Rapture (16 page)

Sohrab began to intone the Surah Al-Fatiha, her pronunciation of the ancient prayer language impeccable and haunting. It had been some time since she last heard those words recited with such beauty and passion.

Locusts appeared at the center of the room, sparking into existence as if from the air itself. The swarm coalesced, a massive darkness that steadily grew outward, like an expanding black hole. There were few places one could seemingly create something from nothing anymore, and she took a grim satisfaction in it, even as the pregnant woman screamed and screamed and the man rushed headlong inside, a machete in hand.

A few simple chemicals created a great hunger in the locusts. She pushed her hands out, compelling the air and the altered chemical compounds around her to direct the insects. They swarmed over the women and man. It took just ninety seconds for the hungry locusts to devour all three bodies to the bone.

When it was done, she clapped her hands, and the locusts and the flesh they had gorged on disintegrated into its base components and rejoined the organic compounds within the derelicts. A few tatters of flesh still clung to the bloody skeletons, like shredded wrapping on some festive package.

She walked across the inner courtyard. The fleshy doors leading deep into the derelict were partially open. For a moment, she suspected it may be some kind of deception. Then she remembered the child, the one she had passed on the stoop. She found it hiding just inside the door, huddled in one of the heaving, slimy crevices of the living ship.

The girl’s eyes were squeezed shut, and she stank of urine.

She took the girl by the collar of her tunic and dragged her down the long corridor with her. The girl shrieked once, then squealed like a tortured puppy.

It meant they knew she was coming, and she did appreciate the aesthetics of a grand entrance, even after all this time.

They waited for her deep within the bowels of the ship, so deep she could feel the ship’s heartbeat beneath her feet. Most of it had long since been reworked by conjurers far more powerful than she, centuries or millennia before, so their original purpose was unknown. The room they convened in was called Shahnaz, after some dead man. But older Family members called it the Heart of Umayma. It was here the Families met to decide how the world would be run. The Queen may have some power over everyday Nasheenian government, but she was just one pawn on a very great field.

As she had expected, it was not the full assembly today. Only her own Family, house Hadiyah. Thirty-nine members in all. Most were already standing when she arrived. Most already knew their fate. They were surrounded in the most potent weapon her people still possessed, but not one of them still had the power to shape it.

None but her.

Which was why they had condemned her.

She threw the squalling child at them. The child rolled across the floor. One of the men, Abdah, reached forward and scooped the child up. They all wore traditional clothes. Billowy white thobes for the men, and creamy khameezes for the women. They wore their hair long and covered—black turbans for men, and black hijabs for women. Within the pulsing dome of the ceiling ran several lines of silver prayer script that read, “God the Creator, the subduer, the provider, the forbearer, will return for you and light your path to the stars.”

Inside the vast chamber, her stir of white-clad Family members were strangely frail, insignificant. She had spent a week outside among the mutant colonials, and she had been reminded of just how physically powerful those ravenous people had become outside the safety of the filtered residences and purified air enjoyed by the Firsts. Her Family and all those like it had stagnated here, desperately trying to maintain the conjurers’ bloodlines and eradicate the mutations among them. But even isolation had failed, after so many millennia, and all the Families truly had left to leverage were the secrets encased in these living tombs, and the shaping power that only a few could still wield.

“Who’s matriarch?” she asked.

When no one stepped forward, she simply cast her gaze across the sea of faces to suss her out. She knew much about being a matriarch. She had been one herself, for a short time. A very short time.

“I am,” one of the older women said. She moved toward her from the back of the assembly.

She recognized her as Parvaneh Ibraheem sa Hadiyah so Mushtallah. The woman was slight at the wrists and ankles, with a delicate face so achingly beautiful that for a moment she feared she would cry. The walking corpses outside weren’t half as pretty as the ugliest First Family outcast. After her exile among the colonials, this room of ravishing, large-eyed, soft-skinned beauties was like walking among aliens.

“We were just recently informed,” Parvaneh said. A hundred years ago, Parvaneh had commissioned the building of the Orrizo, the great monument to unnamed dead men at the center of Mushtallah. She had lost three sons to the conflict—not an undue number for a woman who bore just four children in her lifetime. As a general rule, First Families did not serve. Protecting their blood from the same massive mutations that plagued the colonials required strict breeding practices, and they had long ago exempted themselves from service. But the boys had been willful, headstrong radicals, and got blown up into so many pieces that not even a well-trained scarab army could have put them back together.

“It appears you were informed too late,” she said to Parvaneh. “As was I when they came for me. When they shut me up into that hole.”

“It was for your protection,” Parvaneh said.

“No. It was for yours.” She peered at the small child again, caught up in the older man’s arms. She knew him, too—Abdah sa Shukriya so Ifshira. Her great-grandfather’s brother. It was funny how time passed so quickly when you were free, but dragged on into what felt like century upon century when your brain was clogged with poison and your identity stripped away. Sometimes she felt as if she had been gone millennia. She expected some of them to have died, or show marked aging. But no. They were the same. All of them just the same.

A pity she was not.

Parvaneh followed her gaze. “Let us leave here and discuss your place with us,” Parvaneh said. “We are Family.”

“Place?” she laughed. “I have no place with you.” She pointed to the child. The child with her eyes, her chin, her face. “You already replaced me. Replaced a woman still living. Thought you could do better this time? Thought you could control her? You cannot control what you don’t understand anymore. There are no more conjurers. Haven’t been since me, and won’t be again.”

“Child—” Parvaneh stepped forward.

She felt the air condense. Unlike the Family members upstairs, some of these were still moderately skilled magicians, though not conjurers. True conjuring entailed far more than the rote trickery of a colonial magician. It was about more than simply directing or breeding or codifying existing flora and fauna. It was about creating something from nothing. Or, rather, creating something dynamic from an inert soup of primordial possibilities—chiefly from the organic composites of ancient wrecks like this one. That had been their purpose, after all, and it was that nostalgia for the safety and malleability of this ancient technology that kept the Families winnowing through this wreck, feeding off its brain-dead corpse.

“It’s your turn now,” she told them. She raised her arms.

“Hear us out, child!” Parvaneh said. “How can we aid you? Your mission? Surely you would not condemn a Family that could aid your mission. Your mission protects Family interests. They wouldn’t have called you otherwise.”

She smiled. The grin felt lovely on her face, but the faces that gazed back at her seemed to have no appreciation for it.

“Perhaps you can be useful in that, certainly,” she said, because if she had suggested it, of course, if she had told them outright that it was information or death, these mantids would have gone deep into stony silence. She knew them well. It was what she would have done.

Abdah said, “You must befriend her enemies.”

“And where can I find those?”

Parvaneh and Abdah exchanged a glance. Parvaneh said, “Go north, across the living seal, into the red desert. You still have the skill to open the Abd-al-Karim that far, do you not? They have been sent to the bones of Duha Dima. You remember it?”

“Not half as well as you do,” she said, “but enough.”

“You will know them when you find them,” Abdah said softly. “They are just like you.”

She half-thought to ask why it was anyone in the Families knew where to find a rogue colonial woman, but thought better of it. She wouldn’t have been freed to bring the woman in if she was somebody her Family, too, did not find dangerous to the success of their political machinations. They had bent the world too far. It was too close to breaking. Now it had to stop.

“I hope you succeed,” Abdah said. “There is a far more important task ahead. One only you can perform.” He gazed skyward.

“Anything else you want to tell me?” she said.

Abdah said, “I wish it were not too late for you, child.”

“Funny. I’m quite pleased that it’s too late for all of you.”

She raised her arms, and brought the whole fleshy cavern down upon them.

Only the little girl looked surprised.

T
hings weren’t particularly eventful until Kage shot Eskander.

Nyx wasn’t even sure how it happened. They had stopped both bakkies at the side of the road for mid-afternoon prayer—at Khatijah and Ahmed’s request.

Nyx was squatting just off the road’s right shoulder, taking a piss, when she heard loud voices, a shrill cry, then a shot.

Eskander howled.

Nyx pulled on her trousers and leapt onto the road. Kage was standing over Eskander’s prone body, the magician’s gun in her hand. Kage’s own custom gun was still slung over her back.

There was some babbling among the others, but Nyx didn’t give a shit about that. She reached behind her for her scattergun, ready to put Kage down. When you took on a new team, you did it knowing that not everybody would work out. Oh, sure, you hoped it was all whiskey and fucking, but she had lived too long to expect it.

Eshe grabbed for her arm before the gun was half pulled. She started to swing at him, and he leapt back.

“It was Eskander!” he said. “She shot first.”

“Why the fuck does it matter who shot first?” Nyx rounded on Kage. “Put that the fuck down.”

Kage’s face was smooth and unwavering as a water reservoir, like she was taking a stroll out in some Mushiran field trolling for grasshoppers. She neatly unloaded the magician’s gun and placed it beside Eskander, who was clutching at her gut and shrieking.

“Cat bitch,” Eskander said. She hissed and kicked at the dirt. “I’ll put a bullet in both of you if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Nyx said. “They were bickering,” Ahmed said, stepping up from the other side of the bakkie. “Eskander pulled a gun on her.”

“Catshit,” Khatijah said. “That little maggot made a threat. I’d have handled it different, but it’s not a surprise she pulled a gun.

First,” Nyx said, “Why the fuck does a magician choose her own gun before calling a swarm? Second, I don’t care who pulled what first.

There’s no gun-pulling on teammates. None.” Nyx glanced over at Kage.

Even though Eskander was small for a Nasheenian, Kage was shorter by at least a head and weighed a good twenty kilos less. Nyx half thought to gift them both boxing gloves and send them into a ring to sort it out. “You do it again and we part ways,” Nyx said. “Permanently. Understood?” Kage nodded.

“She said something insulting, I think,” Ahmed said.

“You think?”

“It was in Drucian.”

“You’re supposed to know Drucian.”

“All I caught was something about hunting.”

“Eskander?”

“She’s crazy,” Eskander said.

Nyx squatted beside the prone magician. She jabbed a finger at the bullet wound. Eskander screeched.

“What happened? I don’t mind letting you bleed out.”

Khatijah moved forward to protect her little magician.

Nyx pulled her scattergun and aimed it at Khatijah. “Hush now, kid. I’m in charge. I don’t plan on killing anyone unless I’m provoked. Eskander?

It was nothing. A joke. Fucking maggots can’t take a joke.

You call her that?”

“I just said she was a baby-eater, that’s all. I call all of them that.

Well, stop,” Nyx said.

Nyx glanced up at Kage. “And you—learn to deal with people slinging shit. I don’t care if you pull a gun on somebody on your own time, but while you work for me, you only shoot people I tell you to. Understood?” Kage nodded again.

Nyx stood, taking Eskander’s empty gun with her.

“You can fix her?” Nyx asked Ahmed, nodding to Eskander’s bloody torso.

“I… well, I’m not sure. I haven’t before.”

“Fuck you both,” Eskander said. “It’s deadtech. I need somebody to pull the fucking bullet before it festers.”

“Just pull out the bullet, Ahmed,” Nyx said. “She can make sure it doesn’t fester on her own. Let’s get this done and get back on the road.” Setting everyone into motion didn’t take long. Like most folks, they just wanted somebody to make a decision, and if nothing else, Nyx was good at that. Whether they were always the best decisions was a matter of contention.

Ahmed and Khatijah pulled Eskander up and off the road. Nyx went over to the other bakkie and checked the fuel gauge. They would need to juice it up in two hours. She sat next to the bakkie and pulled out a wad of sen.

Eshe came over, hood pulled up. “You figure them for lovers?” Eshe asked.

She followed his gaze to Khatijah, who stood watch just outside the group huddled around her partner in deception, Eskander. “No. The hand gestures are the same. They use the same tired sayings, mannerisms, that sort of thing. Partners mimic, sure, but there’s some stuff you just never pick up like you did when you were a kid.

Sisters? They’re too different.”

“You never met my sister Kine,” Nyx said. “There was stuff about us that was the same. Ways people stand, say things. It comes from growing up together.”