God's War (24 page)

Khos grunted.

“Any idea which bel dame?” Nyx
asked.

“No,” Rhys said. “Taite ran it
through our voice recognition reel and didn’t come up with any matches.”

Nyx raised her brows. “We should
have every working bel dame’s signature on that reel.”

“Well, it was somebody from the
actual council, not just a girl. Maybe she’s too old to be on the reel?”

“She’d have to be real fucking old
not to be on that reel—or pretty new. It took some skill to pinch that.”

“Hopefully you didn’t pay too much
for it, then,” Rhys said.

“I talked to Husayn,” Nyx said,
before he got cheeky. “No off-worlder has been asking about boxers or about the
magicians in Faleen.” She paused a minute and looked them all over. “She did
say she’s losing some boxers to a big ring in Chenja.”

“You think Nikodem might be around
boxers?” Taite asked.

“Either the Chenjans took her, with
help from our magicians, or she went on her own to go sell something,” Nyx
said. “In any case, the boxing is a good place to start. It’s something she was
interested in last time, and if she’s got as much of a thing for violence as
her sisters say she does, yeah, I’d start with Chenjan boxing.”

“If Raine’s doing recon in Chenja,
he might have the same idea,” Taite said.

“We need to do better than Raine,”
Nyx said. And Nasheen wasn’t exactly a friendly place to be right now. Not that
Chenja would be an improvement, but she liked staying on the move, staying one
step ahead of everyone. “I want to move operations to Chenja. Anneke, the
bakkie is for shit, and you and I need to work on it tonight.”

“I don’t want to go into Chenja,”
Khos said.

“Then don’t. I’ll get another
shifter.”

“Nyx—”

A low, steady whine started outside.
Fucking burst sirens.

Nyx raised her voice and shifted on
the divan, turning back to Khos. “We already talked about this. You go or you
don’t. We’re moving the day after tomorrow. Dawn prayer.” She was done with all
the sniveling. They were out of time for that.

Khos snorted and hunched in his chair.

The
whump-whump
of
the anti-burst guns shook the building. A pause. Another thump.

Nyx tried to measure Rhys’s
reaction, but he was staring off into the air.

“Taite, I’ll need you to stay here
and work the com, keep an ear on what’s going on in Nasheen. All right?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Does Husayn
play cards?”

The siren started to mute out, then
died.

Clear.

“No, but she can teach you to box,”
Nyx said, looking pointedly at Rhys. He didn’t react, but Taite made a face at
her. The idea of Taite doing anything involving vigorous physical movement was
a running joke.

“Anneke,” Nyx said, “let’s go get
that bakkie running properly. We’ll need to give it new paint and put on the
new tags. Rhys?”

He looked over at her. “Yes?”

“You here?”

“I’m here,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “We’ll need you. I
want to talk to you about some things.”

Nyx pushed Khos and Taite away from
the com and laid out the papers she’d taken from Kine’s office. She motioned
Rhys over. He walked up next to her. She opened her mouth to say something
stupid about him, about gravy or prayer wheels or picnicking on the graves of
the dead, but she realized she was too tired, and all she really wanted to say
was that she’d missed him and his buttoned-up coat.

“When I went over to Kine’s, I saw
that they’d gone through her papers looking for something,” Nyx said. “What
they didn’t know is that she doesn’t keep her private papers in plain view, not
when it has to do with her work in the compounds.”

“So what is this?” Rhys asked,
paging through the ciphered sheets.

“Her private papers. I figured you
and Taite could decipher them and see what my bel dame sisters wanted from her.
It could have been a hit on Kine just to get to me, but… well, they knew Kine
and I weren’t close.”

“They aren’t all ciphered,” he said,
pulling out a bound record book. “Looks like compound records. I’d have to know
more about the technology they’re using.”

“Taite can look that up. You’ll
try?”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” Nyx made to move away from
the com. They had a tight deadline, and she already had the litany in her head:
papers, bakkie, call the contagion center, go to the bank, pick up gear and
supplies.

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry about Kine.”

“Me too,” she said. She saw the body
again when she blinked: the sightless eyes, the rusty water, the white feather.
“I’m going to go help Anneke with the bakkie.”

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m a dead man in Chenja.”

Something inside of her hurt,
something she kept trying to dull with sen and whiskey. She pressed her fist to
her gut.

“We’ll be all right. Nobody out
there knows you anymore. I can get you over the border and back.” When she said
it out loud, she almost believed it.

The way you got Tej over the border?

Rhys pursed his mouth and went back
to the papers.

Nyx took Anneke by the collar, and the
two of them went down into the garage and looked over the bakkie.

“Who the hell did you have go over
this?” Anneke asked. She unshuttered the overhead light. The worms in the glass
were dying, and the light was bad.

“Local mechanic in Jameela.”

“I can heal up the front end, maybe
replace the bumper if you want to spend the cash.”

Anneke wrenched at the hood. It
hissed open. She rolled up the long sleeves of her tunic, showing off the
jagged black lines of her prison tattoos, the most prominent of which was a
shrieking parrot clutching a bloody heart. She leaned in. She swore. “Shit,
how’d you get this back here? You need a new cistern. And your brake line is
leaking. Fuck, that coagulant stinks. Who cut this line? You sewed it up
twice.”

“Rasheeda. The tissue mechanic
patched it the second time. I didn’t have the cash to replace it.”

Anneke sighed and straightened. “You
should just get a new bakkie, boss. A proper one with a real flatbed instead of
a trunk, one of those ones with the reinforced cistern.”

“Can’t afford it.”

“Can’t afford the repairs neither.”

Nyx handed her a portable light.
“Lucky for me, my labor’s cheap.”

Anneke grinned. “Yeah, I know. I get
the receipts.”

“At least we know you’re a good
shot.”

“Naw, if I was a good shot you’d
have died in Faleen, proper.”

“I hired you anyway.”

“Bad judge of character.”

“I know.”

“Huh.” Anneke moved to the back of
the garage and pulled out a giant needle, some hoses, and a pair of clippers
from the supply cabinet. She had to stand on a box to reach it. “You think you
can get the boys back over the border?”

“Raine did.”

“Raine had a lot of contacts.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Hand me some clips and some lube,”
Anneke said.

Nyx handed them over, and Anneke
disappeared under the hood. Nyx heard the wet slurping of organic tissue as
Anneke slid her hands among the guts.

“Why’d you keep running with Raine,
after?”

“After what? The thing with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Eh,” Anneke said. “I’ve seen him do
worse.”

Anneke reappeared, poked her head
around the hood to look at Nyx. She was covered in lube and bakkie bile up to
her elbows. “We won’t be able to get Rhys back over the border.”

“Don’t be so dry.”

“I know your count. You never got a
guy back over the border.”

“I’ll get Rhys back over.”

“Yeah. Huh.” Anneke leaned back into
the guts of the bakkie.

“I’ll get him over.”

“Doesn’t sound like it’s me you’re
trying to convince. Hey, I get some cigars for doing this, or what?”

“Just remember to fix the window,”
Nyx said. She set the new tags for the bakkie on the front seat. “And put the
tags on. I’m going to go look into getting a cistern.”

“Hey, Nyx?”

“Yeah.”

She straightened. “I’ve seen Raine
do a
lot
worse.”

“Me too,” Nyx said.

“So how
are
you getting us across the border this time?”

“It’s a surprise,” Nyx said.

Anneke grunted. “I hate surprises,
boss. The last surprise I got, somebody died.”

“Yeah, well, the last surprise I
got, I went to prison,” Nyx said. “I sympathize.”

Rhys woke in a bad mood, and morning
prayer didn’t make him feel much better. He needed a clear head, but even after
going through the salaat, his mind was still stuffed with list after list of
chemical compounds and vat numbers and bug secretions. Kine had been a copious
note-taker, but none of the names and numbering in her records made much sense
to him—it likely wouldn’t make any sense to anybody outside the breeding
compounds. And he was out of time to decode it. He left most of it with Taite
so he could work on it in their absence.

At least his immersion in Nasheenian
organic tech had kept him from dwelling on the border crossing. Nyx kept
telling him that she had a way to get over the border that wouldn’t involve any
of them inhaling chemical vapor and burning out their lungs.

But somehow, he doubted it.

Anneke—who was dark to begin
with—rubbed herself down in bug secretions to stain herself even darker. Anneke
was skinny in the hips and flat-chested and could pass for a boy. She had done
the same a half-dozen times with Raine’s crew, she said. She and Khos could
drive right over the border—a particularly low-tech, low-security part of it,
in any case. She had a couple of her relatives on the other side scout out a
good stretch and assured everybody twenty times over that she could handle
herself.

They were packed at dawn.

Rhys stood with the others around
the loaded bakkie. He had his Kitab in one hand. He watched Nyx standing next
to him, her face a cool blank.

“You keep your head down and report
any deviations to Taite, got it?” Nyx told Anneke. Anneke rubbed down her gun
while they all waited for Khos to shift.

“Yeah, boss. Me and Khos’ll meet you
in Azam, bright and shiny. You gotta take care of that wheel spinner, though.”
She winked at Rhys.

Rhys watched Khos stow his clothes
behind the front seat and start his shift.

Rhys had to look away when he did
it. The contortion and contraction looked obscene.
Wrong
.
As a magician, Rhys could feel the wrongness in the air, the bending of matter
in ways it should not bend.

Anneke opened the passenger door,
and Khos-the-dog jumped inside and settled onto the seat, tongue lolling. He
was a yellow, blue-eyed dog now, cleaner than the wild mutts that scrounged for
garbage in the streets but otherwise no different in appearance.

Nyx sidled up closer to Rhys and
crossed her arms, and the two of them watched Anneke and Khos drive out of
Husayn’s garage and into the violet double dawn.

Rhys took a step away from her, to
give himself some room. He was angry at her again, angry about this, about all
of it. He wanted to find some way to tell her why he was angry, to explain it,
but she tended to believe that every conversation involving strong emotion was
full of words and resolutions that were not meant, as if he were a raving
drunk. She saw every stated emotion as an admission of weakness.

“So where are we going, Nyxnissa?”
he asked.

She spit sen on the garage floor.
“The morgue,” she said.

Rhys closed his eyes and prepared
himself for horror. The last eight years had been an unending nightmare,
starting with his flight across the desert. And it will end with my flight back
into the desert, he thought. The globe the queen had given them had included a
detailed summary of what she was willing to pay them in return for
Nikodem—alive or dead. Nikodem, the alien with the big laugh. He had known her
immediately upon seeing her stills but was uncertain about how he felt about
hunting her. She was just an alien, and the sum to bring her in—even split five
ways—was indeed enough for all of them to retire on. If they completed this
note, he could leave Nyx, and this bloody business, forever.

He had no idea what he would do,
after.

When he opened his eyes, Nyx had
gone.

The dead that came back from the
front were processed in filtered containment facilities expressly designed for
the purpose. Chenja and Nasheen had signed and broken—and signed and broken and
signed again—treaties requiring the return of the dead to the processing
centers—the morgues—within thirty days of a soldier’s death. The morgues were
run by magicians who identified, cataloged, decontaminated, and burned the
dead. The sterile remains were placed in ceramic jars and shipped home to
mothers or sisters or merely sent to the war memorials on the coast—vast,
shining walls of smooth metal that faced the sea. The largest of them was the
Orrizo in Mushtallah, a monument dedicated to unidentified soldiers—dead boys
and patriotic women.

After being reconstituted, Nyx had
worked at the containment center just west of Punjai. She had to pay back the
magicians for putting her back together, and the dirty, dangerous work in the
containment center was the only work they had for her at the time. She had
spent her mornings loading bagged corpses onto carts and her afternoons sorting
piles of body parts that the magicians insisted all went to the same body. More
often than not, the magicians were wrong, and she’d have to take out an extra
arm or leg or the remains of a foot and throw it into another pile made up
entirely of “unidentified” parts that were later burned up and dumped in the
Orrizo.

It had been shit work, and she’d
been hosed down and swept for organics three times after magicians suspected
her of being exposed to contaminated bodies. Chenjans and Nasheenians alike had
been known to plant bug-borne viruses in the flesh of the dead before sending
them back over the border.