Kameron Hurley - God's War

Well, fuck.

“Fair?” Nyx said. “I’m half a corpse.”

“Then all I need to do is kill the other half,” Jaks said.

Rasheeda and Dahab unstrapped Nyx from the table. Dahab glared at her with her new, foreign eye, a bland point of darkness.

Rasheeda was making strange chirping noises.

“I don’t want your squirts taping me up,” Nyx said. “Where’s Rhys?”

“You’ll see your magician soon enough,” Jaks said. She was already at the door.

“You want to fight me?” Nyx said. “Rhys knows how to tape hands. Your bel dames aren’t boxers. They’re bloodletters.” And Nikodem loved magicians.

Jaks paused.

Nyx waited.

Nikodem stood next to the slab, collecting what was left of the bands that had bound Nyx to the table. “Let her have him,” Nikodem said, turning to Jaks. “He’s been drugged.”

Jaks looked them both over with her black eyes, hesitated for a long moment. Cool air blew in from the doorway, oddly humid. The hall was dim.

“Sure,” Jaks said. “Dahab, you get him. And stay here with them. When you’re done, you and Rasheeda bring them both out to the ring. Got it?”

Dahab and Jaks walked off into the hall, leaving Nyx with Nikodem and Rasheeda.

Rasheeda found a chair, turned it backward, and straddled it, facing Nyx. “Long time, sister,” she said.

“Not really.”

“When we cut off your head, I’m going to eat your eyes,” Rasheeda said. “Like I ate your sister’s.”

“Must have been tasty, my sister.”

“Mmmmmm….” Rasheeda licked her lips.

“Not much you could get from her, though.”

“Protein.”

“Uh-huh.” Nyx kept her ace slack. Rasheeda could smell discomfort. Worse, she fed on fear. “Don’t know what the fuck a bunch of bel dames were doing casing the house of a government worker.”

“Mother’s orders,” Rasheeda said, and chirped. What was with the chirping? When did that start? “The papers were for Nikodem, but the blood was for you.”

“How thoughtful. How long have you been working both sides?”

Rasheeda snapped her teeth. “It keeps me honest,” she said.

Dahab walked back in, but the only thing she had a hold of was her gun. “Nikodem, his hands are broken. He can’t wrap shit.”

“Then get Tayyib to fix him,” Nikodem said.

“I don’t like magicians.”

“If he troubles you, sever his head,” Nikodem said. She gathered up some instruments lying next to the sink and put them into a black organic bag. “Come, I want this over with. I have things to do tonight.”

Dahab and Nikodem walked out.

Rasheeda continued to peer at Nyx.

“Your sister told us all about you,” Rasheeda said, leaning over the back of the chair. Her eyes were empty. “Died screaming in the end. She was a bloody fucking screamer. The worst kind.”

Nyx wanted to watch Rasheeda’s eyes bulge and pop out of her head, wanted to watch her face darken and her tongue hang out like a dog’s.

Instead, they waited for a long time, in silence.

Then Dahab’s voice from the hall: “Here’s the wraps and tape. Come on, let’s go, black man.”

Rhys appeared in the doorway. Rasheeda snapped her teeth at him and uncurled from her seat. She sauntered back into the hall. They had stripped him of his tunic and burnous, and dark blood was still smeared across his bare chest. Nyx had never seen so much of him outside of an organics search before.

She looked at his hands. The fingers were straight, and he held two long lengths of cloth and a roll of tape. Fine red ants crawled along his knuckles, his wrists. As she watched, they began to drop to the floor.

His face was impossible to read—his jaw was set, and the dark gaze that met hers was fathomless.

But he was not broken. No, that look was not the look of a broken man.

He nodded at the operating slab.

Nyx sat up on the lip of it. Her body protested. She winced.

Rhys put the tape and wraps next to her. He did not look at her but started wrapping her right hand. He was slow, methodical, professional. How many hands had he wrapped when he worked with the magicians? How many fights had he prepared fighters for? Fights he never watched?

“You all right?” she said softly, and felt stupid for saying it. All right? What did that mean, here?

“When you fight her,” Rhys said low, not looking at her, “goad her into using her left. Let her hit that hard head of yours.”

And something clicked.

Yes, how many hands had he wrapped? Had he wrapped Jaks’s hands, that night in Faleen? Rhys knew hands.

“You trying to make me fall?” she said.

He raised his head and looked at her. “Do you trust me, Nyx?”

“I don’t trust anyone.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Nyx met his look. His was a face she could gaze into forever. She knew it the night she watched him dance, the night her sisters pursued her and her womb bled—the night she reached the end of everything. She supposed she thought that if she could keep him close, she would be able to look at him forever and forget everything else. Sex with him, she could take or leave. But she wanted him. Wanted him in a way she couldn’t explain, and tried hard not to think about.

She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She’d never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women.

“You’re too thin,” he said. “You look hollow.”

He took her right fist in his palm and squeezed it. He leaned in to her.

“I have no love for you,” he said.

“I never asked you to.”

He took up her left hand and started wrapping. There was a noise in the doorway. Just behind him, Dahab turned. Roaches scuttled along the floor.

Dahab swore and stomped at them.

Rhys flicked his wrist toward the band of his trousers, and the razor blade Nyx had given him appeared in his hand. He tucked it between the middle and index fingers of her left hand. He looked only at her hands.

They said nothing more. He finished wrapping.

She made a fist to keep the blade in place, all but the barest hint of the edge hidden in her palm.

“You done, boy?” Dahab said.

Rhys squeezed Nyx’s left fist. “Done,” he said.

The bel dames escorted them out into the hall, up the stairs, and into the ring.

Sometime after Khos came on board with her team, Nyx had gotten drunk and fucked him. She hadn’t been to bed with a man in years, and though he was too big and coarse for her taste, when she was drunk, she didn’t care. He was warm and tasted good and kissed her like a man who breathed women, dreamed of women, found bliss in the arms of women. And for Nyx, who had never known bliss or surrender with or toward anyone or anything, seeing him submit to sensation—to lust, desire—was one of the most intensely erotic things she had ever witnessed.

After, while she pulled on her dhoti and braided back her mussed hair, he had asked her about Rhys.

“You should see the way the two of you look at each other,” he said.

“We don’t look at each other. He’s just a kid.”

“A pretty kid, by anybody’s standard. And if even I can see that, I imagine you sure can.”

“Well, no amount of looking is going to make any difference. He’s still god full, and I’m still godless.”

“Maybe you should find God again.”

“Maybe he should become godless.”

“You compromise for no one.”

“No.”