Kameron Hurley - God's War

Nyx wondered how she was supposed to respond to that. Her head felt stuffed with honey.

“You were missing a kidney,” Yah Tayyib said. “I replaced that as well.”

“I traded it for a ticket out of Chenja. The other one wasn’t mine either.”

“I didn’t think it was,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I put it in there six months ago.”

“Ah,” Nyx said.

“I’m quite sorry about the womb,” Yah Tayyib said. “It was your original, you know, and uniquely shaped. Bicornuate. I would have bought it myself, though for much less than you likely sold it.” He always talked about body parts like bug specimens—dry and purely academic.

“I don’t care much how it’s shaped or whose it is,” she said. “I care about what it can do for me. What time is it? I’ve got Raine on my tail.”

She looked around for her clothes. They were stacked neatly next to the operating slab. She started to get dressed, slowly. It was like trying to work somebody else’s body. She was still a big woman, but she was down to her dhoti and binding, and both were tattered and loose, hanging off her like a shroud.

“You have a price on your head,” Yah Tayyib said, and turned to wash his hands at the sink. Flesh beetles clung to the end of the tap, bundling up drops of water in their sticky legs.

“Yeah,” she said. “More than fifty, apparently.”

“You should turn yourself in to your bel dame sisters. The bounty hunters won’t be so generous. They say it’s black money this time. Gene pirates.” He wiped his hands dry on his robes and regarded her. “What were you carrying?”

“Zygotes,” Nyx said. “Ferrier work. I was supposed to hand it off on this end, but I had to drop it and sell it to some butchers to keep my sisters busy. I figure they lost at least half a day trying to figure out where I dropped it. No womb, no proof, no way to fully collect their note on me.”

The fist in her belly tightened, contracted. She felt dizzy, and leaned back against the stone altar.

“You’ve indebted yourself to us again,” Yah Tayyib said. “This is not the place to settle a blood note. Yours or theirs. Keep your bloody boys and your bloody sisters out of my ring.”

“Still got something against bel dames?”

“You’ve never been a boy at the front.”

“I can’t imagine you being frightened of anything, Yah Tayyib.”

“We all manage our grief differently,” Yah Tayyib said. “Three dead wives and a dozen dead children make me more human, not less. You have chosen your path. I have chosen mine. This is the last time I do this for you, Nyxnissa.”

“You say that every time. Is it too late to bet on the boxers?”

“What in this world do you own to bet?”

Nyx prodded at the red scarring tissue on her right hip. “I’ve got good credit,” she said. She always paid her debts to the magicians… eventually.

“I doubt that,” he said. “You’ve nothing more than rags and flesh.”

She shook her head. Her vision swam. “I’ll get paid when I’ve cleared the blood debt. I can buy whatever I need after that.”

Yah Tayyib sighed. He walked over to the big wardrobe next to the medicine cabinet.

“Am I done bleeding?” Nyx said.

Yah Tayyib pulled out a deep mahogany burnous. “You’ll expel the usual bugs in a few hours. They’re aiding in the last of the repairs. Here, this is the most inconspicuous I have.”

Nyx donned the burnous. It was surprisingly soft. “Organic?” she asked.

“Yes. It will breathe for you, if you need it to.”

“Great,” she said, as if that would make any difference tonight. “Walk me out?”

Yah Tayyib escorted her back through the labyrinthine halls of the magicians’ quarters, all windowless. He took her to the internal magician’s betting booth, where a young woman Nyx knew from her days at the gym stood at the window collecting baskets of bugs.

“I still have credit here, Maj?” Nyx asked.

“You always have credit,” Maj said.

Yah Tayyib huffed his displeasure as Nyx set down a bet on Jaks so Hajjij for fifty.

“You’re a mad woman,” he said as Nyx picked up her receipt and then pushed back through the crowd of magicians.

“Maybe so,” she said. But this would get her Jaks, and Jaks would get her the boy, and the boy would put money in her pockets—and save some Nasheenian village from contamination.

That was the idea, anyway.

Yah Tayyib brought her back to the gym, which had been transformed into a fighting arena. The lights outside the ring were dim. The last of the speed bags had been put away. A man who looked remarkably like a Chenjan dancer moved under the ring-lights and it took Nyx half a minute to realize the dancer really was Chenjan—and male. Some instinctual part of her thought he’d look a lot better blown up, but there was something she liked about him, something about the way he moved, the delicacy of his hands.

She and Yah Tayyib negotiated the crowd to a bench at the back, along the edges of the darkness. Nyx kept her eye on the dancer.

“Who’s he?” Nyx asked.

“The boy?”

He was probably eighteen or nineteen, old enough for the front. Not so much a boy, in Nasheen.

“Yeah,” she said.

“A pet project of Yah Reza’s,” Yah Tayyib said. “A political refugee from Chenja. He calls himself Rhys.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“A nom de guerre ,” he said, using the Ras Tiegan expression. “Yah Reza tells me he used to dance for the Chenjan mullahs as a child. When his father asked him to carry out the punishment of his own sister because he himself was unable, Rhys refused, and was exiled. That’s the story he tells, in any case.”

“Does he do anything besides dance?”

“He’s not a prostitute, if that’s what you’re asking,” Yah Tayyib said.

“Then what’s he do?” she asked.

Yah Tayyib folded his hands in his lap. “He’s good with bugs.”

“A bel dame could use someone good with bugs.”

“He’s worth three of you.”

“You saying I’m a bad girl?”

Yah Tayyib’s expression was stony. “I’m saying you’re less than virtuous.”

Well. She’d been called worse.

The dancer slowed and stilled. The match was about to start, and his time was up.

Nyx scanned the crowd for Raine and his crew, in case they’d gotten in through the cantina entrance. Her gaze found a handful of very different figures instead. Three tall women with the black hoods of their burnouses pulled up, the hilt of their blades visible at their hips, moved through the throng of spectators, sniffing at glasses of liquor and brushing bugs from their sleeves.

Her sisters.

Not the kind she was related to by blood.

Nyx hunkered on the bench. Her insides shifted. She winced.

“How much longer until it starts?” Nyx asked.

“A moment. The visitors wished to speak with the boxers.”

“The visitors?”

“There’s a ship in from New Kinaan. Had you not heard?”

“What do they care about boxing?”

“Not only the boxing,” Yah Tayyib said. “The magicians. Ah, there she is.”

At the far end of the room Yah Reza stood in a door that opened into blackness. Husayn strode in from the darkness, followed by a wave of purple dragonflies that coasted out over the heads of the spectators and swarmed the ring lights. Nyx had known Yah Tayyib’s blind-eyed boxer for years. They’d trained together back when Nyx came in from the front. Husayn was a decade older than Nyx, big in the hips and thighs, with the beefy legs of a woman who spent most of her days running—from what or to where, only Husayn knew. She had a mashed-in pulp of a nose and a misty right eye that wasn’t commonly talked about. Husayn kept a long list of dead men and women in her locker—the ones she’d served with at the front.