Rapture (37 page)

“Who wants first watch?” Nyx said.

Silence. Blank stares.

“All right,” Nyx said. “Not like we can see shit out there anyway.” She took up a position near the staked entry, and listened to the wind yowl while Eshe broke out the rations. She kept her heat specs close. She emptied out her sandals, grateful for a lifetime of callouses so thick she barely registered blisters or bruises anymore.

The others bedded down after eating. As soon as the sun dropped, the desert got cold. Bitterly cold. Eshe started a fire with a handful of fire beetles. They didn’t have much to feed the bugs, so he used far too many to get a steady heat, even in the small space.

Nyx pressed her back against the rock, which still held some of the suns’ heat, and peered out between the flaps of the canvas. Eshe and Isabet argued about something in Ras Tiegan. Ahmed lay on the other side of the tent with his back to all of them. Kage and Khatijah methodically cleaned their weapons. Safiyah sat nearest the fire, talking to herself. On the one hand, Safiyah made Nyx increasingly wary. On the other, the realities of this place meant that relying on her knowledge of the area might be the only thing that kept them alive on this side of the Wall.

Nyx nodded off. When she woke, Safiyah was sitting across from her. Staring at her with big, dark eyes.

Nyx started.

Safiyah grinned. The cat’s-got-a-lizard grin that creeped her out.

“Do they teach anything of the heavenly bodies in the schools for grunts?” Safiyah asked. “I assumed that’s where you were schooled.”

Nyx glanced back into the tent. The others were mostly asleep, or trying to be. The fire beetle carapaces popped.

“Why?” Nyx said.

“Surely someone in your life taught you something of the stars?”

“No one in my life gave a shit about the sky,” Nyx said, but that was a lie. She thought of her mother. “I needed to know how to point and shoot. And not up there.”

“Ah, yes. So you learned to count bullets and calculate the trajectory of bursts. So quaint.”

“You’d have thought it was mighty useful when you were hip deep in a trench about to be overrun and trying to remember how much ammo you had left. Not that any of your people would get that.”

“Still, it’s a pity,” Safiyah said. “There are gravitational points between high-density planets called Damira’s points. It’s when the pull of one planet is no longer stronger than the pull over another body. At that point in the sky, debris becomes forever caught in these areas. So debris wanders through, becomes caught in the tide, and then is pulled back into the vortex in an endless rotation. Forever trapped between two great heavenly bodies in space.”

“What the fuck does this have to do with anything?” Nyx said. Outside, the wind had subsided. She donned the heat specs and surveyed the landscape. In the cold night, people would stand out like flares.

“Your team is like that, I think,” Safiyah said. “Just bits of debris. Rubble. Space junk. Right now they are circling you, but this desert, these people, they are a powerful force in their own right, and they have much to offer. Now your people will be caught between the two. But this impasse will not last forever. Eventually, one body is disabled, atrophies, is set off kilter. And when that happens, well… Everything falls apart after that, doesn’t it?”

“Know what I think?” Nyx said, lowering her voice. She looked over the top of the specs at Safiyah.

“I have not the faintest.”

“I think you should keep your fucking head out of the sky and back in the desert. If you did, you’d have seen there’s a fucking scout watching us from the next outcrop.”

Safiyah hissed and flattened herself on the ground. “God be merciful, woman, why didn’t you say anything?”

“I know how much you love to listen to yourself talk.”

“Menace.”

“You’ll learn to love it,” Nyx said, and slipped her scattergun from its holster. In the specs, the green, human-shaped outline merely held its ground. She expected others, so she waited with gun out.

“Just the one?” Safiyah whispered.

“She’s not doing anything.”

Then the figure moved. Not toward the camp, but away, back down or behind something so Nyx lost sight of it.

Nyx shook her head. “Gone now.”

The magician was shaking her head. “Not gone,” she said. “Going back to consult with her circle leaders to decide what to do with us.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. We should start moving again soon.”

+

They didn’t wait for dawn.

Nyx kept Safiyah with her up front, and Khatijah and Kage made up the rear guard. The sun took a lot longer to come up here, and when it finally did, the roiling clouds kept the whole world bathed in lilac for the first two hours of sunrise. The light made the journey incredibly unreal, like pounding through some spectacular dream. The landscape here had a strange hush about it, expectant, like the creamy red sand was just lying in wait for things to happen. For blood to be spilled.

They walked through a forest of white structures twice as tall as Nyx, all of them twisted into a grotesque semblance of trees, or, in some cases—human figures. The structures oozed some kind of clear, snotty mucus. Nyx hated them.

“Have you heard of Bomani?” Nyx asked Safiyah as they walked.

“Ah, yes. It’s one of the major congregations here. Something like a city.”

“You can get us as far as Bomani?”

“Am I being employed as guide now? I don’t believe we’ve negotiated for that additional service.”

Nyx sighed. “Never mind. You just seem to know your way around.”

“Indeed. Only not as keenly as perhaps you would hope.”

“Nyx?” said Khatijah.

Nyx turned. The wind wasn’t as strong today, but still persistent. The sand stung her eyes. She squinted.

“What?” she said.

“There’s movement back this way.”

“Eshe, see what she’s talking about,” Nyx said. He was closer than Kage, and to be honest, Nyx was too exhausted to haul herself all the way to the back of the line again.

Eshe sighed. “You’re welcome,” he said. He pulled out his specs and walked over to join Khatijah.

Khatijah pointed.

Eshe lit up like a burning bush.

Nyx didn’t even hear a shot or an explosion. One moment she was looking back the way they’d come, following Khatijah’s arm, and the next—a pillar of fire shot out of the ground where Eshe stood.

Nyx threw herself behind the nearest twisted white structure. She could feel the heat through her cover. She squeezed her eyes shut. Eshe’s keening cry was cut short.

Then someone else was screaming.

Isabet.

“Get to cover!” Nyx yelled.

Nyx let out a breath and looked for Ahmed. He might be able to call a swarm out here to shield them from view. From her position, she saw no one. They had scattered when the flame appeared.

Not one had knuckled forward to help Eshe. Not even her.

Her own fault. She had not hired heroes.

Nyx dove to the next mound. Ducked around a corner, searching for her fucking magician. Sand stuck to her where the mucus had adhered to her body.

“Ahmed!” she yelled.

She heard three shots.

Somebody squealed. Hers or theirs, she wasn’t certain.

“Ahmed!”

She ran for the next cover.

Halfway there, the sand around her erupted. She threw her arms up and leapt back, expecting shrapnel. Her whole body went taut as adrenaline rushed through her. Every instinct told her it was a mine.

But she was still whole, and there was a dusty woman swinging a sword at her from the newly blown crater.

Nyx backpedaled to her former cover, yanking at her own blade as she retreated. She was nearly out of bullets, and at close range, she was more comfortable with a blade.

Someone shouted behind her. The woman ahead of her stopped swinging. Nyx stabbed at her. The woman danced back.

“You are mine! I challenge you!”

Nyx turned. The oddly accented Nasheenian was familiar, though she could not place it.

Another woman strode toward her through the formations. Like the other, she was tall and red-brown, with a mane of dark hair. Nyx remembered her. The woman from the tea shop. The one insulted by Kage’s casual fuck.

Well, shit.

Nyx raised her blade.

The woman held up her serrated insect leg, but did not advance.

“I, Shani of Jithra’s Circle, challenge you.”

“And I don’t fucking accept.”

“You’re on Circle Jithra land now,” Shani said. “You accept or I kill you the way I did your boy.”

Nyx regarded the scorched sand where Eshe’s blackened husk lay smoldering. There were more women nearby. She saw a few glimpses among the formations.

“Where’s my team? You fry anyone else?”

“Not if you circle with me. Put away your blade. You’ll call the sand with blood out here.”

“But burning up a boy is fine, is it?” Nyx said. She could smell the burnt flesh. Her memory roiled, and then everything just tumbled apart. She swung.

The woman had the sense to look startled. The blade came down on her shoulder, drew blood before she could dance away.

“Hold your blade!” the woman yelled at her. “You’ll call the sand! You fool!” And then she was nattering off something in her language.

Nyx leapt forward. She felt a dart of flame shoot up behind her, right where she’d been the moment before. She swung again as the woman danced behind more cover. Nyx’s blade cracked against the white structure. It trembled. The tip of her blade whacked the desert woman again, this time in the face. It opened another wound. Blood spilled.

Nyx kept on, relentless, moving among the formations in time with the desert woman. She was aware, distantly, of something hissing around her. And voices. The Aadhya were calling to one another.

A gout of crimson sand burst from the ground ahead of her. Nyx stumbled back. Shani screamed. A twisted, spitting tornado of sand erupted from the ground around Shani. Nyx watched it tunnel into Shani’s open wounds and fill her skin to bursting. Shani’s body became a bloated sack. Her eyes bulged. Then her skin burst, and the sand spilled out, darker than the stuff that went in. The bloodless shell crumpled to the ground. The bloody sand joined the rest of the stuff at Nyx’s feet. She felt it ripple beneath her. This was not like the sand she encountered before in Nasheen. It was the wild variety, eating blood alone, leaving baggy skin and bone corpses behind.

Nyx turned away before she could retch, and ran back through the maze of structures. She found Eshe by following the smell of burnt flesh. When she reached him, she threw down her blade and pulled him into her arms. His skin was blackened; his face, unrecognizable. The clothes were burnt away or seared to the skin. His eyes had melted. In death, there was nothing that marked him as being any different than any other Nasheenian boy, burned up and left to die at the front.

“Eshe?” she said. But he was dead, of course. The same way her whole squad had died, melted up by some mine she had triggered instead of clearing.

She saw Ahmed a few steps away, and Kage just behind him. Ahmed didn’t hold a gun, but a long length of garroting wire. Isabet was crouched near Kage, behind one of the formations. Three dead Aadhya lay on the ground, with no visible open wounds. One’s head was cocked at an unnatural angle, and the other two looked like they had been garroted.

Surrounding them all were over a dozen living Aadhya. They said nothing. Did not move. Simply watched.

“Is this what you wanted, you bloody cats?” Nyx said.

She released Eshe’s body and drew her sword. She hadn’t seen Safiyah or Khatijah, which meant they were either dead or in hiding. She brought her sword to her own throat.

“Get the fuck out of here. I’ll call the sand myself, and my team will shoot each of you in turn. It’ll eat us all together. That’s a fine thing, isn’t it? All of us dead because Shani got jealous about who was fucking who? That what you want?”

It wasn’t until the silence stretched that she realized Shani may have been the only one among them who could speak Nasheenian.

The women stood in silence for some time. Nyx looked them all in the eye, but reading them was impossible. She didn’t know what lines had been crossed. Didn’t know what they respected, what they revered, only that this rogue woman had been insulted enough to want to fight her, and murder Eshe as an afterthought.

Sweat ran into Nyx’s eyes. The grit between her toes itched, and she wondered if she had bleeding blisters down there, wondered if the sand would slowly suck her dry—toes first.

Then the women began to turn away. First one, then another. They covered their faces with the ends of their turbans as they went. The women were so long-legged that they were lost among the formations within just a few strides.

It wasn’t until the last was clear that Nyx let her arm relax. The blade slipped from her fingers. She made herself look at Eshe.

Ahmed and Kage approached. She stared at Eshe’s melted eye sockets. Wondered if he’d ever convinced his white bitch to love him.

And that thought, oddly, was the one that cut her deepest.

She rounded on Kage. Took her by the collar. Smashed her up against one of the structures. It spurted a fresh gush of mucus.

“And you. You, you fucking maggoty cat in heat, you worthless fucking Drucian rag. This is your fucking fault. What the fuck were you doing fucking red women in the desert? This is what comes of it. This. This is your fucking doing,” Nyx spat.

Kage turned her cheek away. “It is private.”

“Private?” Nyx hauled her up again. She took Kage by the back of the neck and thrust her face down against Eshe’s charred body. “Private like death? Like my fucking kid’s death?”

“You don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Nyx said. She pulled her scattergun.

Ahmed stepped forward, “Nyx—”

She swung the gun at him. “Can you fix him?”

Ahmed held up his hands. “He’s not a bel dame, Nyx.”

“Then shut the fuck up.”

“She wanted children,” Kage said. “I had to purge my debt. The debt for the lives I took. And the ones I’ve taken for you. There are just two ways to do that. Bearing children or saving a life. She asked for children.”