about Rhys.
“You should see the way the two of you look at each other,” he said.
“We don’t look at each other. He’s just a kid.”
“A pretty kid, by anybody’s standard. And if even I can see that, I imagine you sure can.”
“Well, no amount of looking is going to make any difference. He’s still god full, and I’m still godless.”
“Maybe you should find God again.”
“Maybe he should become godless.”
“You compromise for no one.”
“No.”
“That’s a lonely place to be.”
“You trying to open me up? You’re nobody special.”
“Haven’t I already opened you?”
“The cunt is not the heart,” she said, standing, “though a lot of people get the two confused.”
He sat along the edge of the bed, behind her, and she could feel the heat of him, though his skin did not touch hers. He was a big man. Why did big men make her nervous?
She left him naked and alone and slightly bewildered on the thin mattress of his raised bed. She always left them bewildered, wondering if they had said something differently, or had said nothing at all, if she would still be in their arms, if she would have surrendered.
The next time she got drunk, she went to a brothel, and resolved to stop sleeping with people on her team.
Now Nyx stood inside a boxing ring, for real, for the first time since she’d left the magicians, since she ran off with Raine and his crew. She had taken this woman to bed too, and she hadn’t surrendered then. She wouldn’t now.
I use you all, she thought bitterly. I use you and then I cut you out like a cancer, like my womb… but they were still there, sticky and hot in her dreams, like the detritus of a butcher’s shop, memories of blood and sand. And she remembered Rhys drawing the shape of a perfect heart in the air.
The air was wet and tasted like copper. Two overhead lights were on, lights that weren’t made to be ring lights but had been rigged for it. She suspected she was in the abandoned waterworks that Rhys and Khos had told her about. This was where Jaks and all the Nasheenian boxers she smuggled in fought. They broke rules and risked their lives to bloody each other in front of an audience that loathed them as women and foreigners. They got bloodied up and took Chenjan money and fucked off to gamble or drink it away and come back the next week, a little hungover, a little stung, and ready to do it all over again.
Dahab and Rasheeda herded Nyx and Rhys into the converted room. Nikodem was already sitting at a table ringside, and Dahab bound Rhys’s hands again and shoved him down next to the alien. Anneke was balled up on the floor next to him, hands tied behind her, a short line connecting the bonds on her hands and feet, so she was bent backward. Her face was swollen. So, they’d gotten Anneke after all. Gotten her alive, even.
Jaks was already waiting in the ring. Behind her, working as her cut man, was the magician Nyx had been waiting for.
“Yah Tayyib,” Nyx said. “Missed me so much you wanted to help put me back together again?”
Dahab prodded her into the ring.
Nyx ducked under the ropes and stood under the hot lights.
Yah Tayyib stood in Jaks’s corner. He was hard-faced, and neatly dressed.
“This whole thing your idea?” Nyx asked. She looked at her own empty corner. “I get a cut magician? Or we still going to play this pretending I’m in boxing shape and have a whole right hand?”
“That’s not the point,” Jaks said.
“Give her the boy,” Nikodem said. “It will remind her of what she’s fighting for.”
Nyx eyed Yah Tayyib. “This clean work?” she asked him, and couldn’t keep the bite from her voice. “You pinch on me for running a womb for a couple of gene pirates and now you’re selling us all out to some space pirate? Who do you think you’
re saving, old man?”
“I’m ending your war,” Yah Tayyib said.
“I spent time at the front too, old man. Don’t pretend only you boys are martyrs.”
“I have never pretended,” he said.
“You smuggled Nikodem into Chenja. Why?”
“I owe you no explanations.”
“You fucking patched me back together, old man. You gave me back a life. You do owe me answers. What did you bring me back for? So you could see me fucked up now?”
“Quiet, please,” Nikodem called from her table.
Nyx swung around and peered out at the darkness. She could barely make out Nikodem’s form. “Then give me some idea! Give me some reason why I’m dying. Why you’re willing to slaughter my team! Why you’re staging this bullshit for some jilted kid’s benefit.”
“Shut up and fight,” Jaks said.
“I don’t even have any fucking gloves,” Nyx said. She was buying time for Rhys to recover from the drugs now, but she didn’t think they knew that yet. “Why not slit my throat and be done with it?”
“Because tomorrow Yah Tayyib gets me into the Chenjan breeding compounds,” Nikodem said. “Because after that day my people will have all we need from your shitty little world. When we’re gone, you can stay here and destroy one another far more efficiently. Then I go and win the war for my people.”
“Your sisters know about that?” Nyx said.
“Sisters? They’re just here for show. When I go home, it won’t be with those pawns.”
“You want a good show?” Nyx said. “You want a real going-away? You give me a proper magician.”
“He’ll work old-fashioned,” Jaks said. “No magic, but he can keep you from bleeding in your face. Maybe get me a little longer with you.”
“You never could accept your death,” Yah Tayyib said.
Nyx turned on him. “You’re right. That’s why I came to you. I trusted you.”
“A bel dame can trust no one.”
“I’m not a bel dame anymore.”
It was the first time she’d ever said it out loud.
Dahab pushed Rhys up into the ring. Under the lights, he looked bigger, his shoulders broader. In the ring, for a brief moment, Nyx could have mistaken him for a fighter.
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