Inaya turned to Nyx. “You’re a filthy, godless woman,” Inaya said lightly.
“I’ve been called worse,” Nyx said, “but not from anybody who killed for me.”
“I didn’t kill for you,” Inaya said. “I killed for Taite. For people like… all of us. I would do it again.”
Her son cried, and she moved his sling under her arm and carried him in front of her. She stepped into the bakkie.
Rhys looked at her. Last time.
Don’t go, she thought. He wouldn’t go.
He turned away from her. He got into the back seat.
Khos shut the door for Rhys and then opened up the front. He gave Nyx a little wave. “The bakkie’s parked two blocks down, on West Maheed.”
He got in. The woman at the wheel pulled back onto the street.
And just like that, it was done.
Nyx watched them drive off into the pale dawn. The second sun was coming up, and a brilliant band of crimson and purple ignited the sky.
Anneke snorted.
“You too?” Nyx said.
“Fuck no,” Anneke said. “Who do you expect to drive you out of this shit hole?”
Anneke looped an arm around her waist, and they limped down the street
as the double-dawn broke. “Is the radio busted?” Nyx asked. “Yeah. Been a little busy, thanks to you.” “It’s a long drive,” Nyx said. “No problem, boss. Unlike you, I get my buddies back over the border.” “Right,” Nyx said. “Not like me.” She looked back up the empty street. She felt as if something had been cut out of her, an organ she would miss. “Boss?” “I’m fine,” Nyx said, and got into the bakkie.
38
Rhys watched the second sun rise while Mahrokh drove them out of Dadfar. Next to him, Inaya sat quietly, and her son slept in her arms. Khos had the window down. Rhys heard the sounds of the waking city: mothers calling their children from sleep, old men hacking out the night’s dust, the faint buzzing of wasps and beetles and the chittering of roaches as the sun warmed their lethargic bodies. He smelled curry and fried protein cakes and the peculiar spicy jasmine scent of red dye, the sort used for turbans. Rhys saw a woman step out onto her balcony and hang a prayer wheel. Three young girls robed in yellow and red ran out ahead of the bakkie and crossed the street to a bakery whose matron was just pushing open the door for the day.
But inside the bakkie, the only noise was the chitter of the bugs in the cistern. Rhys wanted to look back toward the waterworks, but they had turned away from that district three streets ago, and there was no one and nothing behind him.
Let me go back, he thought, and squeezed his eyes shut. No. This was for the best. He had fled into Nasheen because he didn’t want to fight Nasheen. Some part of him had believed that if he ran to them unarmed, they would not harm him. He had been wrong.
As his father’s only son, Rhys had grown up knowing he was immune from the draft. He would marry twenty or thirty women and inherit his father’s estate, his father’s title.
But his father had been a mullah. A powerful one. And unlike some of the more powerful, he had wanted his son to perform the ultimate submission to God, the submission that he himself had never had the courage to perform. He had wanted Rhys to atone for his own sins.
Rhys remembered the way the air tasted that day: oranges and lavender. He remembered the sound of the cicadas. The water bubbling in the fountain in the courtyard just inside the gate. He remembered the sound of the servants and slaves outside, the intermittent cries of the overseers in the fields.
“It’s time to speak of your future, boy,” his father had said, and put his smooth hand on Rhys’s head. He had smiled, his teeth so white, and sat across from him. His father was a tall man with a short beard and broad, generous face. You could stand near him, listen to him speak, and feel as if you were in the presence of some wiser man, a true mullah. His uncles were the same. Rich, powerful men whose influence allowed them to profit from the war, not fight in it.
“I have consulted with your uncles and spoken with your mother,” his father had said. His birth mother, he meant. The others, Rhys called “Aunt.” “We have prayed often to God so that we may find the best path for you, the most humble. A boy of our house has not served God at the front for three generations, and yet we sit on our hill and call ourselves pious men. How can we be pious without sacrifice?”
Even now, huddled in the back of a bakkie—a Chenjan deserter, dead if they found him—Rhys didn’t understand the feeling that had overcome him at his father’s words. The mounting terror. The knowing. War happened to other people. Other people died in God’s war. Poor men. Nasheenian men. Godless women. Like Nyx.
Not Rakhshan Arjoomand.
He would no longer kneel and pray with his father, no longer climb the crooked tree at the far end of his father’s land and stare out over the city. In his mind, his whole life, he had built up and planned out his path, worked out ways to manage a household, playfully picked out wives from among the girls in the village below, and, above all, he had studied the teachings of the Prophet and spent long days trying to learn to submit his will to God’s.
He believed, until that day, that he’d succeeded. If this was the life God wanted for him, submitting to that will was not such a terrible thing. His will and God’s will were one.
The shock of this other life, this other path—blood and death in a foreign country—was so horrifying, so unexpected, that he did not have time to wonder at his own lack of humility. He had explained the impossibility of that other life. He had cursed his father. He threatened suicide. He sobbed. Seventeen years old, and he had sobbed in front of his father like a child. He had watched his father’s generous face harden like a cut gem.
“I am worth more than this!” Rhys had cried.
“More?” his father had said, as if Rhys had told him he needed water in order to breathe. “More than a sacrifice to God? We must submit our desires to God’s will. We are fighting a holy war. God’s war. Every one of us. We fight. We die. This is who we are.”
“It’s not who I am,” Rhys had said.
“Then you do not belong to God. You do not belong to me.”
Rhys had summoned the bugs that night. He showed more skill in that one night than he had during his entire career as a middling magician in Nasheen. He confused and reprogrammed his father’s security system and sent wasps ahead to sniff out his way. But his father had sent the blood bugs after him. The chittering creatures, large as dogs, caught him in their jaws and dragged him back, and it was as if the talent bled out of him in the face of these impossible monsters. When Rhys returned, his father had smashed Rhys’s hands with a metal pipe. Smashed them bloody. Broken.
It was one of his sisters, Alys, who helped Rhys escape the second time. She called her friends, members of Chenja’s own underground, and they had gotten him as far as the border. At the border, their vehicle hit a mine.
Bloodied faces. Body parts. He remembered the smell of burning flesh. Not his own.
After that, he ran.
Ran and ran and ran, until his skin peeled off and his lungs burned.
He had not gone to the front to sacrifice himself to God. He had not gone there to save anyone. In the end, he did not even believe he would save himself. He was just running, fueled by terror, a man running from God, from His will.
But Nyx had not been afraid.
She had volunteered for the front to protect her brothers. She’d protected the boys and women in her squad, until the end, and when she’d failed at that, she burned herself. Carried out the punishment she believed God would have meted out for her sin.
She drank too much, shot up and swallowed drugs, had sex indiscriminately with both genders, did not bend
