Rapture (44 page)

The massive head drove toward Rhys.

Nyx screamed at it. At the sky. At the storm. At herself. But most of all, she screamed at Rhys.

She had gone off into the desert expecting to die to save everything she cared about. But the deeper she got into this, the more it looked like she was going to lose everything and save nothing.

And she would be the one cursed to keep on fucking living.

+

Rhys had spent a lot time running away from things. Running away from the war in Chenja. Running from life with Nyx to start something new in Tirhan. Running from Elahyiah and his children. He ran because he believed that if he ran far enough and fast enough that in some other place, he could be some other man—someone more confident, more powerful. But every place he ran, he found that he was still the same old person. He was the man who ran away—a boy, really. He was a frightened child waiting for someone else to save him. What he had realized during these months in the north was that he was not a man who deserved to be saved. It was when he gave up, that God sent Nyx here.

He knew the arthropod was one of the mature mauta kita. He had seen the smaller versions back in Shaesta. The Khairians murdered them on sight. But first, they would sing to them.

Rhys ran so close to the monstrous thing that he felt the ground shake as it thundered by. Then he drew his pistols, and sang the way Tarik had taught him. Lightning flashed.

The arthropod reared up from the sand a dozen paces from him. It was a massive thing, at least four stories high, gleaming in the thundering night.

Rhys’s voice quavered. He needed one good shot. Just one shot. But to get it, he had to stand his ground.

He heard Nyx yelling behind him. For once, he was glad for her age, and her slow steps. If she went in with weapons blazing now, the beast would devour them both.

Rhys sang. The arthropod undulated above him. It opened its gaping maw, showing row upon row of endless teeth that stretched back into its interior. Rhys took aim at the dark roof of the thing’s mouth, just behind the furthest row of teeth he could see.

The arthropod dipped its head, preparing to strike. He fired. Four shots.

The beast drove straight at him.

Rhys broke and rolled away, and the monstrous thing crashed into the sand where he had stood a moment before.

He heard Nyx’s scattergun go off. Two shots. Then six clicks. She was out.

Rhys struggled to his feet. He stared at the massive body of the arthropod, glittering in the sand a few paces away. As he watched, it spasmed one final time, and was still.

Nyx bent over, trying to catch her breath. “The fuck was that?” she said. “It sick or something?”

“They’re heavily armored outside,” he said. “But not inside. You have to get them to reveal themselves.”

Rhys went forward. Grabbed her hand. “Let’s go,” he said. Nyx stared at his hand in hers, but didn’t pull it away.

She glanced over her shoulder, where Ahmed and Isabet stood on top of the far dune. She motioned them forward.

“Let’s go!” she said.

Rhys released her hand, and went forward, into the tunnel entrance. The glamour shielding the entrance gave easily as he entered. It had been a long time since he traveled in the magicians’ tunnels.

“Safiyah?” he said.

No answer.

It was bitterly black inside.

He pressed his hands forward, and found the familiar silky walls of the tunnels. He started walking, keeping his right hand pressed to the wall as a guide. The tunnels were known to bend and twist at strange times, sometimes even after passing a seemingly featureless wall. Rhys didn’t know how they worked, and even the magicians he spoke to in Nasheen had only empty explanations. They were something created at the beginning of the world; a safe space for traveling across Nasheen when the air above still wasn’t breathable.

“Rhys?” Nyx’s voice.

“I’m trying to find Safiyah,” he said. “It’s still dark up here.”

“Where the fuck is the Drucian when you need her?” Nyx muttered.

He heard more voices—Ahmed and Isabet—behind her.

“Let me get ahead, Rhys,” Nyx said.

Rhys moved aside and let her pass. He knew how much it would annoy her not to lead. He used to think it was her arrogance that did it. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe she always had to lead because if there were bad things happening ahead, she wanted it to happen to her first.

“Safiyah?”

Finally, a response came from far ahead. “You’re terribly slow. Hurry. I’m losing them.”

Rhys heard Nyx’s footsteps quicken. The wall next to Rhys twisted, opened, and he pulled his arm away, fearing it would get caught if the way closed again.

“Slow down, Nyx,” Rhys said. “We’re going to lose the others.”

Ahead, he saw a pale amber light, just visible beyond Nyx’s body.

“There are lights ahead,” he called back at Ahmed and Isabet.

When he caught up to Nyx, she was standing in an oily, shimmering cavern illuminated by a long line of pulsing glow worms that edged the floor. The lighting cast their faces in garish shadows.

“I can track them by the pheromones they leave behind. They’re playing with the chemicals as they go,” Safiyah said, “Opening and closing spaces behind them. I can’t tell you where they’re going until we get t here.”

“So it could be anywhere in the world?” Nyx said.

“Yes. It could be Yazdan, for all we know.”

“Why would they move him now?” Ahmed said. “The Chenjan said they’d left him alone for weeks. They weren’t even in Bomani when we made the raid. Now suddenly they’re back and carting him off across the continent?”

“They were always close by,” Safiyah said. “There are entrances to the tunnels all over the red desert.”

“Wait a minute,” Nyx said. “If you knew about these tunnels, what the fuck did you need us to get you over the Wall for?”

Safiyah smiled. “Well, you know, I would have had to trek all the way back to Nasheen to enter, then pop out here. Easier to get over the Wall where we were.”

“Catshit,” Nyx said. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I recommend we address that concern at another venture,” Safiyah said. “I am losing their scent. You want to find Raine, or you want a pretty story? I, for one, am interested to see this through.”

Rhys watched Nyx mull that over. What more did she have to lose? He certainly had nothing. Rhys glanced back at Ahmed and Isabet. He wondered which of them would run off first. Isabet, most likely. How had she ended up here with Nyx in the first place?

“Go on,” Nyx said. “Get us to wherever Raine is. Then I want some answers.”

“Answers just lead to more questions,” Safiyah said. “But, as you like.”

She clapped her hands, and the wall next to her parted. A perfect, oily cavern opened up—a portal to God alone knew where.

Safiyah stepped inside. Nyx went after her.

Rhys looked back. The red desert and dead arthropods, or something unknown? Anything will be better than here, he thought, and stepped through.

N
yx stepped into humid air. The world was awash in blue-gray dusk—or dawn?—and all around her, massive, twisted trees clawed at the sky. Their monstrous leaves dripped great globs of water onto her face and shoulders. If it wasn’t so fucking cold, she would have been grateful for it after so long in the desert.

Ahead, Safiyah was struggling to get over a mossy dead tree half as tall as she was. “Hurry!” she said. “They’re just ahead!” Nyx saw lights through the trees.

She ran after Safiyah, pausing to help the others over the tree trunk. Isabet was pulling leaves from the trees and dumping the water on her head.

Nyx slogged after Safiyah. Bracken and sticky flowers clung to Nyx’s burnous. She batted them away, hoping none of them were poisonous. She broke through the forest cover a few minutes after Safiyah, and found herself staring over a lush, rolling valley. After so long in the desert, it was like stepping onto some alien world. A city spread below them, protected by a shimmering filter that flickered and flared like some dying thing. Someone had infected it. Nyx expected they would find great black patches of rot on it if they got closer.

“Where the fuck are we?” Nyx asked.

“Ras Tieg,” Isabet said, from behind her.

+

Nyx had them camp just inside the filter under the decaying roof of an abandoned outbuilding, already half reclaimed by the wood. Ras Tiegan filters were less effective than Nasheenian ones. They permitted everything through but the worst of the bugs. The one surrounding this city was especially bad, and Nyx found a massive, cancerous hole in it as soon as they got close. They were exhausted, and in no shape for a fight. Safiyah said she could track Raine with hornets from now on, so Nyx permitted them all six hours of sleep. It turned out the sun was going down. Wherever they were taking Raine, somewhere in the city was the likely destination.

“You know where we are?” Nyx asked Isabet.

She shook her head, and said in her terrible Nasheenian. “Get closer.

To s ee.”

“Not tonight,” Nyx said. They could ask the locals in good time. Ahmed volunteered for first watch, but Nyx took it. Safiyah set out a hornet swarm. “Just a little extra protection,” she said, and winked. Nyx did not feel safer. She had three magicians and some rich Ras Tiegan kid. It meant she was the primary muscle. The thought depressed her.

She sat at the edge of the camp. They dared not light a fire. It was just eating and sleeping. No one took off their weapons.

After a time, Rhys joined her. They sat in silence, staring into the jungle beyond the filter.

Finally, she said, “You want to come back with me, when this is over?” Rhys leaned forward. He sighed. “My first duty is to my family.

Sure. And they aren’t here. So what’s the harm?”

“Do you really have to ask that?”

“Yeah. You’ll ask it soon enough. Either while I’m here or when I’m gone.”

“Always so certain of yourself.”

“Should I be anything else? Tell me you don’t want to come with me, if it’s so easy.”

“It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“I’m married, Nyx.”

“I fuck a lot of people too.”

Rhys snorted. He started rolling a cigarette.

“Filthy habit,” she said.

“That’s what my wife says.”

That made her laugh. It hurt to laugh. She pressed a hand to her chest, wondering if and when she’d bruised something.

“How is it you know exactly how far to push?” he said. He lit the cigarette, offered her a pull.

She accepted.

He said, “You know you can always take it far enough to get me to walk off. Is that what you always want? You like to watch me walk off? Because that’s what happens when you treat people this way, Nyx. Maybe no one else will say it, but I will. You treat us like tools and things. It’s why I loathed every moment in those six years I was on your team.

I thought it was all the sex and liquor and—”

“No, stop. It was you, Nyx. It was everything you are.”

Nyx turned and moved closer to him, her face a handbreadth from his cheek. She could feel the heat of him. He was as beautiful underneath the clothes as he was in them, if she remembered right. No, more so. But there were many beautiful people in the world. There was Ahmed, just a few paces away, and Safiyah, eerily beautiful even for Nyx’s taste. But to be dead honest, Rhys really wasn’t as pretty anymore. She was almost certainly uglier, and he wasn’t getting younger. Was it the fucking she wanted? Would that end it, if she just convinced him to let her fuck him now, far from his wife and family, his petty concerns forgotten for just a few stolen moments? Would she be over it, then?

“You hate everything I am,” Nyx said softly. “But you’re still out here with me. Is that it?” She kept her tone low, the way she would if she was trying to lure some skittish bug, a shiny green beetle. “Is it that you have to take care of her out there? But out here—” she carefully moved her hand to his neck, lightly, as if by accident. It was freeing, really. She figured they’d all be dead by morning. “Out here I take care of you.” Rhys averted his eyes and stood. He put out the cigarette. “That it?” Nyx said. “Rhys, hold on.” She stood and went after him, took his arm. “Hey, listen. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s not anything.

I’m just really fucking tired.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Rhys said. He sounded out of breath.

“I’m just playing around, Rhys.”

His face was stricken. “That’s the problem. To you this is all just some game. A fun way to pass the time. But for me, this is about my personal integrity. Honor. You understand honor? You became a bel dame because it gained you honor, is that right? Being a man who can protect the honor of his own family is all I wanted. I was supposed to keep them safe, Nyx. I failed them. I failed God and my father when I did not go to the front. And I failed God again when I permitted those bel dames to do what they did. They took everything from me, Nyx. They took everything I was. And… fucking you in the woods is not how a moral man would conduct himself. I know what I am, Nyx. I’ve struggled with it, I won’t pretend. But do you know who I am?”

“I think if you relaxed you’d be a better man,” Nyx said.

“Elahyiah left me,” Rhys said. “She took the children.”

Nyx caught her breath. She wanted to fuck him there, and realized, too late, that it wasn’t the right response.

She reached for him. He pushed her away.

“That’s it, then?” she said.

“That has always been it. What does it matter?” He sighed heavily and rubbed at his shaggy head. “If we fucked now, what would it be like in the morning? Would you be done? And if not tomorrow, what about the next day? The next year? A decade from now? I don’t fornicate with women for fun, Nyx. It means far more than that to me. Everything you touch turns to ash. And when things are bad, I always know who you will look out for. You will sacrifice every person in this world for whatever foolish goal you have. Every person here. Even Eshe. Even me.

Don’t bring up Eshe.”

“Why, because it’s true? He was the closest thing you had to a child, and you killed him over this.”