Nyx kept her hand on the magician’s throat. She gritted her teeth. “Rhys—”
“Let go,” Rhys said. He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s all right. We’re all right. Let go.”
She slowly released her hold on Yah Tayyib.
Rhys helped her stand.
Khos got out of the doorway and let the magician stumble into the corridor. The dagger still jutted from his chest. Where would he go now? To his Chenjan friends? The ones who were going to help him get Nikodem into their compounds? Would they give him some kind of a life here? As a Nasheenian man? A Nasheenian war veteran?
“Where’s Anneke?” Nyx asked.
“Here, boss.”
Anneke strode over. She had a pistol in her hand. “I got the alien,” she said.
“Dead or alive?” Nyx asked.
“Don’t know for sure. Pretty dead, likely. But you know how it is.”
Nyx limped back toward the boxing ring. The others trailed her. She stood over Nikodem and gently nudged her body over with one foot. Anneke had shot her at least three times in the chest. Hard to tell with all the blood. A few paces away, Rasheeda’s twisted body still lay on the floor, and at the far corner of the ring, Dahab lay in a pool of blood.
“We need to clean up these bodies,” Nyx said, turning toward the others. As she did, she saw their faces change. They were all at least three paces from her: Rhys next to Anneke, who had the chamber of her gun open as she cleaned it, Khos close enough to spit at, his grim face on the ring.
“Nyx—”
She didn’t know which of them said her name first, but the startled looks on their faces made her swing back and stare into the ring.
Jaks stood with Dahab’s rifle in one hand, her other hand clutching at her bloody throat.
No, Nyx remembered, it hadn’t been the best cut.
Jaks had her point-blank. The rifle would blast a hole in Nyx’s torso big enough for Anneke to put her head through.
Nyx opened her mouth. At least she could try to give off some last witty thing. Something grimly optimistic.
Somebody else shot first.
Nyx jumped at the sound and grabbed at her chest, but it was Jaks who collapsed into the ring.
From the darkness on the other side of the ring, a woman stepped toward them, rifle in hand, a kid slung over her back. She was a pale ghost in the dim light.
“In Ras Tieg,” Inaya said, “we bury our bodies. We know when ours are dead.”
37
They had one last thing to do.
Nyx sat with Jaks’s body, in the ring. Rhys stood next to her, still holding his gun, as if he’d forgotten it wasn’t a part of him. Khos and Inaya stood along the ropes, and Anneke was looting the dead below.
“I want to burn the lab,” Nyx said.
“What lab?” Anneke said, looking up from Dahab’s splattered body, bullet necklaces in hand.
Rhys sighed. “Nyx, what’s—”
“Nikodem never did get into the Chenjan stuff, but she’ll have some Nasheenian information here that no Chenjan needs to find. Fatima and Luce were working with the council to make sure none of Nasheen’s secrets got out of the country. That’s why they were tracking us. I don’t think they know about Rasheeda and Dahab or even the black part of the council they were working with. I don’t want any of our stuff here either, so burn it.”
Rhys stared at her.
Anneke loaded her gun.
Inaya’s kid cried.
Khos shrugged. “This is the last thing I do for you, Nyxnissa,” he said.
“I won’t ask anything else,” she said. “You still have those transmission transcripts she talked about, Rhys?”
“Raine had them.”
“Then hopefully the desert has them,” Nyx said.
Nyx couldn’t make the walk back to Nikodem’s lab. Instead, she stayed in the waterworks and cut the heads off Jaks and Dahab. By the time she started sawing at Rasheeda’s, her fingers were trembling and sweat blurred her vision. She stopped hacking and crawled back into the ring next to Jaks’s headless body. She pressed her forehead to the cool organic matting.
It was a bit like praying, she supposed. She felt as if she were sinking into the ring, surrendering to it. Maybe that’s what it was to surrender to God: to just let everything go, to give it all up. Submission to God meant a submission of one’s desires, of one’s will, to God’s will. Maybe that’s why surrender, submission, scared her so much now—it felt too much like dying, and she’d had enough of dying. She wanted to live.
God, she wanted to live.
She heard someone approach and looked up.
Anneke walked toward the ring, wearing a pale tunic and tattered burnous, both too big for her, but she’d found a belt somewhere and tucked a couple of pistols into it and slung Dahab’s bullet necklaces over her head. Her feet were still bare. In one hand, she carried a burnous stuffed with Nikodem’s head.
“You ready, boss?”
Nyx could smell the smoke.
“Yes.”
Anneke helped her down, and they walked to the door. Khos and Inaya and Rhys came after them a few moments later and the five of them—and Inaya’s kid—stepped through the halls of the waterworks and out onto the street.
Outside, the world was stuck in the hazy blue half place between darkness and dawn. Though there were no streetlights, Nyx saw the outline of everyone’s faces in the dim.
“You have the bakkie, Khos?” she asked.
He handed over the keys.
“I can’t drive,” she said, looking at his outstretched hand. “Why don’t you drive?”
“We’re not going with you,” Khos said. “I have some friends picking us up.”
“You and Inaya heading out?” Nyx said. “I wouldn’t have renewed your contract anyway.”
“I’m going with them,” Rhys said.
Nyx started. “What?”
Dawn crept up on them, bled across the eastern sky, the first rays of the blue sun.
Rhys reached out and almost touched her face. The gesture was so strange and unexpected that she jerked away from him.
He smiled thinly, dropped his hand. “You won’t be able to get me back over the border, Nyx.”
“You’re wrong, I—”
“Nyx, don’t,” Rhys said.
“I know some people who are very good at getting people over the border,” Khos said. “I’ve been helping them out a long time.”
“The whores,” Nyx said.
“The underground, yes,” Khos said.
“So you’ll meet me at the keg?” Nyx said, and her voice broke. She wasn’t even sure why. She just choked on the end of her sentence, like it hurt.
“We’re going to Tirhan,” Rhys said.
“I have a son in Tirhan,” Khos said. “And some contacts.”
“I can get you all amnesty,” Nyx said. “From the queen. That’s what this is all about. Money and amnesty.”
“No, it’s not,” Rhys said.
“You signed a contract with me—”
“And it wasn’t a writ of sale!” Rhys said, biting. She saw his jaw work. He looked away from her, then back, and relaxed his posture. “Good luck to you,” he said, and she remembered how he had looked at her as she pinned Yah Tayyib, as if she was some kind of monster.
Maybe she was.
A bakkie turned onto the street, illuminated by the blue wash of first dawn.
The group instinctively took a step back into the doorway.
“That’s Mahrokh,” Khos said. “I know her bakkie.” He touched Inaya’s shoulder tentatively. She looked up at him. There was something in her face too, but Nyx didn’t understand it.
Khos hailed the bakkie, and it stopped. A veiled woman leaned out. Khos opened the back door.
Inaya turned to Nyx. “You’re a filthy, godless woman,” Inaya said lightly.
“I’ve been called worse,” Nyx said, “but not from anybody who killed for me.”
“I didn’t kill f
or you,” Inaya said. “I killed for Taite. For people like… all of us. I would do it again.”
Her son cried, and she moved his sling under her arm and carried him in front of her. She stepped into the bakkie.
Rhys looked at her. Last time.
Don’t go, she thought. He wouldn’t go.
He turned away from her. He got into the back seat.
Khos shut the door for Rhys and then opened up the front. He gave Nyx a little wave. “The bakkie’s parked two blocks down, on West Maheed.”
He got in. The woman at the wheel pulled back onto the street.
And just like that, it was done.
Nyx watched them drive off into the pale dawn. The second sun was coming up, and a brilliant band of crimson and purple ignited the sky.
Anneke snorted.
“You too?” Nyx said.
“Fuck no,” Anneke said. “Who do you expect to drive you out of this shit hole?”
Anneke looped an arm around her waist, and they limped down the street
as the double-dawn broke. “Is the radio busted?” Nyx asked. “Yeah. Been a little busy, thanks to you.” “It’s a long drive,” Nyx said. “No problem, boss. Unlike you, I get my buddies back over the border.” “Right,” Nyx said. “Not like me.” She looked back up the empty street. She felt as if something had been cut out of her, an organ she would miss. “Boss?” “I’m fine,” Nyx said, and got into the bakkie.
38
Rhys watched the second sun rise while Mahrokh drove them out of Dadfar. Next to him, Inaya sat quietly, and her son slept in her arms. Khos had the window down. Rhys heard the sounds of the waking city: mothers calling their children from sleep, old men hacking out the night’s dust, the faint buzzing of wasps and beetles and the chittering of roaches as the sun warmed their lethargic bodies. He smelled curry and fried protein cakes and the peculiar spicy jasmine scent of red dye, the sort used for turbans. Rhys saw a woman step out onto her balcony and hang a prayer wheel. Three young girls robed in yellow and red ran out ahead of the bakkie and crossed the street to a bakery whose matron was just pushing open the door for the day.
But inside the bakkie, the only noise was the chitter of the bugs in the cistern. Rhys wanted to look back toward the waterworks, but they had turned away from that district three streets ago, and there was no one and nothing behind him.
Let me go back, he thought, and squeezed his eyes shut. No. This was for the best. He had fled into Nasheen because he didn’t want to fight Nasheen. Some part of him had believed that if he ran to them unarmed, they would not harm him. He had been wrong.
As his father’s only son, Rhys had grown up knowing he was immune from the draft. He would marry twenty or thirty women and inherit his father’s estate, his father’s title.
But his father had been a mullah. A powerful one. And unlike some of the more powerful, he had wanted his son to perform the ultimate submission to God, the submission that he himself had never had the courage to perform. He had wanted Rhys to atone for his own sins.
Rhys remembered the way the air tasted that day: oranges and lavender. He remembered the sound of the cicadas. The water bubbling in the fountain in the courtyard just inside the gate. He remembered the sound of the servants and slaves outside, the intermittent cries of the overseers in the fields.
“It’s time to speak of your future, boy,” his father had said, and put his smooth hand on Rhys’s head. He had smiled, his teeth so white, and sat across from him. His father was a tall man with a short beard and broad, generous face. You could stand near him, listen to him speak, and feel as if you were in the presence of some wiser man, a true mullah. His uncles were the same. Rich, powerful men whose influence allowed them to profit from the war, not fight in it.
“I have consulted with your uncles and spoken with your mother,” his father had said. His birth mother, he meant. The others, Rhys called “Aunt.” “We have prayed often to God so that we may find the best path for you, the most humble. A boy of our house has not served God at the front for three generations, and yet we sit on our hill and call ourselves pious men. How can we be pious without sacrifice?”
Even now, huddled in the back of a bakkie—a Chenjan deserter, dead if they found him—Rhys didn’t understand the feeling that had overcome him at his father’s words. The mounting terror. The knowing. War happened to other people. Other people died in God’s war. Poor men. Nasheenian men. Godless women. Like Nyx.
Not Rakhshan Arjoomand.
He would no longer kneel and pray with his father, no longer climb the crooked tree at the far end of his father’s land and stare out over the city. In his mind, his whole life, he had built up and planned out his path, worked out ways to manage a household, playfully picked out wives from among the girls in the village below, and, above all, he had studied the teachings of the Prophet and spent long days trying to learn to submit his will to God’s.
He believed, until that day, that he’d succeeded. If this was the life God wanted for him, submitting to that will was not such a terrible thing. His will and God’s will were one.
The shock of this other life, this other path—blood and death in a foreign country—was so horrifying, so unexpected, that he did not have time to wonder at his own lack of humility. He had explained the impossibility of that other life. He had cursed his father. He threatened suicide. He sobbed. Seventeen years old, and he had sobbed in front of his father like a child. He had watched his father’s generous face harden like a cut gem.
“I am worth more than this!” Rhys had cried.
“More?” his father had said, as if Rhys had told him he needed water in order to breathe. “More than a sacrifice to God? We must submit our desires to God’s will. We are fighting a holy war. God’s war. Every one of us. We fight. We die. This is who we are.”
“It’s not who I am,” Rhys had said.
“Then you do not belong to God. You do not belong to me.”
Rhys had summoned the bugs that night. He showed more skill in that one night than he had during his entire career as a middling magician in Nasheen. He confused and reprogrammed his father’s security system and sent wasps ahead to sniff out his way. But his father had sent the blood bugs after him. The chittering creatures, large as dogs, caught him in their jaws and dragged him back, and it was as if the talent bled out of him in the face of these impossible monsters. When Rhys returned, his father had smashed Rhys’s hands with a metal pipe. Smashed them bloody. Broken.
It was one of his sisters, Alys, who helped Rhys escape the second time. She called her friends, members of Chenja’s own underground, and they had gotten him as far as the border. At the border, their vehicle hit a mine.
Bloodied faces. Body parts. He remembered the smell of burning flesh. Not his own.
After that, he ran.
Ran and ran and ran, until his skin peeled off and his lungs burned.
He had not gone to the front to sacrifice himself to God. He had not gone there to save anyone. In the end, he did not even believe he would save himself. He was just running, fueled by terror, a man running from God, from His will.
But Nyx had not been afraid.
She had volunteered for the front to protect her brothers. She’d protected the boys and women in her squad, until the end, and when she’d failed at that, she burned herself. Carried out the punishment she believed God would have meted out for her sin.
She drank too much, shot up and swallowed drugs, had sex indiscriminately with both genders, did not bend her knee to God, but which of them had been more pious? Which had been stronger before God? The woman who had given her brothers and body to God and then rejected Him, or the man who pretended godliness but could not perform the ultimate act of submission?
Khos put his meaty arm up on the seat and looked back at Rhys. “You sure you don’t want us to drop you off with somebody in Chenja? Must be somebody doesn’t want you dead.”
“No,” Rhys said.
Khos nodded and tur
ned again to the road.
Rhys felt a knot of fear in his stomach and reached instinctively for his copy of the Kitab, but it was not there, of course. Raine had taken everything from him during the interrogation.
Rhys closed his eyes. He did not think of Nyx’s offensive remarks, the heat of her next to him, the way she looked at him when he read to her, her filthy fingernails and stained teeth and the terrible way she mangled her Chenjan. Instead, he thought of her hair. Long and braided, botched and unbound. Black glossy hair like the deepest part of the sky where there were no stars, just darkness. Umayma, at the edge of everything.
And he thought of Kine’s words then—the voice that spoke with the same inflection as Nyx’s, the voice that told him she had been making black market deals with Khairian nomads and interstellar gene pirates who sold her the base ingredients for winning the war.
“These are old-world powers that must be controlled,” Kine had said, her voice even, a little distant. “To take the red sand out of its natural environment, to transport it out of the wastelands, could mean a disaster beyond our imagining. But handled the right way, correctly understood, it could win us the war without the need to alter our shifters. We could, effectively, cure the war by wiping out its cause.”
But if she could not wipe out his people, she would find a way to enslave and modify the shifters.
Rhys opened his eyes and looked over at Inaya, her pale, dirt-smeared face, and tried, again, to see something of the shifter in her. But there was nothing. The air did not bend or crackle around her the way it did around Khos, as if he existed outside the world.
“I have wondered,” Rhys said, “how you got Husayn’s bakkie over the border.”
Khos turned to look at them.
Inaya shifted her son in her arms. “How do you compel bugs to send your messages? How do you use them to mend flesh?”
“I could say it’s a matter of examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do,” Rhys said. “You would have to be a magician to understand.”
“It is like that, then,” Inaya said. “There is some knowledge one just has. That just is. There are things the people of this world can do that no one should know. Your bel dames know something of that. Nasheen’s bel dames have existed in one form or another since the birth of the world. Before they cut up boys, they were responsible for killing rogue magicians and mutant shifters. Did you know that?”
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