Rapture (42 page)

Ahmed’s expression was dark. “He’s Chenjan. What does it matter?”

“I said hold.”

Ahmed didn’t lower the gun.

“What are you doing here?” Nyx asked Rhys.

“I told you. I’m bringing you back. I may be a poor magician, but I have some experience tracking you with hornets. Go if you want. But I’ll find you.”

“The red desert, Rhys. Why are you here?”

He looked at Ahmed and the gun again. “It’s a shame about your magician.”

“What?”

The expression on Rhys’s face then was something Nyx recognized. Some dark thing from many dark nights in back alleys, tracking bounties. Rhys was a fast draw. He had a good killing shot.

She slid neatly between Ahmed and Rhys. Put one hand out, beckoning.

“Your issue’s with me. Let’s finish it.”

“Goddammit,” Ahmed said, lowering the gun.

“I’ve got unfinished business,” Nyx said. “Put the gun away, and leave it be. You need to talk? We’ll talk.”

Nyx gestured for Rhys to come away from the others. They walked together down the other side of the rise. The view here of the moons was spectacular. The closer she was to dying, the prettier things got. The moons didn’t get much above the horizon out here, but they seemed bigger. They ate the sky.

“I know where he is,” Rhys said.

“We have a shot?”

“You have a good magician.”

“Ahmed is—”

“No, the woman.”

“Safiyah?”

“If that’s her name, yes. I saw what she did to the walls in there. Not your cell, but the hall. They’ve got a half-dozen magicians in there running around trying to figure out what happened.”

“How’d you know she did it?”

“What, that man do it? No. He’s… something else.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are magicians, and then there are people who play with bugs. He plays. You can just tell.”

“How is it you came out here, Rhys?”

“Came for a job. Stayed for the lovely scenery.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m indentured. Hanife, the leader here, hired me on as a translator. For all sorts of sordid stuff like what you saw in there. The pay was too good to give up. So I… left my family in the south and came here. I meant to send for them, but… well, things are different.”

“I don’t get it.”

“He bought out my blood debt. I defended myself from some of those Aadhya. The desert people. It’s complicated.” He sighed. “There’s a war brewing out here. Hanife and his ocean people are recruiting men from the clans, giving them weapons and status and having them fight the women-led clans. It’s really brutal out there. You’ve see what the sand can do.”

“That’s why those men attacked us in the hall.”

Rhys smirked. “Yes, not one of your best plans. But then, half your plans never turned out very well.”

“I even tried to stay the fuck away from you,” she said. “See how well I did with that?”

She saw the hint of a smile touch his face. “At least this time, there’s nothing you can take from me.”

She was going to ask him how sure he was of that, but thought better of it. It had been a long few years. Years without Rhys always felt longer.

“What about these ocean people?” she asked. “Why are they harboring Raine?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to ask around without looking suspicious. All I know is he’s been here a few months, kept not far from where you were. No one’s allowed in to see him. A group of people brought him in, then just… left him. Jailer says he had orders to just hold him until told other wis e.”

“That’s… suspicious.”

“It is.”

She saw him reach into his burnous and pull something out. Her eyes widened. “Is that… a cigarette?”

“You want one?”

“Bloody fuck, things do change.” She held out her hand.

He broke the carapace of a fire beetle, and lit both their cigarettes. Nyx inhaled deep. They were laced with sen. Almost immediately, she felt the pain that had been riding with her the last few weeks begin to fade. The throbbing at the back of her head and jaw eased. She had missed sen.

“What else do you know about the ocean guys?”

“There was some split up here, they say. Some great catastrophe the magicians created. That’s what made the desert. After they walled it in, there were still some people left on the other side of that wall. The Yazdani. Not a surprise they’d want to forget people they left behind, I suppose. Their ports up there are frozen most of the year, and I can’t imagine they have a lot of materials for ship building. We certainly don’t.”

“Why the fuck would they want to take Raine that far north, though? There’s no bringing him back from there. If they wanted to kill him, why not kill him?”

Rhys shrugged. “Maybe they anticipated you coming?”

“I don’t like this,” Nyx said.

“Who are you running this note for?”

Nyx shook her head.

Rhys sighed. “The bel dame council asked you, didn’t they?”

“Fatima mentioned it.”

“And you just believe everything Fatima tells you?”

“I don’t take any job without questioning it.”

“She didn’t… Did she make you a bel dame again, Nyx?”

Nyx worked her mouth a bit, considering. “No,” she said. “She offered it. I didn’t take it.”

Rhys studied her closely. His eyes were dark, piercing. He could always read her. She hated it.

“So you aren’t a bel dame?”

“No.”

“You’re just doing this for fun? Not enough blood in your life?”

“I haven’t had any blood in my life in near on seven years, Rhys. It suited me fine. It’s not the blood I missed.” She got to her feet.

He gazed up at her. “What, then? What is it you missed?”

She stared into the blackness. “I missed being useful.”

“I can’t imagine you never being useful, Nyx.”

“I’m almost a decade older than you, Rhys. When you’re my age, you’ll feel it.”

“No,” he said, and stood, brushed off his dusty trousers. He had cleaned them of Khatijah’s blood. “I don’t fear peace, Nyx. There’s always a place for men like me during peace. What destroyed me was this war, and the expectation that I protect my family at all costs. I was tested, Nyx, and I failed.”

“Any man would have failed in your place, Rhys,” she said, low. It didn’t come out as nice as she wanted it to, but it was the truth.

“Is that meant to be comforting?”

“You know, Rhys, I let a whole squad of men die. Men I failed to save. I spent my whole life hearing all about how I was supposed to protect men. My brothers. My squad mates. My team. Then my brothers died, I let my squad get blown up, and I lost some of my best male partners. I lost Taite, and Tej before him. Then you fucked off too. When it all came down to it, I failed again and again. But I didn’t give up like you did. I didn’t walk away from my people. Not when there was something else worth protecting.”

“Didn’t you? You didn’t just run away to the coast?”

“It was that or prison. You fancy prison?”

“You run away from your failures too, Nyx.”

“So we have something in common now?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” He sighed and started back the way he had come. “Peace be upon you,” he said.

“Yeah, fuck off,” Nyx said. She nursed her cigarette.

“Nyx?”

“What?”

“If you want to get Raine, we should probably have some kind of plan.”

“Should we?”

“One condition.”

“What now?”

“If you take Raine out of here, you need to take me too.”

She didn’t want to tell him that—Raine or no Raine—she would have taken him anyway.

B
reaking into Bomani was a lot easier now that they had some idea of what they were doing and a guy on the inside. Rhys pointed them to the least-patrolled portion of the wall, and provided a fine distraction by telling the guards on duty that Hanife had need of them elsewhere. The “corridor” that Nyx had tunneled her way into from the prison cell was actually something like a giant ventilation chamber. Once they slipped back inside, it was easy to move around in and connected most of the major areas inside of Bomani.

Safiyah said she could get them back to the vent they hauled Nyx out of, which meant all Nyx needed to do was extract Raine, haul him into the vent, and then get the whole happy fighting party the hell out of there.

Nyx kept Kage back at the camp with Isabet, insisting that she’d need her on point in case they came running out of the place with thirty desert men on their asses. Safiyah argued against it, insisting that Kage would be useful inside Bomani. But Nyx just didn’t see that. What she needed inside was her magicians, not her sharpshooter.

They went in during the deepest part of the night, the day after Nyx’s escape. The longer they waited, the more likely it was Hanife would find their camp.

Safiyah slipped Nyx and Ahmed back into the vent.

“Good luck,” Ahmed said.

“Don’t die,” Nyx said.

“Trying hard not to,” he said.

Nyx padded down the corridor, Safiyah behind her. Ahmed stayed behind to guard their escape.

“This should be it, if your little Chenjan is truthful,” Safiyah said. She called something within the structure, and a neat slice appeared in the tissue.

Nyx pushed herself into the mucus-filled cavity. She went face first so she could get a look inside. It was another interrogation room, much like the one she had seen the day before. Empty.

Nyx squirmed the rest of the way in. She went immediately to the cells and looked in. The first three were empty. Had they taken him already?

The fourth had somebody inside.

Nyx pulled the bar of bug secretions from the door and opened it wide.

In the dim blue light, she saw a skinny, pot-bellied figure hunched in the corner of the room, hands and feet bound together. He squinted at her. The face was filthy, and unrecognizable.

Fuck, they had come all this way for the wrong man.

The broken old man inhaled deeply, and there was something in the eyes, then, some flicker of recognition, a sharp inhalation of breath. “Well,” he said. “At least they sent their best.”

It was Raine.

“I’m flattered,” she said.

“If you will not honor me, at least show some respect with a quick death,” Raine said.

“I’m not here to kill you, old man.” Nyx pulled her dagger and stepped forward. He squeezed his eyes shut. He seemed so much smaller now. A grizzled old head, ragged beard. She cut his bonds.

“I’m here to save you,” she said.

“Is this some kind of trick?”

“I’d like to say it was. I’d be lying.”

Raine began to laugh. It was a deep, grating sort of laugh that put her teeth on edge. It reminded her of times best forgotten. As she sheathed her dagger, she thought—for the barest of moments—to stab him in the throat. End of the road. End of everything. Cutting off heads was so much simpler than saving them.

“God has a terrible sense of humor,” Raine said.

“Always did. Come on. The sooner we get out of here, the less likely somebody is to raise the alarm.”

Raine grunted and pushed himself forward. He had been a beefy man once. Now he was mostly sagging brown skin over knobby bones. He still had a bit of a paunch, but the rest of him was so thin he seemed terribly disproportioned, like he’d fall over. Nyx really didn’t want to help him get up.

“Come on, Raine. We have a long way to go.”

Raine was unsteady on his feet. Pressed a hand on the wall to hold his balance. “Let’s go then, bel dame.”

She was going to have to carry him. Fuck.

+

Nyx hauled Raine down the twisting corridors, half-dragging him along. He was in no shape to walk, let alone run, but it was hurry up or die now, and she had a long way to go yet. Raine sucked in breath hard and fast. After a time, he started to wheeze, but she did not stop. The flickering skin of the corridor began to change again, and she feared what it was trying to communicate now. Was it telling the guards about them? Was this place really sentient? It wasn’t the night she wanted to find out.

“Didn’t think it would be you,” Raine wheezed.

Nyx was sighting her way along the corridor, searching for the opening Safiyah had made in the skin, the one she’d told both Safiyah and Ahmed to wait for her at. It should be any time now. She heard a soft stirring of voices behind them. Tried to pick up the pace. There weren’t supposed to be people in these tunnels, Rhys said. But Raine was lagging now. Tripping over his feet. She’d have to carry him soon. Fuck, where was that goddamn entrance?

“Thought they’d send… my mother.”

“Fuck your mother,” Nyx muttered.

Raine grunted.

They came to the soft pulsing opening in the skin. Nyx let herself slow down half a step. “In here,” she said. She unhooked Raine from her and pushed him toward the opening.

He gulped air as he tottered toward the opening. He paused in the hall. Nyx heard more voices. She turned, drew her gun.

“Nyx,” Raine said. “You should know… you should know I’m infected.

What?” Nyx said.

He gripped one edge of the seam. “They want you to bring me home. I’m infected.”

“Who wants it?”

“You wouldn’t have gotten this far unless they wanted it.”

“Just go,” Nyx said. “Save the drama for a safer space, all right? Bloody fuck. You have no idea what fucking shit we’ve been through to get you.”

Raine stumbled through the opening.

Nyx jumped through after him.

Safiyah was still there. Nyx wasn’t sure why she was so surprised about that, but she was. The magician neatly sealed the wound. As the last bit of organic light from the hall was shut out, the voices Nyx had heard earlier got suddenly louder. She heard steps across the spongy flooring approach, then retreat.

“Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you?” Safiyah said.

“I thought you loved all this excitement,” Nyx said.

“I love orange-flavored popsicles. Fried maggots on toast. Sunset in Ashura. This? This, I merely tolerate.”

In the semi-darkness, Nyx could see that Raine had his hands over his mouth.

“Come on,” she said. “We have a long way to go yet.”

Safiyah peered at Raine. “Nyx, that man is not… well.”