God's War (19 page)

“I will.”

“And keep everybody on high
security. The bel dames might move on you here. Not likely, but it’s possible.
Council can’t find its own ass some days, and it’ll take them a long time to
agree on whether or not we’re worth killing. Hopefully we’ll be in Chenja by
then and they won’t touch us. Not even bel dames like running the border.
Where’s Anneke?”

“Getting lunch.”

“Keep her on point this afternoon.
And you double-lock the doors and set up an organics net. Taite and I were
burned out of our first office before you came on board. I don’t want to take
any chances.”

Nyx picked up her bag and pushed out
the door and onto the hot, reeking street. She rolled under the bakkie and
checked it for bugs, bursts, and regular explosives. The organic guts
surrounding the hoses and wires were clear, and the pulse was good. She opened
up the trunk to make sure Khos hadn’t left any more bodies in there. She saw
nothing but some bloody blankets and toolkits, but she knew Anneke better than
that. She reached into the trunk and pushed back the blankets. Anneke had two
long rectangular boxes shoved in the back, tied with brown paper. Regular, not
organic. Nyx shook her head and threw the blanket back over them. She might end
up needing the guns anyway, and if Anneke had forgotten about them, it might
make her sweat a little knowing they weren’t in her hot little hands.

She tried to open the passenger side
door. Jammed. She tossed her bag in through the window. She needed to get
Anneke to fix that.

Nyx hopped in, kicked up the engine,
and headed east, to Jameela. To the sea.

To the bloody fucking sea.

Nyx blew out of Punjai and hit the
radio a couple times with her palm, but all she got was misty blue static.

It was going to be a long ride.

She spent the night in the bakkie
after making good time; she got about halfway to Mushtallah. She passed the
sand-swallowed ruins of old cities, now no more than irregular bulges in the
desert, marked only by the tall rusted poles of the cities’ contagion sensors.
Rogue swarms and viral bugs leaking in from the north had blighted whole cities
back in the old days. There were still wild places in the Khairian wasteland,
and the border cities still had working contagion sensors that warned the
unfiltered inside when the mutant monsters of the red desert wandered too far
south or some sand-crazed magician who had gone out there searching for her
soul came back with half her head missing, muttering in tongues. Most magicians
stayed concentrated in the big cities to keep them clean of virulent swarms.
The borderlands just limped along, mostly on their own. There was homesteading
to be done for the poor and desperate, still, in the north and south and
throughout Ras Tieg and Heidia and Druce. Three thousand years old, and Umayma
was still an untamed place.

Nyx had kept as far off the road as
she could without getting stuck in the sand and sat out a benign locust swarm
just before dawn. Once it passed she was back on the road, out past Mushtallah
and the central cities, where the gas lamps lit up every window. She landed another
night on the road, then climbed over the low mountains that divided the coast
from the interior.

As she came up over the other side,
the terrain began to change. Sand gave way to choked crabgrass. The desert bled
to scrubland, then long-needled pine trees, then tall oak hybrids with leaves
the size of Nyx’s head, low ferns with thorns, tangles of wild roses, snake
maples, amber ticklers, patches of low-spring wildflowers. The kinds of bugs
changed, too. Fewer beetles and roaches; more ladybugs and spider mites and
mayflies. There were less hospitable bugs too, the farther she got from the
interior: giant plate-size cicadas and acid-spraying chiggers as long as her
arm.

Nyx found it all pretty
claustrophobic. The trees were so enormous they blocked the sky, the suns. She
couldn’t see beyond the turns of the road. She checked her mirrors more often.

She came out of the mountains and
into rolling fields of red-tipped wheat, saw the broad dirt runs for the kept
dogs. Farmsteads dotted the landscape. Swarms of locusts, red flies, and
ladybugs mobbed the fields, tailored to devour the less friendly bugs and fungi
that ruined the staples.

Nyx found a motel that night at the
Amber Stalk crossroads, named after some dead magician who’d saved the valley
from mutant cicadas. There was a living plaque up under the road marker. Nyx
figured she’d saved a lot more lives than he had, but nobody had ever named
anything after her. She wondered how spectacular your death had to be to come
out the other side with a plaque.

She parked her bakkie out front
alongside flatbeds and rickshaws and a cart hitched to the front end of a
converted bakkie. The bakkie had smoky black patches on its semi-organic
exterior; the first signs of sun-sickness. Along the edges of the parking lot,
she saw a head-size mutant flower chafer scuttling back into the brush. If she
had to deal with giant bugs out here, she preferred benign ones like the
chafers.

Inside the motel, she splurged on
good food and a bath. The only upside to coming out to the coast was all the
cheap food and water.

Nyx didn’t linger long in the bath.
She just scrubbed herself off and rubbed at old wounds that had started biting
and aching as the weather cooled. It was colder on the coast.

She missed the desert.

When she crawled into bed, her
sheets weren’t full of sand.

She couldn’t sleep.

Nyx grabbed her pillow and moved to
the floor. She lay there for a couple of hours staring at the shiny green
roaches scuttling along the ceiling, half the size of the ones in the desert
and the wrong color. A couple took flight, landing on her arms and her face.
She flicked them away.

There was a call box downstairs, but
she had no one to call. If she called Kine, it was likely her sister would tell
her not to come. If she called the keg, she could make small talk with Taite or
Anneke about how they were handling security, but she’d be repeating herself,
and they’d see through it. They’d see some kind of weakness. Maybe fear.

Nyx got up and went to the bar.

The motel had an “honor” bar, the
kind with liquor bottles affixed to the wall upside down and a little book to
record how many shots you’d pulled so they could bill you for them later. Nyx
didn’t intend on taking shots.

Nyx pulled out her dagger, pried a
bottle of whiskey from the wall, and went out and sat on the front porch. The
sky was big, and the stars were the clearest she’d seen since she was a kid in
Mushirah. She drank, leaned back in the chair, and tried reading the
constellations. Tej had been good at that.

Tej. A lifetime ago. Been a long
time since she’d thought of him too. She touched her baldric absently. Blood
and death and aliens—it all went back to that night in Faleen.

A noise from the parking lot drew
her attention. She went still. The night was clear, but the big bloody moons
were at the far end of their orbit, meaning they looked about the size of her
thumbnail in the night sky. Ten years from now, they would look about three
times the size of the sun.

But that didn’t help her out much
tonight.

The figure was dawdling next to
Nyx’s bakkie. Nyx had parked close to the motel so she could keep an eye on it.
The figure crouched for a long while, then rose and moved off. She thought it
might be some kind of giant leaf insect, but as Nyx watched, the figure shrank,
dwindled. She heard a sneeze, and then a white bird was flapping off toward the
road.

Nyx swore.

She clutched the bottle and went
back to her room and bolted herself in. She sat on the edge of the bed. Her
hands shook.

Bloody sisters. Bloody
Rasheeda
.

Nyx took a deep breath, drank more.
Find your nerves, woman, she thought. Find your damn nerves. It took four of
them to take you out last time.

But they might not be so nice this
time.

She closed her eyes and tried to
calm down. It was possible they’d only sent Rasheeda. She could deal with
Rasheeda. But not Dahab. Not Fatima. Not all of them together. Not again.

Nyx opaqued the windows.

The room was dark.

She could not sleep.

She pulled her dagger from the
sheath on her thigh, picked up the bottle with her other hand, and crept
downstairs. She went back to the call box and dialed the pattern for the keg.
She wedged herself into a corner underneath it.

The line buzzed and buzzed and
buzzed.

Pick up, she thought. Pick up. Nyx
closed her eyes. She was on her own out here. It would take four of them to get
her. Fuck, she didn’t need a fucking team, what kind of catshit was this?

“Peace be unto you.”

Nyx opened her eyes.

Rhys’s voice.

Nyx wet her mouth again with the
whiskey, found some words. “You read to me?” she asked.

A long pause. She thought maybe
she’d lost the connection.

“Are you drunk?” he asked.

“Rasheeda’s here,” Nyx said.

Another pause. She heard him moving
around. He must have come from bed and into her office, where the call box was.

“Should I send someone?”

“Can you just read?”

“All I’ve got is the poetry.”

“Fine.”

He sighed. He was always sighing at
her, making faces at her, disapproving, her pious Chenjan. “Do you know what
time it is?”

She didn’t answer.

“How drunk are you?”

“Drunk enough to ask,” she said.

Rhys read to her for a long time.

The fear started to bleed away. It
was like loosening up a garroting wire pulled taut. She clutched the
transceiver to her ear as if it, too, were a weapon, as effective as the
dagger. But, after a while, her death grip eased up. She realized her hand
hurt.

Sometime later, Rhys’s voice began
to soften, grow quiet. Finally he said, “I’m going to bed, Nyx.”

“All right.”

“Nyx?”

“Yeah?”

“You can take Rasheeda.”

“I know.” She wanted to ask him what
he prayed for.

She hung up.

Nyx took a last pull from the
bottle, returned it to the bar, and held out the rest of the night in her room
with the door bolted. She slept in front of it.

The next morning, honey-headed
hungover, Nyx made an inspection of the bakkie and turned up an ignition burst
and a cut brake line. It looked like Rasheeda had tried to disable the main
hose connecting the pedal mechanisms to the cistern as well but had only nicked
it, cutting a secondary hose instead. Some dead beetles and bug juice pooled
beneath the bakkie, but the severed organic artery cushioning the line had
already scabbed over. She knew how to properly fuck up a bakkie without leaving
behind any obvious traces. Rasheeda hadn’t wanted to stop Nyx, just announce
herself and slow Nyx down.

Nyx disarmed the ignition burst. She
opened the trunk and took out one of the toolkits. She patched the leak, cut
out and sewed in a new brake hose, and got back onto the road.

This time, she kept an eye on the
road behind her the whole way.

She stopped at a dusty station just
past a couple of farmsteads at the foot of the coastal hills and filled up on
bug juice. Dead and dying bugs—some of them the size of small dogs—littered the
periphery, wallowing in a citronand-cinnamon smelling mixture of pesticide and
repellent the owner had put down to protect the station.

The woman who popped open her tank
was a soft, fleshy coastal type with a plump mouth.

“You come in from the desert?” she
asked.

Nyx wondered where else there was to
come in from. As the woman pumped the feed into the tank, Nyx gazed out at the
road. She saw a black bakkie crawling around a bend in the road, coming in from
the direction of the motel. Following her.

It didn’t parse. Rasheeda was a
shifter—she didn’t need to send a bakkie after Nyx. She would have followed in
bird form. So who the fuck were
these
people?

Nyx turned her face away, but noted
the movement of the bakkie in the station windows. The bakkie slowed as it
passed the station, then sped up again. Nyx saw three figures. She slumped in
her seat, wondered if they’d open fire.

But the bakkie sped on. She looked
after it.

“Friends of yours?” the attendant
asked. She capped the tank.

“I hope not,” Nyx said. She leaned
over, opened her pack, and rolled a few bursts onto the passenger seat. Just in
case.

She paid the woman and then got back
onto the road.

Three kilometers on, she saw the
bakkie parked at the side of the road.

Waiting.

Nyx switched pedals, kicked the
bakkie a little faster. The other bakkie turned out onto the road after her.

Nyx didn’t know the coast well, and
unlike the cities, the place was wide open, no cover. About all the cover she
had were the hills, and some woods, if she could find them. She switched pedals
again, reached for the clutch. She hadn’t had to use the clutch in a long time.
She wondered if it still worked.

The dark bakkie kept just within her
rearview mirror range. They knew they’d been seen. Either they didn’t know
where she was going and wanted to pin her there, or they were waiting for a
good turn in the road to take her out.

She sped up. They sped up.

She watched the image of the black
bakkie grow larger in the mirror.

She fucked with the clutch. It made
a nasty grinding sound. The bakkie wheezed.

“Come on, you fucker,” she said.

It clicked.

She switched pedals. The bakkie
shuddered. The speedometer climbed. She saw a turnoff on her left that went up
into the hills. Nyx did a neat brake, twisted the wheel, and hit the speed as
she came out of the turn.