“Do you know where they’re taking her?”
“Who?”
“Nyx.”
“What?” This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.
“Where are they taking Nyx? Are they killing her or capturing her?”
“I—”
“You can’t just leave her back there.”
“What are you talking about? She let Taite die. She’d sacrifice me, you, your son, all of us. So long as we’re with Nyx, we’re dead. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
“I heard what that alien said. Nyx isn’t doing this for herself.”
“What?”
Inaya sighed heavily. She shifted her son in her arms, covered her breast. “You want to run away? Nyx believes that killing this Nikodem woman will stop something much worse. The sort of tech Nikodem has could exploit people like…”And Khos realized she was about to say “us.” Instead, Inaya pushed on. “What she’s doing won’t end with Chenja and Nasheen. Umayma is scarcely habitable. To stir up more bugs, more bursts, more hybrids, more… monsters, will upset everything. How long until it burns through Chenja and Nasheen and moves on? How long before Ras Tieg enslaves shifters and sends them to fight in Nasheen’s war? And Tirhan? Mhoria? How long do you intend to shield me? And how long do you think I’ll go on, after you’re dead?”
“Inaya, Taite—”
“Taite is dead,” she said, and he heard a finality in her voice. “I do not love Nyx, but Nikodem and her people are gene pirates, going planet to planet collecting pieces of what they want and need while dropping off reckless alien technology. Things that will destroy us.”
The words of his father and uncles came back to him. Unknowable. Irrational. And he remembered Taite’s story again, about Inaya driving a stolen bakkie from town, pulling a dying shifter from the backseat.
This Inaya.
“Inaya, Nyx isn’t going to save the world—”
“No, perhaps not, but neither are we, by running away from her and the rest. If she cannot succeed in killing the bearer of this knowledge, then one of us needs to. As far as I’m concerned, Nikodem is a gene pirate, and if that’s so, someone should stop her.”
“Inaya—”
“Do you know where they’re taking her?”
Khos tightened his grip on the wheel. “Yes,” he said.
“Take me there.”
“Inaya—”
“Take me there. Or is this a kidnapping? Don’t confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be rescued.”
He felt suddenly ridiculous, angry. “I’m doing this for Taite! And
“Taite is dead. And I don’t want it. So who’s being served?”
“Fuck!” Khos yelled.
“Indeed,” Inaya said, and pulled her breast back out of her robe, drew her son to her chest.
Dust blew in from the road.
Khos drove.
35
Nyx had wanted to be the hero of her own life. Things hadn’t turned out that way. Sometimes she thought maybe she could just be the hero of someone else’s life, but there was no one who cared enough about her to keep her that close. Hell, there was nobody she’d let that close. No one wanted a hero who couldn’t even save herself.
Nyx opened her eyes, but everything was still dark. She heard people talking really close.
“With the information we’ve gotten from Nasheen and what you can get me from Chenja, all I need is to meld my work with what they’re doing in Tirhan, and we’ll have hacked this planet like a blood bank.”
“Don’t know why you had to do it all on the sly.”
“It wouldn’t be sporting to offer two sides of a holy war the same technology. I had to disappear. You and the magicians gave us that. How were we supposed to deal with Chenja when the only docking bays on the planet are in Nasheen? You know how long this has taken us? Decades.”
“Well, you take whatever you want. I give you your pieces of Chenja, and you give me Nyx. I’ve done work with pirates before. Just take your shit off the planet.”
“Our worlds have no shifters, no magicians. The sort of codes you offer us will transform our world. I’ve been fascinated by some of the mutations I’ve seen in Mhoria and Ras Tieg. I can’t imagine the wonders they’re keeping from us in Tirhan.”
“Well, you’re on your own with Tirhan and the red desert. Tomorrow you’ll get your access to the Chenjan compounds. The magicians will arrange it the same way they arranged your disappearance.”
Nyx knew one of the voices, the strange accent. She tried to squint. She wished for sight. A gray wash bled across her senses. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I am endlessly fascinated with Nasheenian magicians.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
Nikodem laughed. It was a big laugh, far bigger than should have come from the body of such a little woman. “We are even, you and I.”
Nyx opened her eyes.
Light flooded her vision. She squinted again. For a moment, everything was blurry light, too intense. Then she started to make out shapes and figures. The world smelled of damp concrete and ammonia.
Nyx struggled to sit up, but someone had bound her to a cold slab at the wrists and ankles.
“Here she is,” Nikodem said. She wore a black scarf over her hair, but instead of a robe, she wore loose trousers and a long tunic. She had two pistols belted at her hips.
Nikodem placed a hand on Nyx’s arm. Behind the alien, Nyx saw someone else, a tall, brown Nasheenian. White hair, lined face, and his hands… his magician’s hands.
Yah Tayyib.
So this was where everything met up. Yah Tayyib turned back into the shadows and left them before she could speak.
There were big lights overhead. Flies circled them.
Nyx was in some kind of converted storage room. Jars of organs lined the walls—jars covered in cooling bugs—and there were two giant, silvery vats against one wall whose sleek sides pulsed. A long table next to Nyx was covered in instruments. Some tendon worms writhed in a white bowl, trying to escape. She saw a com unit next to the shelving and a dozen bugs chattered in a cold glass case just above it.
Nikodem would keep a laboratory someplace safe. Somewhere magicians and bel dames wouldn’t look. Nyx amended that: where
Another woman walked into view from the shadows along the edges of the room. She wore loose trousers and a thigh-length tie-up tunic that she had failed to knot up top. Her small breasts were bound in purple silk. She was a lean, long-faced woman, with the dark circles under her eyes of a bleeder and the confident bouncing walk of a boxer.
Nyx thought the woman reminded her of someone but couldn’t place her.
The woman cocked her head at Nyx and grinned. “I can see you trying to figure it out,” the woman said.
The grin. Nyx knew that grin, the way it didn’t improve the face. There was less joy in it now.
“I know you,” Nyx said.
