Rapture (20 page)

Inaya pressed her palm to Adeliz’s. When she pulled it away, she could see a faint line of characters, encoded in her and Michel’s ciphered script. It read:

Meeting urgent. Cannot return without being compromised. I have found the girl. Saint Affia.

“Thank you,” Inaya said to Adeliz, and quickly excused herself to her room to dress.

As a rule, she did not like to leave the sanctuary of their quarters often, but Isabet’s identity was of such extreme importance that she trusted none but Michel and her secondary general in the capital, Gabrielle, with the information.

She slipped out into the cool night, grateful for air that did not stink of wet dog and roasted meat. The sweet air lasted only until she cleared the warehousing district, and then the powerful stench of curry mixed with open sewer became nauseating. Some day she would retire to the country, with enough wealth to fund a filter that kept out the worst of the wild contaminants. She had visited a farm once belonging to an uncle, and reveled in the vast greenery, the open spaces. Clear water and kneehigh grass spoke to her of some childhood she never had. The statue of Saint Affia lay on the other side of the city square. This time of the evening, a few families were still out, some making prayers and pledges to the four-dozen saints given niches in and around the city center. Affia was a little-loved saint, known for just four miracles and reviled by some revisionists as a fraud. Every decade, some group of priests petitioned to have her sainthood revoked. Yet here she stood, defiant in her niche.

As Inaya approached, she saw that no one had lit candles at the saint’s feet, and the restaurant opposite was already closed and dark. She hesitated in the alley, watching the shadows for movement. Seeing no one, she approached the saint and knelt. Sometimes Michel left notes beneath the feet of the saint, though she felt that Isabet’s whereabouts would be too sensitive to leave to writing. Meeting in person made more sense.

She closed her eyes and left a prayer with Affia, saint of travelers and wayward souls. She prayed for Isabet’s safety. And Eshe’s. She was not so callous that she did not think of him.

She heard the sound of a vehicle approaching, and started. The streets here were narrow, generally only traveled by sleds. But the sound she heard was distinctively that of a popping and hissing bakkie rolling across the cobbles.

Inaya stood. Turned.

Six men were leaping from a still-rolling bakkie. They wore black cowls.

Fear knotted her stomach. She turned and ran in the opposite direction, up the street and past the restaurant.

She turned down the first alley she saw. But another bakkie was barreling toward her, seeking to cut her off. She doubled back. The alley didn’t go through to the other side of the street.

The six men behind her were gaining. She saw more leap out of the second bakkie.

Inaya looked up. Her skin rippled. She prepared to unmake herself. Something pounded into her gut. She flew backward, landed hard on her seat, and knocked her head against the paving. Her vision swam.

She clutched at her gut, thinking she’d been shot. But no, she was still whole. Instead, her hands came away coated in some sticky substance that smelled distinctly of saffron.

Oh, God.

Inaya clawed her way up. Her head spun. She heard their boots on the cobbles. She released her hold on her body’s form, set it free. Her skin prickled. She shivered. But she remained in her form. Imprisoned.

The stink of the saffron filled her senses. Saffron prevented shifters from making the change. She had known that, but never experienced it herself. It was terrifying. She scrambled forward, searching for a way out. Another bakkie popped toward her, this time coming from the road ahead. The forward lights blinded her. She covered her eyes. The men put their hands on her. She screamed. Screamed and screamed.

She carried no weapons. Why would she? She was a shifter, a mutant shifter, with the ability to be and become whatever she wanted. Unless someone knew what she was—unless they brought saffron with them, and incapacitated her with it before she could shift—she was untouchable. But now—she was nothing. Just this. Just another woman. Another thing.

They slipped the bag over her head.

She could not stop screaming.

T
he desert was so hot it ate the spit from stones. Nyx figured they had a day or two on the mercenaries—or whatever they were—maybe more if she could get Kage to push harder. Eshe and Ahmed had a mind to stay behind and simply shoot them, but Nyx didn’t know enough about who had hired them to take the risk. Best guess was it was the Families funding them, and mercenaries—especially Drucian ones— who dealt with the Families were a whole other sort entirely. Families didn’t muddy their business with bel dames, and no order keeper would agree to do work out here at the ass-end of nowhere. So that left mercenaries and bounty hunters, and not the kind who worked out of the Cage back in Punjai. Drucians were notoriously good at stalking people at night, and like Kage, most had great eyesight. If these two knew how to shoot like she did, though, Nyx expected they’d all be dead.

Nyx spent most of the long, dusky nights and mid-morning marches gnawing over her new team like a cat at a bone, watching what they ate, how they slept, where their eyes roamed. It was Ahmed she hoped to catch by watching his eyes, but he stared only ahead, always ahead, scanning the horizon for… what? Well, she knew, didn’t she? Bursts, enemy soldiers, sand vehicles, giant bugs, and maybe something worse, something more personal. The way Ahmed watched the horizon and slept with his back turned away from the fire each night made her wonder just what it was he expected to find there. Most boys she knew who got shoved home without proper decompression time blew right the fuck up. They jumped off bridges or walked naked into deserts or picked off people in the market with some patched-together weapon. He made her uneasy.

By the time they made camp, it was full dark already, and cold, but they were running low on fire beetles. It wasn’t cold enough to waste what was left.

“Three more days?” Ahmed asked as he took his rations from Nyx. As usual, he didn’t meet her eye. It was getting old. His averted gaze made him seem like some kind of house boy, or—worse—Kage.

“How far out are we from the next post?” Nyx asked Eskander.

Eskander was gazing back the way they had come, her face perplexed, as if she had dropped something along the way. “Maybe longer than three days,” she said.

Nyx followed her stare, squinted. Whatever she saw there, Nyx wasn’t privy to it. “That’s the wrong way,” Nyx said.

Eskander turned, frowned. “Yes, I know. It’s just… I thought I saw a light out there.”

“Lot of strange things in the desert,” Ahmed said.

“Eshe,” Nyx said, “you see anything out there? Our mercenaries show up again?”

Eshe stood and peered into the darkness. Khatijah joined him. The sky was only getting darker the farther north they went, and the moons were tracking lower in the sky.

“Might be something,” Eshe said. “Specs?”

She dug a pair out of her pack and tossed them over. Eshe donned the specs. If he still couldn’t see anything, she’d call Kage over.

“Looks like two… three people. Hard to say who they are. Just burnouses. Pretty standard.”

“How are they walking?” Drucians had a peculiar gait.

She saw him chew at his lip. A new thing, that. She didn’t like it—appeared too much like indecision.

“There are a good number of nomads up here,” Eskander said. “If I had to bet, I’d say it was some of their scouts. We must have lost those mercenaries by now.”

“Eshe?” Nyx said.

“They’re heading northwest now. If we just lie low, we should miss them.”

“Then let’s do that. Huddle up. Eshe, keep an eye on them. I want you to take first watch tonight. I’ll do second.”

“I can do second,” Ahmed said.

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” Nyx said. He had been volunteering for quite a few watches, as of late.

Nyx bedded down with the others. They kept their circle pretty tight. She didn’t want anyone wandering off or conspiring after dark. The circle let her keep an eye on all of them at once.

Most nights, Nyx didn’t think she was going to sleep, not until her head hit the sand and the world bled away like some bad dream.

When she finally put her head down, she was out.

Sleep was like water, which was a good thing, because Nyx couldn’t seem to find enough of it. Nyx dreamt often of water—vast pools of water so cold and clear that she could see the ruins of old cities there. They always seemed close enough to touch, even though she knew they must have been thousands and thousands of strokes away.

Dreams were her only escape out here, so when she started awake some time later, she resented the intrusion. She glanced around to see what woke her, but the camp was quiet. She counted every bed, and all were accounted for but Eshe’s. When she turned, she saw him standing three paces away on top of the sandy ruin of some kind of massive container, peering into the night.

“Eshe?” she said. “You see something?”

“I’m… not sure. Did you hear something?”

“Fuck, kid, am I on watch or are you?”

She slipped out of her bedroll and joined him on the rise. What she saw not a hundred paces distant was something she couldn’t quite wrap her head around.

She had heard things about wild beasts in the north—something besides bugs and cats and shape-shifting dogs, parrots, ravens, and even the elusive foxes. What kid hadn’t? But when you got old, got out into the world, you generally came to realize that all those stories were just junk your mothers told you to keep you from wandering around in the desert after dark. She had been a farmer’s kid. Encouraging children to stay within the confines of the irrigated land and brushy thorn fences and windbreaks meant keeping them alive another season. Plenty of kids got hauled off to war or indentured servitude on the interior back then. Those stories were scarier than animals, so wild animals made the best children’s stories. She heard a lot about vicious desert beasts with massive talons and tails and thorny ridges and poison mucus.

But you never really expected to see any. Not really.

“What the fuck is that?” Nyx said.

“I have no idea,” Eshe said, “but there are at least six or eight of them… and they’re coming this way.”

“Up!” Nyx yelled back at the camp as she drew her sword. “We’ve got incoming!”

The whole team—all but Eshe’s Ras Tiegan—were up and armed in less than sixty seconds. Nyx had about three seconds more to appreciate that fact before the first of the things hurled itself into camp.

It was some kind of animal. That’s about all she could say about it with any certainty. If it was a dog, it wasn’t like any dog she had ever seen. Matted dreadlocks covered the face and hooked snout, and fell in a long, jagged frill along its spine. The paws were big as a cat’s, and clawed, visibly clawed—

The tail swept out behind it, thick as a table leg, knobbed at the end with a spiky protrusion that looked like something on a thorn beetle. It must have been about the size of a sand cat, which meant the head was as wide as Nyx’s chest.

What the fuck did a thing like that eat?

You, Nyx thought as it came at her.

She swept her blade low and pivoted right.

Three more of the things barreled past her, snarling and grunting like a pack of mutant cats. Maybe that’s really all they are, she thought, but that thought was short lived as the one snarling at her lashed out a forked tongue that slapped the back of her hand, leaving a long trail of stinging mucus.

Fantastic.

She tossed her blade into her other hand and jabbed at its head. But the more she jabbed in the dark, the more she realized the regular vulnerable spots just weren’t effective. It was like her sword hit some kind of cured leather or bony scale every time. In frustration, she swung at the thing’s legs. It howled and fell. The joints at the knees were weaker than the rest.

“Go for the legs!” Nyx yelled. Beside her, Ahmed and Kage were emptying rounds into one of the beasts, already broken, as it tried to crawl toward them on its good front legs.

Someone was screaming.

Nyx turned.

Isabet, the bloody fucking Ras Tiegan, had an arm down the throat of one of the things. It had clamped down hard, and now her arm was buried to the elbow. She shrieked and gouged at its eyes with her other hand.

Eshe leapt forward, trying to find some purchase with his knife, but these weren’t the sort of animals you wanted to use knives on.

Nyx pulled her scattergun. She walked right up to the thing’s face, and pulled the trigger.

Isabet screamed again. As the animal flopped back, she went with it, arm still locked in its mouth.

But someone was still screaming.

Nyx made a full turn, trying to find out where it was coming from.

“There!” Ahmed said. He bolted past her, drawn by something she couldn’t make out in all the darkness. She followed after him.

They converged on a snarling mass of flesh. Two of the animals were locked in a struggle with Khatijah. Her left hand was already a mangled wreck, and she was missing a vital chunk of her left leg. Nyx watched her bleeding out on the sand while Eskander wailed from her perch on a narrow wedge of rock sticking out from the sand, just large enough for one person to evade the snarling animals.

Nyx and Ahmed unloaded more bullets into the things. The beasts turned their rage just in time for Kage to finish them off from ten paces away. The monstrous bang of her big gun was the best sound Nyx had heard all night.

Khatijah succumbed then, crumpling.

Eskander slithered down from the rock, screaming, still screaming. Sweet fuck, why was she fucking screaming so goddamn much?

“Don’t let her die!” Eskander cried. “Please, please!” She turned a tear-streaked face to Ahmed, and in that moment she appeared much younger than Nyx had first guessed. What was she? Nineteen? Twenty? “Ple as e.”

“She’s bleeding out,” Nyx said. “Call a swarm or something.”

Eskander’s shoulders shook. She grabbed Khatijah and hugged her limp body to her—blood, sand, sweat, and all.