Kameron Hurley - God's War

Inside the motel, she splurged on good food and a bath. The only upside to coming out to the coast was all the cheap food and water.

Nyx didn’t linger long in the bath. She just scrubbed herself off and rubbed at old wounds that had started biting and aching as the weather cooled. It was colder on the coast.

She missed the desert.

When she crawled into bed, her sheets weren’t full of sand.

She couldn’t sleep.

Nyx grabbed her pillow and moved to the floor. She lay there for a couple of hours staring at the shiny green roaches scuttling along the ceiling, half the size of the ones in the desert and the wrong color. A couple took flight, landing on her arms and her face. She flicked them away.

There was a call box downstairs, but she had no one to call. If she called Kine, it was likely her sister would tell her not to come. If she called the keg, she could make small talk with Taite or Anneke about how they were handling security, but she’d be repeating herself, and they’d see through it. They’d see some kind of weakness. Maybe fear.

Nyx got up and went to the bar.

The motel had an “honor” bar, the kind with liquor bottles affixed to the wall upside down and a little book to record how many shots you’d pulled so they could bill you for them later. Nyx didn’t intend on taking shots.

Nyx pulled out her dagger, pried a bottle of whiskey from the wall, and went out and sat on the front porch. The sky was big, and the stars were the clearest she’d seen since she was a kid in Mushirah. She drank, leaned back in the chair, and tried reading the constellations. Tej had been good at that.

Tej. A lifetime ago. Been a long time since she’d thought of him too. She touched her baldric absently. Blood and death and aliens—it all went back to that night in Faleen.

A noise from the parking lot drew her attention. She went still. The night was clear, but the big bloody moons were at the far end of their orbit, meaning they looked about the size of her thumbnail in the night sky. Ten years from now, they would look about three times the size of the sun.

But that didn’t help her out much tonight.

The figure was dawdling next to Nyx’s bakkie. Nyx had parked close to the motel so she could keep an eye on it. The figure crouched for a long while, then rose and moved off. She thought it might be some kind of giant leaf insect, but as Nyx watched, the figure shrank, dwindled. She heard a sneeze, and then a white bird was flapping off toward the road.

Nyx swore.

She clutched the bottle and went back to her room and bolted herself in. She sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands shook.

Bloody sisters. Bloody Rasheeda .

Nyx took a deep breath, drank more. Find your nerves, woman, she thought. Find your damn nerves. It took four of them to take you out last time.

But they might not be so nice this time.

She closed her eyes and tried to calm down. It was possible they’d only sent Rasheeda. She could deal with Rasheeda. But not Dahab. Not Fatima. Not all of them together. Not again.

Nyx opaqued the windows.

The room was dark.

She could not sleep.

She pulled her dagger from the sheath on her thigh, picked up the bottle with her other hand, and crept downstairs. She went back to the call box and dialed the pattern for the keg. She wedged herself into a corner underneath it.

The line buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.

Pick up, she thought. Pick up. Nyx closed her eyes. She was on her own out here. It would take four of them to get her. Fuck, she didn’t need a fucking team, what kind of catshit was this?

“Peace be unto you.”

Nyx opened her eyes.

Rhys’s voice.

Nyx wet her mouth again with the whiskey, found some words. “You read to me?” she asked.

A long pause. She thought maybe she’d lost the connection.

“Are you drunk?” he asked.

“Rasheeda’s here,” Nyx said.

Another pause. She heard him moving around. He must have come from bed and into her office, where the call box was.

“Should I send someone?”

“Can you just read?”

“All I’ve got is the poetry.”

“Fine.”

He sighed. He was always sighing at her, making faces at her, disapproving, her pious Chenjan. “Do you know what time it is?”

She didn’t answer.

“How drunk are you?”

“Drunk enough to ask,” she said.

Rhys read to her for a long time.

The fear started to bleed away. It was like loosening up a garroting wire pulled taut. She clutched the transceiver to her ear as if it, too, were a weapon, as effective as the dagger. But, after a while, her death grip eased up. She realized her hand hurt.

Sometime later, Rhys’s voice began to soften, grow quiet. Finally he said, “I’m going to bed, Nyx.”

“All right.”

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“You can take Rasheeda.”

“I know.” She wanted to ask him what he prayed for.

She hung up.

Nyx took a last pull from the bottle, returned it to the bar, and held out the rest of the night in her room with the door bolted. She slept in front of it.

The next morning, honey-headed hungover, Nyx made an inspection of the bakkie and turned up an ignition burst and a cut brake line. It looked like Rasheeda had tried to disable the main hose connecting the pedal mechanisms to the cistern as well but had only nicked it, cutting a secondary hose instead. Some dead beetles and bug juice pooled beneath the bakkie, but the severed organic artery cushioning the line had already scabbed over. She knew how to properly fuck up a bakkie without leaving behind any obvious traces. Rasheeda hadn’t wanted to stop Nyx, just announce herself and slow Nyx down.

Nyx disarmed the ignition burst. She opened the trunk and took out one of the toolkits. She patched the leak, cut out and sewed in a new brake hose, and got back onto the road.

This time, she kept an eye on the road behind her the whole way.

She stopped at a dusty station just past a couple of farmsteads at the foot of the coastal hills and filled up on bug juice. Dead and dying bugs—some of them the size of small dogs—littered the periphery, wallowing in a citronand-cinnamon smelling mixture of pesticide and repellent the owner had put down to protect the station.

The woman who popped open her tank was a soft, fleshy coastal type with a plump mouth.

“You come in from the desert?” she asked.

Nyx wondered where else there was to come in from. As the woman pumped the feed into the tank, Nyx gazed out at the road. She saw a black bakkie crawling around a bend in the road, coming in from the direction of the motel. Following her.

It didn’t parse. Rasheeda was a shifter—she didn’t need to send a bakkie after Nyx. She would have followed in bird form. So who the fuck were these people?

Nyx turned her face away, but noted the movement of the bakkie in the station windows. The bakkie slowed as it passed the station, then sped up again. Nyx saw three figures. She slumped in her seat, wondered if they’d open fire.

But the bakkie sped on. She looked after it.

“Friends of yours?” the attendant asked. She capped the tank.

“I hope not,” Nyx said. She leaned over, opened her pack, and rolled a few bursts onto the passenger seat. Just in case.

She paid the woman and then got back onto the road.

Three kilometers on, she saw the bakkie parked at the side of the road.

Waiting.

Nyx switched pedals, kicked the bakkie a little faster. The other bakkie turned out onto the road after her.

Nyx didn’t know the coast well, and unlike the cities, the place was wide open, no cover. About all the cover she had were the hills, and some woods, if she could find them. She switched pedals again, reached for the clutch. She hadn’t had to use the clutch in a long time. She wondered if it still worked.