Infidel (10 page)

“What’s going on?” Eshe asked. His voice cracked. “We’re not leaving Suha are we?”

“In about a quarter hour that scalper burst is going to burrow into the palace security system and release a virus that’ll eat all the blood codes authorized for entry into the city,” Nyx said. She had watched it happen before on a much smaller scale, when she planted a scalper burst at a Chenjan security outpost at the front, a lifetime ago. “When that happens, anybody trying to get in or out is going to get eaten alive by the filter and trapped inside with the plague. You ever seen somebody get eaten by a filter? You ever had the black plague?”

“What about the rest of the palace? What about the Queen, and the magicians?” Eshe asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Nyx said. “Maybe she got out, maybe she didn’t.” And if she hadn’t, there was a whole bigger brew of trouble on the stove. “Let’s make sure we do. I don’t want to be stuck inside a filtered city with scalper bursts.”

“Should we call Yahfia?” Eshe asked.
 

Nyx tried to concentrate on the road. Her vision was blurring again. “Yahfia left Mushtallah yesterday,” she said. A magician in a plagued city had a far higher chance of survival than a teenage shape shifter and washed-up mercenary anyway.

Nyx switched pedals again as they hit the flatland and sped toward the filmy curtain of the filter. Off to her right she saw the metal tanks and steam towers of the refueling station. On the other side of the filter was the train station.

“What’s your passkey say, Eshe?” Nyx asked.
 

Eshe stuck his arm out between the front seats, wrist bared. Beneath the tawny skin of his inner arm was a raised disk; his coded passkey into the city.
 

His passkey was a forgery that gave his birthplace as Heidia, but it got him in and out of the interior cities just fine. The city had switched from customs-stamped passbooks to embedded passkeys five years before. When she was a bel dame, Nyx had been inoculated against the city’s filter, which meant none of her blood codes were on record in Mushtallah. By law, none of her organic material could be kept on file in a government-owned system. The bel dame council restricted access to the blood stamp information of their members; cataloguing all of that information into the imperial system would have given the Queen a logbook of bel dame blood codes, allowing her magicians to create viruses tailored to remove troublesome bel dames. In any case, it meant Nyx didn’t have a key. She probably wouldn’t die. But Eshe might.
 

“Still orange,” Eshe said. “How do we know the virus hasn’t spread yet?”
 

“You’ll know,” Nyx said.

“How?”

“Filter goes black,” she said.
 

Nyx switched pedals again. The bakkie sped up. The filter loomed closer. The slow, somber howl of the city’s emergency sirens filled the air.

“Don’t the sirens mean we should stay in the city?” Eshe asked.
 

Nyx kept her eye on the filter. A dying beetle escaped through a leak in the hoses beneath her feet and flitted against her ankle.
 

“Sirens mean they’re going to shut the filter down,” Nyx said.
 

Shutting down the filter was an attempt to save the blood banks from contagion. They would do by default what the contagion was tailored to do: make it impossible for anyone to get in or out of the city alive until the filter’s access to the blood banks was restored by a team of magicians.
 

They were within three hundred yards of the filter.
 

Nyx had seen scalper bursts at work back when they were short-range, highly temperamental bursts. Nobody would have used them on a whole city back then.
 

They were within a hundred yards of the filter. The curtain ahead of them wavered.
 

“Status, Eshe!”
 

“I’m orange,” he said.
 

“We’re good then,” Nyx said.

Nyx pulled the clutch and shifted pedals. The bakkie leapt forward. Eshe slammed into the seat behind her.

“Hold on,” Nyx said.
 

The bakkie hit the filter. An oily film of black spilled from the faux stone pillars along the filter perimeter.

 
Nyx held her breath. The filter crackled. The hairs on the back of her arms stood on end. Something inside the bakkie hissed and spat like scarabs on a griddle. The bakkie shuddered and spun. The hood flew open. A cloud of steam and the gray, wispy remains of the red roaches that had powered the bakkie burst out of the engine’s cistern.
 

Nyx jerked in her restraints, and though she didn’t smash her sternum against the steering wheel, the force that launched her against her restraints took the breath from her.
 

The world wavered, then slowed. When the bakkie stopped moving, Nyx raised her head and looked out at the open hood, the filmy detritus of red roaches and beetles smearing the windshield. There was sand on the hood, inside the cab.
 

“Eshe?” Nyx asked.
 

No answer.
 

Nyx fumbled with her restraints. She got herself loose and twisted around to peer into the jump seat. Through the back window, she saw the glistening black sheen of the filter about ten or twenty feet distant.
 

“Eshe?” she asked.

He lay hunkered in the back, head bowed. She smelled vomit. She touched the side of his face. When he didn’t respond she grabbed him roughly by the chin.
 

“Answer me, you little fuck,” she said.
 

Eshe’s eyelids flickered.
 

“You with me?” she said.
 

“I threw up,” he said.
 

Nyx saw the pool of bile at the boy’s feet.
 

“It means you’re alive,” she said. “Are you hurt? You broken? Come on, the bakkie’s done.”
 

He suddenly jerked in his seat and began to thrash and claw at his arm. He started screaming; a terrible, high-pitched screeching that tore at her gut.

Nyx saw the thumbprint of the passkey on the inside of his arm glowing bright red beneath his skin. She pulled out the dagger strapped to her thigh and popped out the viral passkey. Eshe howled and clutched at the wound. The passkey dropped into the pool of bile. Hissed.

Nyx’s heart thudded loud and fast in her chest. The filter behind her began to spit and crackle. They were well clear of it, but she was worried about airborne contamination, about secondary blasts and filter breaches in addition to the weird thing with the passkeys. What if this was part of a larger assault? Was there a Chenjan ground force on the way?
 

Nyx struggled out of the bakkie and onto solid ground.

“We need gear,” Eshe muttered, and stumbled toward the rear of the bakkie. Blood trickled down his arm.

Nyx helped him pack water and weapons. They brought it all to the train platform, and set the gear under a triangle of shade cast by the big cranes used to heft fuel cylinders onto freight cars.
 

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Some conductors owe me favors.”

He was already sweating heavily. His hair was plastered to his face. He hadn’t covered up since prayer on the hill.
 

“Put your burnous on,” she said. Her chest hurt, and her legs were wobbly. The sun was too high now for them to stay out very long safely. Not that that had stopped her before.

After downing some water and spending a few minutes collecting themselves, Nyx moved all their stuff further up the platform under the awning. The train wasn’t due until dusk—if it came at all, now that the city had been attacked. It was a long time to go without water.
 

Eshe rested beside Nyx, his back against the faux stone of the station. There was an attendant shelter on the platform, but it was empty. There would be a water tap inside. Luckily, Nyx knew how to bleed a lock, even without a magician.
 

“That was a fucked up exit,” Eshe said.
 

“You should see my entrances.”

“Will the burst take out the whole city?”
   

Nyx gazed out at the black filter and ruined bakkie. She would need a good tissue mechanic to replace the entirety of the bakkie guts, and maybe the blown-out cistern…. If somebody didn’t salvage it first. The filter ate everything organic that it wasn’t coded to accept—and that included the bug juice and roach colony that powered a bakkie. There were a lot of scavengers living outside Mushtallah looking for somebody desperate or stupid enough to drive through a filter.
 

“I don’t know,” Nyx said. “Magicians are coming up with weirder and weirder shit all the time.”

She didn’t like the idea that there were truckloads of bursts on both sides of the border that she didn’t know anything about anymore. Suha might have a broader knowledge of current tech, but the best gear and munitions specialist Nyx had ever had retired to the coast six years before to raise munitions-savvy babies.
 

Eshe leaned against her, let his head drop onto her shoulder. Nyx stiffened, tried to relax. He scared her when he acted like a kid. She didn’t like to treat him like one.

He closed his eyes.
 

“You need to stay awake. I don’t want you slipping into any coma,” Nyx said, and shrugged his head off her shoulder. She handed him a water bulb and made him drink.
 

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“We’re going to regroup.” She bunched her hands into fists, watched the muscles and tendons working beneath the skin. “Then we’re going to find out who lived through that burst.”

6.

W
hen Khos came home, he smelled of liquor and opium and… the woman.
 

Inaya lay still in the room opposite his, listening to the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. Even with her back turned, she could smell the other woman. He was a shifter himself; he would know what she could and could not see, hear, or smell. But he padded about the house as if his other wife was a large secret, large enough to fill the house.
 

He stumbled around the other room, throwing off clothes as he went. She heard them pool onto the floor, settle over the door of the wardrobe. He banged against something in the other room, and swore in Mhorian.

Some days she wished the house was bigger. She wanted a whole wing of it to herself, not just one small room. No, that wasn’t right. She wanted a house. A full house on her own salary, a whole life to herself.
 

And then what would become of you? she thought. A divorced foreign woman in Tirhan? They would deport her, and Khos would get the children. No, marriage was about endurance. About enduring far more than you thought you could possibly bear.
 

She heard him run the water in the tub down the hall. She finally opened her eyes and stared out the open window onto the street. When they first moved to Tirhan, she had kept all the upstairs windows shut. They were opaque and filtered, but still, she closed them. She feared swarms, religious police, but mostly she feared the prying eyes of these black foreigners.
 

It took her months to admit that she, the tawny Ras Tiegan with the pale Mhorian shifter husband, was the foreign one.
 

The sound of the water stopped. Inaya closed her eyes again, kept her breathing even, and willed him to pass out. Preferably on the floor. In the other room.
 

But he came to her, as was also his custom on the nights he visited his other wife.
 

He sat next to her on the bed. The bed creaked under his weight. When he touched her, she wanted to melt into the bed, become one with the soft mattress, the bed feet, and deeper, down into the bones of the house. It was a sinful feeling, the kind that made her feel unclean, but she felt it nonetheless. In another life, perhaps, she could allow herself to do what her body desired. But not in this one.
 

Khos shook her gently. She turned to face him.
 

He was a big man, and self-conscious of it. He sat with shoulders hunched, head bowed. She had never seen him stand up straight.
 

“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he said softly, and he placed his hand on her head and stroked her gently.
 

It was the gentleness that had convinced her to marry him. The gentleness and the Tirhani visa.
 

+

Inaya pulled herself out of the tub the next morning and showered with lavender soap. Lavender. It was a scent she could never get in Nasheen, but the Tirhanis loved it. They had shelves and shelves of heavily scented products. Soaps and lotions and perfumes. Smell did not trigger old memories in war veterans, was not blamed for shooting deaths in the marketplace.
 

Someday, she too would escape those dark triggers, the part of her that wanted to break away from the world, tug free, merge with everything else. Become someone, something, else.