God's War (29 page)

“You look terrible,” Fatima said.

Nyx only looked at her.

Fatima’s mouth quirked up at the
corners, not a smile. “You were much more difficult to track when you worked
alone.”

Fatima waited a bare moment, glancing
over at Rasheeda as the other bel dame laid out a series of scalpels and
straight pins and blinking syringes on a scarlet-colored length of silk.

“You were told to stay off this
note,” Fatima said. “Rasheeda and Luce were clear, as I understand it. Yet here
you are, far from Nasheen, looking up an off-worlder. Where are Kine’s papers?
I searched your safe house. Are they in the country? Who else knows about
them?”

Nyx clenched her teeth.

“Your team’s dead,” Fatima said.

“You’re a bad liar,” Nyx said. “If
you toasted my team you’d have told me all about the street they were on and
the way you killed them. You wouldn’t stop with half-assed declarations. You’re
a bel dame.”

Fatima’s mouth quirked again. “You
think so? If you leave this place alive, perhaps we’ll see.”

Nyx grunted.

“We know you were at Kine’s,” Fatima
said. “Did you speak to her before her death? What do you know about her work?”

Kine and her goddamn papers.

Nyx shifted a little in her chair.
If she started talking, she’d be in trouble. She could make up stories, sure,
but she didn’t trust that after several days of torture, she’d be able to keep
the stories straight. But silence implied submission, and she wasn’t keen on
submitting to anyone—not Fatima, not the magicians, not the queen, not God.

“I have no wish to send you home in
pieces,” Fatima said.

Rasheeda squatted next to the
instruments, giggling.

“Tell me,” Nyx said, “what do bel
dames want with information from the compounds? Thought you would be on good
terms with their security.”

“I want to know what
you
know about Kine.”

“What do you know about Kine?”

“Oh, stop it,” Fatima said, and her
expression got ugly. “You want us to chop you up and leave you here?”

“You should have asked my team
before you killed them,” Nyx said. “They’d have known just as much about Kine
as I do.” Burning the pages had been a good idea. If the bel dames wanted the
papers and wanted to keep Nyx off the note, it meant they were probably working
with Nikodem. They wanted her to stay hidden. In Chenja.

Sweet fuck, Nyx thought
are the bel dames working with the Chenjans?
Were they
working some kind of deal together to topple the monarchy?

“I don’t have any patience this
afternoon, Nyxnissa.”

Nyx tacked that down. Afternoon. Not
of the same day she was brought in, though, right? So she’d lost a day?

“You never did have much patience,
sister-mine,” Nyx said, “and I don’t have much patience for traitors. When did
you all decide to sell out Nasheen?”

“Rasheeda?”

Rasheeda grabbed the back of Nyx’s
chair and tilted it. She turned Nyx around so she could see the tub of water
behind her. A thin layer of ice coated the surface. The tub was padded around
the base by a band of insulation that hummed.

“Those are expensive bugs,” Nyx
said.

Rasheeda pushed Nyx over.

Nyx went into the water face first.
The lip of the tub caught her in the gut. Her head banged the bottom of the
tub.

Cold hit her like a fist to the
face.

The first time under, she didn’t
thrash, just shut her eyes and felt the cold eat into her bones.

Rasheeda pulled her back up. Nyx
gasped and went back under, banging her head on the bottom again.

The third time under, she started to
struggle, but Rasheeda had the advantage, and the cold was starting to muddle
Nyx’s head. Black ate away at her thoughts. It felt like descending into the
bowels of Umayma. She opened her mouth to breathe, and sucked in cold water
instead.

It went on for a long time. They
hauled her out fully once or twice, left her gasping in the chair like a spent
swimmer, asked her some questions that didn’t make sense anymore, and then
forced her back under.

Finally, Rasheeda got tired, or
Fatima got tired. Probably Fatima.

Rasheeda hauled Nyx out of the water
and let her chair fall sideways onto the floor, so Nyx had a watery view of
Fatima’s sandaled feet.

“Kine’s papers,” Fatima said. “I
want them. Where are they? They belong in Nasheen, not here. You’ve run black
work before. You think I’m a fool? Who did you sell them to?”

Rasheeda bent over and gazed into
Nyx’s face, blotting out the light. Nyx coughed up cold water. She shivered
uncontrollably.

Fatima wrinkled her nose, said to
Rasheeda. “Give me a couple of her fingers.”

Rasheeda licked her lips. “I want
her eyes.”

Nyx’s thoughts were dark and sticky.
Fatima thinks I killed my sister. But Rasheeda killed my sister. Why doesn’t
Fatima know that Rasheeda killed my sister? Why was Rasheeda only slowing me
down, but Dahab wanted to stop me?

Sticky thoughts. Black thoughts.

Something congealed. Rasheeda had
slowed her down so she could kill Kine before Nyx got there. Rasheeda didn’t
have leave from the council to kill Nyx. Rasheeda was running something on her
own. Fatima was doing clean bel dame work, retrieving stolen Nasheenian
information she thought Nyx had. Fatima had no idea Rasheeda was running black.

“Let’s save the eyes for later,”
Fatima said. She pointed. “Give me those two fingers.”

Rasheeda set Nyx’s chair upright.
The wire had dug into Nyx’s flesh now, drawn blood. She couldn’t feel it,
though, just pressure. What she did feel were the bloodworms boring into her
flesh. Her legs were on fire, and the rest of her was numb.

Rasheeda picked up a cleaver. She
pressed the heel of her palm onto the back of Nyx’s right hand, made her splay
her fingers across the armrest.

They’re just fingers, Nyx thought.
She brought her head up so she could look Fatima in the face.

“I didn’t kill my sister,” Nyx
slurred.

Rasheeda brought the knife down on
her ring and little fingers. Nyx felt pressure, heard the crunch. Pain. Just
pain. Pain is a message. That’s all.

Fatima flinched.

Nyx didn’t.

Rasheeda hacked at Nyx’s hand again.
She hadn’t made a clean cut.

Nyx kept her breathing steady, not
looking at her hand. Her fingers—or where she was supposed to have
fingers—ached. She coughed up more water. She wanted to claw at her burning
legs. She wished it was her legs they cut off.

Rasheeda wiped something onto the
floor with the knife. Nyx heard a dull thumping sound. Her fingers hitting the
gritty floor.

Rasheeda licked the knife.

“Kine’s papers. Or should I take the
whole hand?” Fatima asked. “Another day or two and the worms will have your
legs…”

The first time Nyx was tortured,
Raine had done it.

She had been doing her own side
work, her first contract with a gene pirate. She hadn’t known what the woman
was, at first, just knew she was paying well for an easy job—plug some organic
material into Nyx’s body and have Nyx drive it over to some shady dealer in a
border town. The dealer had cut it out, no problem, and suddenly she had more
money in her account than she’d ever seen in her life.

Raine had figured it out. How, Nyx
never knew. Maybe he kept tabs on her account. He had beat her bloody, called
her a traitor to her own country. He’d bound her and left her.

When he came back for her a day
later, she lay in the dark, in a pool of her own piss, hungry and dehydrated.
He had loomed over her and cut off her ear with one quick slice of a sharp
knife.

“A souvenir,” he’d said, holding her
bloody flesh in his hand.

He kept a collection of ears in his
freezer from every bounty he took. She had thought the collection was funny,
until he’d added a piece of her to it, like she was just another thing to be
used and discarded. Another body. Like a boy at the front.

He had expected her to stay on with
his crew. It was just a little discipline, he’d said, nothing worse than what
had happened to her at the front, right?

She had bided her time for three
days, then went into his room in the middle of the night after a long, heavy
day of footwork and drinking; a coward’s fight. She’d trussed him up and cut
off his cock. She considered the act her formal resignation.

“Just a little souvenir,” she’d told
him while he screamed and strained against his bonds.

The first notes she’d taken as a bel
dame were for his sons. They had deserted from the front, following their
father’s radical politics. She had sent their ears to Raine.

Nyx was not a nice woman. She knew
she didn’t deal with nice women. But she also knew the worst sorts of things
these women could do to her, and there was comfort in that.

There would be no surprises.

“You can take what you want,” Nyx
said, “but remember what I took from Raine. I’ll take everything from you,
Fatima. Your face, your license, your lover, your daughters.”

Rasheeda snickered. “Such a funny
woman! And what will you take from me, eh? Sitting there bleeding in your
little chair!”

“Oh,” Nyx said. “I’m going to
kill
you.”

Rasheeda snorted.

“Bind her fingers,” Fatima said, and
stood. “Tomorrow we want Kine’s papers. Or we take your hands. Then your eyes.
Think about that. And the loss of your legs in thirty-six hours.”

Fatima walked out. Rasheeda bound up
Nyx’s hand, then beat her until her face swelled and her ribs ached and she
hacked up blood. Rasheeda left her, bruised and bleeding.

When the door closed, Nyx murmured,
“Kine, you bitch.”

She drooled blood and saliva into
her lap and let her head hang. Telling them about Kine’s papers meant telling
them where Taite was. If they’d killed her team—and she had an image of the
whole garret burning, of Khos cut into pieces, Anneke’s face blown away, Rhys…
she could at least keep them from Taite for a while. Just a little while.

Taite listened to the results of the
vote come in over the com. He ate from a carton of take-out food, spicy even
for his taste, a Nasheenian imitation of Ras Tiegan food.

All the news was bad.

As the provinces reported in, his
hopes sank. Eighty-seven percent of Abyyad district in favor of drafting
half-breeds. Sixty-eight percent in favor. Ninety-eight percent in favor.
Ninety-eight percent? That was from a district out on the coast, where they’d
never even seen a male over the age of six, let alone a half-breed. What did
they care if he got blown up at the front?

Taite was getting sick. He turned
off the com.

Taite had gone through Kine’s
collection and gotten rid of everything but three recordings, which turned out
to be her dictation sessions. It took a couple of days to break her personal
security code, but once he mastered that, it was easy to loop them into the com
and read them back. He was only fifteen minutes in, but the voting numbers had
gotten to him, and he had opened up his bankbook instead of listening to
transcriptions.

The only way to make it work was to
move Inaya to one of the factory compounds in Basmah and have her keep her job
there. It meant no recovery time after the baby came. It also meant living
dormitory-style with no security. She wasn’t going to be happy, but unless they
collected this bounty soon, he was out of extravagant options. Mahdesh had
already loaned him more money than Taite knew how to pay back, and though
Mahdesh asked for nothing in return, Taite worried over it—spending his lover’s
money to help the sister who would burn them both if she knew.

He heard someone coming up the
stairs and stopped his work. He grabbed his pistol.

Whoever it was knocked three times.

“It’s Husayn.”

He stood, and opened the door.
Husayn had a haggard, wide-eyed look, as if death itself had clawed at her from
the desert.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Someone’s here, says she’s your
sister.”

“What’s she look like?”

“Half-breed, like you. Pale.
Pregnant. Real, real upset.”

“Send her up.”

Husayn walked back down.

Taite put the gun in his belt. He’d
told her not to come unless it was urgent. Had something happened, or was she still
angry at being roomed with whores? She couldn’t stay here. There was no way to
get her to work from Aludra.

He went to the covered window and
peeked out. It was dark outside. At least she’d waited for dark.

He heard her huffing up the stairs
and ran back to the doorway.

Sweat pouring down her face, she
stumbled on the last step, and he caught her.

She was crying.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s
going on?”

They both sagged to the floor. He
held her as she sobbed and clutched at him.

“What happened? Did somebody do
something to you? Inaya?” If they’d touched her, if anyone had touched her—

“Raine is looking for you,” she
said.

“What?”

“He came to the brothel. I don’t
know how he found me. The mistress screamed at him, and he shot her. He shot
her in the head!”

“What happened?”

“He said he’d take you in pieces,
Tatite. He said… he said terrible things. I thought he’d cut me. I thought—”

“What did you say to him?” Taite
started looking around the room for what he could grab and run.

“I said I didn’t know where you
were. I swear, I said it.”

“Inaya,” Taite said gently. He took
her by her wrists and pulled her off him, looked into her red-rimmed eyes.
“Inaya, thank you for that. But, Inaya, you’ve led him here.” The sister he’d
known in Ras Tieg would never have been so careless. What had become of her?
Who had she become back in Ras Tieg, casting votes the way her husband told her
to, turning away from her own kind, damning her own parents? He could
understand her desire for protection. He could understand turning away from the
movement that had cost them everything, but where was the woman he remembered,
the one who could hack a com and retrofit a gun, the woman who had helped wash
and soothe their mother after the worst of the attacks?