Kameron Hurley - God's War

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.

Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium, and the wine she’d gotten from the butchers as a bonus for her womb. But she did get Jaks into bed, and—loser or not—in the desert after dark, that was something.

“What are you after?” Jaks murmured in her good ear.

They lay tangled in the sheets like old lovers: a losing boxer with a poor right hook and a tendency to drop her left, and a wombless hunter bereft of money, weapons, food, and most of her clothing.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Nyx said. It was partly the truth. She was looking for something else too, something worth a lot more, and Jaks was going to help her get it.

The midnight call to prayer rolled out over the desert. It started somewhere out in Faleen and moved in a slow wave from mosque muezzin to village mullah to town crier, certain as a swarm of locusts, ubiquitous as the name of God.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Nyx said, “what I’m about to tell you…”

Nyx woke sometime after dawn prayer with a hangover and what felt like a wad of cotton in her belly. Dropping the womb had bought her some time—a day, maybe more if the butchers were smart enough to sell it before her bloody sisters sniffed her out. She’d shaken them in Punjai when she dumped the womb, along with the rest of her coin.

Jaks was long gone, off to catch a ride to Faleen with the agricultural traffic. Nyx was headed that way too, but she hadn’t said a word of that to Jaks. She wanted her next meeting with Jaks to be a pleasant surprise. Mysterious women were attractive—stalkers and groupies were not. Nyx had tracked this woman too long to lose it all by being overly familiar.

Some days, Nyx was a bel dame—an honored, respected, and deadly government-funded assassin. Other days, she was just a butcher, a hunter—a woman with nothing to lose. And the butcher had a bounty to bring in.

The sun bled across the big angry sky. The call box at the cantina was busted, so Nyx walked. The way was unpaved, mostly sand and gravel. Her feet were bruised, bleeding, and bare, but she hadn’t felt much of anything down there in a good long while. Back at the butchers’, she had traded her good sandals for directions out of the fleshpots, too dopey to figure the way out on her own. Under the burnous, she wore little more than a dhoti and breast binding. She had an old baldric, too—her dead partner’s. All the sheaths were empty, and had been for some time. She remembered some proverb about meeting God empty-handed, but her knees weren’t calloused anymore—not from praying, anyway. She had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference.

She hitched a ride on the back of a cat-pulled cart that afternoon. The cats were as tall as her shoulder. Their long, coarse fur was matted and tangled, and they stank. The cats turned leaking, bloodshot eyes to her. One of them was blind.

The woman driving the cart was a cancerous old crone with a bubbling gash that clove the left half of her face in two. She offered Nyx a ride in exchange for a finger’s length of blood to feed the enormous silk beetle she kept in a covered cage next to her left hip, pressed against her battered pistol.

Nyx had the hood of her burnous up to keep off the sun; traveling this time of day was dangerous. The crone’s skin was rough and pitted with old scars from cancer digs. Fresh, virulent melanomas spotted her forearms and the back of her neck. Most of her nose was gone.

“You coming from the front, my woman?” the crone asked. Nyx shook her head, but the old woman was nearly blind and did not see.

“I fought at the front,” the crone said. “It brought me much honor. You, too, could find honor.”

Nyx had left her partner, and a lot more at the front—a long time ago.

“I’d rather find a call box,” Nyx said.

“God does not answer the phone.”

Nyx couldn’t argue with that.

She jumped off the cart an hour later as they approached a bodega with a call box and a sign telling her she was fifty kilometers from Faleen. The old woman nattered on about the wisdom of making phone calls to God.

Nyx made a call.

Two hours later, at fourteen in the afternoon on a day that clocked in at twenty-seven hours, her sister Kine pulled up in a bakkie belching red roaches from its back end.

Kine leaned over and pushed out the door. “You’re lucky the office picked up,” she said. “I had to get some samples at the war front for the breeding compounds. You headed to the coast? I need to get these back there.”

“You’ve got a leak in your exhaust,” Nyx said. “Unlock the hood.”

“It’s been leaking since the front,” Kine said. She popped the hood.

The bakkie’s front end hissed open. Waves of yeasty steam rolled off the innards. Nyx wiped the moisture from her face and peered into the guts of the bakkie. The bug cistern was covered in a thin film of organic tissue, healthy and functioning, best Nyx could tell by the color. The hoses were in worse shape—semi-organic, just like the cistern, but patched and replaced in at least a half-dozen places she could see without bringing in a speculum. In places, the healthy amber tissue had blistered and turned black.

She was no bug-blessed magician—not even a standard tissue mechanic—but she knew how to find a leak and patch it up with organic salve. Every woman worth her weight in blood knew how to do that.

“Where’s your tissue kit?” Nyx said.

Kine got out of the bakkie and walked over. She was shorter than Nyx by a head—average height, for a Nasheenian woman—but they shared the same wide hips. She wore an embroidered housecoat and a hijab over her dark hair. Nyx remembered seeing her with her hair unbound and her skirt hiked up, knee deep in mud back in Mushirah. In her memory, Kine was twelve and laughing at some joke about conservative women who worked for the government. Rigid crones, she’d call them, half dead or dying in a world God made for pleasure. A farmer’s daughter, just like Nyx. A blood sister in a country where blood and bugs and currency were synonymous.

“I don’t have a tissue kit,” Kine said. “I gave it to one of the boys at the front. They’re low on supplies.”

Nyx snorted. They were low on a lot more than tissue kits at the front these days.

“You’re the only organic technician I know who’d ever be short a tissue kit,” Nyx said.