13
Nyx blew out of Punjai and hit the radio a couple times with her palm, but all she got was misty blue static.
It was going to be a long ride.
She spent the night in the bakkie after making good time; she got about halfway to Mushtallah. She passed the sand-swallowed ruins of old cities, now no more than irregular bulges in the desert, marked only by the tall rusted poles of the cities’ contagion sensors. Rogue swarms and viral bugs leaking in from the north had blighted whole cities back in the old days. There were still wild places in the Khairian wasteland, and the border cities still had working contagion sensors that warned the unfiltered inside when the mutant monsters of the red desert wandered too far south or some sand-crazed magician who had gone out there searching for her soul came back with half her head missing, muttering in tongues. Most magicians stayed concentrated in the big cities to keep them clean of virulent swarms. The borderlands just limped along, mostly on their own. There was homesteading to be done for the poor and desperate, still, in the north and south and throughout Ras Tieg and Heidia and Druce. Three thousand years old, and Umayma was still an untamed place.
Nyx had kept as far off the road as she could without getting stuck in the sand and sat out a benign locust swarm just before dawn. Once it passed she was back on the road, out past Mushtallah and the central cities, where the gas lamps lit up every window. She landed another night on the road, then climbed over the low mountains that divided the coast from the interior.
As she came up over the other side, the terrain began to change. Sand gave way to choked crabgrass. The desert bled to scrubland, then long-needled pine trees, then tall oak hybrids with leaves the size of Nyx’s head, low ferns with thorns, tangles of wild roses, snake maples, amber ticklers, patches of low-spring wildflowers. The kinds of bugs changed, too. Fewer beetles and roaches; more ladybugs and spider mites and mayflies. There were less hospitable bugs too, the farther she got from the interior: giant plate-size cicadas and acid-spraying chiggers as long as her arm.
Nyx found it all pretty claustrophobic. The trees were so enormous they blocked the sky, the suns. She couldn’t see beyond the turns of the road. She checked her mirrors more often.
She came out of the mountains and into rolling fields of red-tipped wheat, saw the broad dirt runs for the kept dogs. Farmsteads dotted the landscape. Swarms of locusts, red flies, and ladybugs mobbed the fields, tailored to devour the less friendly bugs and fungi that ruined the staples.
Nyx found a motel that night at the Amber Stalk crossroads, named after some dead magician who’d saved the valley from mutant cicadas. There was a living plaque up under the road marker. Nyx figured she’d saved a lot more lives than he had, but nobody had ever named anything after her. She wondered how spectacular your death had to be to come out the other side with a plaque.
She parked her bakkie out front alongside flatbeds and rickshaws and a cart hitched to the front end of a converted bakkie. The bakkie had smoky black patches on its semi-organic exterior; the first signs of sun-sickness. Along the edges of the parking lot, she saw a head-size mutant flower chafer scuttling back into the brush. If she had to deal with giant bugs out here, she preferred benign ones like the chafers.
Inside the motel, she splurged on good food and a bath. The only upside to coming out to the coast was all the cheap food and water.
Nyx didn’t linger long in the bath. She just scrubbed herself off and rubbed at old wounds that had started biting and aching as the weather cooled. It was colder on the coast.
She missed the desert.
When she crawled into bed, her sheets weren’t full of sand.
She couldn’t sleep.
Nyx grabbed her pillow and moved to the floor. She lay there for a couple of hours staring at the shiny green roaches scuttling along the ceiling, half the size of the ones in the desert and the wrong color. A couple took flight, landing on her arms and her face. She flicked them away.
There was a call box downstairs, but she had no one to call. If she called Kine, it was likely her sister would tell her not to come. If she called the keg, she could make small talk with Taite or Anneke about how they were handling security, but she’d be repeating herself, and they’d see through it. They’d see some kind of weakness. Maybe fear.
Nyx got up and went to the bar.
The motel had an “honor” bar, the kind with liquor bottles affixed to the wall upside down and a little book to record how many shots you’d pulled so they could bill you for them later. Nyx didn’t intend on taking shots.
Nyx pulled out her dagger, pried a bottle of whiskey from the wall, and went out and sat on the front porch. The sky was big, and the stars were the clearest she’d seen since she was a kid in Mushirah. She drank, leaned back in the chair, and tried reading the constellations. Tej had been good at that.
Tej. A lifetime ago. Been a long time since she’d thought of him too. She touched her baldric absently. Blood and death and aliens—it all went back to that night in Faleen.
A noise from the parking lot drew her attention. She went still. The night was clear, but the big bloody moons were at the far end of their orbit, meaning they looked about the size of her thumbnail in the night sky. Ten years from now, they would look about three times the size of the sun.
But that didn’t help her out much tonight.
The figure was dawdling next to Nyx’s bakkie. Nyx had parked close to the motel so she could keep an eye on it. The figure crouched for a long while, then rose and moved off. She thought it might be some kind of giant leaf insect, but as Nyx watched, the figure shrank, dwindled. She heard a sneeze, and then a white bird was flapping off toward the road.
Nyx swore.
She clutched the bottle and went back to her room and bolted herself in. She sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands shook.
Bloody sisters. Bloody
Nyx took a deep breath, drank more. Find your nerves, woman, she thought. Find your damn nerves. It took four of them to take you out last time.
But they might not be so nice this time.
She closed her eyes and tried to calm down. It was possible they’d only sent Rasheeda. She could deal with Rasheeda. But not Dahab. Not Fatima. Not all of them together. Not again.
Nyx opaqued the windows.
The room was dark.
She could not sleep.
She pulled her dagger from the sheath on her thigh, picked up the bottle with her other hand, and crept downstairs. She went back to the call box and dialed the pattern for the keg. She wedged herself into a corner underneath it.
The line buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.
Pick up, she thought. Pick up. Nyx closed her eyes. She was on her own out here. It would take four of them to get her. Fuck, she didn’t need a fucking team, what kind of catshit was this?
“Peace be unto you.”
Nyx opened her eyes.
Rhys’s voice.
Nyx wet her mouth again with the whiskey, found some words. “You read to me?” she asked.
A long pause. She thought maybe she’d lost the connection.
“Are you drunk?” he asked.
“Rasheeda’s here,” Nyx said.
Another pause. She heard him moving around. He must have come from bed and into her office, where the call box was.
“Should I send someone?”
“Can you just read?”
“All I’ve got is the poetry.”
“Fine.”
