off?
A shot sounded ahead of them. The sound of a rifle.
Nyx stopped, and was going to drop Rhys and reach for her pistol when she realized she didn’t have it. She was down to two poisoned needles in her hair and a razor blade in her one remaining sandal.
She had to make a decision. The shot was had come from the direction of the bakkie, which likely wasn’t there anyway. Behind her was more Chenjan desert, a desert she had last seen a decade before, in the spring. A desert she had blown apart. Something flew over her head, circled them, flew back toward the bakkie.
A white raven.
Nyx looked behind her. They could skirt the other side of the hill, hole up in a cave until dark, and wait for Rhys to get his strength back. They could walk out.
Someone snickered.
Nyx turned.
Rasheeda strode toward them, naked and still shivering. A hail of white feathers blew out behind her.
Nyx tensed.
She needed to run. Taite was dead. Anneke probably was, too. They’d kill Rhys and her, eventually. If they caught her.
Run.
Drop the fucking Chenjan and run, she thought. Fucking run.
Oh, God.
Everything was burning. She was burning in the desert.
Someone moved on the other side of the gully.
Dahab carried a rifle. Half her face was a mass of scar tissue and badly healed bone. One black eye, not her own, peered out from the wrecked half of her face.
Bel dames were hard to kill… especially when there was a magician just down the hall when they were shot.
Run, Nyx thought. Bloody fucking hell, why can’t I fucking run? She started to shake.
Rhys opened his eyes. They didn’t focus right. She wondered if he even saw her.
She wanted to say something stupid and profound.
But all she managed to say was “Don’t die.”
She choked on the rest.
They wouldn’t kill her, not yet.
Whoever wanted her wanted her alive.
Rasheeda flexed her fingers and licked her lips. She stopped three paces from them, one arm akimbo. “I missed you, sister,” she said.
Nyx heard another shot. Something hot and heavy slammed into her back. She lost her balance and tumbled, Rhys in her arms. She tasted dust. She writhed in the sand and reached toward Rhys. He tried to get up. The bel dames were laughing. Another gun went off.
She wanted to hold his hand.
33
Rhys lay on his side on a hard, gritty floor. The air was hot and oddly humid. His shattered hands were bound behind him, and they throbbed. Someone lay across from him. Shiny darkness pooled on the stones under her.
“Nyx?” he said. “Nyx?”
They were in some kind of cell. He saw pale orange light between him and Nyx, seeping from beneath the door. He thought it was Nyx. Was she dead? Had they killed her?
“Nyx,” he said.
The figure moved and moaned.
Nyx.
His hands bled pain, but he tried to move them anyhow. The knots were tight. His head still hurt. He closed his eyes and tried to find the bugs, tried to call out for something, anything. Some wasps or some pinchers, preferably roaches to gnaw through the sticky bands. But he met only a wall of blackness, emptiness. His whole world had gone silent.
“Nyx,” he said again.
She turned toward him. His eyes were adjusting to the low light coming in from under the door.
Her hands were bound too, but in front of her. She reached toward him.
“They shot me,” she said.
“You make a good target,” he said.
She made a strange hiccupping sound. It took him a moment to realize she was laughing.
“God, that hurts,” she said, and gasped.
“Where did they hit you?”
“You can’t feel it?”
“I’m blind like this.” How long ago had Raine drugged him? His head swam. Memory bit him, memories of blood and needles and the sound of bone crunching under boots. His hands twitched.
“It’s bad,” she said.
Fear choked him. Suddenly and completely. Nyx never said it was bad, even when it was. “How bad? Where is it?” he said.
“Where’s Anneke? Is she in here?”
“Where are you shot, Nyx?”
She reached out and grabbed him by the collar, pulled him close. They lay a breath apart on the dirty floor. There was something wet underneath him now. Her blood.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, stupidly. She was shivering.
He needed his hands. He twisted his wrists, tried to loosen the bands again. His hands throbbed. Pain blinded him.
“I can stop the bleeding,” he said. “I just need my hands. If I can—”
“My sandal,” she said.
“Did they—”
“It’s here.” She brought up her leg and kicked something from the sole of it. The razor blade. He heard it clink across the floor. “Lie on your belly. I can cut you out.”
He turned onto his stomach, and she cut his hands free from behind him.
Rhys tried to flex his ruined fingers. White pain shuddered through him. Something tapped at the corner of his mind. He heard a chittering sound—the delicate flutter of a moth’s wings. He closed his eyes and concentrated.
Where were they? It was like reaching through a dark gauze.
“I’m dying,” Nyx said.
“No,” he said. He put his hands on her. She rolled over onto her back. More blood escaped from beneath her. Too much blood.
“I fucked it up,” she said.
He couldn’t disagree with that. “Yes,” he said.
“I wanted to be brave,” Nyx said.
“Brave? I heard about the front. Did you forget I knew that? How much more brave—”
“That’s a lie,” she muttered.
“What?” He could almost feel the hurt in her. He closed his eyes again. If he just concentrated, just willed the drug out of him…
“I’m not a hero,” Nyx said. “I shouldn’t have been reconstituted. They should have buried me in the Orrizo. Fuck, I was stupid.”
