Rapture (41 page)

“They’re asking one last time if you want to share the location of your desert friends. They know you didn’t come alone. They want to know what you’re here to do,” Rhys said. “You can understand their… concern.”

“I understand that they’re already illegally squatting here,” Nyx said. “They’ve got no more claim on it than I do.”

“What are you here for, Nyx?”

“They really going to let me go if I say?”

“Probably not.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“They would have me tell you that you might live.”

“We both know otherwise though, don’t we?”

He nodded.

She shrugged. “Then let them do their worst.”

Rhys sighed, and spoke to the men in their language. She was hoping it was about what she said, but he rambled on for a good long time—long enough to start making her nervous.

The men argued. They weren’t happy with whatever he was saying. But Rhys kept talking in that soft, calming way he did. Eventually, they relented.

Rhys said, “They’ve agreed to give you a few hours with the body of your friend. To… think things over. I told them it would be very effective, since Nasheenians have an aversion to blood.”

“You said that, did you?”

“They’re from very far away,” he said. He gestured to the men.

One of them grabbed the hook and chunked it into Khatijah’s body. Hauled it back into the cell. The others escorted Nyx inside with it.

They shut the door.

Nyx let out her breath.

The men talked for a time. She stayed wedged up against the door. It was slightly spongy, like the floor. Was everything made of some organic shit? She found she could not look at Khatijah’s ruined body. Her bug was spent. There was no chance of bringing her back, even if Rhys was ten times better at being a magician than he actually was, or if he’d even help her. What the fuck was he doing here?

She gingerly touched her jaw where she’d been hit. It could have been worse.

Nyx looked around for a way out. The whole room was dark. A line of the blue bioluminescent lighting ran along the upper edge of the cell, but that was all. No windows. No openings. Where did the air come from? When she pressed her cheek to the wall and felt it breathe beneath her, she remembered. It was a living thing. Like being trapped inside some porous lung.

The voices outside finally ceased. She heard the squelch of boots across the floor. The sucking sound of a door closing. Silence.

Nyx hated prison.

She made herself look at Khatijah’s body. Maybe dying really was the only way out. She brought them to this. It was time to let go. It was time to throw the fight again—hers, this time. It wouldn’t take too long to convince them to kill her. She always managed to find the perfect way to piss people off.

When she decided to die, it was almost a relief. Water in the desert.

She heard something outside again. Footsteps.

“Nyx?” Rhys’s voice.

Nyx stood.

The door opened.

She let out her breath. Rhys reached forward and cut her bound hands.

She tried to think of something grimly optimistic to say.

Rhys embraced her.

It was sudden, and wholly unexpected. Nyx found herself gripping him tightly. He was thinner than she remembered, less muscular. The last time she’d held him this way they were both mostly naked, hiding atop a desk in a ruined Ras Tiegan church, trying not to get eaten by mutant red sand. It had been a long time since she thought about that day, clinging to him amid all that death. If she thought about it all, it was painful, just like every other fucking thing from her bloody fucking past.

He released her.

“So you came for me after all,” Rhys said.

She shook her head. “Sorry. Not me. I had no idea what happened to you. You made me swear not to look for you, remember?”

Something dark passed over his face, like disappointment. “Yes. You’re right. I did. You took a blood oath. But then… Why are you here? You and…I’m sorry about her.”

“We’re here to bring Raine back to Nasheen.”

“Raine.” He hesitated. Then, “Yes. I’d thought he was dead.”

“People don’t stay dead in Nasheen.”

“Why would you come all the way out here for him? This place would kill him as well as anybody.”

“I didn’t come here to kill him.” She grimaced. “I sort of came here to save him.”

Rhys raised his brows. “You came here… to save Raine?”

“S or r y.”

“It’s just odd how that happens, Nyx. Like last time. When you burned away my life.” The congeniality was gone. Why? Because she came here for somebody else?

“Doesn’t look like there’s much left to burn this time.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“You tell me. I don’t blame anybody else for my life. When I left Tirhan, you had a wife and a job. If you don’t anymore, that’s none of my doing.”

“That’s catshit, Nyx.”

“Your mouth used to be a lot cleaner, too.”

“Let’s not start this again.”

“I didn’t start it. You were the one acting like a fucking ass. As always. Without a change. Not a fucking change in what, six, seven years?”

“Seven years,” he said. He regarded her. “The years haven’t been kind.”

“Not to either of us,” she said, because though Rhys would never be an ugly man, he had gone from pretty to handsome in the ensuing years. His hair was a little longer, his face more drawn, tired. He was so thin that the lines in his face were more prominent.

“Can we fuck about it later?” Nyx said. “These people creep me the fuck out.”

Rhys shook his head. “You never change. Do you have people outside who can help you?”

She thought of her little team. Ahmed, Kage, Safiyah, and Isabet. She couldn’t trust them any farther than she could throw them. She already lost the one she trusted most. “I have a team. But they’re cobbled together.”

“Where are they?”

Nyx felt a moment of hesitation. He saw it.

“I’m not here as an interrogator, Nyx.”

Could she really trust that? “They’re out there,” she said. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I can’t help you if I don’t know.”

“And I can’t… Rhys, I can’t trust you.”

“What?”

“Would you trust me?”

Rhys looked at the floor.

“Yeah,” she said. “All right. Fuck.”

“Let me see what I can do,” he said.

“He’s not going by his old name. They call him Hamza Habib now.”

Rhys said, “Yes, I know. Shit.”

“Fuck, your mouth has gotten bad. You drink now, too?”

“Nyx, why are you always turning up looking for the most dangerous people I know?”

“Why are you always fucking around with dangerous people? Blame God, not me.”

“I have no interest in talking about God with you.” He stepped back into the interrogation room. “I’ll return.” He closed the door.

“Rhys,” she said.

“What?”

She tried to puzzle out what to say. It all felt confused. “Don’t fuck me over. I know I deserve it. For what happened. I’m sorry.”

She heard him on the other side. When he spoke, it sounded like he had pressed himself against the door.

“I know how you died. You were coming to the house to warn me. You were just…” And his voice caught.

“I was too late,” she said. She saw Eshe burning.

“I have to go,” he said.

He went.

Nyx slid to the floor. Put her head in her hands. Her fingers touched the end of her poisoned needles.

Poison.

She raised her head, and gazed across Khatijah’s body to the far wall.

Nyx pulled a needle from her hair and jabbed it into the pulsing wall. Then she took the second and third and jabbed them into the section as well, making a perfect triangle in the spongy tissue.

She wasn’t even sure it would work, but the idea of sitting around waiting for Rhys to figure something out scared the shit out of her.

Nyx waited. After a time, black tendrils of rot began to appear, like cracks, from the wounds around the needles.

It took a good two hours to peel away the dead tissue. She worried the infection wasn’t going to do the right kind of damage. Finally, she got a hole big enough that she thought she could wiggle through. On the other side was another nondescript corridor. She wondered how anyone navigated in this fucking place.

She pulled herself into the narrow hole. Her shoulders didn’t quite fit. For the first time, she wished she was a lean, scrappy type like Anneke, or even Kage. She rested her elbows just inside the hole, squeezing as best she could into the tiny space. She got her head through and gazed down either side of the corridor. She imagined the wall repairing itself, growing smaller and smaller until it cut her head off.

It would be fitting.

Nyx expelled the air from her lungs and twisted her torso sharply to the right. She got her left arm free. Stretched it out into the open air. Her head was out next. She braced herself against the outside wall with her free arm—and pushed.

Her body moved a hand’s length further through the hole—and her right shoulder jammed up against the inside wall. She tried to suck in a breath. She was stuck so tight her chest hurt. One more shallow breath— then she exhaled hard a second time and kicked her way free.

Nyx scrambled into the corridor, pressing herself hard against the wall. She had no idea what to do next. She had no weapons. No sense of where she was.

She took a deep breath and padded down the hall, listening for voices. After a time, she heard a strange buzzing sound coming from the floor. She paused. That’s when she realized that she had still not run into any doors. Where did all of these halls lead?

Nyx started to run. She needed to get out of this fucking pit.

She heard a sucking sound to her left.

Something reached out from the wall.

She shrieked. Stupidly.

And tumbled through the other side, into Safiyah’s arms.

“There you are,” Ahmed said, beside her. There was a swarm of insects at his feet, palm-sized cicadas with giant mandibles. “Big teeth,” he said, “but also a fine sense of smell.”

“Get me the fuck out of here,” Nyx said.

“Gladly,” Safiyah said.

+

Back at the camp overlooking Bomani, Nyx wiped the organic sludge from her skin with sand. Ahmed sat next to her, eating the last of their dried worm meat.

“Are we calling that it?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Nyx said. “If Fatima really just wanted to kill all of us on some fool’s errand, she’s succeeding pretty well.”

“Why did you take this job if you knew it’d kill you?” Ahmed said.

“Why did you?”

Ahmed gazed off toward Bomani. Behind them, Kage sat cleaning her gun, Isabet slept, and Safiyah was muttering to Ahmed’s little army of cicadas. About what, Nyx didn’t care to know.

“That bel dame came looking for me because I killed my commanding officer,” Ahmed said.

Nyx sighed. “Of course you did.” It was her own fault. She should have had each of them checked out on the bel dame boards before she signed them. Why hadn’t she done it? Because they were discharged, of course. She had assumed that every boy discharged from the front was being let go as part of the ceasefire. She wouldn’t think to sit around and weed out the ones who deserted for crimes committed. But this was a fine time to come out of the trenches if you were a deserter, wasn’t it? It was a lot harder to track a boy among a sea of boys than a young, pretty face surrounded by women and a scattering of old men.

“I had my reasons,” he said.

“Didn’t we all.”

“You’ve killed bel dames before.”

“I’ve also killed a lot of boys before,” she said, pointedly. “Don’t get me started on which is easier.”

“I’m sorry, Nyx.”

“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.” And then everything started to unravel. His calm way with each member of her team, slowly and carefully building alliances for the inevitable showdown. The way he showed just enough interest in everyone to say he was your friend, but not enough to show any one person they were a favorite.

“You should have told me this up front.”

“You wouldn’t have signed me. I honestly thought they would stop at the Khairian border. I’m not all that important.”

“Aren’t you? What was her name? Who was she?”

“Just… I don’t know. She was just…”

“Don’t fuck with me, Ahmed. I’m not in the mood. Tell me who she was.”

“Just another officer. They were all the same to me.”

“Did you kill all of them?”

“No.”

“Did you fuck all of them?”

Ahmed turned away.

Nyx half thought to drive a knife through his skull herself. Why not? Why not just leave another long line of bodies out behind her in the desert? She had a powerful magician in Safiyah. But Safiyah worked for herself. Nyx expected to wake one morning and find out she’d fucked off into the desert somewhere, or just ridden some giant arthropod out. No, she needed desperate people. Desperate people could be counted on to act consistently. Bel dames or no, Ahmed needed her. In fact, with bel dames after him, he needed her more.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

Nyx sighed. She was so goddamn tired. She hadn’t been this goddamn tired in a long time. She missed Radeyah. Suddenly. Powerfully. But there were no nice girls for people like Nyx. Nobody sitting up waiting for them. She knew that when she left. Knew she was giving it all up. But what choice did she have? Nyx just wished that she could figure out solutions that had lower body counts.

“Nyx?”

She had zoned out. A dangerous thing. She started, and saw Ahmed pointing down toward Bomani. There was a dark figure there, walking in the crimson moonlight.

Nyx motioned for them all to flatten themselves on the ground. The figure gazed up, straight at where Nyx lay. She knew him.

“It’s Rhys,” Nyx said.

+

“I’m here to bring you back,” Rhys said. He wore a deep violet burnous, organic.

“Good luck with that,” Ahmed said, and leveled a gun at him.

Nyx raised her brows.

Rhys took the measure of him with one glance. “I’m a faster draw. And she isn’t worth it.”

“Hold on,” Nyx said.