Rapture (49 page)

Alharazad laughed. “Don’t try and bluff me, girl. Raine isn’t coming home alive. We made certain of that.”

“Why did you send me after him if you never meant him to come home alive?”

“It was because we didn’t want him coming back alive that we sent you, you fool,” Alharazad said. “I sent you after him because you were the only bel dame we had with the guts to murder him where he stood, and you’d do it without getting the order.”

“So that’s why you wanted me to be a bel dame,” Nyx said. “So I’d kill him for you. What purpose does that serve?”

Fatima sighed. “Nyx, you are sadly behind the times.”

“Enlighten me.”

Nyx was aware of Safiyah beside her, fairly humming with anticipation. This was the deal. It was Nyx who wanted the answers this time. Safiyah was ready to burn the place down around them. Nyx wondered how that would go, with over a thousand bel dames on Blood Hill. But then, she didn’t expect to make it out of this interview.

“There’s no room for bel dames in the new world, Nyx,” Alharazad said. “I didn’t believe it, not until Fatima came to me about it. If we want power in the new order, we need to be something else.”

“‘We’? You mean you and her.”

Nasheen was about power. Having it. Wanting it. Killing for it. Without power you weren’t anything. And when you saw power shifting, you either fought for the old way or you blazed a new one. Alharazad and Fatima had decided to burn it all down behind them. And murder Nyx and Khatijah and all the rest of their bel dame sisters behind them. Nyx should have figured that.

“We need what those aliens have,” Alharazad said. “The First Families would have them shot out of the fucking sky. But let me tell you what a stronger leadership would do. One led by Fatima and myself. With the aliens’ help, we finish Chenja. We end the war properly. That’s all any of us ever wanted.”

“This is all very unfortunate,” Fatima said. “You really need to tell us where Raine is. When a man like Raine has been lost, the Queen has only one choice to avoid civil war, and that’s to disband the order that took him out.”

“How many women will die for his death? I assume you’ll blame more than just me.”

“We’ve chosen a suitable number,” Alharazad said.

“Tell me this, then,” Nyx said. “Since I’m such a fucking idiot. Why did you take Raine to Ras Tieg? The Queen’s cousin? What was that about?”

Fatima said, “That was not our call.”

“That was done at the Queen’s request.”

“To what purpose?”

“When she found out he was still alive, she asked that he be moved there to assist in taking care of their shifter problem,” Fatima said. “Two problems settled with one piece. There’s a rebellion there, you know. She requested that he be left there for you to dispose of. And if you didn’t, well… we had an agent in place to act if you didn’t.”

“I—hold on. What?”

“Raine was never meant to come home,” Alharazad said. “We told him he couldn’t come home so he’d convince you to let him stay in Ras Tieg. You forget, Nyxnissa. I was a bel dame long before you. And a far better one. We played you from the start. And you sang beautifully.”

“What agent?” Nyx said, and then she knew. “The fucking Ras Tiegan girl.”

Alharazad grinned. “Not so slow after all.”

+

Inaya paced the parapet as the tide of sand lapped at the base of the church. There were hundreds of people up on the roofs now, watching as the sand bled the streets dry. The public buildings went down first. Inaya watched over a dozen people devoured as it succumbed.

She looked again to the jungle. It would spread without end, eat the entirety of Ras Tieg. And then what? The world? She knew there were contagions bred to engulf certain people, or certain areas. Had this been tailored to the city, the country, or the world?

“Mother Mhari, full of grace,” she muttered. She got down on her naked knees and prayed. She thought of God’s Angels, mutant shifters like her who had been trained only to hurt and destroy. She thought of her husband, Khos, and her children. She had told them she would make a better world. And instead, she had brought some spider into her house and now everything was disintegrating around her. She gazed up at the cloudy sky. No light, no signs, no miracles. Just her, naked on a roof in a tiny town at the edge of everything, with a choice to make.

She got to her feet. When she shifted, she was able to move the matter she was not using… somewhere else. It was how she moved organic and inorganic objects… like a bakkie that she needed to get across a border. She didn’t know where the bits of her went when she did not need them, but she knew she could recall them at will. Or leave them, if she chose.

Now she must do something very terrible, something that could upset everything, because though she was able to put pieces of herself into that other place, she had no idea what would happen if she tried to put something like… this there.

Inaya drew a deep breath— and broke apart.

+

“We’ll do with politics what we tried to do with blood,” Alharazad said. “You’ll see. Where’s Raine?”

“You should know better, Alharazad. Nasheenian politics will always be full of blood,” Nyx said. “And Ras Tieg, too, it looks like.”

Fatima sighed. “The girl was just one of Genevieve Leichner’s virgin maids. I’m astounded you didn’t see her for what she was immediately.”

No, Nyx admitted, she always overlooked people who played at being weak. She’d made the same mistake with Inaya, way back when.

“They were dispatched to infiltrate the Fourré some time ago,” Fatima said. “It’s not my pet project, but the Queen was very hopeful about the outcome. I told you we have been working closely with her on this. Ras Tieg has been highly unstable since the rise of the Fourré. Before then they were not much of anything. But when the Queen realized a simple trade could help us solidify our relations with Ras Tieg, she agreed.”

“She traded them Raine for political stability?”

“Where do you think she’s retiring once she steps down?” Alharazad said. “Not the fuck anywhere here. She’s not going to be popular much longer.”

“I’m sorry we kept you out of much of this, Nyx, but you understand the necessity,” Fatima said. “You would have done the same.”

Nyx felt numb. It was all so big that she had trouble getting her head around it. She had been used. Thoroughly, totally, and completely. She had given up everything—her home, and Anneke, Radeyah; and lost an entire team, lost Eshe—for what?

Alharazad laughed. “You look so confused. It’s all right. Are you really the last one standing?”

“Can’t be,” Fatima said. “You’d have to have gone through the tunnels to get back so quickly. Is this your new magician?”

“Indeed,” Safiyah said. It was the first time she’d spoken.

“And what are you called? Need a job?” Alharazad said, and laughed.

“I am on a job, actually,” Safiyah said lightly. “Perhaps you remember me, Alharazad. Surely you of all people remember my name, and how you angered my Family when you murdered our brothers.”

For a moment, Nyx didn’t register the look of horror on Alharazad’s face. She thought it was just gas.

But as Alharazad’s mouth began to work, Nyx realized it was more than just some passing bodily discomfort.

“You,” Alharazad said.

Safiyah grinned. “Me,” she said.

+

Inaya tore herself into a billion pieces. It was freedom. Complete, utter, perfect freedom. When she tore herself, she tore part of the world. Something folded. But instead of letting that piece of the world close back up, she kept it open. She bent the spaces around the tide of sand, and began to funnel it to the place where she kept herself.

There was a moment of deep resistance. Then the sand, too, began to break down, break apart. She transformed it. One moment, seething gray death. The next, inert matter broken up into its basic parts, perfectly packaged for storage in the twist she had made in the world.

She broke the weapon apart bit by bit, even as more people screamed and died around her, and the flow of sand gushed toward the edges of the filter. She began to spread herself thinner and thinner, blanketing the town, the world. She heard the caw of a raven.

As she spread apart, she was less and less aware of herself. The matter broke beneath her. She broke against it. She was losing. Something was being lost.

+

Safiyah gazed upon the face she first saw in the palms of her handler, several months past. She had enjoyed her sojourn in the desert, tracking down the one woman sure to draw this one out of hiding.

Alharazad was not an easy woman to find, or to fool. Not unless she wanted to be found. And Nyx was the sort of woman that Alharazad delighted in underestimating. Safiyah knew, because she hadn’t thought much of her either, in the beginning. The colonial was slow, uneducated, and very dirty. But resilient. Terribly resilient.

Safiyah said, “What, no greeting?”

“You know each other?” Nyx said.

“In passing,” Safiyah said. “It took me a time to remember your face.

You were much younger when you visited me, weren’t you?

Who let you out?”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell you everything now. Why would I do that?

Simply congratulate me on finding you, and die gracefully.” The old woman tried to bolt. The bel dames around them surged. Nyx drew her blade, and stepped further into the room. She prepared for a good fight. A final fight. Safiyah could see it in her face, and thought it very cute.

Safiyah called the ravenous swarm of flesh beetles she had kept on call in anticipation of just such an event.

The screaming was perfectly lovely. The councilwoman even retched. Any day Safiyah could make a bel dame retch was a fine day indeed.

And the troublesome retinue of armed bel dames? Well, that only took a few moments longer.

Somedays Safiyah truly loved what she was.

+

In some other life, there was a woman named Inaya il Parait. She married a man named Khos. Khos loved her all his life, but she did not love him. She loved her children. She loved her freedom. She loved the idea of being normal, and leading a normal life.

But she had never been ordinary.

And now, she was coming apart.

Inaya watched the world from the sky. She was all-seeing, all-knowing.

She wondered if this is what it felt like to be God. To see all the joy and horror at once, to pick up grains of sand one by one while a great tide of destruction threatened the world. She was just one entity. Her against the world felt like too much.

She knew she was breaking further and further apart, knew that she was fading, knew that with each grain she removed from the world, it was one less piece of her that she would have the strength to pull back.

The sand broke against the filter. She half hoped it would stop, but no—it simply ate the filter. Bled through. She spread herself thinner. Consciousness floated.

There once was a woman…

And then she felt something else ahead of her. Some other entity, something like her. It, too, ate at the sand. The tide had become a wave.

The wave soon became a runnel.

Inaya began to grasp back at the bits of herself. She felt some semblance of consciousness return. As she regained control, she was able to focus on the final movement of the sand, until every last grain was broken and removed.

It was painful, coming back.

Inaya burned with the effort. She staggered into her body like a drunkard. Fell to her knees. Coughed up bloody mucus and dead beetles. She snorted air into new lungs. The ground beneath her was scorched bare. Every last scrap of organic matter had been eaten by the sand.

She raised her head.

There was another figure there across from her at the edge of the filter, a pale man. He coughed up a swarm of red beetles. They buzzed about his mucus-smeared head.

Inaya crawled toward him. Hunger stabbed her belly. She would need to eat soon.

He looked up.

It was the Angel who interrogated her—Pieter. The one from the prison. The one she had spared.

He met her look, said nothing. Then he was on his feet, running out past her, through the filter, and into the trembling jungle. +

Nyx stared at the pile of bones where Alharazad and the dozen bel dames had been. “I’m… I can’t… what the fuck was that?”

“You asked once why I followed you,” Safiyah said. “It’s because I’m hoping they give me something difficult next time.”

“They?” Fatima said. Her voice was faint. The beetles had picked Alharazad clean, but left Fatima intact.

“You think you are the only power in Nasheen, child? Oh no. Yours is a very new power, and you only have as much as we permit you. Don’t get too comfortable, now.”

“The boys—” Fatima began.

“The boys will be just fine,” Nyx said, suddenly. It bubbled up from inside of her. “Because as I told you, Raine’s still alive. You don’t know any different, do you? There will be people here to corroborate that. He just checked in with them. Should be on the radio any minute. Raine isn’t going to be found. And nobody else is going to look for him. He’s retiring from politics. The bel dames are going to keep going on as they are until the new government decides what do to with them. No one’s going to kill anyone. How does that sound?”

“Bloody awful,” Safiyah said.

“Fatima?” Nyx said.

“I… need to think.”

“No thinking. Doing.” Nyx walked up to the table. “If there’s a new government in Nasheen, you can bet I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you’re not a part of it.”

“Then shoot me.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what you do.”

“Is it? You really don’t know me at all, do you, Fatima? I’m not like you. Not anymore.”

“There is no place for you in the new world,” Fatima said.

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Nyx said. “If you had any goddamn sense, you’d hope so too.”

Nyx pushed past Safiyah into the hallway. She needed to get away. Far, far, the fuck away.

“Nyx!” Safiyah called. “Come now, darling, let me buy you a drink.”

But Nyx was unsteady on her feet, burning with fear. As she stepped into the hall, she was overwhelmed by the number of women around them, scurrying from one job to another. She reached for her blade.