God's War

Then Dahab’s voice from the hall: “Here’s the wraps and tape. Come on, let’s go, black man.”

Rhys appeared in the doorway. Rasheeda snapped her teeth at him and uncurled from her seat. She sauntered back into the hall. They had stripped him of his tunic and burnous, and dark blood was still smeared across his bare chest. Nyx had never seen so much of him outside of an organics search before.

She looked at his hands. The fingers were straight, and he held two long lengths of cloth and a roll of tape. Fine red ants crawled along his knuckles, his wrists. As she watched, they began to drop to the floor.

His face was impossible to read—his jaw was set, and the dark gaze that met hers was fathomless.

But he was not broken. No, that look was not the look of a broken man.

He nodded at the operating slab.

Nyx sat up on the lip of it. Her body protested. She winced.

Rhys put the tape and wraps next to her. He did not look at her but started wrapping her right hand. He was slow, methodical, professional. How many hands had he wrapped when he worked with the magicians? How many fights had he prepared fighters for? Fights he never watched?

“You all right?” she said softly, and felt stupid for saying it. All right? What did that mean, here?

“When you fight her,” Rhys said low, not looking at her, “goad her into using her left. Let her hit that hard head of yours.”

And something clicked.

Yes, how many hands had he wrapped? Had he wrapped Jaks’s hands, that night in Faleen? Rhys knew hands.

“You trying to make me fall?” she said.

He raised his head and looked at her. “Do you trust me, Nyx?”

“I don’t trust anyone.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Nyx met his look. His was a face she could gaze into forever. She knew it the night she watched him dance, the night her sisters pursued her and her womb bled—the night she reached the end of everything. She supposed she thought that if she could keep him close, she would be able to look at him forever and forget everything else. Sex with him, she could take or leave. But she wanted him. Wanted him in a way she couldn’t explain, and tried hard not to think about.

She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She’d never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women.

“You’re too thin,” he said. “You look hollow.”

He took her right fist in his palm and squeezed it. He leaned in to her.

“I have no love for you,” he said.

“I never asked you to.”

He took up her left hand and started wrapping. There was a noise in the doorway. Just behind him, Dahab turned. Roaches scuttled along the floor.

Dahab swore and stomped at them.

Rhys flicked his wrist toward the band of his trousers, and the razor blade Nyx had given him appeared in his hand. He tucked it between the middle and index fingers of her left hand. He looked only at her hands.

They said nothing more. He finished wrapping.

She made a fist to keep the blade in place, all but the barest hint of the edge hidden in her palm.

“You done, boy?” Dahab said.

Rhys squeezed Nyx’s left fist. “Done,” he said.

The bel dames escorted them out into the hall, up the stairs, and into the ring.

36

Sometime after Khos came on board with her team, Nyx had gotten drunk and fucked him. She hadn’t been to bed with a man in years, and though he was too big and coarse for her taste, when she was drunk, she didn’t care. He was warm and tasted good and kissed her like a man who breathed women, dreamed of women, found bliss in the arms of women. And for Nyx, who had never known bliss or surrender with or toward anyone or anything, seeing him submit to sensation—to lust, desire—was one of the most intensely erotic things she had ever witnessed.

After, while she pulled on her dhoti and braided back her mussed hair, he had asked her about Rhys.

“You should see the way the two of you look at each other,” he said.

“We don’t look at each other. He’s just a kid.”

“A pretty kid, by anybody’s standard. And if even I can see that, I imagine you sure can.”

“Well, no amount of looking is going to make any difference. He’s still god full, and I’m still godless.”

“Maybe you should find God again.”

“Maybe he should become godless.”

“You compromise for no one.”

“No.”

“That’s a lonely place to be.”

“You trying to open me up? You’re nobody special.”

“Haven’t I already opened you?”

“The cunt is not the heart,” she said, standing, “though a lot of people get the two confused.”

He sat along the edge of the bed, behind her, and she could feel the heat of him, though his skin did not touch hers. He was a big man. Why did big men make her nervous?

She left him naked and alone and slightly bewildered on the thin mattress of his raised bed. She always left them bewildered, wondering if they had said something differently, or had said nothing at all, if she would still be in their arms, if she would have surrendered.

The next time she got drunk, she went to a brothel, and resolved to stop sleeping with people on her team.

Now Nyx stood inside a boxing ring, for real, for the first time since she’d left the magicians, since she ran off with Raine and his crew. She had taken this woman to bed too, and she hadn’t surrendered then. She wouldn’t now.

I use you all, she thought bitterly. I use you and then I cut you out like a cancer, like my womb… but they were still there, sticky and hot in her dreams, like the detritus of a butcher’s shop, memories of blood and sand. And she remembered Rhys drawing the shape of a perfect heart in the air.

The air was wet and tasted like copper. Two overhead lights were on, lights that weren’t made to be ring lights but had been rigged for it. She suspected she was in the abandoned waterworks that Rhys and Khos had told her about. This was where Jaks and all the Nasheenian boxers she smuggled in fought. They broke rules and risked their lives to bloody each other in front of an audience that loathed them as women and foreigners. They got bloodied up and took Chenjan money and fucked off to gamble or drink it away and come back the next week, a little hungover, a little stung, and ready to do it all over again.

Dahab and Rasheeda herded Nyx and Rhys into the converted room. Nikodem was already sitting at a table ringside, and Dahab bound Rhys’s hands again and shoved him down next to the alien. Anneke was balled up on the floor next to him, hands tied behind her, a short line connecting the bonds on her hands and feet, so she was bent backward. Her face was swollen. So, they’d gotten Anneke after all. Gotten her alive, even.

Jaks was already waiting in the ring. Behind her, working as her cut man, was the magician Nyx had been waiting for.

“Yah Tayyib,” Nyx said. “Missed me so much you wanted to help put me back together again?”

Dahab prodded her into the ring.

Nyx ducked under the ropes and stood under the hot lights.