Rapture (15 page)

The bel dame unrolled a portable slide and placed it on the desk. Inside the small office, the six of them were a little cramped, but Nyx liked it that way. She wanted to see how they all did together in close quarters. Things were going to get a hell of a lot closer.

“I was the bel dame heading up Hamza Habib’s security,” Khatijah said. She tapped open a schematic on the slide. A burst of lemony scent filled the room, and the schematic rose from within the slide, projecting a map of northern Nasheen and Khairi in the air above it, like a radio.

“Wait,” Nyx said. “The bel dames were guarding Raine? Seriously?”

Khatijah pressed six points on the map. Nyx recognized them—waypoints for the caravans that went north. “When he went missing, we activated secure points across the country. We had sightings at these six.”

“Sightings? And you didn’t catch him?” Nyx said.

“I had no women in place here. Too many military personnel have been called back from the front, and now we’ve got bel dames in country policing all the military. That doesn’t leave me much to work with.”

“Who was he with?”

“That’s a real good question. If I knew that, we wouldn’t need you.”

“And if you’d done your job, you wouldn’t need me either,” Nyx said.

Khatijah regarded her. Nyx grinned.

Eshe pointed to the furthest point on the map. “Why are there no more sightings after this? Is this where he is?”

“No,” Khatijah said. “That’s our furthest Nasheenian outpost. After that, there’s nothing.”

“So they just hauled him out into the desert? Why not kill him here?” Nyx said.

“Obviously they are not interested in killing him.”

“So we start there,” Nyx said. “And see what they can tell us about where he went.”

Khatijah sighed and muttered, “Indeed.”

Nyx leaned toward her over the table. Khatijah waved away the schematic and rolled up her slide.

“If we have a problem, Khat, we should hash it out before we leave.”

Eskander patted the bel dame’s arm and said. “No problem, right?”

“Councilwoman Kosan asked that I serve as your guide,” Khatijah said.

“And what the bel dame council wants, it gets,” Nyx said. “Don’t think this was my idea either.” She turned back to her team. “Ahmed, do one last sweep. Eshe, wait for me in the bakkie. Kage, go with Ahmed.” And then, to Khatijah, “You and your sister can ride together in the second bakkie. We’ll take the lead. Good?”

“If we’re the guides, shouldn’t we lead?” Khatijah said.

“You already showed me the map. I know where we’re headed. That’s a start. But after that, I hope one of you has some knowledge of what comes after Nasheenian-occupied Khairi.”

“I’ve been there,” Eskander said. “Out beyond the last outpost. I know where we’re going.”

“Obviously.” Nyx regarded them both again—lean, guarded, an army of two. “I feel so much better running off to retrieve a man with the women who lost him.”

“And I’m quite pleased to partner with a known traitor who slaughters bel dames and fucks Chenjans.”

Eskander said, “I told you—”

“Oh it’s fine, Khat,” Nyx said. “It’s all true. I murdered boys and babies, slaughtered my own brothers, blew up a hundred bel dames, and tried to fucking assassinate the Queen herself. All true. All but the fucking Chenjans part. That’s just a bit much, isn’t it?”

Nyx walked out. She heard Eskander speaking again, empty words about how much they needed to impress Fatima. Nyx had a lot more to chew on now. Fatima had been “guarding” Raine for some time, then. But why? And how the fuck did a bel dame lose somebody they were guarding? And why send this odd pair into the desert to find him with Nyx of all people? They weren’t top operatives, for sure, though Khat certainly had potential. No, Fatima wanted them out of the way. Or wanted to punish them. Any bel dame could hand over a schematic and tell Nyx to go north. This was something else.

Nyx met the others outside. She sat with Eshe and smoked a cigarette for a few minutes until Khatijah and Eskander joined them. Khatijah’s face was impassive again. Eskander was all smiles.

“Let’s get underway!” Eskander said. “We are ready.”

Nyx stepped into her own bakkie, one she had picked up for fifty notes from a hard-up former mullah with an addiction to military-grade sen. Eshe slid in beside her. Ahmed and Kage were in the back, separated by Kage’s big gun.

“Am I right in thinking that didn’t go well?” Ahmed said.

“Any time I step out of a room with another bel dame and my head’s still intact, it went well,” Nyx said.

Kage peered out the window, nose nearly touching the glass.

“Forget something, Kage?” Nyx asked.

“No,” she said, but did not move her head.

“Great,” Nyx said. “Let’s see how far we get before the road runs out.”

She put a lot of confidence in her voice, but she was still thinking about her dream, and the mangled, inscrutable faces of the women on her team. The job was simple. They always sounded so fucking simple. Find a kidnapped politician. Return him before the boys rose up against the Queen. Return him, alive, before the blood.

The sorry truth was, though—she couldn’t remember the last bounty she brought in alive. And she feared this one would be no different. She was getting the feeling that that’s why Fatima had hired her for the job, and that didn’t sit well with her at all.

Eshe turned on the radio.

T
he world was brighter than she remembered, and more intense. Some of the names had changed. Whole cities had disappeared, swallowed by the war during her imprisonment. But there was one place in the world that was just the same, and she walked there now, comforted by the shiny amber streets, the bright awnings above the tea houses, and the sounds of the soft, lilting accents of the Firsts.

Only a few individuals walked the streets this time of day. It was far too hot, and the suns too close, for any intelligent Family member to brave the street. The ones who did were concealed in slick organic burnouses and billowing organic trousers the color of spider’s silk. They wore hijabs that wound around both head and face, with opaque, organic veils over their eyes to shield the sun. Her own blood-red burnous and uncovered head made her a subject of interest, but none stopped to question her. She had easily passed through the filter that led to the hill. Her blood was too old to be purged from that filter. To purge her code would have rejected one of every eighty Family members on the hill.

Her Family’s estate was one of just forty-five that jutted from the dusty face of Mushtallah’s second hill. Like the other hills of Mushtallah, the interior of the second hill was the shell of a discarded derelict. The face of her family’s house was outside, molded to fit the landscape, but inside the Firsts still met and conspired deep within the old starship. The warm, organic heart of it still beat softly, powering much of the residences and the magicians’ tunnels. Three thousand years was a long time for a ship to slumber, even one of the old colonial scouting ships, and she didn’t expect this one would go on much longer. Like the Firsts themselves, it was a calcified old wreck, drunk on the memory of itself, its former power. She had once stood within a few meters of the heart, pressed her ear to the spongy walls, and listened to the ship muse about days long past. Most of it was madness, of course. After three thousand years, any organic thing would go mad. For her, it had taken much less time than that.

She paused outside her family’s residence and tasted the filter there. It was a complex weave of scents, aloe and chamomile, beeswax and capsicum, and the peculiar nutty tang of crushed hornets. The mix of scents told her she was no longer coded for this filter. Unsurprising, given how long she had been captive. And for the reason behind it.

But the warp and weft of this weave were far looser than the filters of her memory, and it was an easy thing to unravel them. She called a swarm of red beetles, a cloud of mites, and a blue beetle. She extracted the chemicals she needed, and simply rewove the pattern of the filter. Some would have unstitched it completely, but in her time, too much tampering warned the conjurer on duty, and she wanted as little interference as possible, even if all the true conjurers were long dead.

She slipped through the benign section of the filter and onto the garden walk. Inside the filter, the air was moist, balmy, like a spring day in the Tirhani lowlands. Giant plants stretched above her, their weepy, massive leaves reducing the impact of the dangerous sunlight that trickled through the filter. Inside, there were no walls around the estate, just the greenery, which created a luxurious privacy screen.

From the height of a splayed, variegated leaf the size of a tea table, a pale green lizard regarded her. She never understood why her family insisted on keeping lizards. Unlike the bugs, they weren’t good for anything but eating.

She pushed further into the lush little jungle. The path she took was laid with blue stones imported from Tirhan. Along the circuitous walk, she passed an open-air tent splashed with ornately decorated pillows. The space was dominated by a low tea table of real wood. The tent was different, but she remembered playing in a space much like it as a child. She had caught and killed lizards there, too, and cooked them over a smoky fire until the housekeeper found her and raised an alarm throughout the whole house, fearful not so much of a spreading fire but of the callous destruction of the garden’s resources for something so banal as a real wood fire.

She rounded a bend in the path, and came upon the house. The primary residence was made from bug secretions, built up around an old deadtech foundation whose corrugated patches of rust and decay could still be seen floating within the secretions along the upper stories. The lower half of the house had been set with green and gold tiles. A single arched doorway led into the house—but of course, there was no physical door in that doorway. Just a filter. Only authorized Family members would get through it.

She stepped onto the tiled front patio and passed under the arch into the bright open courtyard. A fountain bubbled at the center of it, twisted into the form of a giant, undulating centipede, half again as tall as she was. A small child played in one of the massive garden planters lining the yard. Pink and crimson blooms towered over the child, each flower as large as the child’s head.

The child peered up at her from the dirt. The child’s face was at once familiar and foreign. It put her in mind of another child, one she had once seen in the mirror quite often.

For a moment, she thought the child might speak. But instead, the child leapt away and bolted into the house. That was just as well. It put off the inevitable.

She deftly, neatly, untangled this second filter to allow her entry, and stepped under the arch.

Inside, the house was cooler and drier than the yard. Natural light illuminated most of the smooth, rounded surfaces of the interior; the skylight it bled from was a smooth tunnel burrowed through solid secretions.

Two women lay in the recessed seating buried in the floor, settled just opposite a massive oven-stove that funneled most of the house’s heat through the walls, effectively baking the inhabitants to the most optimal temperature, no matter the season. The women were engaged in an easy conversation as they wove an intricate pattern of mellow scents and mild, lemony red mist into what she guessed would soon become a locust tailored to play chess or screes or some other board game with them.

One of the women was hugely pregnant, which she found oddly comforting. She had been traveling for nine days, and in all that time, had not seen one pregnant woman. Only the Families and a few undocumented refugees still birthed their children one at a time from the comfort of home instead of at the baby farms on the coast.

Beyond them, she could see out into the side yard where an older man wearing a long blue tunic and matching trousers tended the narrow rows of a burgeoning flower garden.

For a moment, none of them were familiar. But that was just a trick of the dim light.

“God the compassionate, the merciful…” the non-pregnant woman murmured, and stood. The organic matter they were weaving abruptly began to dissipate back into the world. The smell of it changed, too— burnt copper.

The woman was markedly older than her pregnant companion, but both bore the same slim build and petite frame. Her long dark hair was wound back from her skull in a knot. As she raised her hands to her mouth, the hennaed patterns that snaked from her hands and up into the drooping folds of her robe became visible. Her name was Sohrab sa Hadiyah so Ikram. She remembered the name because the city of Ikram had been swallowed by the war two hundred years before, and Sohrab would joke about it often at Family gatherings, telling lively tales about how one day she would rebuild it into a shining, ravenous traveling city mounted on the back of some monstrous scarab, a roving city exclusively for Firsts.

Family members were difficult to surprise, so she took some pride in the women’s shocked faces. The pregnant woman even clutched at her massive belly, perhaps thinking she was there to remake her child in the womb.

“Who is this?” the pregnant woman asked, a note of true anxiousness in her voice.

But she was not here to catch up with her clutch mates. “Where’s the rest of the Family?” she asked.

Sohrab’s gaze flicked to the rear of the residence, past the interior courtyard, deeper, into the warm belly of the beast that sustained the Families.

“They are discussing what to do… with you,” Sohrab said. “We did not… expect you.”

“Oh, I’m sure you expected me. Just not so soon.” She raised her hand.

The pregnant woman shrieked. Sohrab fell to her knees, clutching her hennaed hands. Neither of them were conjurers, and they knew better than to try and draw weapons on her. The man outside lifted his head from his gardening. She heard the soft sound of the child padding across the tiled floor, somewhere close.

She called the bugs from within the walls. Knit them from gut to wingtip from the old organic compounds that threaded throughout the house, binding the deadtech in place. She drew on the same stuff the shifters did to remake themselves, the ancient organic matter of the derelicts that had once been siphoned off to build the world. Now it was gelatinous, mutated stuff; unstable. But still useful.