Kameron Hurley - God's War

“You nervous?” he asked.

“I’m never nervous.”

“Of course not,” he said. “This is Petal Dancing .”

“Oh, God, this isn’t something soft, is it?”

“Not everything that’s beautiful is weak.”

“No, it just makes you that way.”

He smiled. “We disagree, then.”

“We do,” she said.

Nyx cupped her glass in both hands. Rhys began to read, in that voice that could calm her during the worst days—days when bugs got into the money bin and bodies piled up in the freezer like cheap popsicles. Time stretched. His accent had gotten better since she’d started asking him to read out loud. It had been a couple years now, she supposed. She insisted he read in Nasheenian, not so much to improve the accent but because hearing him speak Chenjan—hearing him speak the same language as the people she’d spent two years throwing bursts at on the front felt obscene, and there wasn’t much anymore that made her feel so fucked up down to her bones.

After a time, Nyx stopped her fidgeting. She let herself forget some of the worst of the fear. Another announcement came on over the station radio. The delay had been extended.

She finished her drink.

They boarded the train two hours later and found their way to a private first-class cabin whose bench seats were nonetheless so close that if they sat directly across from each other, their knees touched. They didn’t sit that way.

Rhys opened his copy of the Kitab, and Nyx fixed herself at the window and watched the Nasheenian desert roll past them in a blur of umber brown and violet blue. The sky was a pale amethyst today, bruised purple along the western horizon, the direction of the front.

“How fast do you think these go?” she asked.

“A hundred, hundred and twenty kilometers an hour,” Rhys said.

“Huh,” Nyx said. She wasn’t going to argue. “You know anything about courts and royalty?” she said.

He did not raise his eyes from the Kitab. “I thought bel dames held intimate soirees with queens and politicians all the time. You should be an old hand at this.”

“We don’t flirt and whore ourselves out like dancers,” she said. He flinched. Why did she always want to twist the knife with him?

“Just make it look good, all right? It’s bad enough you’re Chenjan.”

“I didn’t ask to go along. If you take offense at the—”

“It’s your fucking accent I can’t stand.” Something roiled up in her, something old and twisted. She hated it even as the words slipped out. She pressed her fist to her belly.

He shut his book and stood. “Excuse me.”

“Sit down.”

“I signed an employment contract with you,” he snapped. “You did not obtain a writ of sale. I’ll be in the dining car.” He rolled open the door. It banged behind him.

Nyx rubbed at her face. The worst of her troubles always started with what came out of her mouth.

She heard a knock at the cabin door. She stood and slid it open, trying to come up with something that sounded nice but not like an apology.

But it was not Rhys at the door. A young woman wearing a blue Transit Authority uniform offered her a complimentary newsroll.

The scrolling text that slid across the translucent projection of the newsrolls was even tougher to read than static text, but Nyx figured Rhys would want to read it when he got back. An offering. She could look at the pictures. Her teachers at the state schools had called her dead dumb because she got all her letters backward. Some of the better newsreel companies had an audio option, but this wasn’t one of them.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the roll.

She sat back down, but before she twisted the news back into its thumbnail-size roll, she looked over the projection. Bundled between two articles about border skirmishes near Aludra was a picture of the gates of Faleen. The nose of a star carrier reared up behind them.

Nyx stared at the carrier a long time. She’d seen that carrier before. She tried to find an article with it, but all she noted was a short blurb before the picture scrolled over to the next image of three beaming young boys heading for the front.

Star carriers didn’t get lost in Faleen twice, and even if it was a different carrier than the one she’d seen the last time she was there, it was the same make as the last one. Aliens interested in boxers were back in Nasheen. What the hell was up with that?

Nyx spent a long while staring at the scrolling pictures, but the image of Faleen didn’t pop up again.

What did an off-world carrier want in Faleen? What did the queen want with her in Mushtallah? Being a bel dame had taught her that there were no coincidences, only cause and effect.

She was going to need another drink.

Rhys could recite the Kitab by heart, but he never quoted it at Nyx.

He sat in the dining car reading for hours, yet no one came to wait on him. He even stayed long enough for the wait staff changeover. Three women gave him openly hostile stares as they passed his table. A Transit Authority agent asked to see his papers. The few times he’d dared to go off on his own outside the Chenjan district since joining Nyx’s team, he’d been beaten up, cut, and much worse. He didn’t travel alone anymore. Much as he hated it, knowing Nyx was just two cars away was somewhat comforting, though her sharp tongue was not.

What finally drove him back to the cabin was the conductor’s announcement that they were nearing Mushtallah and were about to go through customs. Customs agents were as violent with Chenjan men as security agents and order keepers.

Rhys put his things away and passed between cars. The stricken Nasheenian landscape rolled by. The world outside did not look so different from Chenja here: There were fewer minarets, and some of the older, mostly untouched villages were tiled in ceramic and still bore huge gold-gilt inscriptions from the Kitab above the lintels to all of their village gates, groceries, and the wealthier houses. He saw old contagion sensors sticking up from the desert, half buried, some of them with the red lights at their bulbous tips still blinking. There were fewer old cities in the Chenjan interior. The oldest relics, Rhys supposed, would be farther north, in the Khairian wasteland, where the first world had been created and abandoned. Out here, though, was the most he had seen of old-world Nasheen. He had never been to Mushtallah.

Rhys knocked at the compartment door. As Nyx pulled it open, a passing member of the Transit Authority paused in the hall at the sight of him and asked Nyx if Rhys was bothering her.

“It’s all right,” Nyx said. “He’s mine.” The Transit Authority agent gave them both a good long look before moving on again.

Rhys shut the door.

“Here, I kept the news for you,” Nyx said. She tossed him a newsroll. He pocketed it. She had the red letter in her hands again. He pretended not to notice. He had spent six years with her—five and a half longer than he’d expected. She was supposed to be his way out of the boxing gym and on to more lucrative contracts with universities and First Families. But even with an employer on his résumé, his middling talent was not great enough to make up for his ethnicity.

Rhys glanced out the window and decided it was almost thirteen in the afternoon, about time for noon prayer. He rolled out his prayer rug. Nyx went off to find the bathroom.

Despite—or because of—her prison record, Nyx had a good reputation with just about every border agent inside Nasheen. Rhys had crossed into enough cities with her to know. During his more cynical moments, Rhys wondered if she got through customs so easily because she’d slept with all of the agents. It had taken him some time to realize just how terrible Nasheen’s problem with same-sex relations had become. Though sex between two men was not only discouraged, but illegal, what passed for sex between women was actively celebrated, and Nyx used sex as freely and easily as any other tool on her baldric. What women found appealing about her, he could not say. She was coarse and foul-mouthed and godless. She was also the only woman who would employ him.