wanted Nikodem alive. Nyx could kill her later.
After Anneke dragged Nikodem back into the trunk, Nyx turned to her and Khos. “Khos, I’m going to need your shot. It’s not as good as Rhys’s, but it’ll do. Can you work your way around from the other side of the hills? I want you to fire on Raine if he pulls first.”
“And if he doesn’t pull?”
“We walk away.”
“And leave Nikodem?” Khos said, and she heard the surprise in his voice.
“When we walk away, I want you to shoot her.”
“I won’t do that.”
“I’m a bad shot, Khos. I can’t do point.”
“I’ll do it, boss,” Anneke said. “I’m a better shot than the old dog anyway.”
“Fine.” Nyx pulled a ball of sen out of her pocket, rolled it between her fingers. “He’ll have his own shooter up there. You take that one out. When me and Khos are clear, I need you to shoot Nikodem.”
“And Raine?”
“You leave Raine to me.”
“You know he travels with a magician,” Khos said.
“We’ll have ours there.”
“He’ll be drugged,” Khos said. “And he’s hardly a magician even when he’s sober.”
Nyx pocketed the sen. “I’ve got some unguent in the back. We’ll slather ourselves with it before we go in. It’ll slow the bugs down, at least. Confuse their sense of smell.
“Keep your transceiver on you. If the plan changes, I’ll let you know,” Nyx said. “When we have Rhys—after we get some distance—you take Nikodem out. Or, if Raine tries to pull when we back up, you shoot whoever pulls the weapon. You can try shooting at the magician, but she’ll likely have some defenses up. Lay down some cover fire, and I’ll deal with Raine. Me and Khos can take Nikodem’s head and wrap it in the organic burnous. Then we get the fuck out of here and go home and collect our money.”
“Sounds thin,” Anneke said.
“Sounds like all we’ve got,” Khos said, and pulled up the hood of his burnous. “Can we go now?”
They drove out past the shrine marking the sandy road that headed up toward the hills. Nyx dropped Anneke off with a good burnous and a bag of water, and Anneke loped off toward the hills with her rifle slung over her shoulder.
Nyx looked over at Inaya and her kid, at Khos. He was staring out the window. “You ready?” she asked.
“Let’s get it over with,” he said. Inaya’s kid started crying again.
“Give Anneke a minute to set up,” Nyx said. She got out of the bakkie and walked around the shrine. She needed some space.
Nyx sat down on the other side of the shrine, in the shadow of the great curved slab, and watched a couple lizards scuttle away from her. She took a deep breath and clenched and unclenched her hands, taking a good look at them. She thought about Raine. Tried not to think about Rhys, about what Raine had done to him.
Raine knew her, knew how she worked. He’d taught her how to work that way. He knew all about Bahreha. It was why he asked her out here.
She rubbed at her eyes with her palms.
“Nyx,” Khos said.
She looked up. He stood over her, too tall and too broad, a foreign man in a foreign country. But, then, here in the Chenjan desert, she was a foreigner too. And an infidel. An enemy.
“Anneke’s reached the top,” he said.
“Yeah. All right.”
She pulled out the unguent from one of the gear bags. They wiped themselves down with it and then got into the bakkie and drove out to the base of the hills, until the road got too rocky to drive on.
Nyx parked, and Khos helped her move some stones behind the back tires.
“I want you to stay here, Inaya,” Nyx said. “When you see us heading back, I want you to take the stones out from behind the tires and start the bakkie. Understand?”
“Yes,” Inaya said.
Nyx checked all of her gear and cleaned her pistols. Khos cleaned his own. They did not speak. She nodded at him when he was done, and Khos popped the trunk and pulled Nikodem out. Nyx gave her some water, but the alien could barely keep her feet.
Nyx and Khos got Nikodem to walk by holding her up between them.
They stumbled through some low-lying scrub and into a rocky gully. The hills reared up on either side of them, a pair of heavy breasts that Nyx might have found comforting under different circumstances.
“Let’s keep out of the gully,” she said. The sky was clear above them, but there were dark clouds just north, and that meant it was raining up in the mountains. Gullies filled up hard and fast in the desert. The water might be coming their way already. She didn’t trust the weather. She didn’t trust much of anything.
They killed a couple of acid-spraying chiggers along the way and surprised a centipede eating what looked like a sand cat kitten, but they were all wild bugs—nothing Raine had thrown at them.
Nyx and Khos—with Nikodem still between them—skirted the edge of the gully, which meant treading through waist-high brush. Long scratches lined Nyx’s already scarred legs, and a flurry of biting bugs rose in soft clouds around them.
They cleared the scrub and rounded a bend in the path along the gully, giving Nyx a clear view past the base of the hill. She saw a tall, solitary figure wearing yellow robes. Bugs crawled along the hem of the robe. Magician.
Nyx told Khos to hold up.
Nikodem sagged between them. Nyx left her in Khos’s grasp and stepped forward to the lip of the gully. Sand and stones tumbled down the soft slope and into the ditch below.
Nyx surveyed the surrounding hilltops—there were plenty of rocky, scrub-filled places to hide. Why show his magician up front? To keep her from doing something stupid? Raine knew it was already too late for that.
Something moved just across the gully. Nyx reached for her pistol with her bad hand. What had appeared to be another swath of uninteresting brush blurred and morphed into a dark, bare-headed man in a tattered robe lying in the rocky sand. Behind him stood the hefty, barrel-chested Raine.
Nyx saw another man step out far to the left of them. She recognized him as Dakar, a mercenary from the Cage. He was broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with a crop of black hair and legs that looked too big and beefy to carry him very far. Nyx remembered that he was also a shape shifter, and a good shot.
Nyx held her pistol in her bad hand. “You tell him to stand down!”
“Why?” Raine said.
Nyx grabbed Nikodem by the arm and jerked her close. She put the gun to Nikodem’s head. “Because I’m a better shot from here.”
Khos’s hands moved toward his pistol.
Nyx dropped her gaze to Rhys. Rhys’s face was turned away from her, and one arm rested limp on his chest. He had not moved.
“He alive?” she barked.
Raine nudged Rhys with his sandaled foot. Rhys put up a hand as if to ward off a blow.
“Alive enough,” Raine said.
“You get him up and push him across the gully,” Nyx said. “I do the same with mine, and we walk off. You keen?”
“I’m disappointed, Nyx. No threats? No lectures?”
“You’ve always been the blowhard. You played this dirty from the start. I want this over.”
“You pass me the mark, and we’ll see about your magician.”
“Don’t push, Raine. I’ve got nothing to lose.” She tightened her grip on Nikodem.
Raine pulled a small curved blade from his belt. Even from across the gully, she recognized it. It was the knife she’d taken from him the night he took her ear. She’d cut off his cock with it.
“There are plenty more pieces of him I can cut off,” Raine said.
Nyx took Nikodem by the collar and pushed her toward the lip of the gully. The alien stumbled and muttered
