Kameron Hurley - God's War

Kine looked her over. “Are you as desperately poor as you look? I know a good magician who can scrape you for cancers.”

“I’ve been worse,” Nyx said, and shut the hood. “Your bug cistern is in good shape. It’ll breed you enough bugs to power this thing back to the coast, even with the leak.”

But the leak meant she’d get to Faleen just a little bit slower. If there was one thing Nyx felt short on these days, it was time.

Nyx slid into the bakkie. Kine got behind the steering wheel. For a moment they sat in stuffy, uncomfortable silence. Then Kine turned down the window and stepped on the juice.

“What’s her name?” Kine asked, shifting pedals as they rolled back onto the road.

“Who?”

“I can smell her,” Kine said, tightening her hands on the steering wheel. Her hands had the brown, worn, sinewy look of old leather. Her lip curled in disdain.

“I’m working a note,” Nyx said. “What I do to bring it in isn’t your business.”

“A note for a deserter, or one of those dirty bounties you deal in? If you’re bringing in a deserter, where’s Tej?”

Tej, Nyx thought, and the shock of it, of hearing his name out loud, of thinking Tej, my dead partner , was a punch in the gut.

“I couldn’t get him back over the Chenjan border,” Nyx said. Another boy buried in the desert.

A clerk the color of honey had given Nyx a bel dame’s note for a boy named Arran nearly three months before, after he’d deserted his place at the front and sought refuge in Chenja. His officer had called in the bel dames because she believed he’d been exposed to a new Chenjan burst, a delayed viral vapor that hid out in the host for up to four months before triggering an airborne contagion. The contagion was capable of taking out half a city before the magicians could contain it. Nyx had gone into the bel dame office and been inoculated against the latest burst, so all she had to do was bleed on the boy to neutralize the contagion, then cut off his head and take him home. Even clean, the penalty for desertion was death. Boys either came home at forty or came home in a bag. No exceptions.

This was Nyx’s job.

Some days, it paid well.

So Nyx and Tej had tracked Arran. Arran had gone over the border into Chenja. That part was easy to figure out. Where in Chenja, though, that was harder. It took tracking down Jaksdijah so Hajjij first. Arran had been a house boy of Jaks’s mother, a coastal boy raised in the interior. Jaks was the last of his known, living kin. Nyx and Tej found Jaks boxing for bread at an underground fighting club thirty kilometers inside the Chenjan border. The mullahs didn’t like Chenjans fighting foreigners—which made Jaks’s fights illegal—but it paid well.

Tej and Nyx bided their time for a month, waiting for Arran to show up while their money ran out. Arran didn’t disappoint. Tej was on watch the night a hooded figure knocked on Jaks’s door. Just before dawn, Jaks and Arran were headed back to Nasheen.

Tej and Nyx followed.

But Tej hadn’t made it back.

“He was the only one of your partners I liked,” Kine said, and pursed her lips, probably to hold back words God wouldn’t permit her to say. Then, “You should partner with men more often.”

Nyx snorted.

They blew back out onto the road. The shocks in the bakkie were going out too, Nyx realized, leaking vital fluid all over the desert. She hoped Kine knew a good tissue mechanic at the coast.

“Where am I taking you?” Kine asked. Sand rolled across the pavement.

“Faleen.”

“A bit out of my way.”

Nyx let that one go and looked out the window, watching flat white desert turn to dunes. Kine didn’t like silence. Give her a long stretch of stillness and eventually she’d change the subject.

Kine was government now, one of the breeding techs who worked at the compounds on the coast. She had some kind of slick security clearance that went well with her hijab and lonely bed. Nyx saw her only when she was ferrying samples to and from the front—just another blood dealer, another organ stealer.

“A ship came into Faleen this week,” Kine said as she rolled up the window. Nyx saw the wide sleeve of her burnous come down, flashing a length of paler skin from wrist to elbow—dusty sand instead of sun dark. “If you’re looking for magicians to help you bring in this deserter, there are a whole mess of them gathering in Faleen. I hear even the lower sort are there, the sort who might—”

“Where from?”

“The magicians?”

“The ship.”

“Oh, yes. The ship is from New Kinaan.”

Colonists had been barred from Umayma for a thousand years. Nyx hadn’t even seen a ship in a decade. Umayma sat at the edge of everything; most of the sky was dark at night. All she ever saw moving up there were dead satellites and broken star carriers from the beginning of the world.

“I’ve corresponded with them for some time,” Kine said, “for my genetics work. They fight another of God’s wars out there in the dark, can you believe it?”

“Does the radio work?” Nyx asked. Knowing aliens were out there killing each other for God, too, just depressed her. She leaned forward to fiddle with the tube jutting out of the dashboard.

“No,” Kine said. She pinched her mouth. “How did you lose Tej?”

Nyx wasn’t sure she could answer that question herself, let alone give Kine a good answer.

“You have any weapons?” Nyx asked.

Kine’s face scrunched up like a date. “If you can’t tell me that, then tell me who’s tracking you.”

“You giving me the fourth inquisition?”

“Nyxnissa,” she said, in the same hard tone she used for quoting the Kitab.

Nyx dipped her head out the open window. The air was clearing up.

“Raine,” she said.

Kine’s hands tightened on the wheel. She shifted pedals. The bakkie rattled and belched and picked up speed. Dust and dead beetles roiled behind them.

“You’re doing black work, aren’t you?” Kine said. “One of your dirty bounties. I don’t like dealing with bounty hunters. Raine is the worst of them, and you’re no better, these days. I’ll drop you at the gates of Faleen, but no farther.”

Nyx nodded. The gate would be good. More might get Kine killed.

Raine would bring Nyx in if he had to cut up half of Nasheen to do it. Nyx had been a part of his team, once, and it had been a great way of picking up skills and paying off some magician-debts for having her body reconstituted. After a while, though, he’d started to treat her like just another dumb hunter, another body to be bloodied and buried. When she started selling out her womb on the black market, well, that had made the animosity mutual. He had good reason to track her down now. Reasons a lot less personal than cutting off his cock.

“Tej was a good boy,” Kine said, “You kill good men for a lost cause just like Raine.”

“Raine always got us back over the border.”

“Raine isn’t a bel dame. He’s a bounty hunter.”

“There’s not much difference.”

“God knows the difference.”

“Yeah, well, we all do it our own way.”

“Yes,” Kine said, and her hands tightened on the wheel. “We’re all trying to cure the war.”

Spoken like a true organic technician, Nyx thought.

“But there is a difference,” Kine said, turning to look at her again, hard and sober now. “Bel dames enforce God’s laws. They keep our boys at the front and our women honest. Bounty hunters just bring in petty thieves and women doing black work.”

Women like me, Nyx thought.

Her black market broker, Bashir so Saud, owned a cantina in Faleen. The cantina was first. Even on a botched delivery, Bashir owed her at least half what it was worth. If Nyx had taken the job in Faleen instead of through Bashir’s agents in Punjai, she’d have half her money now and wouldn’t be so hard up. As it was, her pockets were empty. The last of her currency had been eaten with Tej.