Infidel (45 page)

Nyx walked up through second class and found it was less than half full, and every passenger a neat little Tirhani. She convinced a suspicious porter that all the privies were full in second and she’d piss on the floor if she didn’t get by.
 

She knocked on Rhys and Yah Tayyib’s compartment door.
 

“Come,” Rhys said, in Tirhani.
 

Nyx rolled the door open.
 

Rhys was alone, sitting against the window with a tattered book in his ugly hands. He wore trousers, and she couldn’t help but look at the outline of his long legs. Outside, the verdant Tirhani jungle whooshed past: huge amber trees and ropey vines as wide as her arm. A giant suckered insect of some kind thudded on the window, then flew off.
 

“Everything all right?” he asked.
 

“Yeah,” she said, rolling the door closed behind her. “Just kinda crowded back there. Wanted some air.”

He closed the book. She’d assumed it was the Kitab, but no, it was some poetry book.
 

She sat across from him, near the door.
 

“Hungry?” she asked.
 

“No.” He opened the book again.
 

She fidgeted. They had packed a few weapons in the cases at their feet, but mostly the cases were full of bugs. Useful things Yah Tayyib and Rhys said might help secure a safe house in Beh Ayin.
 

“Thanks for coming,” she said, lamely. It felt stupid the moment she said it.
 

“I’m not doing this for you,” he said. “I’m doing this for my wife.”
 

“Right. I know. I—” she stopped. Chewed on her words. This was always where she pissed people off. It wasn’t a great time to do that. He wore his pistols at his hips again. His hair had started to grow out. Her gaze moved across his clear, pretty face, the broad shoulders, slender chest, and settled there on the ugly hands. The too-big, short-fingered stevedore’s hands. Dead man’s hands.
 

She pulled her gaze away. “You call that woman you know out here? The one you told me about?”

“Tasyin doesn’t know where they’re staying. But she did infer that they’re coming to an agreement soon. A day or two. Not much more. We’ll have to work fast. If they get the weapon… I don’t know.”

“Maybe they’ll sell it to Nasheen and Chenja at the same time. Save us some trouble.”
 

Rhys shook his head. “Still doesn’t take care of the coup.”

“No. That one’s up to us, whether or not they make the deal.”
 

They sat in silence a good while longer.
 

“Tayyib go out for food?”

“Privy. The train makes him sick.”

“Hrm,” Nyx said. She sighed and stood. “Well, that’s enough air, I guess.”
 

“Nyx?”
 

“Yeah?”
 

“Make me a promise.”

Nyx hesitated. Felt herself fidgeting again. Fuck, what was wrong with her? “Sure,” she said, “if I can.”
 

“I need you to promise that no matter what happens, you won’t look for me. You won’t come for me.”
 

“You think I would?”

“If you needed me. The way you needed me this time.”

“Rhys-”

“I want your oath, Nyx. I want a bel dame blood oath that when I leave here you won’t look for me again.”
 

Give it to him, she thought. You owe him that.
 

“I do this and we’re even,” she said.
 

He didn’t answer.
 

Nyx pulled the dagger at her hip. It was small enough that it hadn’t raised too many eyebrows on the train. She made a smooth cut across her thumb. Blood welled up. She stood, reached out and pressed her bloody thumb to his forehead, left a smear of red behind.
 

“I swear I won’t come for you. By God, even. You want my bloody print on paper? You want witnesses? Want me to wait for Tayyib?”

“No,” he said. He kept his dark eyes locked with hers while he wiped the blood from his forehead with his sleeve.
 

“Good enough?” she said.
 

“Good enough,” he said, and went back to his book.
 

Nyx grit her teeth. “That’s it? The best you’ve got?”
 

He didn’t answer.
 

“Why did you come, Rhys? Why go to all the trouble?”

“I told you. My wife asked me.”

“Fine.”
 

He closed the book, raised his head. “What did you expect me to say, Nyx?”
 

“That you missed it. All of it. Not the worst parts maybe, but the good parts. If you didn’t, you’d be back there with her instead of me.”
 

She rolled open the door and stepped into the hall.
Fuck him and his—

Yah Tayyib stepped out of the privy in front of her. She sighed and made to push past him.
 

“Didn’t go as well as you hoped?” Yah Tayyib said. She wanted to punch the smirk off his tattered face.
 

The train suddenly spasmed. Nyx lost her footing and jerked forward, smack into Yah Tayyib. He flew back. The whole train juddered. Screams.
 

Then Nyx was tumbling. Loud voices. More screaming. Noise. Darkness.
 

The world stopped moving.
 

Nyx’s stomach heaved. She vomited.
 

She was tangled with a crush of others. When she put out her hands, she found bare earth. The stink of her own vomit made her move. Push through the debris.
 

Nyx scrambled for a twisting sliver of light among the wreckage and slithered free. Her head spun. She clambered up on top of the twisted car and stared out at the jungle. Her hands and knees were scraped and bloody. She turned and looked behind her.
 

The first class car had split open on the track. She staggered off the car and back toward the rest of the wreckage. Bodies littered the jungle floor. The car had split open and let them tumble down the slight rise of the track and into the jungle. Beyond the strip around the tracks, the free contaminated world buzzed and whirred.
 

She crawled over the wreckage, onto the track. Most of the rear of the train had tumbled off, but nothing had broken open. Most folks would probably be alive. The front half was in worse shape. Much worse. The front three cars had carved out a long swath of jungle ahead of them.
 

“Nyx!”
 

She turned. Yah Tayyib was upright. Blood streamed from his face.
 

“Tayyib? I need to find Rhys!”
 

Yah Tayyib started climbing toward her. Other passengers began to move and moan. Nyx pushed past a few as they staggered around looking for belongings. A high, keening cry cut the air. Then another and another as the survivors picked through the corpses.
 

“What of Suha and Eshe?” Yah Tayyib asked as he came up next to her. She climbed on top of the shattered hull of the overturned first class cabin and started pressing her face to all the opaqued windows.

“They’re at the back. They’ll find us,” she said. “No damage back there.”
 

The porters were calling people together to comb the wreckage.
 

Nyx crawled across broken windows and twisted metal. Bug swarms were gathering above them.
 

“We need to move soon,” Yah Tayyib said, staring at the swarms.
 

“Where?” Nyx said. “Into the jungle?”

“We’re only a few kilometers from Beh Ayin. It’s dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as staying here.”
 

“Nyx?”

Rhys’s voice.
 

She looked down the pitch of the tracks. He stood straight in his tattered coat. He was missing a boot, and she saw his hands were scratched and bloody.
 

She crawled down from the wreckage and walked toward him.
 

“Yah Tayyib’s right,” Rhys said. “We need to move. The bugs are going to pick this place clean.”
 

They found Suha and Eshe bruised and shaken, but alive. It took another half hour to recover their bags and get Rhys some new boots off a corpse. By then, the swarms had darkened the sky.
 

“Come, come,” Yah Tayyib said.
 

“Where do you think you’re going?” one of the porters called. The porter had gathered a few dozen survivors in the ruins of the train. More were climbing along the rear of the train, pulling people from the cars.
 

Nyx didn’t even look back at him. She handed Eshe a jar of unguent. “You slather yourself in that. It’s a long hike. Won’t be pleasant.”

Yah Tayyib looked back up at the sky as they pushed into the jungle.
 

“They’re dead, ain’t they?” Suha said.
 

“Without a half-dozen magicians?” Yah Tayyib said. “Yes.” He led the way deeper into the contaminated wilderness.
 

37.

W
ithin an hour, cysts had appeared in the warm, moist crevices of Rhys’s armpits, the kink of his elbow, the soft flesh behind his ear. He could convince some of them to burst and expire through will alone, but the rest he cut out. It always hurt worse if you let the little ticks and midges grow and split open on their own.
 

Yah Tayyib kept away the worst of the bugs—the hulking, skittering shapes that paced them as they walked along the tracks. They had moved back onto the train tracks after they cleared the wreck. They moved steadily east now in the faltering daylight. Getting caught out in the jungle overnight wasn’t… promising. The bugs out here were far too big and far too wild for Rhys to control. He felt them, yes, though not as keenly as Yah Tayyib felt them. Every few minutes, he was able to call in a dragonfly swarm to eat the lesser biting bugs that plagued them—the ones Yah Tayyib did not have the stamina to bother with.
 

Rhys brought up the rear of their little processional. Suha walked ahead of him, hands moving to her pistols every time something in the undergrowth shuddered and hissed. He didn’t bother telling her that the bugs would be too fast and too well-armored to kill with regular bullets. They had few enough bullets as it was to go bouncing them off mutant scarabs and horned beetles that likely weighed a hundred kilos.
 

Ahead, Yah Tayyib paused. Rhys saw a large, dark shape moving along the tracks ahead.
 

“You want me to shoot it?” Eshe asked.

“Low on ammo,” Suha said. “Save it for when we need it.”
 

When. Not if. Rhys appreciated her sense of the inevitable.
 

Nyx pushed up next to Yah Tayyib. Rhys moved next to her to get a better look.
 

“What the fuck is that?” Nyx said.
 

It was a centipede, six meters long, gnawing on some dead creature run over by the last train that had come through. The centipede’s head was as big as Rhys’s—the torso about matched Eshe’s in breadth.
 

As Rhys watched, it lifted its giant head from its meal and turned its antennae toward them.
 

“Please tell me I can shoot it,” Eshe said.
 

“Save the bullets,” Nyx said. “Tayyib?”

Yah Tayyib shook his head. “It’s not responding. They’re very wild out here. Very contaminated. Not everything responds.”
 

Nyx looked back at Rhys. She had fished a hijab out of the wreckage, and wore it pulled forward to get some relief from the sun pounding down on her uncovered face.
 

“Any ideas?” she asked.

“Eshe has a good one,” Rhys said. “It’s not as well-armored as the beetles. But then, the bullets might just antagonize it.”
 

“If it’s angry, it will charge,” Yah Tayyib said. “Are you keen on wrestling with a giant centipede?”

“It would be a first,” Nyx said.
 

Rhys snorted. He didn’t think it was a laugh until it came out that way. Nyx looked surprised, raised a brow.
 

“You want to help?” she asked.
 

He shook his head. “You’re on your own.”
 

“Maybe we can just wait,” Eshe said. “Or go around?”

“Fuck that,” Suha said. She pulled her pistols. “Fine. Let’s do it.”
 

Nyx raised her scattergun, and the two of them stepped up in front of Yah Tayyib. Rhys shook his head and stepped up with them.
 

“You game, gravy?” Nyx said.
 

“Somebody here actually needs to hit something,” he said.