enormous sand cats on heavy chains.
Nyx shouldered her pack and slammed the door. She said to Khos through the open window, “Don’t give Anneke any shit. Taite’s in charge. If he says fuck off, you do it.”
“He knows where to find me,” Khos said, and grinned. He and Taite were fast friends, disparate brothers from foreign countries who went to mixed brothels together, back before Taite had a boyfriend. Nyx wasn’t sure why the friendship annoyed her. Maybe because she didn’t understand it. When had she ever had a friend close enough to go to brothels with? Not since grade school.
“Just don’t blow all your money on girls and wine. I need you to keep your head clear for whatever I bring back. Don’t throw it all away on some green girl.”
“I like them green.”
“Virgins are boring,” Nyx said. “What is it with Mhorians and virgins?”
She caught Khos blushing before he turned away. It was remarkable how red he could get. Nyx waved him off. He gave a blast of the horn and backed away from the station. She watched him go. She was worried about what all that time at the brothels meant. She was worried, too, about the team, about how long she could keep them working for so little. It had been a long time.
Nyx turned and saw Rhys standing at the edge of the crowd. They didn’t give him much space. He kept a firm footing, though creepers bumped into him with their nets and at least one child spit at him. He was the only black man in view for as far as Nyx could see—a black roach skittering along a sea of sand.
The station reared up behind him, gold-colored stone perched on a series of pointed arches that the bustling mob slowly pushed through on their way to the platforms and ticket desk.
Nyx elbowed her way into the swarm and looked back once to make sure Rhys was following unmolested. The arches leading into the station were plastered with martyrs’ letters from women who’d volunteered for the front. A couple of pushy women dressed in the prophet’s green were handing out copies of the latest propaganda sheets and shiny carcasses of pretty holiday beetles, insects known for their cowardly aversion to loud noises.
Nyx shouldered past, and the look she gave the green-clad women was enough to make both of them jerk their hands away from her, withdrawing their insulting little beetles.
Once inside the station, Nyx found some room by the empty fountain and shuffled around the tickets.
Rhys looked at her dubiously. “You do know how to use those, right?” he asked.
Nyx turned the tickets over a couple more times until she matched the gate numbers at the station to the ones on her card.
“Fuck off,” she said.
They got lost on one of the platforms and had to double back. Once they were on the right platform, Rhys bought himself a purified water. Nyx bought a whiskey, straight.
Rhys watched her take a swig with his usual distasteful eye.
“I can get you a soda,” he said.
“I’ve had enough of soda,” Nyx said. She wanted to be drunk by the time the train arrived in Mushtallah. She knew Mushtallah. She had done all of her bel dame training there. Most magicians and bel dames worked out of the capital, and she expected she was going to run into a lot of women she knew. In the border towns she was somebody to fear, to loathe—a former bel dame who brought in every bounty with the same determination and brutality she’d taken in her bel dame notes. But in Mushtallah, she was just another criminal. Nobody. Nothing. Just like she’d been when they threw her in prison.
Rhys pulled out a slim volume of what looked like poetry from his robe.
A voice came on over the platform radio, and a misty woman’s head came into view just over the train tracks.
“There will be a slight delay due to unrest along the Bushair line running north-northwest. This will affect lines Zubair, Mushmura, and Kondija. Thank you for your patience.”
Somebody had blown up another track along the Bushair line, then. Nyx allowed herself a minute to wonder how many people had died. She wondered if it mattered.
She sipped her drink and watched Rhys while he read.
“Would you mind reading out loud?” she asked, hoping she sounded nonchalant. It felt too much like she needed something.
He raised his gaze above the ends of the pages and looked at her.
Nyx kept staring at the tracks. She wanted to do something with her hands.
“You nervous?” he asked.
“I’m never nervous.”
“Of course not,” he said. “This is
“Oh, God, this isn’t something soft, is it?”
“Not everything that’s beautiful is weak.”
“No, it just makes you that way.”
He smiled. “We disagree, then.”
“We do,” she said.
Nyx cupped her glass in both hands. Rhys began to read, in that voice that could calm her during the worst days—days when bugs got into the money bin and bodies piled up in the freezer like cheap popsicles. Time stretched. His accent had gotten better since she’d started asking him to read out loud. It had been a couple years now, she supposed. She insisted he read in Nasheenian, not so much to improve the accent but because hearing him speak Chenjan—hearing him speak the same language as the people she’d spent two years throwing bursts at on the front felt obscene, and there wasn’t much anymore that made her feel so fucked up down to her bones.
After a time, Nyx stopped her fidgeting. She let herself forget some of the worst of the fear. Another announcement came on over the station radio. The delay had been extended.
She finished her drink.
They boarded the train two hours later and found their way to a private first-class cabin whose bench seats were nonetheless so close that if they sat directly across from each other, their knees touched. They didn’t sit that way.
Rhys opened his copy of the Kitab, and Nyx fixed herself at the window and watched the Nasheenian desert roll past them in a blur of umber brown and violet blue. The sky was a pale amethyst today, bruised purple along the western horizon, the direction of the front.
“How fast do you think these go?” she asked.
“A hundred, hundred and twenty kilometers an hour,” Rhys said.
“Huh,” Nyx said. She wasn’t going to argue. “You know anything about courts and royalty?” she said.
He did not raise his eyes from the Kitab. “I thought bel dames held intimate soirees with queens and politicians all the time. You should be an old hand at this.”
“We don’t flirt and whore ourselves out like dancers,” she said. He flinched. Why did she always want to twist the knife with him?
“Just make it look good, all right? It’s bad enough you’re Chenjan.”
“I didn’t ask to go along. If you take offense at the—”
“It’s your fucking accent I can’t stand.” Something roiled up in her, something old and twisted. She hated it even as the words slipped out. She pressed her fist to her belly.
He shut his book and stood. “Excuse me.”
“Sit down.”
“I signed an employment contract with you,” he snapped. “You did not obtain a writ of sale. I’ll be in the dining car.” He rolled open the door. It banged behind him.
Nyx rubbed at her face. The worst of her troubles always started with what came out of her mouth.
She heard a knock at the cabin door. She stood and slid it open, trying to come up with something that sounded nice but not like an apology.
But it was not Rhys at the door. A young woman wearing a blue Transit Authority uniform offered her a complimentary newsroll.
The scrolling text that slid across the translucent projection of the newsrolls was even tougher to read than static text, but Nyx figured Rhys would want to read it when he got back. An offering. She could look at the pictures. Her teachers at the state schools had called her dead dumb because she got all her letters backward.
