patch, but from the look of all the dead and dying beetles floating in the pooling organic feed at her feet, she wasn’t going to have much of a colony to work with, and she needed more coagulant. The gash in the cistern wasn’t healing over right.
She needed to work fast. Dahab would be back.
It took just under an hour to get the bakkie sewn up enough to start and another half hour to let the bugs rejuice. Even then, Nyx had to push the bakkie onto the road. Her chest hurt, and she had to stop and rest twice to catch her breath and ease the ache.
Dahab had taken the duffel bag out of the cab, but Nyx still had a buck in notes sewn into her dhoti and some cash stowed under the dash. The bag had contained the last of her sen, though. She was going to have to finish this trip sober.
She walked around the front of the bakkie to get in and came face to face with a giant, flat-backed millipede busily devouring the spilled contents of her cistern. The insect was a good meter long. It reared up at her and hissed.
Nyx reflexively jerked the acid spray on her rifle. The insect made a high-pitched whirring sound and started to smoke. She finished it off by bashing in its fist-size head with the butt of her rifle.
Fuck, she’d be glad to get back to the interior.
Nyx got the bakkie moving. It broke down twice. She stopped at a farmhouse and asked for directions to Jameela. She hadn’t had a chance to see her face, but it probably didn’t look great. The bakkie was worse. It was no wonder the coastal folk looked at her funny.
She finally turned in to Jameela, a bustling seaside town that supported the towering breeding centers looming behind it—row upon row of barracks, courtyards, labs, health centers, mess halls, and a single mosque. The first time the Chenjans blew up a breeding center, Nasheen had nearly given up the war.
Nyx dropped her bakkie at a local tissue mechanic’s and walked the rest of the way to Kine’s complex.
Kine lived in a tenement three blocks from the breath of the ocean. Nyx didn’t know how she could stand the salty death stink of the sea. After Nyx followed her brothers to the front and their mother died at the compounds, Kine had retired to the coast and gone into organic tech. She studied reproductive theology, working on a cure for the war.
We all fight the war our own way, Nyx thought idly as she climbed the stairs. She knocked at the heavy door. When no one answered, she pressed her palm to the faceplate on the door. Bugs stirred beneath her fingers, lapped up the secretions on her skin. Working at the breeding compounds got Kine extra security. All that time at the coast—at the compounds, nose in a book, moving magician-trained bugs across a dish, locked safe behind secure doors at the edge of a soupy sea, her only company the words of the Kitab and the violently conservative women she shared her days with—it was no wonder Kine had come back wearing a hijab to mark her as one of the fundamentalist followers of the Kitab, the Kitabullah.
Kine had, however, tailored the house to admit blood kin. Nyx was the only blood kin Kine had left. Their mother had borne the five of them—three boys, two girls—in one pregnancy at the breeding compounds. She hadn’t been interested in having any more. That was before women had quotas.
The door slid open. Automatic doors creeped Nyx out.
The first thing Nyx saw was one of Kine’s long coats and a crumpled hijab on the floor. Kine didn’t leave her clothes on the floor. Her place was always immaculate.
Nyx didn’t call out for Kine. She unshouldered the scattergun. She tended to be a better shot with fluid at short range. She stalked into the flat.
I’m a bloody fucking fool, she thought. Of course the council wouldn’t have authorized killing Nyx in so short a period of time. But they would have happily authorized the slaughter of everyone around her. Her chest hurt. She needed to find Kine and call the keg.
There was a broken lamp in the main room. Dead glow worms littered the floor. Nyx nudged one of them with the toe of her sandal. They were still soft. It had been an hour, maybe two. She had missed them by an hour.
Nyx poked around the kitchen, found a couple of drawers open. Had Kine been looking for a weapon? Had she known there was someone in the flat?
Nyx checked behind all the doors as she moved, cleared each room. Kine had put up blank-faced portraits of the prophet in the living area, and hung some gaudy inscriptions from the Kitab alongside them. In her bedroom, though, Kine kept pictures of the five of them, her kin, embedded in the walls—glowing, partially animated portraits of better days. If you got too close, you could see that what made the images move were multi-colored layers of rug lice. The faces of their brothers laughed back at Nyx: Amir, the oldest by an hour; brilliant Fouad; and skinny little Ghazi, the runt.
By seventeen, all the boys were dead.
Nyx pushed open the bathroom door.
Kine lay in the tub, mouth open, one arm flung over the edge. The water was rusty and full of shit. The room stank. Congealed blood blackened the floor.
Nyx got close enough to see that most of the blood had come from a long tear in Kine’s gut. Her bowels had let loose—before or after she expired, Nyx didn’t care to know. Kine’s eyes were black holes of blood and eye pulp. They’d finished her off with two shots to the head.
There was blood in the bowl of the sink. They’d washed their hands, after.
Under the sink was a single white feather.
Nyx looked at her sister’s body for a long minute. Nyx’s palms were wet. The flat was cool.
She dared not make any calls from inside the flat. They’d likely bugged it.
Nyx did a pass through the last room, Kine’s study. They’d gone through the desk, opened up jars and boxes of bugs. The dead and dying insects littered the floor or clung to the ceiling. Smears of velvet black—blue, violet— ran across the floor. Torn organic papers, bleeding those same colors, were crumpled and scattered around the window.
What did Kine have that they’d wanted? If the only reason they killed her was to get to Nyx, why go through the—
Nyx turned abruptly and ran back to the bedroom. She felt along the edges of one of the animated photos of her, Kine, and their brothers until she found the catch. The depiction was not soldered to the wall. It popped free and swung out.
For a conservative like Kine, images of living things of any kind were vulgar, obscene. An affront to God. If she had them around, it was to tell somebody something. Or remind herself of something.
Inside the hidden cabinet were Kine’s real records: papers and bug recordings of her work in the compounds. Nyx found a satchel and stuffed the lot of them into it without looking. Rhys would help her sort them out. She put the picture back in place. Her siblings grinned at her. Kine winked. Nyx wiped down the frame.
On her way out, she cleaned the faceplate as well. She walked quickly but didn’t dare run.
Back at the mechanic’s, she found a call box. She flipped the switch that agitated the bugs and plugged in the pattern for the keg.
The bugs chattered for a long time. She heard someone on the other side of the building and ducked behind the box.
“Pickup, you fuckers,” she muttered. She saw a sudden clear image of Anneke with her head blasted in, Taite with a sword through his gut, Rhys’s hands—
“Peace be unto you,” Rhys’s voice carried to her from the desert.
“You listen to me,” she said. Her voice shook. She stilled it. “You tell Taite to get his sister to a safe place and cut free his boy. Tell Khos to get his whores to another house, and if Anneke gives a shit about anybody, you tell her to get them a train ticket. Anybody we care about, get them out of the city or out of their places. And start packing up our stuff. You know the regrouping point. You put a filter up and get out of there. You hear me?”
“Are you all right?”
“Kine’s dead.”
He inhaled sharply. “Nyx—”
“You go get anybody you care about, Rhys. Tell them to clear out.”
“Everyone I care about is on this team,” Rhys said.
