Rapture (2 page)

Most Nasheenian politicians were First Family matriarchs—snobbish, inbred, smooth-skinned folks with a taste for languages and distrust of anything that hadn’t passed through an organic filter. They wouldn’t be caught dead inside a shoddy seaside compound in a backward Nasheenian vassal state.

Nyx circled around to the back of the house and listened for the kids. They were always up to some shit in the garden or on the grounds. But out here, behind the fence and filter, she didn’t hear a damned thing but the thrashing sea.

She crouched next to the rear gate. She didn’t see any footprints around the back. No sign of anything being tampered with.

The gate was coded for her and Anneke’s family. They’d invested in the filter and the codes first thing. Trouble was, you exiled yourself long enough and you started to get comfortable. You started getting drunk and going to fights. You started bringing women home. Nyx should have known somebody would find her.

She pressed her palm to the faceplate. There was a brief prickling as the plate extracted and verified her blood. Then the gate clicked.

Nyx shoved the door open with the end of her scattergun. She waited a half breath before chancing a look into the compound, gun first.

Anneke was waving her arms around like a woman on fire, caught up in some animated conversation with a Ras Tiegan woman. It took Nyx a minute to recognize the foreigner.

The Ras Tiegan was Mercia sa Aldred, a diplomat’s daughter who Nyx had been charged with keeping alive six or seven years before. Mercia was a slim young woman now, with the flat face and tawny complexion of a Ras Tiegan. Her eyes were big and dark, half-lidded. As she turned to Nyx, the corners of her wide mouth moved up. Paired with her flat forehead, the broad nose, and strangely delicate frame, she was not a handsome woman. Mercia kept her hair uncovered now, but Nyx noted the scarf wrapped around her neck, stitched with the little x-shaped symbol that marked her as a follower of the Ras Tiegan messiah. No doubt she’d prayed to some minor god of diplomats before coming here. Ras Tiegans had minor gods for everything.

Behind Mercia stood two government-issued bodyguards. Nyx recognized their type. Former vets—underworked and overpaid. They wore loose, dark trousers and matching tunics. Their burnouses were less somber. Smoky gray instead of black. Both women had cropped hair and the peculiar hyperawareness about them that came from spending too much time at the front. Veterans were always the first pick for government security.

A delighted smile lit up Mercia’s face. She made the leap from unremarkable to handsome when she smiled. Mercia stood in one clean movement, and even if Nyx hadn’t known her, the polite, easy way she stood to greet her with that plastered-on smile would have given her away as some kind of diplomat or politician.

Nyx hated diplomats and politicians almost as much as she hated babysitting their kids.

“Mercia sa Aldred,” Nyx said.

The smile broadened.

“You remember,” Mercia said.

“Where is everybody?” Nyx asked Anneke.

“How the hell should I know?” Anneke said. Her dark little face was scrunched up like a cicada husk. “It’s fight night. You don’t think the kids are going to hang around here with a couple old women, do you?”

“Anybody follow you?” Nyx asked Mercia. “Or can I take out you and your nannies and be done with it?”

Mercia’s smile vanished. “I—”

The bodyguards moved forward.

Nyx cocked the gun and leveled it at them. “Who’s first?”

“Lay off,” Anneke said. “She’s got something worth hearing.”

“There are a good many people back in Nasheen who’d pay for my head,” Nyx said. “I like it just where it is, thanks.”

“You’ve been taken off the lists,” Mercia said, quickly. Her hands were up now, gesturing rapidly as she spoke. “They’re even sending Chenjan terrorists home. Mhorian spies. Mercenaries, too. And bel dames. Anyone who moved against the Queen during the war has been pardoned. It’s part of the armistice.”

“Catshit,” Nyx said. “There have been ceasefires before. One of them lasted twenty years. The war’s not ending. No such thing as peace. Somebody’s paying for my head. Who?”

“There’s no bounty, Nyx. And the war is ending.”

Anneke grimaced. “Ease off. Eshe sent a message and vouched for her.” Anneke reached for an empty glass sitting on the sandy stone of the yard and poured a drink. Nyx hadn’t noticed the drinks before. How long had this sweet-tongued diplomat been lapping at Anneke’s ear?

“Oh, Eshe the Ras Tiegan rogue called, did he?” Nyx said. “Well, let in every wandering creeper who caught his eye, then.” Then, to Mercia: “Who sent you? Bel dames? Queen? Your slick diplomat mother?”

“My mother’s dead,” Mercia said.

“Well, sorry about your mother,” Nyx said. She wasn’t sorry at all, in fact. She had never liked Mercia’s mother, but the old cat bitch’s death likely put Mercia next in line on someone’s hit list.

“You don’t listen to the news?” Mercia asked.

“Not if I can help it,” Nyx said. She hadn’t sought out news of home in three years. All the news was the bloody same. “I’m not in Nasheenian security anymore. I don’t give a cat’s piss for politics. So tell me why you’re here or go home.”

“I’m Ambassador sa Aldred until my mother’s replacement is appointed,” Mercia said. “Things in Nasheen are very bad.”

“Things in Nasheen have always been bad.”

“And there is good money to be made when things are bad.”

Anneke thrust a glass of whiskey at Nyx. Nyx considered it. She eyed the bodyguards again. “You want to talk? Send them back outside.” She nodded to the guards.

“No way in hell,” the smaller of the two guards said.

“I could shoot you now,” Nyx said.

“Please wait in the bakkie,” Mercia said.

“I have to respectfully—” the bigger one began.

“I said wait there.”

The bodyguards mulled for a bit. Then started for the gate. Nyx kept her gun trained on them. The bigger one eyed Nyx as she passed, said, “We’ll burn this place down you do anything to her.”

“It’ll be a little late then, won’t it?”

The woman bared her teeth.

When the gate was closed behind them, Nyx lowered her gun.

“Nasheen is on the brink of revolution,” Mercia said. “There are discharged boys with nothing to do but start fights and steal bread. Women are running raids on their own into Chenja, in defiance of the ceasefire. The bel dames… I have never seen them so openly hostile to their own people. The streets are bloody. Bloodier than I’ve seen them, and I spent half my life in Nasheen. I’ve had three bodyguards murdered in as many months.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I remember you saving my life when it was yours they wanted,” Mercia said. “I’d pay you for it again.”

“Honey pot, you came all this way to offer me a job?” Nyx snorted. “I think that’s enough talk. Take your women out of here and go home.” She started toward the house, said over her shoulder, “And next time you come banging on a wanted woman’s door, think up a better story.”

“Wait, please,” Mercia called after her.

Nyx trudged up the steps. She should go out front and kill the bodyguards. She wasn’t too keen on killing Mercia—she was a diplomat after all—but there were plenty of places in Druce to stash a body. Thing was, she wasn’t so certain it was only Mercia and the bodyguards who knew where she was now. How long until some other bakkie full of women came along and bombed out the house? How many more of Anneke’s children would blister and bleed to death before it was done? Seven years. She thought she might just die out here, forgotten, presumed dead. But once they found you out, there was no turning back. She would have to kill a dozen people to keep this place quiet and safe now. Kill a dozen people… or go back to Nasheen with Mercia.

“You know how long it took me to find you?” Mercia said. “Finding Eshe took many months, and I had to tell him the fate of the world was at stake before he’d even give me the name of the nearest town. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”

Nyx got to the top of the steps. She heard two of Anneke’s kids—Avava and Sabah—arguing inside about which of the three squads of kids was making dinner that night. Anneke’s remaining dozen were almost thirteen years old now, and there were few things more mentally aggravating than a house full of hot-and-bothered thirteen-year-olds. Most of them were wickedly good shots and passable at putting together mines, thanks to Anneke and Nyx, respectively, but more and more these days, Nyx was asking herself what the hell they were doing teaching kids to fight a war that everybody said was supposed to be ending.

“Nyx!” Mercia pleaded.

Nyx started to push through the filter that kept the worst of the bugs and contagion from the house.

“Fatima sent me!”

Nyx stopped cold in the door. Turned back.

Mercia had followed her to the edge of the porch. Mercia’s look was less composed now, on the edge of panic. Why? Why was it so important to bring a bloody anachronism back to Nasheen? Weren’t there enough bel dames and mercenaries to keep the streets running red?

“And what does Fatima have to say?” Nyx asked.

“She has… a job for you.”

“And you couldn’t say that up front?”

“She didn’t think you would come. And if it had been her or another bel dame at your door, you would have killed them outright. But she said that if you wouldn’t come… She said she has a job for you. She wants you to be a bel dame again. She says now that the Queen’s pardoned you and she’s leading the council, she has the authority to redeem you.”

Nyx felt something flutter inside of her, something that had been dead a good long time.

“She must be very desperate to send you here with an offer like that,” Nyx said. “Or she must think I’m very stupid.”

“Things are bad, Nyx.”

“How do you profit from this?” Nyx knew enough about politicians to know that even Mercia was likely a fine one at this point, and fine politicians didn’t do anything unless they stood to profit from it.

“It’s not about me, exactly, it’s about… saving Nasheen.”

“Of course it is,” Nyx said.

She raised her gun and aimed it directly into Mercia’s face. The little diplomat had the sense to tremble. The color bled out of her face.

“Get the fuck off my porch,” Nyx said.

+

“You going to fuck her or kill her?” Anneke asked when Nyx sent Mercia off with her bodyguards. “You never look that close unless it’s one or the other.” Nyx stood with Anneke in the prayer room on the second floor, watching Mercia and the bodyguards get into the bakkie. Downstairs, the rest of the kids had come home and joined Avava and Sabah, still arguing about who was going to make dinner. Nyx supposed their choices would be fried locusts, yam noodles, or something unsavory that they had fished out of the ocean. They had pulled some globular one-eyed monster out of that seething, viscous sea the week before, and the thought of it still gave Nyx the dry heaves.

“Not sure yet,” Nyx said.

Anneke sighed. She had a stooped way of walking now, something to do with the degeneration of her spine. Genetic, the magicians had told her. Shouldn’t have hauled around forty kilos of gear for twenty-five years of mercenary work, either. But what was done was done, and though bone regeneration was possible, eliminating the root cause of her disease was not, and no matter how often Anneke went in to get it fixed, her body would just fail again. Anneke’s hair was shot through with white now, and her pinched, Chenjan-dark face was the face of an old woman, though she wasn’t much older than Nyx.

“You gotta make a decision sometime,” Anneke said.

Nyx said, “She upstairs?”

“Who? Oh. Yeah.”

“Mercia see her?”

“No.”

“You tell Mercia about her?”

“Fuck no, why’d I do that?”

“Mercia’s got a pretty story,” Nyx said. She watched Mercia’s bakkie roll off down the rutted drive. “I just don’t know that I believe it.”

“Believe her or not, they know where we are now,” Anneke said. “I got that.”

“You going to risk it?”

And Nyx heard the real question behind that. It wasn’t fear for Anneke’s own life, no—Anneke knew she didn’t have long left—it was fear for the kids, and for everything and everyone they had come to care for here. It was a mistake to let her guard down, to let anyone close, even after all this time.

“Just got to tear it all down,” Nyx muttered.

Anneke pursed her mouth. “She’ll understand. She knew what you were before you hooked up with her.”

“Nobody really knows what I am,” Nyx said. “Not until I put a bullet in their head.”

Nyx went upstairs. Opened the bedroom door. There sat her lover, Radeyah, sketching the view of the sea from the balcony on a foolishly expensive slide that devoured each stroke. She was joyously lit up in that moment like a woman at peace with God.

Radeyah turned as Nyx entered, and the light went out of her face.

“It was one of them, wasn’t it?” Radeyah said.

“They’ve asked me to go back to Nasheen.”

Radeyah and Nyx had grown up together in Mushirah, a farming settlement on the Nasheenian interior. Friends first, lovers later. Then they fell apart when the boy Radeyah fancied came home from the front with half his body missing. Radeyah stayed on in Mushirah, and Nyx went to war.

Nyx thought that was the end of it, until a boozy night in Sameh, now thirty years later, when she saw Radeyah sitting out on the levee sketching the sea. Nyx had known her immediately. Radeyah was older, and plumper, but her face was still warm and her body, if anything, more inviting. Nyx knew it could only end badly.

It’s why she was so shocked when Radeyah came to her two weeks later at the local tea house and said, “I’ve been wondering all week why you were staring at me. But you’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem, aren’t you? Do you remember me?”

In answer, Nyx had ordered her a fruity drink, and asked if she had finally bought the seaside house she always talked about. Radeyah laughed, and it was a liquid laugh that stirred something long since dead and buried inside Nyx—some whole other life that she had to forget in order to lead this one.