God's War (40 page)

She stumbled toward the voice
without knowing why. She felt the wasps sting her face, her arms, her legs. She
had sweated away most of the unguent. She kept her hand over her face.

She fell, and banged her knee on a
stone. She dropped the dagger and put both hands down to catch herself. Her
hands came away wet.

Water. Why was there water in the
gully? Unless…

Nyx ran blindly toward what she
hoped was the other side of the gully.

Water rushed past her ankles. As she
ran, the water rose, and then she was slogging through it. The wasps stung.

She hated it when she was right
about the fucking weather.

She lost her fight with the water.

Nyx let herself drop under. The buzz
of the bugs abruptly stopped. Her burning skin was suddenly cool. The current
was strong. Bits of stone and wood and some dead thing smashed into her. She
broke the surface, tried to stand. The water was chest-deep now.

She could not swim, of course.

When she looked up, the cloud of
wasps was somewhere behind her. She tried to find her footing, but the current
was too strong.

Nyx collided with the side of the
gully. She groped for a handhold and found a loose root. She held on and hauled
herself out of the water. She rolled onto the other bank like a beached log and
gasped. Anneke was running over to her from just upriver, her gun slung behind
her, bumping against her ass.

“Where’s Rhys?” Nyx asked.

“You breathing, boss?”

Anneke crouched next to her, cloaked
in a sheen of sweat.

“Where’s Rhys?” she repeated.

“Still upstream, boss.” She looked
over her shoulder at the raging water in the gully.

Nyx pulled herself into a sitting
position and gazed out at the gully as well. Raine had been in there. Pinned to
the ground with a sword. She reached for the ear she’d tucked into her dhoti,
but it was gone, torn away by the water.

She looked for the cloud of wasps
but saw nothing upstream.

“Where’s Khos?” Nyx asked.

“Last I saw, the fucker was running
back toward the bakkie.”

Nyx knitted her brows. Her arms and
face stung. “Go see if the bakkie’s still there,” she said.

Fucker, she thought. Cowardly
fucker. And perhaps something worse. If Khos had headed out before the end of
the fight, it was more than possible that he had either set himself up with a
back exit or, worse… Please, fuck, she thought, let that not be it. That’s not
it. He wouldn’t do that. Nobody on my team would do that.

She got to her feet. Anneke ran off
toward the bakkie.

Nyx stumbled along the bank toward
the scrub, searching for Rhys. She saw one dark arm flung out from a line of
scrub, palm open toward the sky. She had a sudden memory of her sister, Kine,
in the tub, bloodied, eyeless.

She fell to her knees and scrambled
toward him. He opened his eyes, squinted at her. Closed his eyes.

“You,” he said.

“Me,” she said.

“I saw you fall.”

“Thought you could get rid of me so
easy?”

“Hoped,” he said, and opened his
eyes again.

“I think I killed Raine.”

“Never liked him anyway,” Rhys said.

“You still drugged?”

“Yes. But it should wear off. I was
due for another dose.”

“They fuck you up?” Nyx asked.

Rhys closed his eyes again,
grimaced.

“We need to go,” she said.

“Their magician was shot, but she’ll
be coming around.”

“It’s not the magician I’m worried
about,” Nyx said. She looked behind her at the raging water in the gully. Where
was Nikodem? Had she fallen and washed down the gully too? Or had she scrambled
back up the way Nyx had, heading for the road?

She glanced back down at Rhys, at
the shallow rise and fall of his chest. She saw now that there was something
wrong with his hands. The fingers looked twisted. Broken.

She wanted to kill Raine again. Even
dirtier this time.

Nyx closed her mouth, leaned back
away from Rhys. Her heart ached. This wasn’t the time for petty sentiment. She
had spent so long trying not to feel anything.

“We need to go. I’ll carry you,” she
said.

She squatted and pushed her arms
underneath him. She was nearly the same size as Rhys, but as she lifted him,
she had to go easy, find her balance. She was exhausted.

The stings hurt, and her vision was
going blurry. Her knees nearly buckled. The heat was rapidly sucking the
moisture from her hair and clothes.

She followed the gully back down
through the hills. The water was already lowering, bleeding off. She looked
behind her and no longer saw any storm clouds. At least when it rained up there
it didn’t last long.

Sand stuck to her skin. She’d lost a
sandal somewhere in the gully. She walked with a limp. As she walked, she
became increasingly certain that Khos had taken Inaya and the bakkie and fucked
off. And Rhys was getting heavier. Her breath came hard. She stumbled.

She looked at Rhys, in her arms. A
couple of hours. Could he walk in a couple of hours, after the drugs wore off?

A shot sounded ahead of them. The
sound of a rifle.

Nyx stopped, and was going to drop
Rhys and reach for her pistol when she realized she didn’t have it. She was
down to two poisoned needles in her hair and a razor blade in her one remaining
sandal.

She had to make a decision. The shot
was had come from the direction of the bakkie, which likely wasn’t there
anyway. Behind her was more Chenjan desert, a desert she had last seen a decade
before, in the spring. A desert she had blown apart. Something flew over her
head, circled them, flew back toward the bakkie.

A white raven.

Nyx looked behind her. They could
skirt the other side of the hill, hole up in a cave until dark, and wait for
Rhys to get his strength back. They could walk out.

Someone snickered.

Nyx turned.

Rasheeda strode toward them, naked
and still shivering. A hail of white feathers blew out behind her.

Nyx tensed.

She needed to run. Taite was dead.
Anneke probably was, too. They’d kill Rhys and her, eventually. If they caught
her.

Run.

Drop the fucking Chenjan and run,
she thought. Fucking run.

Oh, God.

Everything was burning. She was
burning in the desert.

Someone moved on the other side of
the gully.

Dahab carried a rifle. Half her face
was a mass of scar tissue and badly healed bone. One black eye, not her own,
peered out from the wrecked half of her face.

Bel dames were hard to kill…
especially when there was a magician just down the hall when they were shot.

Run, Nyx thought. Bloody fucking
hell, why can’t I fucking run? She started to shake.

Rhys opened his eyes. They didn’t
focus right. She wondered if he even saw her.

She wanted to say something stupid
and profound.

But all she managed to say was
“Don’t die.”

She choked on the rest.

They wouldn’t kill her, not yet.

Whoever wanted her wanted her alive.

Rasheeda flexed her fingers and
licked her lips. She stopped three paces from them, one arm akimbo. “I missed
you, sister,” she said.

Nyx heard another shot. Something
hot and heavy slammed into her back. She lost her balance and tumbled, Rhys in
her arms. She tasted dust. She writhed in the sand and reached toward Rhys. He
tried to get up. The bel dames were laughing. Another gun went off.

She wanted to hold his hand.

Rhys lay on his side on a hard,
gritty floor. The air was hot and oddly humid. His shattered hands were bound
behind him, and they throbbed. Someone lay across from him. Shiny darkness
pooled on the stones under her.

“Nyx?” he said. “Nyx?”

They were in some kind of cell. He
saw pale orange light between him and Nyx, seeping from beneath the door. He
thought it was Nyx. Was she dead? Had they killed her?

“Nyx,” he said.

The figure moved and moaned.

Nyx.

His hands bled pain, but he tried to
move them anyhow. The knots were tight. His head still hurt. He closed his eyes
and tried to find the bugs, tried to call out for something, anything. Some
wasps or some pinchers, preferably roaches to gnaw through the sticky bands. But
he met only a wall of blackness, emptiness. His whole world had gone silent.

“Nyx,” he said again.

She turned toward him. His eyes were
adjusting to the low light coming in from under the door.

Her hands were bound too, but in
front of her. She reached toward him.

“They shot me,” she said.

“You make a good target,” he said.

She made a strange hiccupping sound.
It took him a moment to realize she was laughing.

“God, that hurts,” she said, and
gasped.

“Where did they hit you?”

“You can’t feel it?”

“I’m blind like this.” How long ago
had Raine drugged him? His head swam. Memory bit him, memories of blood and
needles and the sound of bone crunching under boots. His hands twitched.

“It’s bad,” she said.

Fear choked him. Suddenly and
completely. Nyx never said it was bad, even when it was. “How bad? Where is
it?” he said.

“Where’s Anneke? Is she in here?”

“Where are you shot, Nyx?”

She reached out and grabbed him by
the collar, pulled him close. They lay a breath apart on the dirty floor. There
was something wet underneath him now. Her blood.

“You’re bleeding,” he said,
stupidly. She was shivering.

He needed his hands. He twisted his
wrists, tried to loosen the bands again. His hands throbbed. Pain blinded him.

“I can stop the bleeding,” he said.
“I just need my hands. If I can—”

“My sandal,” she said.

“Did they—”

“It’s here.” She brought up her leg
and kicked something from the sole of it. The razor blade. He heard it clink
across the floor. “Lie on your belly. I can cut you out.”

He turned onto his stomach, and she
cut his hands free from behind him.

Rhys tried to flex his ruined
fingers. White pain shuddered through him. Something tapped at the corner of
his mind. He heard a chittering sound—the delicate flutter of a moth’s wings.
He closed his eyes and concentrated.

Where were they? It was like
reaching through a dark gauze.

“I’m dying,” Nyx said.

“No,” he said. He put his hands on
her. She rolled over onto her back. More blood escaped from beneath her. Too
much blood.

“I fucked it up,” she said.

He couldn’t disagree with that.
“Yes,” he said.

“I wanted to be brave,” Nyx said.

“Brave? I heard about the front. Did
you forget I knew that? How much more brave—”

“That’s a lie,” she muttered.

“What?” He could almost feel the
hurt in her. He closed his eyes again. If he just concentrated, just willed the
drug out of him…

“I’m not a hero,” Nyx said. “I
shouldn’t have been reconstituted. They should have buried me in the Orrizo.
Fuck, I was stupid.”

Rhys opened his eyes. “What?”

She was still shivering.

“I was a sapper,” she said. “We went
in and exploded bursts, cleared minefields. I told you I was too good to kill.
I could cut out a mine and make four better ones from the guts. You give me a
magician and some bug juice and I could take out half a city. And I did, you know,
I did… I watched a lot of boys die. A lot of good boys. I killed a lot of good
boys. Women, kids. Everyone.”

“It’s a war, Nyx. None of us did
things we’re proud of.” Rhys caught himself.

“I was good at it. It made me
somebody else, though. I didn’t like what it made me.”

He heard them, then. The bugs.
Close. He needed more time. How much time did she have?

“Nyx, you can’t—”

“I was doing a sweep at the edge of
some agricultural compound out here. Bahreha, back before I blew all these
compounds. It didn’t used to be desert. Oh, I was so good. I took out whole
cities, Rhys, whole cities full of your people, women and girls too. I was just
doing some stupid job with my squad, clearing these flesh mines, and I fucked
up.

“I set off a burst. Just one burst,
clumsy, and when I did it I fucking froze, and then I just clawed past those
boys in my squad, those boys I fought and bled with, and I didn’t even warn
them. Didn’t even call out. Just ran.

“There was acid everywhere. My boys
blew apart and melted. I crawled out with their bloody steaming guts all over
me. When I got out, they had to spray me off with a neutralizer.

“What kind of a woman does that,
Rhys? Lets boys die? We’re supposed to protect them. I let them die. I killed
my own boys.”

She fell silent for a long time.

In the silence, Rhys heard the hiss
of a nest of cockroaches. Then nothing. Only the labored sound of Nyx’s
breathing. How badly was she hurt? He needed to
know
.

“I burned myself,” she said in the
darkness. “I got drunk and went out into the fields. The moons were in
progression back then, and, oh, they were so big and bloody and there was
plenty of light. I dragged out a keg of fuel oil, the kind we used for fire
bursts, and I set myself on fire. I just set myself on fire, Rhys—”

“Nyx—”

“I judged myself.”

“Judgment is God’s task, not yours.”

“I left God in Bahreha.”

Rhys heard footsteps outside the
door. The light changed. Rhys fell back onto his side and tucked his hands
behind him.

The door started to open.

Nyx used her thumb to push the razor
blade under him.

A woman stood in the doorway, a
black shadow.

“Get her up,” the woman said, and
Rasheeda padded in behind her and took Nyx under the arms and hauled her out.

“What are you doing with her?” Rhys
asked.