Kameron Hurley - God's War

“Four. Four a month for a half-breed woman and her illegal kid. Come on, Nyx. It’s two minutes of your day.”

“Anneke will vote. Tell her you’ll buy her a big gun.”

“Think about how much of your team you’d lose. You work with more men than any other hunter.”

She packed the last of the bursts, and tied her bag closed. “I’ve gotta go,” she said.

“If they draft half-breed men today, they’ll take resident foreigners next,” Taite said, and his tone got wheedling. She hated it when he did that. “They’ll take Rhys.”

“I’ll be in Jameela for a few days,” she said. “Transit’s about a week turnaround. Rhys is in charge of the keg, but you’ll need to back him up if there’s security trouble. Khos has a transmission for Rhys to sort out. You’ll need to help him. And finish hacking into Raine’s com.”

“You driving all the way to the coast?”

“Yeah. You’ll need to take a local caravan if you have to get out.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out three of the notes she’d pawned off the body. “You get that to your sister. Tell her if we make a bag on this note I’ll get her kid inoculated.” Nasheen didn’t inoculate foreign kids for free.

“You’ll vote?”

“Don’t push me.”

Nyx went out into the keg. Rhys was sitting at the front desk doing paperwork, bleeding bugs onto greasy pages.

“You have the keg,” she said. “I’ll be back in about a week.”

He glanced up. Looked at her with his dark eyes. She remembered listening to him pray, back at the palace. Had she ever heard him give a salaat that included personal prayers? They’d worked together for six years, and for six years she’d managed to be in some other room or smoking out on the street or patching together a bakkie every time he prayed. What did he pray for, all those times she wasn’t listening?

“Nyx?” he said.

God, she wouldn’t mind standing there a while longer while he looked.

She hated that.

Nyx dropped her bag, and splashed her face with water from the ablution bowl near the door.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Never better.”

Her whole body ached. She hadn’t slept well on the train, and she’d had dreams about that old boxing match in Faleen—Jaks the outrider and stocky-legged Husayn bashing each other’s head in, blood soaking into the organic matting of the ring, the whole first row of spectators covered in blood and saliva, their faces animated, jubilant. She had dreamed of her womb, a perfect heart, cut up on a butcher’s block somewhere between Punjai and Faleen.

“Make a couple of calls to some people you know in the Chenjan districts. Just make sure Nikodem’s not there.”

“I will.”

“And keep everybody on high security. The bel dames might move on you here. Not likely, but it’s possible. Council can’t find its own ass some days, and it’ll take them a long time to agree on whether or not we’re worth killing. Hopefully we’ll be in Chenja by then and they won’t touch us. Not even bel dames like running the border. Where’s Anneke?”

“Getting lunch.”

“Keep her on point this afternoon. And you double-lock the doors and set up an organics net. Taite and I were burned out of our first office before you came on board. I don’t want to take any chances.”

Nyx picked up her bag and pushed out the door and onto the hot, reeking street. She rolled under the bakkie and checked it for bugs, bursts, and regular explosives. The organic guts surrounding the hoses and wires were clear, and the pulse was good. She opened up the trunk to make sure Khos hadn’t left any more bodies in there. She saw nothing but some bloody blankets and toolkits, but she knew Anneke better than that. She reached into the trunk and pushed back the blankets. Anneke had two long rectangular boxes shoved in the back, tied with brown paper. Regular, not organic. Nyx shook her head and threw the blanket back over them. She might end up needing the guns anyway, and if Anneke had forgotten about them, it might make her sweat a little knowing they weren’t in her hot little hands.

She tried to open the passenger side door. Jammed. She tossed her bag in through the window. She needed to get Anneke to fix that.

Nyx hopped in, kicked up the engine, and headed east, to Jameela. To the sea.

To the bloody fucking sea.

Nyx blew out of Punjai and hit the radio a couple times with her palm, but all she got was misty blue static.

It was going to be a long ride.

She spent the night in the bakkie after making good time; she got about halfway to Mushtallah. She passed the sand-swallowed ruins of old cities, now no more than irregular bulges in the desert, marked only by the tall rusted poles of the cities’ contagion sensors. Rogue swarms and viral bugs leaking in from the north had blighted whole cities back in the old days. There were still wild places in the Khairian wasteland, and the border cities still had working contagion sensors that warned the unfiltered inside when the mutant monsters of the red desert wandered too far south or some sand-crazed magician who had gone out there searching for her soul came back with half her head missing, muttering in tongues. Most magicians stayed concentrated in the big cities to keep them clean of virulent swarms. The borderlands just limped along, mostly on their own. There was homesteading to be done for the poor and desperate, still, in the north and south and throughout Ras Tieg and Heidia and Druce. Three thousand years old, and Umayma was still an untamed place.

Nyx had kept as far off the road as she could without getting stuck in the sand and sat out a benign locust swarm just before dawn. Once it passed she was back on the road, out past Mushtallah and the central cities, where the gas lamps lit up every window. She landed another night on the road, then climbed over the low mountains that divided the coast from the interior.

As she came up over the other side, the terrain began to change. Sand gave way to choked crabgrass. The desert bled to scrubland, then long-needled pine trees, then tall oak hybrids with leaves the size of Nyx’s head, low ferns with thorns, tangles of wild roses, snake maples, amber ticklers, patches of low-spring wildflowers. The kinds of bugs changed, too. Fewer beetles and roaches; more ladybugs and spider mites and mayflies. There were less hospitable bugs too, the farther she got from the interior: giant plate-size cicadas and acid-spraying chiggers as long as her arm.

Nyx found it all pretty claustrophobic. The trees were so enormous they blocked the sky, the suns. She couldn’t see beyond the turns of the road. She checked her mirrors more often.

She came out of the mountains and into rolling fields of red-tipped wheat, saw the broad dirt runs for the kept dogs. Farmsteads dotted the landscape. Swarms of locusts, red flies, and ladybugs mobbed the fields, tailored to devour the less friendly bugs and fungi that ruined the staples.

Nyx found a motel that night at the Amber Stalk crossroads, named after some dead magician who’d saved the valley from mutant cicadas. There was a living plaque up under the road marker. Nyx figured she’d saved a lot more lives than he had, but nobody had ever named anything after her. She wondered how spectacular your death had to be to come out the other side with a plaque.

She parked her bakkie out front alongside flatbeds and rickshaws and a cart hitched to the front end of a converted bakkie. The bakkie had smoky black patches on its semi-organic exterior; the first signs of sun-sickness. Along the edges of the parking lot, she saw a head-size mutant flower chafer scuttling back into the brush. If she had to deal with giant bugs out here, she preferred benign ones like the chafers.