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.
Kine looked her over. “Are you as desperately poor as you look? I know a good magician who can scrape you for cancers.”
“I’ve been worse,” Nyx said, and shut the hood. “Your bug cistern is in good shape. It’ll breed you enough bugs to power this thing back to the coast, even with the leak.”
But the leak meant she’d get to Faleen just a little bit slower. If there was one thing Nyx felt short on these days, it was time.
Nyx slid into the bakkie. Kine got behind the steering wheel. For a moment they sat in stuffy, uncomfortable silence. Then Kine turned down the window and stepped on the juice.
“What’s her name?” Kine asked, shifting pedals as they rolled back onto the road.
“Who?”
“I can smell her,” Kine said, tightening her hands on the steering wheel. Her hands had the brown, worn, sinewy look of old leather. Her lip curled in disdain.
“I’m working a note,” Nyx said. “What I do to bring it in isn’t your business.”
“A note for a deserter, or one of those dirty bounties you deal in? If you’re bringing in a deserter, where’s Tej?”
Tej, Nyx thought, and the shock of it, of hearing his name out loud, of thinking
“I couldn’t get him back over the Chenjan border,” Nyx said. Another boy buried in the desert.
A clerk the color of honey had given Nyx a bel dame’s note for a boy named Arran nearly three months before, after he’d deserted his place at the front and sought refuge in Chenja. His officer had called in the bel dames because she believed he’d been exposed to a new Chenjan burst, a delayed viral vapor that hid out in the host for up to four months before triggering an airborne contagion. The contagion was capable of taking out half a city before the magicians could contain it. Nyx had gone into the bel dame office and been inoculated against the latest burst, so all she had to do was bleed on the boy to neutralize the contagion, then cut off his head and take him home. Even clean, the penalty for desertion was death. Boys either came home at forty or came home in a bag. No exceptions.
This was Nyx’s job.
Some days, it paid well.
So Nyx and Tej had tracked Arran. Arran had gone over the border into Chenja. That part was easy to figure out. Where in Chenja, though, that was harder. It took tracking down Jaksdijah so Hajjij first. Arran had been a house boy of Jaks’s mother, a coastal boy raised in the interior. Jaks was the last of his known, living kin. Nyx and Tej found Jaks boxing for bread at an underground fighting club thirty kilometers inside the Chenjan border. The mullahs didn’t like Chenjans fighting foreigners—which made Jaks’s fights illegal—but it paid well.
Tej and Nyx bided their time for a month, waiting for Arran to show up while their money ran out. Arran didn’t disappoint. Tej was on watch the night a hooded figure knocked on Jaks’s door. Just before dawn, Jaks and Arran were headed back to Nasheen.
Tej and Nyx followed.
But Tej hadn’t made it back.
“He was the only one of your partners I liked,” Kine said, and pursed her lips, probably to hold back words God wouldn’t permit her to say. Then, “You should partner with men more often.”
Nyx snorted.
They blew back out onto the road. The shocks in the bakkie were going out too, Nyx realized, leaking vital fluid all over the desert. She hoped Kine knew a good tissue mechanic at the coast.
“Where am I taking you?” Kine asked. Sand rolled across the pavement.
“Faleen.”
“A bit out of my way.”
Nyx let that one go and looked out the window, watching flat white desert turn to dunes. Kine didn’t like silence. Give her a long stretch of stillness and eventually she’d change the subject.
Kine was government now, one of the breeding techs who worked at the compounds on the coast. She had some kind of slick security clearance that went well with her hijab and lonely bed. Nyx saw her only when she was ferrying samples to and from the front—just another blood dealer, another organ stealer.
“A ship came into Faleen this week,” Kine said as she rolled up the window. Nyx saw the wide sleeve of her burnous come down, flashing a length of paler skin from wrist to elbow—dusty sand instead of sun dark. “If you’re looking for magicians to help you bring in this deserter, there are a whole mess of them gathering in Faleen. I hear even the lower sort are there, the sort who might—”
“Where from?”
“The magicians?”
“The ship.”
“Oh, yes. The ship is from New Kinaan.”
Colonists had been barred from Umayma for a thousand years. Nyx hadn’t even seen a ship in a decade. Umayma sat at the edge of everything; most of the sky was dark at night. All she ever saw moving up there were dead satellites and broken star carriers from the beginning of the world.
“I’ve corresponded with them for some time,” Kine said, “for my genetics work. They fight another of God’s wars out there in the dark, can you believe it?”
“Does the radio work?” Nyx asked. Knowing aliens were out there killing each other for God, too, just depressed her. She leaned forward to fiddle with the tube jutting out of the dashboard.
“No,” Kine said. She pinched her mouth. “How did you lose Tej?”
Nyx wasn’t sure she could answer that question herself, let alone give Kine a good answer.
“You have any weapons?” Nyx asked.
Kine’s face scrunched up like a date. “If you can’t tell me that, then tell me who’s tracking you.”
“You giving me the fourth inquisition?”
“Nyxnissa,” she said, in the same hard tone she used for quoting the Kitab.
Nyx dipped her head out the open window. The air was clearing up.
