Nyx walked into her office and dumped her gear onto her desk. As she saw Khos walk in to the keg she hollered that she wanted to talk to him. Rhys was still standing near the door, at the ablution bowl she had set out for those who wanted to wash themselves before and after they spoke to her. Her business had that effect on people. Rhys had his hands in the water, sleeves up.
She turned back in to her spare office, kicking her chair away. It wasn’t even noon, so the light coming through the latticed windows was low. She climbed up on to her battered desk and propped open the old entrance in the ceiling.
Better.
Khos knocked on the open door.
“Get in here,” Nyx said.
She climbed down from the desk as Khos came through the doorway. He needed a wash.
“Funniest thing,” Nyx said. “I had a body in my trunk this morning.”
“Yeah.”
“Sit.”
Khos lumbered over to one of the backless chairs in front of her desk. They were mismatched chairs, trash she and Taite had picked up years before when they moved out of their firebombed storefront in the Chenjan district and onto the east side. He’d been allergic to the original upholstery, and she’d had to redo most of it herself.
Nyx took off her burnous and draped it over her chair. She removed the most extraneous of her weapons and piled them up next to her for cleaning.
“You want to step away from the crew?” Nyx asked.
If Taite was a good but fragile kid, Khos was like the kid’s lumbering, towheaded older brother. Nyx had picked up Khos Khadija at a brothel outside Aludra three years before. They were both there to see the same girl and had bumped into each other on the stairs. When she found out he was Raine’s new shifter, she hired him at twice the cut Raine was giving him. She’d been very drunk. She’d also been very drunk later, when she slept with him. She didn’t like big men all that much, but it had been a hot fuck for all that. She knew it had been a while since she’d been to bed with anybody at all, because right about now he was starting to look half good again.
Khos shrugged. If the seat had a back, he would have slumped.
“It was side work. I forgot about it.”
She climbed into her chair and perched up on the back, her feet on the seat. She leaned forward.
“You were supposed to wait on me and Rhys. Instead, you panicked and moved too soon, and we lost our take.”
“I told you, Raine showed up and they were heading out. We would have lost all of them if I hadn’t gone in when I did.”
“So instead, all three of them lit out the back window, right into Raine’s ambush, and we ended up with some dumb kid who was worth more alive than dead.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Is this your crew? Did I sign a contract of yours, or did you sign one of mine?”
He grimaced.
“Answer me.”
“No, it’s not my crew.”
“You know how many hunts me and Anneke have been on? A hell of a lot. There’s nothing we haven’t seen.”
“Nyx—”
“I don’t want to hear about Mhorian chivalry. You don’t like working with women, you shouldn’t be in Nasheen. As I heard it, it’s your love of women that got you here in the first place. Women can fight as well as fuck, you know it?”
He shifted in his seat, looking toward the window. She knew he hated it when she swore. Mhorians were a strange bunch of refugees, a late addition to Umayma. They’d been given some of the shittiest, least developed land in the world, and the vast majority of them had died within the first year of landing. A thousand years worth of hard living had made them a prickly, stubborn sort of people. Most of them were religious zealots, worse than any Chenjan, obsessed with laws and prescriptions about marital relations and the segregation of men and women. A full three-quarters of their Book dealt with rules about marriage, sex, and birth. Nyx had been with Khos the first time he saw a topless woman on the streets of Nasheen, burning an effigy of the Queen in protest of some new regulation about births completed off-compound. The look on his face had been worth a thousand notes.
Mhorian women also cost money, like bugs. Nyx supposed that in a society where most of you were dying and you didn’t have much initial bug tech, women’s wombs would go for more. Khos had lit out of Mhoria looking for a good wife he didn’t have to pay for, and he hadn’t had much luck in Nasheen. Who wanted to shack up with some Mhorian shifter and push out useless half-breed babies? Half-breeds didn’t get free government inoculations. The vast majority died within the first three years as a result. Nyx figured it was why Khos spent most of his time in brothels. Maybe he thought those women were hard up? What he didn’t seem to get was that women in Nasheen who made a living as prostitutes were usually doing so for political reasons, not because they were desperate for money or anxious about having husbands. Women in Nasheen didn’t grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory.
“I need to know you’ll follow the plan,” Nyx said. “If I can’t count on that, I cancel your contract. I can get another shifter, you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Go sit with the others in the keg. We’ve got to prep for another pickup.”
He heaved himself out of his seat, and shut the door softly behind him. For a man his size, he moved with surprising quiet.
She took a deep breath, exhaled, and pulled the letter out of her dhoti.
She closed her eyes. She was thirty-two years old, and every bone in her body hurt, every joint, every muscle. Some mornings, she woke up so stiff she had to roll herself out of bed and stretch for a quarter-hour just so she could stand without pain.
Nyx sat on the edge of the desk. She didn’t have the money to replace any more body parts, and she wasn’t so sure that any magician could tell her what needed replacing even if she could afford it. Yah Tayyib once told her she needed a new heart.
She’d thought he was serious.
This bounty wouldn’t buy her a new heart. It wouldn’t fix anything she’d broken. But it might get her out of this hole and working closer to the wealthy Orrizo district in Mushtallah, dressing real fine, getting patched up by the best, and getting all the good notes.
She wanted a new life: a life she could trade for something more worthwhile than twenty bloody notes and the contempt of a bunch of refugees.
7
At dawn, Nyx made Khos drive her and Rhys out to the central train station in Basmah, following the long scar of the elevated tracks the whole way. The local, intercity trains didn’t run anymore, and hadn’t in about three years. The Chenjans had taken out the main line between Punjai and Basmah so many times that the Transit Authority had stopped sending out tissue mechanics to fix it. They used to come back at least one woman short after every run. Most of the busted tracks were planted with mines and bursts now.
The threat of Chenjan terrorism kept train tickets on the working long-distance lines exorbitant. Nyx had ridden the train only twice in her life—to and from the front.
Khos got them within a hundred yards of the station before the crowd of bakkies, rickshaws, and pedestrians brought them to a standstill. Half a dozen security techs dressed in red burnouses prowled the station with
