Infidel (9 page)

“Hush, now, woman,” the guard barked. “I’m just escorting you out.”

Nyx left Bloodmount under escort, and walked back out through the primary filter and onto the girl-clotted street. She took a deep breath to clear her muggy head while she gnawed on Fatima’s offer. Bel dame? Why would she want that again?
 

Because you used to be something, she thought, and snarled. A young girl at the corner jumped at her look and shrank back, frightened. She grabbed at her companion, and ducked into the nearest doorway.
 

Nyx used to be young, and fiery, and strong. She used to be able to cut off a head in forty-five seconds with a dull blade. She used to be able to drive a bakkie like a demon.
 

She stopped at the corner to catch her breath. Her head swam. She blinked a few times. Fuck, she used to be able to cross the fucking street without gasping for air. What the fuck was she now? Some diplomat’s errand girl?
 

Better to be Fatima’s errand girl?
 

She stumbled around the block to the Montrouge and found Eshe and Suha at a corner table—the ugly weapons tech and the plain-faced kid clerk with the bent spine—gnawing on fried plantains and curried rice. She remembered meeting up with other teams. Better teams.
 

Don’t let her get to you, she thought. But it was too late for that. Honor. Sacrifice. Obligation. All the death she meted out used to mean something. When had it stopped meaning anything? When did it turn into worthless bloodletting, just like the front?

“How’d it go?” Suha asked.
 

“I don’t know yet,” Nyx said.
 

“I got some news you’ll like, then.”
 

Nyx sat next to her and ordered a whiskey straight. “Hit it,” she said.
 

“Just checked the bounty boards again.”
 

“Glad your contact’s still talking. She owe you something big?”

“Big enough to get me high-end news.”
   

“Tell me the name’s not mine.”

“Better. Somebody posted a bel dame note for Kasbah so Sabah.”
 

“The Queen’s head of security?”

“It came down half an hour after it was posted. Queen struck it, of course, but somebody in the bel dame council approved it before the Queen got wind of it.”
 

“Only the council can issue a note.”

Eshe whistled softly. “That’s pretty gutsy.”
 

“Fuck,” Nyx muttered. “That’s civil war. They’re going after the
Queen.
”
 

“The bel dames?” Eshe said. “That’s stupid.”
 

“Politics,” Suha said.
 

Nyx shook her head. She was tired. “We need to go,” she said. “This place isn’t safe.”

“When the fuck was Nasheen ever safe?” Suha said.
 

Nyx tried to get up, stumbled. Eshe jumped up to help her. She pushed him away. “I’m fine,” she said. “We need to go. We’re next.”
 

5.

O
n clear days, when the smog wasn’t so bad, Nyx and Eshe would drive out to one of the low hills outside Mushtallah. They would trap one end of a white burnous in the bakkie window and prop up the other end on two long poles and create their own shade. For a while they used old rifles as supports, but the sand and dirt jammed in the barrels afterward made Suha spit and mutter and bang around the hub like a woman possessed by gun-loving angels.
 

After they set up the shade, they watched the blue sun fire up over the black sky, its tail-end going lavender, then deep violet as the second sun—the big orange demon—overtook the horizon behind it. The cool blue dawn would turn the color of a bright bruise, then go deep scarlet, and the double dawn would bleed over the city. In the light of the cool dawn they would listen to the familiar wail of the muezzin and eat figs and naan and drink strong black buni and talk about the best ways to avoid a fight.
 

But this morning they weren’t up there for a picnic. Nyx and Eshe had spent the predawn hours digging up a weapons cache Nyx had buried the year before. She had some stashes in the border towns, too, but this one had some sentimental items—stuff she didn’t have room for at the storefront.
 

Nyx crouched in the cache hole and passed a pair of specs and a z22 carbine rifle up to Eshe.
 

“What do we need all these for?” Eshe asked for the third time.
 

Nyx waited until he reached for more, then handed him a bag of fever bursts. “Careful with those. They crack open and we’ll be snorting our brains out our nose.”
 

Eshe took the bag in both hands and made his way toward the bakkie. When he returned, the blue light of the first dawn touched his face. The call to prayer rolled out over the desert.
 

“I have to pray,” he said.
 

Nyx swore.
 

“I’ll be right back!” he insisted.
 

Nyx crawled out of the cache and sat at its edge. She took a long pull on a water bulb. She’d tried drinking whiskey earlier, but had retched it all up. Nothing had sat well with her since the fried plantains at lunch the day before. She’d vomited the fight night dinner she and Eshe had shared with Mercia, too.
 

Eshe lay prostrate on a prayer rug on the other side of the bakkie, his fingertips stretched toward the base of an old willowren tree that clawed at the sky with barren, charred branches.

 
She had another two hours before she was due at the gym for some conditioning. That gave her just enough time to clean up the storefront’s security. She’d been expecting bel dames to come after her for a long time. Trouble was these weren’t proper bel dames with notes for her head. These were rogues, and rogues were—at best—unpredictable. What protection could Fatima and her corrupt little circle give her?
   

Nyx walked over to the bakkie. She turned on her transceiver and punched in Suha’s personal code. The bug casing used for the diplomat job belonged to the diplomat. She would miss that bit of high-end tech. It was hard to come by a secure com method that didn’t require a magician to run it.
 

“You got me?” Nyx said.
 

“Yeah, I’m here. Just hitting the gym,” Suha said.
 

“You deliver that note to the bounty office?”

“Addressed for the Queen’s eyes only, yeah. I don’t know how you expect to get a note to the Queen that way, but yeah, I did, right when they opened.”
 

“She’ll answer,” Nyx said. The Queen would be just as interested in what the bel dames were up to as Nyx was. And the Queen might know why it was a bel dame who had tried to kill Nyx was running around the palace meeting diplomats. “Thanks.”
 

She liked to keep transceiver conversations short. Unlike a magician-bugged communication, archaic radio signals were easy to hack. She hadn’t had a com specialist on her team since the year before, when she found out the girl was selling zygotes and venom out of the storefront on fight nights. She didn’t much care what her team did in their spare time, but using Nyx’s hard-won resources to do it was one step to the left too many.
 

So until she replaced her com specialist or hired a hard up magician, her com was dodgy at best. The most secure way to get the Queen anything was through the bounty office. Best case, she’d get a list of recent bel dame visitors to the palace. She knew the Queen’s head of security, Kasbah, and figured her records would be meticulous. She hadn’t seen either Kasbah or the Queen in six years, not since she took their note on an alien gene pirate, but they’d remember her. Nyx was a lot of things, but forgettable wasn’t one of them.
 

Nyx leaned against the bakkie and watched the second sun rise. Eshe straightened and rolled up his prayer rug. He walked toward her, an awkward and gangly kid. Neither of them wore their burnouses, but in another hour the sun would get too hot to stand.
 

“Why do we need—” Eshe began again.

He was stubborn. She’d give him that.
 

“Because I retired all my good gear three years ago. You think you need an acid rifle or perimeter mines to look after some drunk kid? You fight bel dames with bel dame weapons.”

“You really think they’re coming after us?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll go after them.”

“Suha says you’re crazy.”

“Suha’s one to talk. C’mon.”
 

They finished packing and loading the bakkie. Nyx pulled the bug door closed over the cache. They spread dirt and sand over the scar in the soil and headed to the bakkie.
 

As Nyx opened the driver’s side door, something in the air trembled. She paused.
 

A boom rolled over the city. The ground beneath her shook. She ducked behind the bakkie door. The rolling wave swept over them.
 

The world trembled, and was still.
 

Eshe scrambled out from behind the bakkie. Nyx poked her head over the door.
 

They looked over the city.
 

Mushtallah was the oldest city in Nasheen, built back when the only dangers to a city in the interior were wild sand cats and virulent strains of magician-tailored bugs, usually the ones coming from the Khairian wasteland in the north. The city stretched over and among seven prominent hills. The First Families lived on five of those hills, the bel dames on another. The seventh, the one nearest the center of the city sprawl, was Palace Hill, seat of the Nasheenian monarchy for the last three hundred years and the Caliphate for a thousand years before that. The city’s ancient walls had long since fallen into ruin. After the first time the city was burned out by the Chenjans, the Queen and the high council authorized the installation of an organic filter that barred all bugs and non-authorized organics from the city.
 

So the first thing Nyx looked for when she gazed over the city was the organic filter. Even this far out, she and Eshe were still inside the filter; it protected a refueling station just a mile west of them. Just beyond the filter was a freight rail station that unloaded the raw components of bug juice and station gear and loaded up goods destined for the front. The filter was visible as a hazy sheen along the periphery of the city.
 

The sun was too low and bright to make out much of anything on the other side of the city, so Nyx looked behind her for the filter. She had to rub at her eyes a couple times, but yes, there it was; the filter that kept out the worst of Chenja’s munitions and mutant bug swarms. They hadn’t taken that out, at least.
 

“That’s bad, isn’t it?” Eshe said, pointing.
 

Nyx looked.
 

If she squinted, a thread of smoke was just visible at the city center, a soft tail curling above Mushtallah’s central hill.
 

The Queen’s palace.

Nyx saw the tail of smoke grow wider and darken into a blue-black plume. Something was licking around the palace compound and surrounding hillside, alive.
 

“Hand me the specs,” she said.

Eshe unpacked a pair of specs and tossed them to her.
 

Nyx pinched the specs to the bridge of her nose. The palace compound jumped into sharp, magnified relief. Too magnified. A blaze of white fire filled Nyx’s vision. She squinted twice to zoom out. The center of the palace compound was a fiery, white-hot ruin. A black plague was crawling from the center of the wound and enveloping the palace grounds.
 

Nyx pulled off the specs. She knew what that was.
 

“What?” Eshe asked.
 

Nyx jumped into the bakkie and started it up. The bakkie belched and coughed. “Let’s go!”

Eshe threw the rifles in front and squeezed into the jump seat.
 

Nyx yanked her transceiver out from under the dash. She put the bakkie in reverse and hit the quick button pattern for the hub. The connection opened.
 

“Checking in. We’re in one piece,” Nyx said.
 

“I’m headed to the keg now. No idea of the damage,” Suha said. “I have the radio on, but I’m not getting any news. How big was the hit?”

“It’s a scalper bug burst, a pretty fucking big one, on Palace Hill.”
 

“Direct hit?”

“Dead center. It’s on the move. Could contaminate the whole city in less than an hour.”

“Where are you?”

“About half a kilometer from the train station. I’m getting us out before the filter freezes up. You have an out?”

“Always. I’ll meet you at the safe house.”

“Go,” Nyx said, and tucked the transceiver into the top of her breast binding.

Nyx switched pedals and swung the wheel; the bakkie sent up a stir of dust and sand. She hit the far left pedal and they blew back down the sandy road toward the refueling station. It was going to be tight, getting through that filter, but they had less chance of survival if they were locked in the city with the burst.