The desert was still flat and white, and they passed burst craters and abandoned vehicles along the road. He expected the air to be different somehow, now that they’d crossed the border, but the air contained the same yeasty stink. Nyx sat near the window, a scarf pulled up over her face to keep away the dust and to obscure her appearance. She had cut her hair with Damira’s machete when they changed clothes. It was a bit of a botched job, a ragged mop of thick, dark hair that did nothing to soften her face. She looked like a wild desert orphan, someone who’d grown up on an abandoned farm near the front after her family was slaughtered.
He sat in the middle, trying to give Damira some space. It meant sitting closer to Nyx, but after spending the morning inside a body bag, the idea of pressing himself against someone alive didn’t seem so indecent.
Too long in Nasheen, he thought, and watched the flat desert rolling out before him. How long until it looked different? Until it wasn’t just some long stretch of Nasheenian desert but the land of his birth? His father’s land, the land they bled and died and prayed for?
Rhys glanced over at Damira again, then at the prayer wheel. He had opened his mouth to form the question in Nasheenian when he realized he could speak Chenjan freely. The words came out a little stilted. “Can I ask what you pray for?” he asked.
She kept her eyes on the road. “I pray for an end to the war.”
He could barely hear her over the sound of the tires on the gritty road and the chitter of the bugs.
They passed a hastily erected road sign along the edge of the scarred highway, its base covered over in lizards. The original sign was a rusted-out hulk, mangled and broken and half-buried in the sand behind it. The new sign announced distances to the nearest Chenjan cities:
Azam, 40 km
Bahreha, 86 km
Dadfar, 120 km
“Where did you live?” Damira asked him.
“Here in Chenja?”
“Yes.”
“A little town west of Bahreha called Chitra,” he lied.
“My mother heard that Chitra was once a beautiful city.”
“I don’t remember it that way,” he said. He had never been to Chitra.
“No one alive does,” she said.
The desert stayed flat and white all day. Rhys saw more evidence of recent fighting as they drove—spent bursts and abandoned artillery, black-scarred rents in the desert, pools of dead bugs. He saw a heap of burning corpses in the distance. He knew there were corpses because the giant scavengers were circling, despite the smoke: couple of sand cats, black swarms that must have been palm-size carrion beetles, and some of the rarer flying scavenger beetles with hooked jaws, the kind that grew to over a meter long and had been known to devour children in their beds.
There were human scavengers as well, walking along the road as they passed, asking for rides. One of them looked like a Chenjan deserter, his jacket torn from his body, long tears in his dark skin that looked like they’d been made by a sand cat. When the man turned, Rhys saw that half his skull was missing. He could see the gray-red wetness of his brains beneath the sand and dirt and cloud of flies. He wouldn’t last long unless he found a magician. He must have dragged himself out from under the heap of corpses and was probably trying to walk home. They would patch him up and send him back.
Rhys looked away.
He had fled across the desert to escape this fate. Some part of him wondered if it had all caught up with him at last.
18
Damira dropped them off outside Azam, a bleeding border city. A half-dozen anti-burst gun towers ringed the swollen black sprawl of the city, half again as tall as its two minarets. Most of the gun towers were charred husks. Heaps of debris littered the roadway.
Rhys and Nyx walked with their hoods pulled up. Geckos skittered across their path. They passed a contagion sensor along the road, tilted at a hard left angle. The light at the top flashed yellow; the whole thing was covered in locusts.
The sun was low in the sky by the time they made it past the burst guns and into the city. It was dead quiet, like the streets around a magicians’ gym before a fight. Rhys saw some moths under the eaves of the tenement buildings, blasted-out archways riddled with bullet holes. The city was teeming with wild and tailored bugs; they made Rhys’s blood sing. Swarms of flesh beetles darkened the sky. A few ragged people stared out at them from the ruined buildings. Rhys saw a couple of scabby kids digging in the sandy basin of what had once been the city’s central fountain and asked them where everybody was.
The boy sneered at Nyx, but as he turned to Rhys, his expression sobered and he pointed east, toward Nasheen.
“That fighting we passed was close,” Rhys said.
He saw Nyx gaze down the deserted street. A swarm of wasps hummed over the rooftops. In the west, the primary sun was headed down, and the sky was starting to go the brilliant violet of dusk.
“We don’t have time to get to Dadfar tonight,” Nyx said, in halting Chenjan, probably for the child’s benefit. Speaking Nasheenian would draw even more attention than the color of her face. “If Anneke’s in, we have to hole up.”
They walked past prayer wheels hanging in broken lattice windows, cracked water troughs, and abandoned bug cages. Rhys caught the distinctive smell of gravy over protein cakes, spinach and garlic.
Nyx led him down a narrow, refuse-strewn alleyway that smelled heavily of urine and dog shit. He had to pick his way around heaping piles of garbage and feces and rubble. They stirred up fist-size dung beetles and enormous biting flies. At the end of the alley, in a cracked parking lot, Rhys saw Nyx’s familiar bakkie—new paint, new tags, but her bakkie nonetheless—squatting underneath a spread of spindly palm trees. One of the trees was splintered in half. The other bakkies he could see were all sun-sick, rusted-out wrecks—Tirhani made, just like the ones in Nasheen. A woman in a soiled burqua called to them from the scant shade of the palms. She had something in her hands—tattered lengths of cloth for turbans.
“Here it is,” Nyx said, pointing to the green awning at their left. The way house was a leaning, three-storied facade of mud-brick and bug-eaten secretions. The tiled roof was coated in flaking green paint. A battered poster under one of the reinforced windows bled black organic ink all over the bricks, announcing the arrival of a carnival now four years past.
“Nyx,” Rhys said, “we shouldn’t stay in Azam.” He had his own reasons for that. He had family in Azam.
“We’ll be fine,” Nyx said, and rapped on the heavy, bullet-pocked door of the way house.
A small peeping portal opened. Rhys saw one misty eye look back out at them.
Nyx glanced at Rhys.
“We have reservations,” Rhys told the misty eye. He had to stop again, work backward from the Nasheenian. It had been too long since he spoke Chenjan at length. “My brother has preceded us.”
The door opened.
A haggard old man stood on the other side, a long rifle in one of his bent, arthritic hands. “Anneke,” the old man said.
Rhys looked at Nyx.
“Yeah,” Nyx said.
A slim figure stepped toward the door from the dim of the reception area. Rhys recognized Anneke under the black turban that wound about her head and covered her face. Khos-the-dog trotted behind her, pausing in the light from the doorway to yawn and stretch.
“Any trouble?” Anneke asked in Chenjan. Rhys was startled at how smoothly she spoke, with no hint of an
