Infidel (35 page)

“You?”

Inaya stepped out of the bakkie, left it running while she crossed to the other side.
 

Rhys drifted in and out as they spoke.
 

“They took too many tonight,” Inaya said. “I need you with the children. If she’s alive, I can get her out of there and back without notice. You can’t.”
 

“They nearly took everything, Inaya,” Khos said, and lowered his voice to a fierce whisper. “Rhys’s family! Gone! Like that. These aren’t border toughs. These are bel dames.”

“More reason for me to go. Give me a gun.”

“Inaya—”
 

“Don’t question me. Not now. You know what I am.”
 

“Bloody fool.”

“And you married me. What does that make you?”

Rhys heard the door open and close again. Heard the bakkie grind out of park, and suddenly they were moving. He opened his eyes.
 

“Inaya?” he said.
 

“She’s looking for Nyx, the fool,” Khos said.
 

“Your children?”

“Safe,” he said. “God willing. I left them with my other wife.”
 

“I…” Rhys tried to tangle through that. It didn’t make sense. “Your…other wife?”
 

“God will keep us safe.”

“God did not keep my children safe,” Rhys said.
 

And though Khos did not say it, he saw his answer in the thin, hard line of Khos’s mouth in the rearview mirror.
 

God could only be at one house that night.
 

He had not chosen Rhys’s house.
 

27.

I
naya went through the garden first, and pulled along the cloak of the night with her. Her body felt weightless, insubstantial, so free. The air around her danced. She took a deep breath, and surrendered herself to her body’s promise of freedom.
 

She became the night.
 

Deep marks in the ground. Footprints. Four, five women had been there. Likely medium height: one small, heavy in build.
 

She moved over the well and gazed deeply inside, saw nothing. She passed over an overturned basket of lemons on the back porch, and noted the filter was down, though that would not have stopped her movement through the house. They must have powered down the house before coming in.
   

A little girl’s slipper lay at the center of the living room. The desk had been overturned, its contents rifled and spilled across the floor. The housekeeper’s body was sprawled just inside the doorway, like a broken mantid. There were dirty dishes in the sink, avocado peels and bread crusts on the counter. She moved upstairs.
 

Scarves, clothing, and loose papers littered the stairs. Inside Rhys’s bedroom, she found the source. The women had ransacked the room, starting with the writing desk and moving to the wardrobe.
 

She paused halfway inside. One brown, bare leg was just visible, sticking out from the other side of the bed. She rose up over the bed to get a better look. The woman lay face up, dressed in a tunic and belled trousers. Her face was bloated and discolored.
 

This was their end, then.
 

She breathed in for a long moment—like pulling air through her skin—and shifted back.
 

Painful. Like trying to fit a fire inside a soda bottle. She assembled the pieces of herself and found her footing again on the soft, organic floor. Felt the heavy pull of the world, the weight of her bones, again.
 

From what was left of the mist, she reconstructed the shotgun. A sleek metal and organic piece not a year old. A present Khos had given her during better times. She watched it take form as she stitched it back into existence.
 

When she was done, she rubbed herself down with one of the bed sheets and pulled on one of Elahyiah’s abayas. She bent and patted down the dead bel dame’s body, found nothing. No weapons, no papers, no trinkets. Her sisters had cleaned her out. On the bed near her, she saw a faux wooden box. There was no lock. Inside was a tattered length of green silk and two pistols. Inaya picked it up and dumped it out. A black spider, big as her thumb, skittered free.
   

Other than the spider, just pistols, dead ammo. She went back to the wardrobe and grabbed a somber blue hijab as she went to search the other rooms.
 

She found no more bodies. They had even searched the children’s room, overturned the wardrobe, cut open the mattresses. Dead and dying beetles littered the floor, released from their broken lamps. What were they looking for?
 

But she found no more bodies.
 

No Nyx.
 

Inaya went back out to the well where Khos had said he found Rhys. The ground was muddy with blood and crushed grass. Rasheeda’s body was there. She recognized the sneering radio-star face immediately. Someone had split open the back of that pretty head, though. Inaya kicked at the leaking pieces of Rasheeda’s head, and smashed the gray matter into the soil. A single roach encased in an amber-colored sac was visible among the offal. It flexed its mandibles. She crushed that, too, then gingerly picked up half of Rasheeda’s skull and tossed it into the well. One less bel dame to keep her up at night.
 

She stared into the black well again. The wells here were deep, built to tap into the underground river that fed the city’s salty sea. The city used up most of the water before it reached the sea, but up on the hill, the aquifer was still deep. The bodies would have been pulled into the sea by now, or caught down there on some rocky protrusion. The bodies could poison wells in the neighborhood if left to rot. She’d need to make an anonymous call to the health authority.
 

As she turned away, she saw something heaped at the edge of the copse of lemon trees and scrub brush behind the well. She raised the shotgun and walked toward it. The smell gave it away. To her eyes, it looked like a pile of damp rags and brittle bones, but her nose said differently.
 

Inaya knelt in the bloody grass. Elahyiah’s body was bent and twisted in on itself, tangled in wire. Her skin was cool to the touch. Inaya moved the twisted body and found the tangled ruin of one of the children beneath her.
 

Her gut churned, and she had to look away. Her hands shook. She sent up a prayer to Mhari, protector of women and children. Was it Souri, the broken child? Her skull had been crushed, likely against the wall of the well on the way down. Her tiny limbs bent and broken. Inaya saw no sign of Laleh. From the look of the wire, the body had torn free sometime between falling into the well and getting hauled back up.
 

They must have been hauled up. Inaya looked over toward the well, at least a dozen paces distant. Why had the bel dames pulled her out? What game was this?
 

“El?” she said, softly. She put her fingers in front of Elahyiah’s mouth. Waited for breath. If she’d only drowned, there was still time…

Elahyiah made some sound. Death rattle, or cough?

“El?”
 

Inaya began untangling Elahyiah’s body from her dead child’s. The wire had cut into her flesh, torn long rents in her robes. She’d have broken ribs, likely, and perhaps much worse.

“Come now, we’re going to get some help and get you out of here.”
 

“My babies,” Elahyiah murmured.
 

“I’m getting help.” Inaya could not take apart and reassemble living things. She could become them, yes, but sentient creatures were much harder to pull apart and put back together than organic tubing and blister shells.
 

“I’ll get us a taxi,” Inaya said. “Be still.”
 

Inaya stood, and started toward the front porch to finish the search. Maybe Laleh had run off? But there was nothing on the porch, just the filthy organic sludge of the ruptured bug juice tank that had fed the house’s filters.
 

Inaya slipped the shotgun under her abaya and walked back across the street, toward the park. Some of the revelers had returned now. She didn’t need to be seen on the street with a shotgun. A few notes would coax a rickshaw puller from the taxi ranks to get Elahyiah to… that other woman’s house? Or the true safe house?
 

Inaya grit her teeth. Desperate times. It was she who had suggested they visit the other wife to secure the children. Khos had not seemed surprised at her knowledge. Had he assumed she always knew? That she wanted it like this?
     

She pulled the shotgun again as she entered the park. She paused a moment to sniff the air. Her sense of smell wasn’t nearly as good as it was in shifter form, but it was still better than most.
 

Just smoke. All she could smell was that terrible smoke.
 

She walked back through the park, taking the same route she had watched Nyx take. What was she doing out here, looking for some bloody mercenary? But Elahyiah had been alive. If Elahyiah could survive bel dames and drowning, Nyx could survive a simple assassination.

Would she have gone around the park? No. Inaya had not known Nyx well, but she had spent a good deal of time with Rhys after coming to Tirhan. She saw the way he looked when he spoke of her. And she knew Nyx had come back for him. Nyx wouldn’t have gone around, even though that way was more cautious. Caution had never ruled her thinking when it came to Rhys.
 

Inaya saw her own smoldering house on the other side of the park. Organic technicians had arrived to put out the blaze. She saw them in their great blue smocks talking on the porch.
 

She turned around to look into the park. She would have to take the long way.
 

Inaya walked the path again, slower this time, and watched the ground. As she came within sight of Rhys’s house, she saw the blood. Someone had smeared dirt over it. Standing this close now, she could smell it.
 

She paused, closed her eyes, and took a long, deep breath through her nose. The world hummed around her. Her body tugged at her. That same urge for freedom.
 

Inaya pushed off the path and into the thick brush and hanging vines. Bugs whirred and buzzed around her.
 

Just off the path, years of runoff had created a deep ditch, cluttered in forest litter: dead leaves, dead insects, broken carapaces, twisted vines. Thorn bushes grew from it. Inaya hunted along the ditch.
 

The blue-gray dawn was still distant along the horizon. She saw the boot in the bloody half-light of the waning moons, and paused. She looked along the ditch another few feet.
 

The body had been dumped in the widest part of the ditch. Dead leaves, dirt, and loam had been kicked over it.
 

Inaya approached slowly, gun out, listening for others along the path, listening for ambushers; a body for bait.
 

But there was nothing.
 

She reached forward. The body had been turned on its side and covered over in a coat. She pulled the coat back. Dirt and loam and dead leaves fell softly to the ground.
 

Nyx lay curled on her side, face ashen, dirt and blood in her hair. Her jaw was askew, crushed. Inaya saw a thick black pool of drying blood soaked into the front of her tunic. Fire ants swarmed across her torso, her face, but avoided her eyes. Her blank, dead eyes.
 

Just another dead thing along the road.

Inaya started to reach forward to look for weapons or cash, but hesitated. Expected Nyx to leap up and cut her head off. She pulled her hands back. The bel dames would have cleaned her out, just as they had cleaned out their sister Rasheeda. Inaya covered the body again with the burnous.
 

She walked onto the path and wiped the bugs and detritus from her abaya, then concealed her gun. She walked back to the street and walked quickly toward the taxi ranks.
     

Someone had finally called Nyx to account for her crimes.
 

God leaves no one unpunished, Inaya thought. But her eyes watered, blurred. Nyx was dead. Whether it meant the rest of them were damned or saved now, she did not know.
 

28.

I
naya pushed through the frame of the door, shepherding Elahyiah behind her. They stumbled into the blasted interior of the main room of the mausoleum. The door was still mostly intact, but from inside Inaya could look out the busted colored glass of the window and into the tangle of the graveyard.
 

Nyx’s big ugly companion, Suha, must have seen her approach. She met Inaya at the door and helped her pull Elahyiah in and off to the next room.
   

“Are you all right?” Khos asked.
 

Inside, the mausoleum was dusty and crowded. Inaya coughed.