water for her group of fighters after they were cut off from the only well for miles. Nyx remembered the water on the streets the night before, and wondered now if it had been some kind of Tirhani pilgrim thing.
“Bloody fucking dung beetles,” Anneke muttered, following her look. “You watch them. Someday they’re going to show up here, guns hot, telling us they’re our bloody liberators come to save us from ourselves.”
“After selling guns to both sides,” Nyx said. “It’s real easy to sit out there on the coast playing holier than thou and getting fat off someone else’s war.” It was Chenja’s reliance on Tirhani weapons that kept Tirhani pilgrims getting visas, and Nasheenian reliance on the same that kept them ferrying bug tech and magicians by the boatload to Tirhan. Fucking dung beetles.
Across the square was a mosque, and the muezzin called out mid-morning prayer, bringing most of the activity in the market to a halt. Anneke dusted off the sidewalk in front of her and pulled the prayer rug from her back. Going into the mosque would have been risky. Always better to pray outside official spaces when you were cross-dressing in Chenja.
Nyx wandered through the market as it cleared out. She bought a couple of mangoes—Rhys liked mangoes —and another roti. Most Chenjan food was shit, but there was nothing better than a good roti.
She looked over the stalls nearest her and saw Anneke still prone on the sidewalk. She walked a little more until she came to the other side of the square, where a veiled woman sold prayer rugs. On the street behind the woman, a bakkie sat idling, its windows opaqued. Nyx started eating a mango as she watched the bakkie. Strange to leave your bakkie idling while you hopped into the mosque for mid-morning prayer. Chenjans weren’t any more honest than Nasheenians, no matter what Rhys said. Somebody was liable to steal their transport. If not Nyx, then somebody like her.
The veiled woman who owned the stall was praying. The day was going to be hot. Nyx smelled curry over protein cakes and grimaced. Chenja.
She turned again to look for Anneke. As she did, she saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye. She ducked and thrust her elbow behind her. She caught somebody in the gut.
A bag went over her head, and the light bled away.
Nyx kicked out, but she was already off her feet. Something hard hit her in the head. She let out a long scream, hoping somebody around her would note that she wasn’t being kidnapped willingly.
Somebody shouted something. Nyx got hit in the head again.
A bakkie door opened, and she was shoved inside. Her captor took the bag off her head. Nyx had one dizzying moment to look into Rasheeda’s grinning face before her sister thrust a toxic scarab beetle into her mouth and gagged her with a rag.
Nyx choked on the beetle as its poison trickled down her throat, turning the world gray and hazy, making her too drugged to move.
20
Nyx forced herself to focus. The poison was wearing off. She’d eaten most of the beetle while trying to breathe. Her head felt too heavy to hold up. She was strapped to a chair bolted to the floor. She was naked. She hadn’t recognized the other women who stripped her and searched her, but she knew Rasheeda was working this with another sister. If Rasheeda had been working alone, she would have just killed Nyx.
Nyx tried raising her head again and looked around. The room was dim. The floor was gritty and oddly damp. The whole room felt too damp. It was probably a basement room dug just above the old riverbed.
She tugged at her bonds—organic rope that fed off her sweat and blood. The more she moved, the tougher it got. Over that, barbed wire twisted into some bizarre shapes on the arm rests. Rasheeda liked to twist restraining wire into grim parodies of faces. They’d trussed her feet as well and pinned her at her elbows and wrists so she had to sit a certain way or risk losing circulation in her arms. She wished they’d tied something around her head to keep it up. She let it sink again.
Time stretched. Her head cleared. She was cold and thirsty. There was something wrong with her legs. She held her urine as long as she could before finally pissing herself. That was part of the game, of course, leaving her in a pool of her own urine, so thirsty she’d drink it if she could reach it. The light globe above her was never shuttered. How long they waited until they came to her depended on how desperate they were for information.
But what information? About Nikodem and the boxing? They’d know about that. Rasheeda didn’t want Nikodem anyway. Their goal was to keep her away from Nikodem, wasn’t it? Or were they using her to find Nikodem? What was this, another intimidation game?
She waited. Her body stiffened. She tried flexing her arms, her back, her shoulders, her legs. She was going to start losing feeling in her limbs if she didn’t find a way to move.
Nyx finally managed to get a look at her legs. Bloody wounds crisscrossed her flesh. The lines moved and wriggled. Alive.
They’d stuffed her wounds with bloodworms.
Her gut roiled. She looked up again. Something moved in the far dark corner of the room in the broken masonry. She briefly saw the shiny head of a giant centipede peek through. The pain would kick in soon—maybe another couple hours—when the bloodworms had excreted enough poison into her skin to start the slow burn. Her lower limbs already tingled.
She avoided thinking about her team. She didn’t think about the interrogation, about what she’d seen Rasheeda do to people. Instead, she thought about the black sand of Tirhan, the kind she’d spun stories about back in Mushirah. She thought about sitting on a deck under a couple of broad-leafed palm trees surrounded in dark green foliage, sipping cool coconut drinks spiked with vodka.
She thought about counting stars with Tej, and she remembered the good nights with that girl, what was her name? Radeyah, yes. Radeyah, with the kind eyes and quick tongue who’d told her they’d spend a lifetime growing old together in the same bed in a little beach house in Tirhan, though all that water in one place scared the shit out of Nyx. But Radeyah’s boy lover had come back from the front—most of him—and dreams of Tirhan and vodka and a lifetime of Radeyah’s sweet tongue and soft hands had ended.
She had told that story again, though, wrapped in bed with another sort of woman, a desperate outrider. Told her all about Tirhani beaches she had never been to and never wanted to see—
Arran. The note that killed Tej.
Nyx used them all to get to somebody else, to pick up some other note. It was her job. It’s what she did.
The door opened.
Nyx raised her head.
Rasheeda walked in, wearing loose trousers and a short coat. Her black hair was pulled back from her cool, flawless face, and she was grinning. Her eyes were flat and black and, paired with the grin, she looked like some kind of demon, something come up straight from hell to inhabit a soulless body. She carried a bag and a stool.
Behind her was Fatima.
Nyx wasn’t surprised. This was the sort of job Fatima would pull. Fatima was skinny—skinnier than Nyx had ever seen her—and her dark hair was shot through with white; very becoming on a Nasheenian woman. Fatima fixed a hard look on Nyx, then shut the door. Nyx hadn’t seen Fatima since she sent Nyx to prison.
Rasheeda snickered and set the stool in front of Nyx, just far enough away so Nyx couldn’t bite her nose off.
Fatima sat as Rasheeda unpacked her instruments from her bag.
“You look terrible,” Fatima said.
Nyx only looked at her.
Fatima’s mouth quirked up at the corners, not a smile. “You were much more difficult to track when you worked alone.”
