homesteading. Still got some homesteading out there in the southeast. Would be funny, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“You heard the bel dames are clearing out of Mushtallah?”
Nyx quirked an eyebrow at her. “Where you hear that?”
“Around. They sold the place on the fifth hill, you know, where you trained. They’re relocating to Amtullah.”
Removing themselves from the queen’s city. Finding a safer staging area. Nyx took a long drink. It was going to be an interesting couple of years.
“What about you, boss? All this moving around. You got money now. Where you going?”
Nyx shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe it’s time I retired too. Some other hill. Not sure what I’d retire to, though. Not much else I’m good at.”
She sipped her green drink and grimaced. Too sweet. How the hell had Rasheeda swilled these things?
Anneke finished her second drink and called for another.
Nyx didn’t bother reminding her it was a cafe, not a cantina.
“Maybe you should go to Tirhan,” Anneke said. She didn’t look at her, but became suddenly interested in the cooling bugs in her glass.
“Should I, now?”
“Dunno. Might be some work there, maybe running boys out of Chenja and Nasheen. Something a little different. Or same thing, different side.”
Nyx leaned back in her chair. There was nothing for her in Tirhan. They wanted their own life out there. She would leave them to it.
“I’m not a good woman,” Nyx said.
“I never wanted to be good,” Anneke said.
They went back to their hotel, but Nyx couldn’t sleep, so she spent the evening out walking in the cool night air, listening to the hum of the cicadas. Big women bustled past her, some veiled, most not. She heard the call for midnight prayer, and she stopped just outside a mosque and thought, inevitably, of Rhys.
She remembered him lying there on the rocky ground next to the gully in the Chenjan desert, his face bruised, his fingers broken, barely breathing. She remembered kneeling next to him, thinking, “Don’t die. Don’t die. Take me. Take my heart. Yah Tayyib says I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Take my heart.”
She had opened her mouth to say it, had nearly broken down and grabbed at Rhys like some kind of crazy woman, a girl losing her lover to the front.
Take my heart.
“I am such a fool,” she said aloud. The worshippers moved past her. A couple dogs barked in the street.
She pulled her burnous more firmly around her and turned away from the mosque and back into the street. She walked with all of the other godless women and young men, the ones who fueled themselves on the strength of their own will. Sometimes she wondered who she had turned away from first, her world or its God, abandoned somewhere in Bahreha, like an organ at the butcher’s.
The haunting cry of the muezzin faded away. A burst trailed across the midnight sky. The faithful were at prayer.
Nyx went on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote most of this book during the year I was dying.
I’m dying a lot less quickly these days, but neither I nor the book would be here without the support of a small army of folks who saw me through that year and beyond.
Big thanks to my first readers: Patrick Weekes, Julian Brown, Miriam Hurst, and David Moles. Finding good first readers can take a lifetime, and this bunch are among the best you’ll ever dig up. I can always count on them to call me on my bullshit. I hope they’ll continue to stick with me, even if sometimes I ignore them and leave in all my bullshit.
Special thanks to Jennifer Whitson. Though we’re no longer friends, I wouldn’t be writing this today without her love, enthusiasm, energetic support, and a particularly expedient 911 call.
This book also would not exist without the friendship, encouragement, financial advice, and ass-kicking of my adopted family, Stephanie and Ian Barney. They have saved me in every way a person can be saved.
But just creating a book and getting up after a knockout doesn’t get the book to print. For that, I have my tireless agent, Jennifer Jackson, to thank. She dusted off the book after round one and passed it into round two with all the professional aplomb of the best boxing manager. Thanks also to my purchasing editor, Jeremy Lassen, and the posse at Night Shade Books. Both Jennifer and Jeremy took a big gamble on a bloody little book.
Hats off as well to all of the editors who had a hand in this book along the way, including Juliet Ulman, David Pomerico, and copyeditors K.M. Lord and Marty Halpern. Special thanks also to David Marusek, Colleen Lindsay, Greg Beatty, Jeremy Tolbert, Tim Pratt, Geoff Ryman, Shana Cohen, Kaitlin Heller, and the generous-and-always- inspiring Jeff VanderMeer for various and sundry professional advice, shouts-outs, and writing opportunities that have sustained me over the last ten years.
Many thanks to my friends and family for their financial and emotional support. My Clarion experience and Master’s work at the University of Kwazulu Natal in Durban, South Africa was made possible in large part by the generous contributions of Roger Becker, Edward Becker, and Ernie Rogers. Additional contributions were also made by Steve and Kris Becker, Annie Hurley, Jeanne Mack, and Jacqueline Hurley (
To Jayson Utz, who stumbled into this whole process mid-fight, thank you for supporting me during many long nights of uninterrupted writing time when we’d both rather be doing something else. Thank you for the incredible patience, fortitude, strength, and love you have generously shared with me during our partnership.
Finally, many thanks to my long-suffering parents, Terri and Jack Hurley, who told me—back in the hazy 80’s—that they would be happy to encourage their dorky kid’s writing career, so long as I knew I’d always be poor.
Over the years, I found out that poverty wasn’t such a catastrophe. The real tragedy would have been dying before I’d ever published a book.
There are some things worth coming back for.
St. Anne’s Hill
Dayton, Ohio
Fall 2010
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kameron Hurley currently hacks out a living as a marketing and advertising writer in Ohio. She’s lived in Fairbanks, Alaska; Durban, South Africa; and Chicago, but grew up in and around Washington State. Her personal and professional exploits have taken her all around the world. She spent much of her roaring 20’s traveling, pretending to learn how to box, and trying not to die spectacularly. Along the way, she justified her nomadic lifestyle by picking up degrees in history from the University of Alaska and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Today she lives a comparatively boring life sustained by Coke Zero, Chipotle, low-carb cooking, and lots of words. She continues to work hard at not dying. Follow the fun at www.kameronhurley.com
