Nyx stepped toward him, grabbed his wrist with her bad hand. “You can do this?” she said softly.
“I’ve spent much of my life in one ring or another,” he said. He looked her in the eye. She held the look for a long time.
God, why didn’t I find you sooner? she thought.
Jaks tossed a pair of gloves across the ring. “Come now, bel dame,” she said.
Nyx handed the gloves to Rhys. “You lace them on,” she said, and bent forward so their foreheads touched. He did not draw away. So close, he smelled of blood and sweat and something even more intimate. Perhaps it was fear she smelled, or the biting chemical odor of a magician. But it was something uniquely Rhys. I’ll miss you, she thought.
“Keep the laces on the left loose,” she said. “I want to be able to get them off with my teeth. You know.”
“I know,” he said.
Rhys slipped on her gloves and took his time lacing them up. He was good with the knots on the right, but he tied a simple bow on the left and tucked the ends into the seam of her left glove.
“Good?” he said.
“Good.”
Nyx was in no shape for a fight. She was worse off now than she had been back at Husayn’s gym. She wanted to believe that Jaks hadn’t had much time to box either, but as she looked across the ring and saw Yah Tayyib take off Jaks’s coat, that hope went right out of her head.
Jaks was lean and muscled, and under the lights the contours of her body were that much more dramatic. She was also young, six or seven years younger than Nyx, and though she had lived a hard life, there was no way she’d been rebuilt as many times, in as many ways, as Nyx had.
Nyx didn’t look out at Rhys or Anneke. And she would deal with Yah Tayyib later.
She looked at Jaks.
Yah Tayyib was rubbing Jaks’s arms and shoulders. Nyx had no illusions that this would be a proper fight with proper rules. She saw no one at the buzzer. It was going to be one long round, with a moment or two for Rhys to patch her back up if she got too bloody. Maybe.
Nyx stood with her hands down and her left toe forward. She waited.
Jaks didn’t put in a mouthpiece, and she didn’t offer one to Nyx.
“Don’t get hit,” Rhys said.
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Nyx said.
Yah Tayyib took his hands off Jaks and waved at the buzzer. A thousand hard-backed beetles exploded into movement, sounding the bell.
Jaks leapt forward.
Nyx left her hands down until Jaks was within hitting distance. Then she ducked and blocked Jaks’s wide, wild left hook. As Nyx ducked, she pivoted behind Jaks and caught her with a left jab to the back of the head.
The dull edge of the blade she held in her fist jarred her palm. She sucked in a breath, stepped back into a fighting stance.
Jaks stumbled and turned and moved away, reassessed.
They circled, hands up.
Nyx watched Jaks gnaw on strategy. She had opened too eager, just like she did eight years ago, hungry for a quick fight, for first blood.
Most people who watch a fight think it’s all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.
Once two fighters knew how to fight, they stood pretty even. What made one win and the other fall wasn’t about blood or sinew or sweat. It was about will.
Jaks was old enough to know that.
So was Nyx.
Nyx dropped her hands again.
Jaks made as if to hesitate, then stepped in and fired.
Nyx ducked and blocked. The blow glanced off her forearm. She had only enough strength to take a couple of good hits. She needed most of these to bounce off, but she needed them to bounce off in a way that made Jaks think she was winning. Nyx was tired. Not all of the hunched posture was feigned. Her body ached. It didn’t feel like her body anymore. Hadn’t for a long time. She sometimes wondered who she belonged to: the queen, the magicians, the front; Raine had thought she belonged to him, thought he had some responsibility.
But in the end it was just Nyx in a ring.
Jaks sent out a double right jab, a left cross. Nyx kept her hands up. Nothing got through, but she let Jaks keep at it, keep pounding at her forearms and shoulders. Jaks tucked in an uppercut to Nyx’s midsection.
Nyx huffed air and stepped left, tried to get herself out of the corner Jaks was trying to push her into.
“Hit me!” Jaks yelled at her. She batted at Nyx’s raised hands, and Nyx peered between her gloves at Jaks’s pinched face. “Hit me, you fucking coward!”
“Your brother was the one who wouldn’t fight,” Nyx said, pushing back at her with her gloves. “Your brother was the coward.”
Jaks swung, a wide right hook, double left jab, right uppercut. The combination was too fast for Nyx. The uppercut caught Nyx hard under the chin. She fell back and caught herself on one knee.
Jaks brought a gloved fist down. Nyx rolled out of the way and staggered back up, brought up her hands. Sweat poured into her eyes. The bell didn’t sound. It had been longer than two or three minutes. Too long.
That was all right. Nyx didn’t intend to fight fair either.
“Look at you, broken up over a dead boy,” Nyx gasped. She sucked more air, tried to concentrate on her breathing. Remember to breath, remember to breath….
You kept yourself from drowning by breathing air.
Jaks swung again, a wild swing. Nyx caught her in the belly with a hard left uppercut, pummeled the side of her face with a left hook.
Jaks reeled and swung. She caught Nyx across the ear.
Nyx grabbed her in an embrace, locked their bodies together.
“You rigged this whole thing for a dead kid, a coward,” Nyx murmured in Jaks’s ear, “and you’re no better.”
Jaks pushed her away and tried forcing her backward. Nyx pushed back.
The lights were starting to flicker. Nyx thought maybe her sight was going. She tried to blink the sweat from her eyes. Her face was starting to swell up. She needed both eyes. She tried to protect the bad side, the one with the swelling eye, but Jaks saw what she was trying to do and swung away at that side with her right.
Nyx stumbled again. She saw darkness at the edges of her eyes. Jaks pounded at her. Still with the right.
Nyx staggered back, put her hands up again. Blood leaked from a wound just above her eye. She blinked, rubbed the side of her face against her shoulder, smeared blood.
“Let me clean her up!” Rhys yelled. “Let me clean her up!”
The lights were flickering. What was that? Nyx tried to look up, but Jaks was on her again.
Nyx hung back on the ropes and let Jaks pummel her shoulders and forearms. She let the force of the blows bleed into the ropes.
“You want to know how he died?” Nyx said. “He was a bleeder, just like you.”
But of all the things she remembered, vividly, from her last night as a bel dame, the death of Jaks’s brother was not one of them.
Just another boy, another body, to Nyx.
But to Jaks: the world.
What had Nyx done, what had she given up, for her brothers? Her mother?
Jaks pounded at her again. Sweat poured down her face. Her body shone.
Nyx’s arms were tired. She waited out the shaking and the pain, kept taking the hits. She didn’t look directly at Jaks’s face but kept her eye on the left side of Jaks’s body, just below the collarbone. She watched the muscles move there from between her gloves. She didn’t need her peripheral vision so long as she had a good look at the way Jaks’s muscles and tendons moved under the skin.
She remembered to breathe.
“You can hit me harder than that,” Nyx said.
Jaks’s assault slowed down. She was losing momentum.
Nyx used the ropes to push herself up aga
inst Jaks. She forced the younger woman back and yelled at her, “He bled out like a dog.”
The swing came from the right. Nyx blocked and saw her move left.
Bel dames didn’t trust anyone.
Lucky she wasn’t a bel dame.
Nyx dropped her guard on her right and ducked and turned her head. Instead of smashing her in the temple, Jaks’s left caught Nyx full force on the upper right side of her head. The hardest part of her head.
Light exploded behind Nyx’s eyes. She dropped to her knees.
Jaks cried out and fell back, clutching her bad hand to her chest.
Nyx curled over her hands and pulled at the knot on her left glove with her teeth. Her head spun. Black juddered across her vision.
Jaks dropped next to Nyx and grabbed her by her butchered hair, jerked at her throbbing head.
Nyx wedged her left glove between her knees.
Jaks forced Nyx to face their audience. “You could have cut and run from your team. You could be in Tirhan now, living on that beach you told me about in that shitty cantina outside Punjai. But you didn’t run, and this is where it left you.”
Jaks’s left hand was limp at her side. She spoke through her teeth, whispered into Nyx’s ear, “You think dying for your team makes you a hero? No, Nyx, heroes live for what they love. It’s what separates the heroes from the cowards. Arran and I weren’t the cowards. You’re the coward.”
She let go of Nyx.
“What do you think I’ve been doing my whole life?” Nyx said. “Giving up?”
Nyx jerked her left hand free of her glove and caught Jaks in the throat with her left elbow.
Jaks choked and clutched at her throat. She made a clumsy swing with her bad hand, but the knock on Nyx’s head had broken something deep, and when her bad hand hit Nyx’s head, it felt like a halfhearted swipe, a slap.
Somebody yelled something. A dog barked.
Nyx pinned Jaks. She brought the razor blade across Jaks’s throat. It was a ragged cut, rough and desperate. She pressed hard, sliced. Blood ran, Jaks
thrashed, and Nyx sprang for the edge of the ring.
Rhys leapt across the ring and punched Yah Tayyib full in the face. It was a beautiful, unexpected hit, and the old man toppled off the edge of the ring. Rhys jumped after him. Nyx rolled under the ropes and came up in a crouch among the startled spectators, drooling spit and blood.
People were moving, just shadows in the dark. Nyx was momentarily blind after stepping from the glare of the ring and into the dim. Nyx moved before her eyes adjusted. She heard Rasheeda snicker. Nikodem was already standing. Yah Tayyib yelled.
Dahab’s gun went off.
Nikodem drew one of her pistols. Nyx slammed the palm of her hand into Nikodem’s face. Nikodem fell back onto the table.
Nyx pulled a poisoned needle from her hair and jabbed it hard into Nikodem’s arm.
Anneke still lay under the table. Nyx used the razor blade to saw Anneke’s bonds. She gave Anneke the razor blade. Anneke crawled to her feet.
A tawny dog darted past them. Khos? Where had he come from?
Nyx yelled at the dog. “The gun on the floor! Give Rhys the gun!” She didn’t see Rhys. Where was Rhys? She squinted and wiped the blood and sweat from her eyes.
The dog retrieved the gun with its mouth and took off across the dim room.
Nikodem was holding a hand to her gushing nose while stumbling toward the door.
Nyx heard Rasheeda snickering and looked up.
Rasheeda carried no weapons. She merely reached out and clawed at Nyx’s face. Nyx stumbled back and fell.
Anneke scrambled past Rasheeda toward Nikodem and the other pistol.
“I’m hungry, sister,” Rasheeda said. She stalked forward like a cat.
Nyx tried to get up, but the floor was bloody and slick. She grabbed one of the chairs.
Rasheeda leapt at her.
Nyx got to her feet and pulled the chair between them.
Rasheeda grabbed the chair and held it up.
Nyx ran.
Dahab stood at the corner of the ring as Nyx ran past. She shot at her. A chair kicked back and splintered an arm’s length away.
Nyx covered her head and ran toward the other side of the boxing ring, where the magicians had gone.
Rasheeda strode after her.
As she ran, Nyx saw Rhys and Yah Tayyib; a cloud of beetles, flying ants, and wasps circled them. The floor was covered in roaches. She crunched across them on bare feet. She saw someone run past the struggling magicians. Beside the figure ran a tawny dog.
Somebody hit her on the back of the head.
Nyx sprawled on the floor, scattering roaches. The dog barked. Somebody yelled at her. Why was everyone yelling?
Rasheeda stood over her, grasping the broken leg of a chair. She swung it again.
A gun went off.
Nyx looked out into the darkness.
Rasheeda dropped the chair leg, and clutched at her throat. She started to shiver and morph.
Dahab appeared from the other side of the ring, trained her gun on Nyx. “You fucking—”
The pistol went off again. Dahab jerked back. The rifle fell from her hands. A line of blood appeared from a hole at the center of her head.
Rasheeda was squawking and bleeding feathers.
Nyx watched Rhys step out from the darkness, pistol trained on Rasheeda. Rasheeda screamed and finished morphing into a raven. She flapped twice.
Rhys shot her again.
Rasheeda-the-raven dropped like a stone to the floor. The body shivered and changed back into the form of a woman, naked and bleeding, covered in feathers and mucus.
Roaches swarmed over Nyx’s legs. She looked up at Rhys. He’d always been a good shot.
He turned away from her, gun still in hand, still ready, and pointed his pistol toward Yah Tayyib, who was struggling to his feet. Yah Tayyib had sent up a cloud of wasps to obscure him. Rhys bolted into the cloud. He held up his hands to call back the swarm.
Nyx crawled toward Dahab’s crumpled body and found a dagger. She ran after Rhys, into the cloud.
As the cloud began to collapse, Yah Tayyib pulled himself toward the door among the remnants of the swarm.
“No you don’t, old man,” Nyx said.
But he was covered in wasps as he reached the door, and all Nyx had left was a dagger and a powerful desire to fall down and press herself against the cool floor. She tried one last sprint, but her legs buckled. She caught herself with her bad hand.
Oh, fuck it, she thought.
She threw the dagger at Yah Tayyib just as he turned to look back.
The curtain of wasps shuddered. Nyx didn’t hear the dagger hit the floor.
The curtain swayed.
Yah Tayyib collapsed, and the wasps buzzed angrily above his head and began to dissipate. The magician clutched at the dagger in his chest.
For a moment, Nyx was so startled that the dagger had hit him that she stared at him stupidly, awestruck at her own throw. She crawled toward him. He had one hand on the hilt of the dagger, and with the other he dug into his robe, probably looking for a boxed flesh beetle or killer roach.
Nyx grabbed his wrist and pinned him beneath her. She was breathing hard. Blood had congealed on her face. She still outweighed him.
“Who are the bel dames who want Nikodem alive? Why?” she demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me, old man, or I’ll tear your head off with my bare hands.”
“Nyxnissa, I do not know.”
“Who told you to bring Nikodem here?”
“She came to me with an offer. Rasheeda and Dahab said they spoke for the council,” he said. His mashed nose was bloody from the hit he’d taken from Rhys, and moisture collected at the edges of his dark eyes. An old man. A war hero. One of the few who came back, making backyard deals with bel dames. “They told me the queen was selling out Nasheenian samples in exchange for help from the aliens with the extermination of the bel d
ame council. With the council out of the way, the queen will have no one to argue against her weapons programs.”
“What?”
“This is what they told me.”
“The queen told me that Nikodem can end the war.”
“With whatever technology Nikodem’s people give us in exchange for our genetic material, no doubt that is true. The queen will also gain absolute power over Nasheen, and then Chenja. Then the world.”
“You expect me to believe that a magician who’s spent time at the front moved without knowing what everybody’s cards were? You think I’m stupid?”
“I’ve always thought you foolish.”
She gripped his throat with her good hand.
He gasped and squirmed beneath her. “You have the potential to be more than you are,” he whispered. “You always have. And you chose this. How did I fail you?”
“Fail me?” she said, disbelieving. “Fail me? You fucking betrayed me. You acted like some kind of fucking father from a historical drama and then sent me to prison. How did you fail me? You fucking killed me! You took away everything I had, you fucking fuck!”
“Nyx?”
Rhys’s voice.
“Nyx, let him up,” Rhys said. He had walked up beside her. She saw his bare feet.
“I intend to eat him,” Nyx said.
“Clever,” Rhys said. “Then you can be just like Rasheeda.”
Nyx looked up at him. He had pulled Jaks’s neglected tunic over himself. It was a little short, but otherwise a good fit. It was like Rhys, to think of modesty in the middle of a firefight. He still had a gun in his right hand.
“I’m not letting anyone walk out of here,” Nyx said.
Rhys grimaced. “Have I murdered monsters only to save something worse?”
Khos padded in from the doorway in front of her, human again and naked. “Unless you want the others coming after you, you better cut off their heads,” Khos said, “just to be sure.”
Nyx eyed Rhys. There was something in his face that had not been there before. He looked at her differently. His look made her feel cold.
“You and I need to talk,” she said.
“We do,” Rhys said. He pressed a hand to her shoulder. “Let Yah Tayyib up. It’ll take him time to recover. He won’t attack us alone. By the time he’s fit, we’ll be away from here.”
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