Nyx hesitated along the stair, looking for some sign of Khos. Nothing.
“What you doing here?” Nyx asked as she came into the foyer.
Inaya looked oddly relieved to see her. “You’re alive,” she said. “I heard about the train.”
“Terrorist bomb, they’re saying. Didn’t know you Ras Tiegans had that big a grudge with Tirhan, still.”
Inaya’s face twisted. “They murdered thirty thousand people when they claimed this region. Whole towns. I do not begrudge the people here. They are colonized.”
“Careful where you say that,” Nyx said. There was no one at the front desk, and Beh Ayin seemed like a laid-back frontier town, but Nyx didn’t trust Tirhanis much more than Chenjans.
“It’s not about that anyhow,” Inaya said. “Or, it is, but not in the way you think. Can we speak privately?”
“Come up.” Nyx brought her upstairs to the room she shared with Eshe and Suha. They’d split up the rooms for privacy and sanity. Rhys and Yah Tayyib slept next door.
It was a small but clean room, two single beds and a low couch, tea table, and the balcony. Nyx went right to the windowed doors leading out onto the balcony and pulled the curtains.
“Where’s Khos?” she asked.
“With his wife. And the children.”
“His other wife?”
Inaya nodded. “It’s a long story. I came here to help you.”
“Why?”
“I have some information you might need.”
“And you needed to bring it to me in person?”
“Yes. It’s the sort of information I’m not supposed to have.”
“This should be good.” Nyx sat on the edge of the bed.
Inaya sat across from her on the divan. “I work for the Ras Tiegan underground.”
“A spy? Khos said as much.”
Inaya looked surprised. “Did he?”
“Close enough. What do you know?”
“I found out our embassy is paying a significant amount of money to a local magistrate in Beh Ayin.”
“Not so strange. Bribe?”
“Yes.”
“She harboring your rebels?”
“It’s a he. And no, I don’t think so. The Ras Tiegan government doesn’t support the rebels.”
“Not officially.”
“No. Not ever. They’re the same group arguing for shifter rights within the country. The government would never support them.”
“You think—”
“Ras Tieg would be
very
interested in whatever weapon your bel dames have to offer, and they couldn’t parley officially with bel dames without angering the Queen. If there are as many as we suspect, they’d be expensive to house and feed, and even more expensive to keep the local government quiet about them.”
“You have an address?”
“Better.”
“Better?”
“It’s nearly Offsday, by the Ras Tiegan calendar.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s our prayer day.” Inaya smiled, and Nyx understood her then. She remembered this little woman picking up a shotgun after Khos tried to hustle her to safety back in Chenja. “I know where he goes to church.”
+
“How are we running this?” Rhys asked.
“Clean and neat,” Nyx said. “Like always.”
She felt better leaning over a schematic, even if the best they could find was a dodgy little portable slide with a ripple in the organic screen. They had spent three days scouting out the church, and now they were running out of time. If they didn’t move now, the bel dames would. After three days of scouting, they would know Nyx was coming. Nyx had what she needed to put something together, but the others still balked.
“I have been party to the end result of most of your plans, Nyx,” Yah Tayyib said. “Perhaps we should try something a bit more realistic.”
“There’s very little chance he knows we’re here,” Inaya said. “And he certainly wouldn’t think we’re coming for him.”
“He won’t. They will,” Suha said from her post at the window. She spit sen on the floor.
“I’m counting on that,” Nyx said.
Inaya wrinkled her nose and handed her a cup.
Suha snorted.
“Are we just going to blow up half the country?” Rhys said. He sat on the divan in their room eating curried rice from a take-out container.
“You have a subtler way, Rhys?” Nyx said. “You told me they’re close to a deal. We don’t move now and we may not get another chance.”
“Fool’s errands,” Yah Tayyib said.
“
You
got a better idea?” Nyx said.
“I don’t like shifting,” Inaya said. “Too much of this plan relies on that.”
“I don’t like dying,” Nyx said. “Sometimes we do shit we don’t like.”
“It’s a big building,” Eshe said. “If we had a week or two more to scout it out—”
“We don’t,” Nyx said.
“I say we just snipe the fucker and see who claims the body,” Suha said. “That’s clean and neat.”
“Listen. He eats and sleeps and probably fucks in this church,” Nyx said. “And if we snipe him and leave him they’ll likely burn him inside it. It won’t draw them out. Only we can do that. Every day but prayer day, the place is a fucking fortress. We got one day. Tomorrow. Or we wait another nine days until it comes around again. We want to risk nine days? Anybody?” Nyx looked around at them all in turn.
No answer. Blank faces.
“We want to move,” Nyx said, “we move first. That train took out the tracks. It’s going to be days before anybody else comes into town. Or goes out of it.” She glanced at Inaya, realized she hadn’t bothered asking her how Inaya had gotten in without a train. She could do that, and a lot more, of course. Which was why they needed her for this. “They won’t be looking for or expecting visitors. We got lucky. They could have had a woman at the station waiting for us. Instead, we came around the back. We’re low and quiet now. We have the edge. It’s a slim edge, but an edge, and we won’t have it much longer.”
“Let’s do it,” Eshe said.
Suha threw up her hands. “I’m up half the night on gear grab and then you got me on a bug hunt? Shit, Nyx.”
“You sleep in the morning before your hunt,” Nyx said.
Yah Tayyib rubbed at his temples. “I find it difficult to believe I am going along with one of your schemes.”
“Oh, come on, you’ve been wanting to fuck up all those big, bad bel dames a long time,” Nyx said.
“I will not deny that.”
“Let’s go, then.” Nyx slid the schematic closed.
Suha gestured to Eshe, and the two slipped out to start pulling together gear. Nyx was on munitions duty, but that would wait until they had the raw materials.
“I will retire for the night,” Yah Tayyib said.
Inaya stayed to speak with Rhys for a time. Nyx drew out some simple explosive designs on the slide while they talked. It’d been a while since she put anything custom together like this, but even the simplest stuff could be effective. Especially when nobody was expecting it.
She poured herself a finger’s length of whiskey. They may have been out of guns and ammo, but Eshe never failed to find some bootleg whiskey at every town they visited. Some days Nyx wondered if it was why she’d hired him in the first place.
When she looked up, Inaya was closing the door, leaving her alone with Rhys.
She got back to the whiskey.
He stood. “I’m not a great sniper,” he said.
“I know.” She raised her head. He had cleaned up some, and looked human again. “But they don’t. They’ll think that’s where I put you on purpose.”
He turned toward the door. Paused. “Why did you agree to take this note?” he asked.
“Just wanted to do it.”
“You just got it into your head to go after rogue bel dames?”
“So full of questions. Little late for that, you think?”
“No,” he said. He sat across from her. Put his big ugly hands flat on the table, just like a polite Nasheenian. Some habits were hard to break, she supposed. “Eshe said you talked to the bel dame council.”
“You two getting on real well, then, you and Eshe?”
“Look at me.”
“Fuck you,” Nyx said. “I’m not some fucking Chenjan harem girl. You want to issue commands like I’m some dog, I’ll cut your goddamn hands off again.” She finished the whiskey in the glass. It burned.
He sat back. Pulled his hands off the table.
“I forget, sometimes.”
“That I’m not a dog?”
She chanced a look up now, careful. She was always curious about what she’d see on his face. Always half-hoping he would look at her with something other than contempt and disgust. But his face was oddly taciturn now, resigned.
“I forget you’re Nasheenian,” he said.
“Your mistake,” she said. Angry, again. Why was it that’s all she could say to him, ever? Angry, bitter words to a man who had followed her through hell for six years.
“Yes.”
They sat in silence for a while. Nyx figured he was trying to wait her out. Two could play that. And she was better at it.
“What did they promise you, I wonder?” Rhys said. “What could they give you that would possibly bring you out all this way?”
Nyx tapped her finger on the slide, chose a different trigger.
“The Queen couldn’t make you a bel dame again, but the bel dame council can, can’t they? If you do them a large favor. Hunt down their rogues.”
She stopped her tapping.
“Don’t lie,” he said. “You bring them the rogues and they make you a bel dame, right? That’s it, then.” He let out a long breath. “We are so stupid. My God, you’re not doing this for Nasheen at all. Not for your brothers or any dead boys or that squad you burned yourself up for. You’re giving it all up. All of us up. To be a bel dame again. A government-sponsored murderer.”
“Being a bel dame is an honorable thing,” Nyx said. She tossed the slide onto the table, met his look. His face was hard and bitter, like the flat silty beach surrounding the inland sea. “Isn’t that what you’re always going on about, how I’m so dishonorable?”
“Ah, of course. Because what those bel dames did to my family was quite honorable.”
“Those are rogues, not real bel dames.”
“You did worse to other families when you were a bel dame.”
“I never—”
“I know what bel dames do, Nyx. Wrap it up with pretty words like honor and sacrifice and it’s still just hunting and killing children.” Rhys shook his head. “I should have listened to Khos.”
“I’ve never lied to you about what I do.”
“Catshit.”
“You’ve gotten a dirty mouth since we got on that train.”
“It is catshit, Nyx. You lie all the time.”
“I got lots of reason to do what I do. Just ’cause I don’t tell you all of them doesn’t mean I’m a liar.”
“So the bel dames did send you.”
“You know,” Nyx said, “I thought fucking would loosen you up a little. But you just act more and more like a cat in heat—rubbing your ass up against everything until it gives.”
“You didn’t get anything from that transmission you couldn’t have figured out on your own in the local gyms,” he said.
“What happened to your family wasn’t my fault. Rasheeda would have found you regardless. You were the one who shot her.”
“To save your life.”
Nyx rubbed her face. The air around them was cool, but humid. She listened to the chittering bugs beyond the filter. Her skin prickled. She searched for some way around what he had said, found some words, half believed them:
“You were saving your own ass,” she said. Even to her ears, it sounded lame.
“Why would I save myself, Nyx? Do you know what my father called me when I… he called me infidel. When I refused…” He hesitated.
“Refused what?” she said, low.
“I didn’t get exiled for protecting a relative,” he said. “I got exiled because I refused to go to the front.”
Nyx sat back in her seat. It was a little like being punched. “What are you talking about?”