God's War (23 page)

“What’s going on?” Nyx asked. She
tore her look from the men.

“We have a breach in Punjai. Minor
skirmish. Should be cleaned up in half a day.”

“What’s the threat level?” Nyx
asked.

The woman narrowed her eyes.

“I spent time in Bahreha,” Nyx said.
“I laid the mines that took out Lower Azda.”

The soldier shrugged and looked
blank, and Nyx realized all that had been a decade ago. A lifetime, in terms of
the war. Thousands had died since then. Bigger cities had been contaminated or
overrun or blown up. You’re an old woman, Nyx thought.

“A couple of bursts contaminated the
southern half of the city, and a small terrorist unit got through. Nothing
serious. We’ll have it cleaned up, matron. Go on toward Basra. We’ve cleared
the road through to there.”

The southern half of the city.
Nowhere near the Chenjan quarter, which meant her storefront might be safe. Had
her team gotten out before the quarantine? Fucking hell.

“Thanks,” Nyx said. She looked again
toward the men on the other side of the barricade. “You take care of the boys
for me.”

“Yes, matron,” the soldier said. “We
always do.”

Nyx turned the bakkie down the temporary
sticky-graveled road that the military had put down to bypass Punjai. Punjai
under quarantine would buy her time. Anybody—even a bel dame—would have a tough
time getting into Punjai, and once in, would have a tougher time wading through
the chaos of contaminated quarantined quarters. If her team had gotten out,
they might have bought enough time to regroup in Aludra and bolt the fuck off
to Chenja without any bel dame knowing the wiser.

Maybe.

A whole heap of maybe.

Nyx ducked and rolled under Husayn’s
right jab and threw a right uppercut to her body. Husayn blocked with her left
elbow and pushed forward again, throwing a left hook followed by another right
jab.

Husayn had gotten a good deal more
skilled with age. Not quicker—just smarter. Still, Husayn moved forward when
other boxers moved back. Nyx should have remembered that before agreeing to a
“friendly” spar with Husayn.

Nyx stopped trying to drive her back
and stepped sideways instead. She threw a punch at Husayn’s kidneys, but her
heart wasn’t in it. Husayn swung and caught her with a left hook to the jaw,
another left hook to the face. Nyx saw darkness move across her vision.
Something flashed at her from the back of her brain, some other fucked-up
memory. She deflected a double right jab, but she didn’t see the uppercut
coming until it knocked her backward onto the dusty mat. Her head felt like it
was floating.

Husayn laughed. “You’re getting
slow, old woman.”

Nyx used the ropes to help herself
up. She waited for her head to clear.

Husayn’s gym had two rings, and a
couple of kids were sparring in the other one, far more effectively than Nyx
had been.

“I’ve been out of the ring for a
while,” Nyx said. She worked her jaw. She was going to hurt tomorrow. Hell, she
hurt now.

Husayn grinned crookedly. She had
gained a little weight and broken her nose a couple more times, but otherwise,
she was the same Husayn. She’d stopped fighting for the magicians not long
after Nyx went to prison, and she got leave from the magicians to start her own
gym. Lots of young kids came her way hoping to gain some experience before
testing their mettle in a magicians’ ring.

“How’s business been?” Nyx asked.
She found one of the discarded corner stools and started unknotting her gloves
with her teeth. Nyx’s team was around, Husayn had assured her when she drove up
just after mid-morning prayer; they’d shown up a day before the quarantine,
then scattered their own ways. Probably to mosques and brothels, Nyx thought.

Husayn shrugged and pulled off her
own gloves. She never laced them very tightly.

“Been good, as things go.”

Nyx nodded at the sparring kids in
the other ring. She let her gloves drop to the ring. “I thought you kept a
busier gym.”

“Huh,” Husayn said. “Used to. Most
of them headed out to Chenja. There’s a fighting ring out there taking away my
best fighters.”

“You know where in Chenja?”

“I heard they’re out of Dadfar.”

“That so?” Nyx said. If they were
going after Nikodem in Chenja, the fighting rings were a good place to start.
And Husayn had spoken to the aliens before.

“Yeah, heard that from a couple
girls now,” Husayn said.

“You remember a fight in Faleen,
about seven or eight years ago? You fought an outrider named…” Nyx realized
she’d let the name slip again, and had to fish for it. “Jix. Jaks something, Jaksdij,
maybe?” Fuck, Nyx thought, I cut up the kid’s brother, and I don’t even
remember her name.

Husayn crinkled her mouth. “I fought
a lot of girls, been knocked around a time or two.” She rapped her knuckles
against her head. “Don’t remember all the girls I fought.”

“How about aliens? You ever seen any
of those?”

Husayn’s face opened up. “Aw, hell,
the aliens, yeah, I remember them. Aw, yeah,
that
fight.”

“I might be looking for one of them.
She met up with you at that fight in Faleen. Name’s Nikodem Jordan.”

“Blood and hell, Nyxnissa, what’re
you getting yourself into?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“I heard that before.”

“What did she talk to you about?”

Husayn sighed. She spared a look at
the sparring kids and then went and picked up another of the corner stools and
plopped it down next to Nyx. She sat, leaning in close, so her sweat dripped on
the mat at Nyx’s feet.

“She was a real strange talker, that
one. Was pretty nice, hearing she was so interested, but those magicians, they
said not to talk about boxing or bugs too much, you understand?”

“Magicians like Yah Tayyib?”

“Huh,” Husayn said, and spit. She
wiped at her face, grimaced. “He wasn’t the one cutting black work. Can’t fault
somebody for doing their job.”

“Let’s say this isn’t personal. What
if I told you Nikodem was back—and missing—and the queen had me looking for
her?”

Husayn guffawed, but when Nyx’s
expression didn’t change, she sobered. “No shit?”

“No shit. It’s cloak-and-dagger work
though, all right?”

“Right, all right. This real spindly
girl comes in and talks to me before the fight. I was pretty riled up, you
know. I get all anxious before a fight, and answering questions—from dogs or
aliens or whatever—is not something I got any interest in.”

“What did she want?”

“Wanted to know how we trained, what
it felt like to be a boxer, whether or not the bugs or inoculations got in the
way. Best I could figure, she thought the bugs made us feisty or some shit,
’cause she couldn’t imagine us going around bashing each other up for fun. She
must live on a real dull world.”

“She say anything about why she was
here? What she was working on?”

Husayn shook her head. “Naw, and I
didn’t think to ask. Magicians all around, you know? I figured she was under
their protection. Whatever project magicians got going, you leave it be. You
remember.”

“Yeah,” Nyx said. “I remember.”

“Something else she said,
though—wanted to know if I’d ever fought a shifter. I told her we don’t allow
shifters in a ring, and she said why not? I told her it was ’cause they had an
unfair advantage. She thought that was stupid, you know, since we’d fight
magicians and all. I had to tell her being a magician just means you’re using
bugs. Magicians can stop using bugs. They can even drug up the bad ones to
keep
them from using bugs. But shifters, it’s in their
blood. They’re half us, half something else. Told her the First Families used
to call them angels. She was real interested in that.”

“Huh,” Nyx said. “She didn’t know
the composition of shifters?”

“Naw, she thought they were just
like magicians. Called on certain bugs or something to change them up. I told
her no, they were something else, something that got fucked up at the beginning
of the world. Told her shifters live half in this world, half in the afterlife.
Angels.”

Nyx nodded. It was a popular
idea—shifters being angels or demons—but she had known too many shifters to buy
into that one. So Nikodem was interested in knowing about shifters. Bugs and
shifters.
We’re all trying to cure the war,
Kine had
said. If shifting was genetic, in your blood, could you parse it out?

Do something dangerous with it? Use
it to make other things? Gene pirates muttered about that kind of shit all the
time, but Nyx had stupidly believed it wasn’t something Nasheen or Chenja would
consider. Too fucked up.

“Thanks,” she said. “I better clean
up and talk to my crew.”

“Yeah, I saw some of them come back
in when you hit the mat. Isn’t much of a safe house if they keep wandering
around in broad daylight,” Husayn said.

“Thanks. I’ll talk to them,” Nyx
said.

“Nothing of it,” Husayn said. “You
spend six weeks here, I could get you back into shape, you know.”

“We won’t be here that long,” Nyx
said. The bel dames would burn them out.

Husayn shrugged. “Too bad. I keep
wanting to whip that dancer of yours.”

“In more ways than one, I’m sure,”
Nyx said.

Husayn winked. “That Chenjan accent
turns me frigid. But you know, your little black man’s not a half-bad boxer.”

“Rhys doesn’t box. He’s a dancer.”

“He
does
box.
He’s a magician, ain’t he? And he’s in good shape. A little small, maybe, but
there are a lot of women at that weight. I’ve been working with him since he
got in. I thought he was training with you.”

Nyx knit her brows. “Not with me.”

“Well, he’s not bad.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

So Rhys was boxing now, despite his
long-suffering abhorrence for blood and violence. When had he started that up?
It explained how he stayed in shape. He was probably taking lessons from Husayn
just to spite Nyx. If she had fewer things to worry about, she might have let
it get to her. As it was, she’d spent the last two nights mostly drunk and
driving, trying to ward off nightmares of Kine lurching out of the tub, seeking
her out with cold hands and bloodied eye sockets. It was not enough that she
still dreamed of her dead brothers and her dead squad. Now her sister clawed at
her as well. Too many dead.

Nyx hopped out of the ring. She
landed badly and winced. She was hungover, and everything was starting to hurt
again.

Nyx headed into the steam room. She
cleaned herself up and slipped into the closet where Husayn had built a
stairwell that went up into the attic.

Nyx found Anneke with her forehead
pressed to the floor. Anneke prayed facing north in the center of a vast array
of weaponry. Taite had set up a makeshift com center in a far corner, and he
and Khos were playing cards on the console. It looked like they’d all slipped
in while she fought. What, had they been at lunch?

Rhys had hung up a sheet to screen
his sleeping area from the others. She heard him praying, too low to make out
the words, as usual, and figured it must be about noon.

She was hungry. They must have
eaten.

“What have you all got for me?” Nyx
asked.

Khos leaned back in his chair. “What
happened to the bakkie?”

“What happened to your face?” Taite
said. They were playing for locusts, and one of the bugs was creeping off the
table. They must have seen the bakkie in the garage.

“You still need me to fix that
window?” Anneke said, coming up from her prone position.

Nyx found a seat on a threadbare
divan at the center of the room. There were some deflated speed bags in one
corner, and a lone punching bag hung from the long main beam of the ceiling.

“I missed you all too,” she said.

“Anneke and I checked out some of
the mercenaries on the note,” Khos said, shoving his cards back at Taite. Taite
poked at one of the locusts. If they were just a little harder up, he’d likely
eat them. “Two more dropped their notes. If I didn’t know better, I’d say
somebody was convincing them it was a good idea. We’re down to one bounty
hunter and two mercenaries.”

“The ones who dropped had pretty
good money in their accounts after they did,” Taite said. “I hacked into
Raine’s com for about a day before he patched the leak. As of three days ago,
he’s still after the note.” Nyx saw the statue of Taite’s little Ras Tiegan
saint stuck up on the top of the com console. It was good to know that some
things were constant.

“Where’s Raine at?” Nyx asked. She
wondered how much of her own gear they’d managed to get out.

“He has someone doing recon in
Chenja. But he was just in Faleen talking with Yah Tayyib.”

Yah Tayyib. Yeah, it was where she
would have gone first too, if the old man would have seen her.

Rhys’s praying died off, and he
walked in, buttoned down as ever, though the attic was stifling. He’d cut his
hair again, shaved himself nearly bald. She hated that.

“She isn’t in any Chenjan districts
I have contacts in,” Rhys said. “All they know is that a lot of bel dames are
looking for an off-worlder.”

“Bel dames? Not bounty hunters or
mercenaries?”

“Definitely bel dames.”

So bel dames
were
looking for Nikodem. And if they were looking for Nikodem, it meant they
didn’t know where she was either. Were they trying to make sure Nyx didn’t get
to her first? Why? To keep Nikodem away from the queen?

“How about that transmission on our
dead bounty hunter? Did you decode that?” Nyx asked.

“It’s a transmission from someone
who says they’re on the bel dame council,” Rhys said. He sat on the far side of
the divan from Nyx. “They were asking him to drop the note on Nikodem in
exchange for immunity. They knew he was smuggling out boys to Heidia and were
threatening to cut off his head and turn him in unless he dropped out.”