Bashir sat at a corner table smoking sweet opium. Nyx could taste it. The smell made her nauseous. Bashir had two bottles of sand-colored whiskey at the table, and someone had left behind a still-smoking cigar that smelled more like marijuana than sen. Bashir had two teenage boys beside her, both just shy of draft age, maybe fifteen. They were sallow and soft-looking and kept their hair long, braided, and belled. Somebody had kept them out of training. Letting adolescent boys go that soft was illegal in most districts, even if they were prostitutes. They wouldn’t last a day at the front—the Chenjans would mash through them like overripe squash.
“Nyxnissa,” Bashir said. She exhaled a plume of rich smoke. “Thought I’d seen the last of you.”
“Most people think that,” Nyx said, sliding next to one of the boys. He flinched. She outweighed him by at least twenty-five kilos. “Until I show up again.”
“How was your trip?” Bashir asked. She wore red trousers and a stained short coat but kept her head uncovered. Her skin was a shade paler than those who worked in the desert, but the tough, leathery look of her face said her wealth was recently acquired. Like the boys, she was getting fat and soft at the edges, but unlike the boys, she’d fought it out on the sand with the best of them in her youth. There was muscle under the affluence.
“Not as smooth as I hoped,” Nyx said. She pulled off her hood.
Bashir looked her over with a lazy sort of interest. “A bug told me you don’t have what we bargained for.”
“I need a drink,” Nyx said, “and half of what you owe me.” She hailed the woman at the bar, but Bashir waved her woman back.
“The bug says you dropped the purse at the butcher’s.”
“I did,” Nyx said. “It was a high-risk job. You knew that when your agent gave it to me.” She’d been carrying genetic material worth a nice chunk of money in that womb. Bashir wasn’t going to let it go easy, no, but bel dames made good black market runners which made them valuable to people like Bashir—until they got caught. Word got around when you did business with gene pirates.
Being unarmed made it easier to resist the urge to shoot Bashir in the head and demand the contents of the cantina’s till from the barmaid. She was too close to the magicians’ gym to get away with that.
“It was a substantial purse,” Bashir said.
Nyx leaned back against the seat. The boy next to her had a hold of his glass, but wasn’t drinking. Like many Nasheenian women, Bashir was known to like boys, but these ones were a little young and soft for a desert matron.
“Where’d you pick up these two?” Nyx asked.
“Lovely, eh?” Bashir said. Her dark eyes glinted in the low light. The place was too cheap for bulbs. They were still using worms in glass. “They were a gift. From a friend.”
Bashir didn’t have friends. Nyx cut a look at the door. The bouncers had closed it. The woman at the bar was still wiping the same length of counter she’d been mopping when Nyx dropped in. I shouldn’t have come, Nyx thought. She should have gone straight to the magicians and asked for sanctuary. It had been only a matter of time before turning Nyx in was worth more than a black market purse. But, fuck, she’d needed the money from this job.
Nyx knew the answer but asked anyway.
“Who gave them to you?”
Bashir showed her teeth.
“You’ll get shit from the magicians for crossing a bel dame,” Nyx said. They could take her money, her shoes, her sword, her
“Your reputation’s been tumbling for a good long while, Nyxnissa. The bounty hunters have your name in a hat now, and if you’re lucky, it’ll be Raine who brings you in and not some young honey pot trying to prove something by cutting off your head. What would your sisters say?”
“Leave the bel dame family out of it.”
“There’s been some stirring in the bel dame council. Rumor has it they want to clean up this little mess with you internally, the way Alharazad cleaned up the council. They’ll cut you up and put you in a bag.”
“Then you and your pirates are losing a good ferrier.”
“You don’t deliver enough to make yourself worth the risk. And now you dropped your womb, so I don’t have anything invested. Putting out a note on you got me a good purse for reporting a pirate. Delivering you to the bounty office and claiming my own bounty makes us even.”
So Bashir had turned her in for bread.
“How much am I going for?” Nyx asked. Her hands itched for a blade that she no longer carried. She was good with a sword. The guns? Not so much.
“About fifty,” Bashir said.
Well, that was something.
The boy beside Nyx took his hand away from his drink.
The woman behind the bar moved toward the kitchen.
All right, then.
Nyx kicked up onto the tabletop before the boy could steady the pistol in his other hand. The gun went off with a pop and burst of yellow smoke.
She threw a low roundhouse kick to the other boy’s face and leapt off the table before Bashir could get her scattergun free.
Reflex sent her running for the back door, kicking up sand behind her. She shouldered into the kitchen, knocked past a startled Mhorian cook, and ran headlong out the open back door and into the alley.
A strong arm shot out and slammed into her throat. The blow took her off her feet.
Nyx hit the sand and rolled.
Still choking, Nyx tried to get up, but Raine already had hold of her.
He twisted her arm behind her and forced her face back into the sand. She spit and turned her head, gulping air. She saw two pairs of dirty sandaled feet in front of her. She tried to look up at who owned them.
Little ropy-muscled Anneke hadn’t broken a sweat. She stood chewing a wad of sen, one arm supporting the weight of the rifle she kept lodged just under her shoulder. She was as dark as a Chenjan, and about the size of a twelve-year-old. The other feet belonged to the skinny half-breed Taite, who wasn’t a whole hell of a lot older than thirteen or fourteen.
“You must be desperate,” Nyx said, spitting more sand, “to use Taite and Anneke as muscle.”
“That’s all the greeting I get?” Raine asked. He pulled her up, kept a grip on her arm, and tugged off her burnous.
“Where did you lose your gear, girl? I taught you better than that.” He shook the burnous out, probably thinking she’d hidden something in it.
Raine was a large man, a head taller than Nyx, just as dark and twice as massive. His face was broad and flat and stamped with two black, expressionless eyes, like deep water from a community well. The hilt of a good blade cut through a slit in the back of his brown burnous. He was pushing Bashir’s age—one of the few who’d survived the front.
She grunted.
He took off her baldric and passed it to Anneke for inspection.
“Nothing here,” Anneke said, and tossed the baldric at Nyx’s feet.
“You’re clean,” Raine said, half a question. “You know how much you’re going for?”
“More than fifty,” Nyx said.
He took Nyx by her braids and brought her close to his bearded face. The beard was new, a Chenjan affectation that would get him noticed on the street and pegged as a political radical. “Do you know what the queen does to bel dames who turn black?” he asked. “When they start selling zygotes to gene pirates? Those pirates will breed monsters in jars and sell them to Chenjans. But you don’t care about that, do you? You need pocket money.”
Raine had recruited her from the magicians’ gym after she was reconstituted. They’d spent long nights and longer days talking about the war and his hatred for those whose work he saw as perpetuating it. Gene pirates— selling genetic material to both sides—were no better to him than Tirhani arms dealers.
