Kameron Hurley - God's War

“That’s a lonely place to be.”

“You trying to open me up? You’re nobody special.”

“Haven’t I already opened you?”

“The cunt is not the heart,” she said, standing, “though a lot of people get the two confused.”

He sat along the edge of the bed, behind her, and she could feel the heat of him, though his skin did not touch hers. He was a big man. Why did big men make her nervous?

She left him naked and alone and slightly bewildered on the thin mattress of his raised bed. She always left them bewildered, wondering if they had said something differently, or had said nothing at all, if she would still be in their arms, if she would have surrendered.

The next time she got drunk, she went to a brothel, and resolved to stop sleeping with people on her team.

Now Nyx stood inside a boxing ring, for real, for the first time since she’d left the magicians, since she ran off with Raine and his crew. She had taken this woman to bed too, and she hadn’t surrendered then. She wouldn’t now.

I use you all, she thought bitterly. I use you and then I cut you out like a cancer, like my womb… but they were still there, sticky and hot in her dreams, like the detritus of a butcher’s shop, memories of blood and sand. And she remembered Rhys drawing the shape of a perfect heart in the air.

The air was wet and tasted like copper. Two overhead lights were on, lights that weren’t made to be ring lights but had been rigged for it. She suspected she was in the abandoned waterworks that Rhys and Khos had told her about. This was where Jaks and all the Nasheenian boxers she smuggled in fought. They broke rules and risked their lives to bloody each other in front of an audience that loathed them as women and foreigners. They got bloodied up and took Chenjan money and fucked off to gamble or drink it away and come back the next week, a little hungover, a little stung, and ready to do it all over again.

Dahab and Rasheeda herded Nyx and Rhys into the converted room. Nikodem was already sitting at a table ringside, and Dahab bound Rhys’s hands again and shoved him down next to the alien. Anneke was balled up on the floor next to him, hands tied behind her, a short line connecting the bonds on her hands and feet, so she was bent backward. Her face was swollen. So, they’d gotten Anneke after all. Gotten her alive, even.

Jaks was already waiting in the ring. Behind her, working as her cut man, was the magician Nyx had been waiting for.

“Yah Tayyib,” Nyx said. “Missed me so much you wanted to help put me back together again?”

Dahab prodded her into the ring.

Nyx ducked under the ropes and stood under the hot lights.

Yah Tayyib stood in Jaks’s corner. He was hard-faced, and neatly dressed.

“This whole thing your idea?” Nyx asked. She looked at her own empty corner. “I get a cut magician? Or we still going to play this pretending I’m in boxing shape and have a whole right hand?”

“That’s not the point,” Jaks said.

“Give her the boy,” Nikodem said. “It will remind her of what she’s fighting for.”

Nyx eyed Yah Tayyib. “This clean work?” she asked him, and couldn’t keep the bite from her voice. “You pinch on me for running a womb for a couple of gene pirates and now you’re selling us all out to some space pirate? Who do you think you’re saving, old man?”

“I’m ending your war,” Yah Tayyib said.

“I spent time at the front too, old man. Don’t pretend only you boys are martyrs.”

“I have never pretended,” he said.

“You smuggled Nikodem into Chenja. Why?”

“I owe you no explanations.”

“You fucking patched me back together, old man. You gave me back a life. You do owe me answers. What did you bring me back for? So you could see me fucked up now?”

“Quiet, please,” Nikodem called from her table.

Nyx swung around and peered out at the darkness. She could barely make out Nikodem’s form. “Then give me some idea! Give me some reason why I’m dying. Why you’re willing to slaughter my team! Why you’re staging this bullshit for some jilted kid’s benefit.”

“Shut up and fight,” Jaks said.

“I don’t even have any fucking gloves,” Nyx said. She was buying time for Rhys to recover from the drugs now, but she didn’t think they knew that yet. “Why not slit my throat and be done with it?”

“Because tomorrow Yah Tayyib gets me into the Chenjan breeding compounds,” Nikodem said. “Because after that day my people will have all we need from your shitty little world. When we’re gone, you can stay here and destroy one another far more efficiently. Then I go and win the war for my people.”

“Your sisters know about that?” Nyx said.

“Sisters? They’re just here for show. When I go home, it won’t be with those pawns.”

“You want a good show?” Nyx said. “You want a real going-away? You give me a proper magician.”

“He’ll work old-fashioned,” Jaks said. “No magic, but he can keep you from bleeding in your face. Maybe get me a little longer with you.”

“You never could accept your death,” Yah Tayyib said.

Nyx turned on him. “You’re right. That’s why I came to you. I trusted you.”

“A bel dame can trust no one.”

“I’m not a bel dame anymore.”

It was the first time she’d ever said it out loud.

Dahab pushed Rhys up into the ring. Under the lights, he looked bigger, his shoulders broader. In the ring, for a brief moment, Nyx could have mistaken him for a fighter.

Nyx stepped toward him, grabbed his wrist with her bad hand. “You can do this?” she said softly.

“I’ve spent much of my life in one ring or another,” he said. He looked her in the eye. She held the look for a long time.

God, why didn’t I find you sooner? she thought.

Jaks tossed a pair of gloves across the ring. “Come now, bel dame,” she said.

Nyx handed the gloves to Rhys. “You lace them on,” she said, and bent forward so their foreheads touched. He did not draw away. So close, he smelled of blood and sweat and something even more intimate. Perhaps it was fear she smelled, or the biting chemical odor of a magician. But it was something uniquely Rhys. I’ll miss you, she thought.

“Keep the laces on the left loose,” she said. “I want to be able to get them off with my teeth. You know.”

“I know,” he said.

Rhys slipped on her gloves and took his time lacing them up. He was good with the knots on the right, but he tied a simple bow on the left and tucked the ends into the seam of her left glove.

“Good?” he said.

“Good.”

Nyx was in no shape for a fight. She was worse off now than she had been back at Husayn’s gym. She wanted to believe that Jaks hadn’t had much time to box either, but as she looked across the ring and saw Yah Tayyib take off Jaks’s coat, that hope went right out of her head.

Jaks was lean and muscled, and under the lights the contours of her body were that much more dramatic. She was also young, six or seven years younger than Nyx, and though she had lived a hard life, there was no way she’d been rebuilt as many times, in as many ways, as Nyx had.

Nyx didn’t look out at Rhys or Anneke. And she would deal with Yah Tayyib later.

She looked at Jaks.

Yah Tayyib was rubbing Jaks’s arms and shoulders. Nyx had no illusions that this would be a proper fight with proper rules. She saw no one at the buzzer. It was going to be one long round, with a moment or two for Rhys to patch her back up if she got too bloody. Maybe.

Nyx stood with her hands down and her left toe forward. She waited.

Jaks didn’t put in a mouthpiece, and she didn’t offer one to Nyx.

“Don’t get hit,” Rhys said.