Kameron Hurley - God's War

“At least we know you’re a good shot.”

“Naw, if I was a good shot you’d have died in Faleen, proper.”

“I hired you anyway.”

“Bad judge of character.”

“I know.”

“Huh.” Anneke moved to the back of the garage and pulled out a giant needle, some hoses, and a pair of clippers from the supply cabinet. She had to stand on a box to reach it. “You think you can get the boys back over the border?”

“Raine did.”

“Raine had a lot of contacts.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Hand me some clips and some lube,” Anneke said.

Nyx handed them over, and Anneke disappeared under the hood. Nyx heard the wet slurping of organic tissue as Anneke slid her hands among the guts.

“Why’d you keep running with Raine, after?”

“After what? The thing with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Eh,” Anneke said. “I’ve seen him do worse.”

Anneke reappeared, poked her head around the hood to look at Nyx. She was covered in lube and bakkie bile up to her elbows. “We won’t be able to get Rhys back over the border.”

“Don’t be so dry.”

“I know your count. You never got a guy back over the border.”

“I’ll get Rhys back over.”

“Yeah. Huh.” Anneke leaned back into the guts of the bakkie.

“I’ll get him over.”

“Doesn’t sound like it’s me you’re trying to convince. Hey, I get some cigars for doing this, or what?”

“Just remember to fix the window,” Nyx said. She set the new tags for the bakkie on the front seat. “And put the tags on. I’m going to go look into getting a cistern.”

“Hey, Nyx?”

“Yeah.”

She straightened. “I’ve seen Raine do a lot worse.”

“Me too,” Nyx said.

“So how are you getting us across the border this time?”

“It’s a surprise,” Nyx said.

Anneke grunted. “I hate surprises, boss. The last surprise I got, somebody died.”

“Yeah, well, the last surprise I got, I went to prison,” Nyx said. “I sympathize.”

Rhys woke in a bad mood, and morning prayer didn’t make him feel much better. He needed a clear head, but even after going through the salaat, his mind was still stuffed with list after list of chemical compounds and vat numbers and bug secretions. Kine had been a copious note-taker, but none of the names and numbering in her records made much sense to him—it likely wouldn’t make any sense to anybody outside the breeding compounds. And he was out of time to decode it. He left most of it with Taite so he could work on it in their absence.

At least his immersion in Nasheenian organic tech had kept him from dwelling on the border crossing. Nyx kept telling him that she had a way to get over the border that wouldn’t involve any of them inhaling chemical vapor and burning out their lungs.

But somehow, he doubted it.

Anneke—who was dark to begin with—rubbed herself down in bug secretions to stain herself even darker. Anneke was skinny in the hips and flat-chested and could pass for a boy. She had done the same a half-dozen times with Raine’s crew, she said. She and Khos could drive right over the border—a particularly low-tech, low-security part of it, in any case. She had a couple of her relatives on the other side scout out a good stretch and assured everybody twenty times over that she could handle herself.

They were packed at dawn.

Rhys stood with the others around the loaded bakkie. He had his Kitab in one hand. He watched Nyx standing next to him, her face a cool blank.

“You keep your head down and report any deviations to Taite, got it?” Nyx told Anneke. Anneke rubbed down her gun while they all waited for Khos to shift.

“Yeah, boss. Me and Khos’ll meet you in Azam, bright and shiny. You gotta take care of that wheel spinner, though.” She winked at Rhys.

Rhys watched Khos stow his clothes behind the front seat and start his shift.

Rhys had to look away when he did it. The contortion and contraction looked obscene. Wrong . As a magician, Rhys could feel the wrongness in the air, the bending of matter in ways it should not bend.

Anneke opened the passenger door, and Khos-the-dog jumped inside and settled onto the seat, tongue lolling. He was a yellow, blue-eyed dog now, cleaner than the wild mutts that scrounged for garbage in the streets but otherwise no different in appearance.

Nyx sidled up closer to Rhys and crossed her arms, and the two of them watched Anneke and Khos drive out of Husayn’s garage and into the violet double dawn.

Rhys took a step away from her, to give himself some room. He was angry at her again, angry about this, about all of it. He wanted to find some way to tell her why he was angry, to explain it, but she tended to believe that every conversation involving strong emotion was full of words and resolutions that were not meant, as if he were a raving drunk. She saw every stated emotion as an admission of weakness.

“So where are we going, Nyxnissa?” he asked.

She spit sen on the garage floor. “The morgue,” she said.

Rhys closed his eyes and prepared himself for horror. The last eight years had been an unending nightmare, starting with his flight across the desert. And it will end with my flight back into the desert, he thought. The globe the queen had given them had included a detailed summary of what she was willing to pay them in return for Nikodem—alive or dead. Nikodem, the alien with the big laugh. He had known her immediately upon seeing her stills but was uncertain about how he felt about hunting her. She was just an alien, and the sum to bring her in—even split five ways—was indeed enough for all of them to retire on. If they completed this note, he could leave Nyx, and this bloody business, forever.

He had no idea what he would do, after.

When he opened his eyes, Nyx had gone.

The dead that came back from the front were processed in filtered containment facilities expressly designed for the purpose. Chenja and Nasheen had signed and broken—and signed and broken and signed again—treaties requiring the return of the dead to the processing centers—the morgues—within thirty days of a soldier’s death. The morgues were run by magicians who identified, cataloged, decontaminated, and burned the dead. The sterile remains were placed in ceramic jars and shipped home to mothers or sisters or merely sent to the war memorials on the coast—vast, shining walls of smooth metal that faced the sea. The largest of them was the Orrizo in Mushtallah, a monument dedicated to unidentified soldiers—dead boys and patriotic women.

After being reconstituted, Nyx had worked at the containment center just west of Punjai. She had to pay back the magicians for putting her back together, and the dirty, dangerous work in the containment center was the only work they had for her at the time. She had spent her mornings loading bagged corpses onto carts and her afternoons sorting piles of body parts that the magicians insisted all went to the same body. More often than not, the magicians were wrong, and she’d have to take out an extra arm or leg or the remains of a foot and throw it into another pile made up entirely of “unidentified” parts that were later burned up and dumped in the Orrizo.

It had been shit work, and she’d been hosed down and swept for organics three times after magicians suspected her of being exposed to contaminated bodies. Chenjans and Nasheenians alike had been known to plant bug-borne viruses in the flesh of the dead before sending them back over the border.

Even the dead were participants in the war.

Nyx still had some contacts at the morgue, so she and Rhys hitched a ride with a caravan going to Punjai, waiting out the hottest part of the day at a little cantina before walking the rest of the way to the center. An old woman named Ashana met them at the gates at dusk, after Rhys had finished his prayers and Nyx had finished her sen. Ashana brought them in through the filter at the rear of the compound, where the bodies selected for contamination—as opposed to decontamination—resided.