God's War (44 page)

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 dame 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.”

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.”

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 for 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.