Kameron Hurley - God's War

The spectators were finding their seats. Nyx watched her sisters take up a position along the far wall. They did not sit. They would look for a lone woman congratulating the winner at the end of the bout—Nyx knew enough about the game not to bet on losers.

Unless she wanted to.

Jaks appeared from the more traditional entrance, the one from Bashir’s cantina. She was a tough, skinny little fighter with a face like death—long and hard and forgettable. She was so sun sore she looked Chenjan. She had her chin tucked and her shoulders rolled, and she walked with her hands up. She had no patron, no cut woman, no manager. She walked alone and looked just the way she should: like a scared kid pulling her first fight in a magicians’ gym.

Another of the magicians, Yah Batool, stepped up into the ring and announced the fighters.

Jaks and Husayn touched fists. The stir of dragonflies circled the lights, casting wide, weird shadows over the faces of the crowd.

When the buzzer sounded among the caged insects kept just below the gym’s water clock, Jaks leapt forward and opened with a neat right double-jab-crosshook combination. She was young, and overeager. She could probably outlast Husayn if she wanted to, but when the bugs signaled the end of the round, Jaks was already breathing hard, and her face was bloody. Husayn had clipped her open. Yah Batool sealed the cut and sent her back out.

Rounds were three minutes long, and in a magicians’ ring, the boxers fought it out until somebody was knocked down for the duration of a nine-second count or tapped out in their corner. Nyx had seen outriders go down three seconds into the first round. She’d also stayed up all night watching two magicians pummel each other until one of them had an eye dangling from its socket and the other was spraying blood every time she exhaled.

Jaks’s bleeding made Husayn arrogant. Jaks knocked Husayn down in the third round. The knockdown sent Yah Tayyib and the rest of the crowd to their feet. The air filled with a collective roar of dismay.

Nyx took the opportunity to slip past Yah Tayyib’s elbow and make her way toward the back of the room.

Yah Batool started the count.

Nyx circled around to the front of the cantina, keeping to the darkness at the rear of the ring and avoiding her sisters. Behind her, Nyx heard the crowd give a yell at the count of seven, and she turned to see Husayn back on her feet.

Husayn wouldn’t lose this fight. It was why Nyx hadn’t bet on her. Jaks would visit the betting booth to collect her money for the night, and like every new boxer at a magicians’ gym fight, Jaks would want to know who had bet on her. Jaks would check the books and see Nyx’s name. There was no faster way to get a losing boxer to take you home than to bet on her when nobody else did. And if Nyx had done her job the night before, Jaks would be giddily looking for Nyx in the bar later.

The bodies inside the cantina were packed so tight that Nyx had to shoulder her way through to a free patch of counter space. She edged a smaller woman out of a seat and ordered a whiskey from a slim half-breed barmaid.

Nyx perused the bar. She saw Anneke standing outside the door to the street. Raine and his team were likely worried the magicians had filtered the place against them. Bashir should have been looking for Nyx too, but Bashir spent fight nights watching the fight, and business dictated that she attend the postfight parties with the local tax and gaming merchants. She wouldn’t be running the bar.

Nyx looked for a good way to blend in with the chattering locals and decided to flirt with the sour-faced woman at her left, who turned out to be a gunrunner from Qahhar.

Nyx heard the fight end in round five. A wave of celebratory dragonflies cascaded from the arena and into the cantina through the open door. They brought with them a wave of scent—lime and cinnamon—that drowned out the musky stink of sweat-slathered women and warm beer. Dragonflies meant the magician-sponsored fighter had won.

The bar got louder. The winning betters bought rounds of drinks, and the gunrunner started weeping into her beer, grieving for her wayward girlfriend. She bid Nyx good night.

Nyx watched Anneke leave the doorway. Anneke would take up a position on higher ground, where she could get a better view as the cantina began to clear out en masse.

Jaks came through the door half an hour later, both eyes going purple, lip swollen. Blood oozed through a heavy wad of salve smeared above her brow. She walked like she had the last time she lost a fight—like a woman who believed she’d never see another break.

When Jaks got close, Nyx tugged her hood back so Jaks could see her face.

“Buy you a drink?” Nyx asked.

Jaks grinned. It wasn’t an improvement on her face. “I suppose I owe you money,” she said. “I saw that you bet on me.”

Nyx shrugged. “Seemed like a fine idea at the time. What kept you so long?”

“Those off-world women chewed my ear clean off with all their talk,” Jaks said.

“What, the ones from New Kinaan?” Yah Tayyib hadn’t been shitting, then. What kind of alien came all the way out to this blasted rock to talk to boxers?

Jaks sat next to her. “Yeah. What about you, what the hell you doing in Faleen?” Jaks asked.

“Looking for you,” Nyx said. She had never been a good liar, so whenever the truth worked, she used it. “What are you drinking?”

“Whatever you are,” Jaks said. She was still beaming, and Nyx had a twinge of something like guilt. She let the feeling slide away, like oil on the surface of a cistern.

The barmaid brought their drinks. Nyx moved closer to Jaks, so their knees touched. “You have family in Faleen?” Nyx asked.

Jaks chattered about her kin. They lived just outside Faleen, she said. She’d been trying to build up to a magician’s fight since she was fourteen. She had two sisters and a handful of house brothers. Her mother was on the dole, the waqf , and not well off.

“Boxing keeps me in bread,” Jaks said, polishing off her third whiskey. Like Nyx, she drank it straight. “And it’s good for picking up girls,” Jaks added.

“I don’t have a place,” Nyx said. “You empty tonight?”

“Mostly,” Jaks said. She was grinning like a fool now, like a kid. She was probably sixteen. She’d never been to the front, never been a bel dame. You could see the difference in the grin, in the eyes.

Jaks leapt from her seat and bounced around. She paid the tab and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Nyx hunched and shifted her weight to alter her usual walk as they crossed the bar. Jaks moved out the door, and Nyx looped an arm around her narrow waist and turned to press her lips to Jaks’s neck, letting her hood shield her profile. She saw a stir of figures hanging around outside but couldn’t catch their faces in the dim night. Her sisters would be figuring out soon that she had bet house credit on the wrong boxer and wouldn’t be showing her face at the betting booth to collect.

Jaks was only a little drunk; the liquor made her happy.

“Listen,” Jaks said as they stumbled down the alley, groping at each other. “We need to be quiet. I’ve got company.”

“I’m a spider,” Nyx said.

Jaks took her down a dead-end alley near the Chenjan district. Something hissed at them from a refuse heap. Nyx reflexively pushed Jaks behind her. Three enormous ravager bugs, tall as Nyx’s knee, scurried out from the refuse pile. One of them stopped to hiss at them again. It opened its jaws wide. Nyx kicked it neatly in the side of the head, crushing an eye stalk. The bug screeched and skittered off.

Jaks laughed. “I should have warned you. They don’t spray around here. Lots of mutants.”