noted the missing fingers on the hand that clutched the scattergun, and the worn hilt of the sword sticking through the slit in her burnous. The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.
“Yes or no?” Nyx said. “It’s a long drive.”
Inaya gazed up at Khos, her face a mask of mourning. Her son cried.
“Yes,” Khos said.
Nyx started down the stairs.
“Get your son,” Khos said.
Inaya went back to her room, and Khos helped her pack her carpetbag. She put her son into a sling and held him to her.
Khos herded her and her son down the stairs. “I’ll be right behind you,” he said.
Inaya stumbled downstairs.
Khos walked over to the box containing Taite’s head. Nyx couldn’t protect them. She had lost Taite, and she would lose Rhys.
Khos had promised to look after Inaya.
Damn him and his bloody fucking promises.
He pulled the transceiver out of his burnous pocket and called Haj.
“What do you have for me?” she said.
“Everything,” Khos said, and put the lid back on the box.
Something inside of him hurt, and he thought about why he’d come to Nasheen four years before. He thought about the question Nyx had asked him when she interviewed him in that cramped little storefront in downtown Punjai.
“Why leave a peaceful country and come out here to wallow in all this war and shit?” she’d asked.
“I wanted to go somewhere where the pain outside matched what I felt, here,” he’d said, and touched his heart, and thought of his son. “A country at war with itself seemed like the best option.”
32
Nyx drove them out of Dadfar and into the desert. A fine dust coated the interior of the bakkie and the seams of their skin. She wore a pair of goggles and a scarf tied over her butchered hair. Nyx left a long trail of dead and dying beetles in her wake and tried not to think too much about a dancer on the other side of Bahreha.
Inaya sat next to her, her little body tense, clutching her baby to her breast. She stared out across the flat plain of the desert, the monotonous line of the road, and said nothing.
Sitting next to the door, Khos kept his rifle in his lap and his elbow jutting out the open window.
Anneke tapped on the windshield when the heat got too bad, and they stopped to wait out the worst of the day at a little roadside oasis.
The place was empty except for a couple of stray cats and some black tumbleweeds rolling through the empty courtyard of a long-abandoned market. Nyx knew Bahreha. In the spring, this whole blasted desert heath turned green. She had laid mines just north of the city and dug trenches out here, somewhere real close. The whole place looked different in the summer. It was like she was traveling on some long road, headed full circle.
Nyx popped the trunk and pulled off the cooling tarp she’d thrown over Nikodem. Despite the tarp, Nikodem was sweating a lot, too much. Her face was swollen, and when the tarp came up, she didn’t do much more than loll her head back and squint. Her eyes looked funny.
Nyx pulled her out and hauled her over to the relative shade of the massive stone arches bordering the courtyard. A couple of mangy palm trees jutted up from the sandy ground near the fountain. She saw some termite mounds in the far distance, but no trace of acid sprayers or centipedes. Inaya moved after them to stand in the shade. Khos shadowed her.
Anneke trudged up to the fountain and returned with a half-filled bucket of brackish water. Nyx doused Nikodem in it. Anneke went back for more, and the two of them wet Nikodem through until the off-worlder shivered and her eyes started to focus again.
“What did you give her?” Anneke asked.
“Nothing. She’s overheated,” Nyx said.
“Fool,” Nikodem murmured, and her speech was slurred. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Nyx said.
Nikodem firmed up her mouth.
Nyx slapped her.
Nikodem slobbered all over herself and started shaking. “Oh, it’s much better than you could imagine,” Nikodem said, and grinned a stupid grin, then winced. Her lip was split and bloody. She was brutally heat sick.
“You wanted to play Nasheen and Chenja for fools, and now you’ll die for it,” Nyx said. “I’m not the one looking the fool here.”
“I’ve created whole armies on our world, the real world,” Nikodem said. “Dumb beasts. I could create armies here. Different sorts of beasts, beasts you could never imagine. Your magicians and shifters…. You have no idea of their potential. We just need to understand… The Chenjans are more advanced than you are, did you know it? All that holds them back is their religion. They fear God’s wrath. But I could breed you the sorts of creatures you couldn’t even imagine. Armies. I can breed them full-formed, like baby foals.”
Nyx had no idea what a foal was, but it didn’t sound good. “Anneke,” Nyx said, “more water.” The water would keep her talking.
Anneke walked back to the fountain. Khos stood by, watching Inaya more than the road. Nyx didn’t like the way they looked at each other. She didn’t like a whole lot of things right now.
Nyx crouched next to Nikodem but kept one eye on the road.
“Listen, woman, listen,” Nikodem said. “No longer will you have to see your sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, dying at the front. You can manufacture these beasts and send them out in your stead. Let God decide.”
“Beasts?” Nyx grimaced. “Shifters aren’t beasts. What do you and the Kinaanites get out of this?”
Nikodem turned her head away again. Nyx punched her this time. Closed fist.
Nikodem hiccupped and shook. She bared her bloody teeth and spat. “You’ll find that ours is the only way to understand God. There was only one prophet, one Son of God, and He bled and died for
“Yeah, your Prophet’s such a pacifist he sends you to other worlds for weapons and tells you to keep us fighting each other? Fuck that, you hypocrite alien.”
Nikodem coughed and hacked. “We have a war to fight. You don’t understand. We fight in God’s name.”
“I understand just fine,” Nyx said.
Nikodem rattled off something that sounded like a curse. “With shifters and magicians, we could pound our enemies into submission. We can do much, blending your genes with ours.”
So Nikodem was just another gene pirate, a fucking
“I should cut your head off right now,” Nyx said.
Anneke returned with more water. Nyx dumped it over Nikodem’s head.
The woman shivered, then spat, “Oh, what do you know? You’re just an uneducated bloodletter. What do you know about God’s plan, about the salvation of your soul?”
“No more than a butcher,” Nyx said. “But a butcher knows how to serve it halal.” She stood. “Anneke, put her back in the trunk.”
Two-faced, two sides, like Rasheeda.
It all made her head hurt. She had one good solution to this problem, the same old solution, but Raine
