Kameron Hurley - God's War

“He has someone doing recon in Chenja. But he was just in Faleen talking with Yah Tayyib.”

Yah Tayyib. Yeah, it was where she would have gone first too, if the old man would have seen her.

Rhys’s praying died off, and he walked in, buttoned down as ever, though the attic was stifling. He’d cut his hair again, shaved himself nearly bald. She hated that.

“She isn’t in any Chenjan districts I have contacts in,” Rhys said. “All they know is that a lot of bel dames are looking for an off-worlder.”

“Bel dames? Not bounty hunters or mercenaries?”

“Definitely bel dames.”

So bel dames were looking for Nikodem. And if they were looking for Nikodem, it meant they didn’t know where she was either. Were they trying to make sure Nyx didn’t get to her first? Why? To keep Nikodem away from the queen?

“How about that transmission on our dead bounty hunter? Did you decode that?” Nyx asked.

“It’s a transmission from someone who says they’re on the bel dame council,” Rhys said. He sat on the far side of the divan from Nyx. “They were asking him to drop the note on Nikodem in exchange for immunity. They knew he was smuggling out boys to Heidia and were threatening to cut off his head and turn him in unless he dropped out.”

Khos grunted.

“Any idea which bel dame?” Nyx asked.

“No,” Rhys said. “Taite ran it through our voice recognition reel and didn’t come up with any matches.”

Nyx raised her brows. “We should have every working bel dame’s signature on that reel.”

“Well, it was somebody from the actual council, not just a girl. Maybe she’s too old to be on the reel?”

“She’d have to be real fucking old not to be on that reel—or pretty new. It took some skill to pinch that.”

“Hopefully you didn’t pay too much for it, then,” Rhys said.

“I talked to Husayn,” Nyx said, before he got cheeky. “No off-worlder has been asking about boxers or about the magicians in Faleen.” She paused a minute and looked them all over. “She did say she’s losing some boxers to a big ring in Chenja.”

“You think Nikodem might be around boxers?” Taite asked.

“Either the Chenjans took her, with help from our magicians, or she went on her own to go sell something,” Nyx said. “In any case, the boxing is a good place to start. It’s something she was interested in last time, and if she’s got as much of a thing for violence as her sisters say she does, yeah, I’d start with Chenjan boxing.”

“If Raine’s doing recon in Chenja, he might have the same idea,” Taite said.

“We need to do better than Raine,” Nyx said. And Nasheen wasn’t exactly a friendly place to be right now. Not that Chenja would be an improvement, but she liked staying on the move, staying one step ahead of everyone. “I want to move operations to Chenja. Anneke, the bakkie is for shit, and you and I need to work on it tonight.”

“I don’t want to go into Chenja,” Khos said.

“Then don’t. I’ll get another shifter.”

“Nyx—”

A low, steady whine started outside. Fucking burst sirens.

Nyx raised her voice and shifted on the divan, turning back to Khos. “We already talked about this. You go or you don’t. We’re moving the day after tomorrow. Dawn prayer.” She was done with all the sniveling. They were out of time for that.

Khos snorted and hunched in his chair.

The whump-whump of the anti-burst guns shook the building. A pause. Another thump.

Nyx tried to measure Rhys’s reaction, but he was staring off into the air.

“Taite, I’ll need you to stay here and work the com, keep an ear on what’s going on in Nasheen. All right?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Does Husayn play cards?”

The siren started to mute out, then died.

Clear.

“No, but she can teach you to box,” Nyx said, looking pointedly at Rhys. He didn’t react, but Taite made a face at her. The idea of Taite doing anything involving vigorous physical movement was a running joke.

“Anneke,” Nyx said, “let’s go get that bakkie running properly. We’ll need to give it new paint and put on the new tags. Rhys?”

He looked over at her. “Yes?”

“You here?”

“I’m here,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “We’ll need you. I want to talk to you about some things.”

Nyx pushed Khos and Taite away from the com and laid out the papers she’d taken from Kine’s office. She motioned Rhys over. He walked up next to her. She opened her mouth to say something stupid about him, about gravy or prayer wheels or picnicking on the graves of the dead, but she realized she was too tired, and all she really wanted to say was that she’d missed him and his buttoned-up coat.

“When I went over to Kine’s, I saw that they’d gone through her papers looking for something,” Nyx said. “What they didn’t know is that she doesn’t keep her private papers in plain view, not when it has to do with her work in the compounds.”

“So what is this?” Rhys asked, paging through the ciphered sheets.

“Her private papers. I figured you and Taite could decipher them and see what my bel dame sisters wanted from her. It could have been a hit on Kine just to get to me, but… well, they knew Kine and I weren’t close.”

“They aren’t all ciphered,” he said, pulling out a bound record book. “Looks like compound records. I’d have to know more about the technology they’re using.”

“Taite can look that up. You’ll try?”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” Nyx made to move away from the com. They had a tight deadline, and she already had the litany in her head: papers, bakkie, call the contagion center, go to the bank, pick up gear and supplies.

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry about Kine.”

“Me too,” she said. She saw the body again when she blinked: the sightless eyes, the rusty water, the white feather. “I’m going to go help Anneke with the bakkie.”

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m a dead man in Chenja.”

Something inside of her hurt, something she kept trying to dull with sen and whiskey. She pressed her fist to her gut.

“We’ll be all right. Nobody out there knows you anymore. I can get you over the border and back.” When she said it out loud, she almost believed it.

The way you got Tej over the border?

Rhys pursed his mouth and went back to the papers.

Nyx took Anneke by the collar, and the two of them went down into the garage and looked over the bakkie.

“Who the hell did you have go over this?” Anneke asked. She unshuttered the overhead light. The worms in the glass were dying, and the light was bad.

“Local mechanic in Jameela.”

“I can heal up the front end, maybe replace the bumper if you want to spend the cash.”

Anneke wrenched at the hood. It hissed open. She rolled up the long sleeves of her tunic, showing off the jagged black lines of her prison tattoos, the most prominent of which was a shrieking parrot clutching a bloody heart. She leaned in. She swore. “Shit, how’d you get this back here? You need a new cistern. And your brake line is leaking. Fuck, that coagulant stinks. Who cut this line? You sewed it up twice.”

“Rasheeda. The tissue mechanic patched it the second time. I didn’t have the cash to replace it.”

Anneke sighed and straightened. “You should just get a new bakkie, boss. A proper one with a real flatbed instead of a trunk, one of those ones with the reinforced cistern.”

“Can’t afford it.”

“Can’t afford the repairs neither.”

Nyx handed her a portable light. “Lucky for me, my labor’s cheap.”

Anneke grinned. “Yeah, I know. I get the receipts.”