God's War

He sighed. He was always sighing at her, making faces at her, disapproving, her pious Chenjan. “Do you know what time it is?”

She didn’t answer.

“How drunk are you?”

“Drunk enough to ask,” she said.

Rhys read to her for a long time.

The fear started to bleed away. It was like loosening up a garroting wire pulled taut. She clutched the transceiver to her ear as if it, too, were a weapon, as effective as the dagger. But, after a while, her death grip eased up. She realized her hand hurt.

Sometime later, Rhys’s voice began to soften, grow quiet. Finally he said, “I’m going to bed, Nyx.”

“All right.”

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“You can take Rasheeda.”

“I know.” She wanted to ask him what he prayed for.

She hung up.

Nyx took a last pull from the bottle, returned it to the bar, and held out the rest of the night in her room with the door bolted. She slept in front of it.

The next morning, honey-headed hungover, Nyx made an inspection of the bakkie and turned up an ignition burst and a cut brake line. It looked like Rasheeda had tried to disable the main hose connecting the pedal mechanisms to the cistern as well but had only nicked it, cutting a secondary hose instead. Some dead beetles and bug juice pooled beneath the bakkie, but the severed organic artery cushioning the line had already scabbed over. She knew how to properly fuck up a bakkie without leaving behind any obvious traces. Rasheeda hadn’t wanted to stop Nyx, just announce herself and slow Nyx down.

Nyx disarmed the ignition burst. She opened the trunk and took out one of the toolkits. She patched the leak, cut out and sewed in a new brake hose, and got back onto the road.

This time, she kept an eye on the road behind her the whole way.

She stopped at a dusty station just past a couple of farmsteads at the foot of the coastal hills and filled up on bug juice. Dead and dying bugs—some of them the size of small dogs—littered the periphery, wallowing in a citronand-cinnamon smelling mixture of pesticide and repellent the owner had put down to protect the station.

The woman who popped open her tank was a soft, fleshy coastal type with a plump mouth.

“You come in from the desert?” she asked.

Nyx wondered where else there was to come in from. As the woman pumped the feed into the tank, Nyx gazed out at the road. She saw a black bakkie crawling around a bend in the road, coming in from the direction of the motel. Following her.

It didn’t parse. Rasheeda was a shifter—she didn’t need to send a bakkie after Nyx. She would have followed in bird form. So who the fuck were these people?

Nyx turned her face away, but noted the movement of the bakkie in the station windows. The bakkie slowed as it passed the station, then sped up again. Nyx saw three figures. She slumped in her seat, wondered if they’d open fire.

But the bakkie sped on. She looked after it.

“Friends of yours?” the attendant asked. She capped the tank.

“I hope not,” Nyx said. She leaned over, opened her pack, and rolled a few bursts onto the passenger seat. Just in case.

She paid the woman and then got back onto the road.

Three kilometers on, she saw the bakkie parked at the side of the road.

Waiting.

Nyx switched pedals, kicked the bakkie a little faster. The other bakkie turned out onto the road after her.

Nyx didn’t know the coast well, and unlike the cities, the place was wide open, no cover. About all the cover she had were the hills, and some woods, if she could find them. She switched pedals again, reached for the clutch. She hadn’t had to use the clutch in a long time. She wondered if it still worked.

The dark bakkie kept just within her rearview mirror range. They knew they’d been seen. Either they didn’t know where she was going and wanted to pin her there, or they were waiting for a good turn in the road to take her out.

She sped up. They sped up.

She watched the image of the black bakkie grow larger in the mirror.

She fucked with the clutch. It made a nasty grinding sound. The bakkie wheezed.

“Come on, you fucker,” she said.

It clicked.

She switched pedals. The bakkie shuddered. The speedometer climbed. She saw a turnoff on her left that went up into the hills. Nyx did a neat brake, twisted the wheel, and hit the speed as she came out of the turn.

The bakkie screamed under her. She caught the smell of burning bugs, death on the road. She glanced back and saw smoke and dead beetles roiling out from the exhaust. The way was narrow and twisted, and as she climbed, the grasslands turned to a forest of oak hybrids. She took the turns too fast.

Nyx kept checking the mirror. She spent a moment too long looking and nearly lost herself on a narrow turn. She’d seen the other bakkie.

They were still behind her.

She kept a sharp eye out for turns off this road. She didn’t want gravel tracks or logging roads. The bakkie would get stuck, and she’d be for shit.

The black bakkie was right behind her. She could just see their faces now. The big woman in the driver’s seat was definitely Dahab. Not a doubt in her mind. Dahab had a new team with her—and not bel dames from the look of them.

And she had a real good feeling they weren’t with Rasheeda. That threw a whole other contagion into the mess.

Nyx twisted around another curve. Raine had taught her to drive when she was nineteen. It was the first thing he taught every member of his crew. She knew how to pedal her way out of a tight spot.

Nyx heard a shot, and ducked. Checked the mirror again. The woman riding shotgun with Dahab was doing what people riding shotgun did.

Nyx dared not take her hands off the wheel. Even if she could clip off a couple shots with her pistol, the odds of her hitting anything in or around that bakkie were slim.

She reached a crossroads. Right would take her further up into the hills. Left was down into the coastal valley. Down meant she would have to put a lot of faith in her repair of the brake line.

Fuck it.

She veered left and barreled down the hill. She disengaged the clutch.

Heard another shot.

Something exploded against her back window.

That wasn’t good. Organics. A fever burst? Something worse?

She grabbed at one of the bursts on the seat next to her and lobbed it out the window. Heard a satisfying pop as it exploded on the road.

The bakkie squeezed around another narrow turn. The cover of the woods was thinning out. She saw a house set back away from the road. If she couldn’t lose them, she had to fight them.

Fight Dahab.

Nyx ignored the house and kept on the road.

She came down a long stretch and turned. The road abruptly changed from pavement to gravel. Logging road.

The bakkie skidded on the sudden raw stretch. Nyx hit the far left and far right pedals, and all four wheels twisted sharply, giving her some traction.

She looked back. Missed a turn. She spun the wheel and tried to recover, but she was trying to recover on