Rapture (17 page)

“Inaya says I’m like you.”

“Inaya doesn’t know me. I’d say she’s hardly in a place to judge how like me you are.”

“Do you think people can be different? Different from the way they learned to be?”

Nyx peered at him. “Who are we talking about now? Those bloodyminded sisters, or you?”

Eshe shrugged.

“Listen,” Nyx said. “Don’t let that little honey pot tell you what you are.

You make who you are. It’s for nobody else to decide. Understand? If I learned any damn fucking thing in my life, it’s that. Got it?

Sure,” he said, but he was staring at the ground, not at her. “Good. That’s a bunch of catshit, letting people tell you who you are.

Who do you want to be? Come on—who?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Then you better start knowing, and soon. Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.”

“Nyx?” Ahmed said.

Nyx started. She hated it when they snuck up on her. Made her feel old. “What now?”

Ahmed wiped his bloody hands on his trousers. A swarm of red mites clustered on a brownish spot just above his knee.

“She’s ready,” he said.

“Can she walk?”

“Does she need to?”

“Teach me to agree on a magician like Eskander who can’t hold her wormy little tongue.” She stood, dusted her trousers.

Ahmed made a strangled sound. He turned away and coughed. “God, don’t you get fucked on me too,” Nyx said.

He shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“Then let’s go have some more fun,” Nyx said, and walked toward the forward bakkie.

“I had a trench commander tell me that once,” Ahmed said, following her, “right before a burst blew her to pieces. Cleaned her guts out of my clothes for weeks.”

“Charming,” Nyx said. “You chat up a lot of women with that line?

I… What?”

“You’ll get used to it,” Eshe said.

Ahmed shook his head and hung back to speak to Kage. Eshe walked with Nyx to the lead bakkie. “What did Suha used to say?

You always did go soft as old cheese for the pretty ones?”

“I remember it was you always getting into trouble with pretty girls.

How often did I drag you out of some mad woman’s bed after too much to drink, huh? More kick than a cat in heat.”

“Let’s just go,” Eshe said as his face began to flush.

Nyx banged on the bakkie’s hood. “All right, folks. Let’s go rescue some guy in distress.”

+

That night, they camped outside a bug juice station, huddled just outside the comforting lights of the parking area. Eshe had first watch. He counted two bakkies and a cat-pulled cart come in after dark. That was it.

When he hit his four-hour shift, Eshe turned back to camp to tell Ahmed it was his turn. Ahmed was still passed out, one arm around the scattergun Nyx had issued him. And Nyx was nowhere to be seen.

Eshe walked away from the edge of the parking lot and into camp. He supposed Nyx could have gone to take a piss, but it was strange he hadn’t seen her.

He crossed to the other side of camp, the side facing the desert. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Nyx always told him trouble was more likely to come from the desert, but he had fixated on the parking area. That’s where all the traffic was.

“Eshe.”

He started so violently he nearly tripped over his own feet. Nyx sidled up next to him, as if she’d simply congealed from desert shadow. How a woman that big could manage anything like stealth, he had no idea. Maybe I’m just out of sorts, he thought. He needed some sleep. Nearly twelve days with this crew was wearing on him.

“There’s somebody following us,” Nyx said.

Of course there was.

“You know who it is?”

“No. Single person, though. Tracks came in off the road, there—” she nodded in the direction she meant. Out past the camp, it was very dark. He couldn’t tell exactly where the tracks had started. Pretty far away from the station, that was certain. Whoever it was had walked all the way past them, then doubled back through the desert.

“You know where she’s hiding?”

“I want to try and flank her. You come with me?”

“Let me put Ahmed on watch first. In case she has friends.

Good,” Nyx said.

Eshe went back to camp and woke Ahmed. As soon as Eshe leaned over him, he jerked awake, clutching his scattergun.

“Your watch. I’m checking something out with Nyx. Be careful. There might be more than one.”

Ahmed rose. Took up his gun. “Done,” he said.

Eshe crept back to where Nyx waited behind the station.

Nyx motioned him beside her. She pointed toward a low rise behind the station. The moons were in recession, and wispy clouds streaked the sky, so it wasn’t the best vantage.

“You sure it’s not just some vagrant camping for the night, like us?”

“That spot gives her full view of our camp. Not the station. Not the road. Our camp. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

She motioned him to the right. She took the left.

He pulled his knife.

They crept across the desert. Eshe had learned how to walk softly back in his street days in Mushtallah. The secret was to step along the outside of your foot and roll it inward to take your weight. He had avoided some potentially nasty fights that way.

Nyx was heavier, and less patient. She got there first.

It was a dangerous thing to sneak up on somebody. Best case, you actually caught them by surprise, and killing and incapacitating them was fast and easy. At worst, they had already made you, and were waiting with gun drawn or blade ready.

Eshe always expected the latter.

He dove behind the rise a bare second behind Nyx, but she already had her arm around the woman’s throat.

Eshe saw the woman’s pistol on the ground. She had not been caught totally unaware, then. He needed to work on his stealth. Or not sneak around with Nyx.

Nyx shoved her gun to the woman’s head. Not even so much a woman, really. She was petite, not too much larger than Kage, and swaddled in a large burnous and too-big trousers. But it was the pistol that gave her away.

“Wait! Nyx, let her go.”

“What? Fuck?” Nyx said.

“Let her go. Please. Her pistol. It’s Ras Tiegan.”

“The fuck is that supposed to matter?”

“I know her, Nyx. Please.”

Nyx let her go. Tore back the hood of the girl’s burnous. Isabet gasped.

“Who the fuck are you?” Nyx said.

“Isabet Softel. I’m…” She blustered a bit, seemingly trying to find the Nasheenian words for what she needed to say. Finally, in Ras Tiegan, she said, “Eshe, tell her who I am.”

“I can tell her who you are, but not what you’re doing here,” he said, also in Ras Tiegan.

“None of that curry-mouthed catshit,” Nyx said, waving her gun at them both now. “The fuck is going on?” She grabbed Isabet’s discarded pistol and sneered at it.

“Inaya sent me after you,” Isabet said, in Ras Tiegan.

“Give me a minute,” Eshe said to Nyx as she popped open the chamber on the Ras Tiegan pistol. He switched languages again. “Catshit,” Eshe said to Isabet. “What the hell are you doing here? Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? How long have you been tracking me?”

“Since you left. Michel helped me across the border. He said that Inaya insisted that I bring you home. I thought it was a fool’s errand, but—”

“For a very great fool,” Eshe said. “Are you alone?”

“Yes, I told you—”

“How are you going to get back?”

“I told you. You’re to come with me, and together—”

Eshe shook his head. He had to walk away from her, just a few paces, to try and clear his head. They were a long way from the Nasheenian border, an even longer way from the Ras Tiegan one. How she made it this far on her own baffled him. There was no way she’d make it all the way back alone. If Inaya had wanted him to return so badly, why send Isabet? Did she want to murder the girl? He closed his eyes, and thought of Corinne. Anything was possible with Inaya. Who knew what she was playing at?

Eshe said, in Nasheenian, “She says Inaya sent her after me. She says she can’t go home unless I go with her.”

“Tell her to wait in Nasheen then.”

“I… Nyx, look at her. I can’t send her back alone.”

“She bring anyone else with her?”

“No.”

Nyx regarded Isabet. In the dim light, he couldn’t make out Nyx’s exact expression, but whenever she went quiet it meant she was actually thinking something through, weighing her options. It was usually a good thing. Fewer people died.

“She do anything useful?”

“We worked together in the shifter rebellion. Inaya’s Fourré. She comes from a rich family. Has a lot of connections.”

“In Ras Tieg?”

“Yes.”

“We’re not going to Ras Tieg.”

“No.”

Nyx holstered her pistol and started to walk away. “Get rid of her.”

“No, wait,” Eshe said. “She’s not going to give up, Nyx. She’s going to keep following us.”

“Let her follow.”

“She’ll die.”

“Most of us probably will.”

“Then why can’t she die with us?”

“Because she’s dead weight. I’m not feeding and watering somebody who’s just going to end up a body later without giving anything back. You see how easy it was to jump her? We don’t need any of that.”

“Wait,” Eshe said. He searched for something about Isabet that Nyx could understand. You couldn’t appeal to morality. One body was very like another, to Nyx.

“She’s trustworthy,” Eshe said.

“What?”

“I trust her,” Eshe said. “Isn’t that exactly what we need right now? Somebody we can trust? Fatima’s people are just spies, and that Ahmed guy, and the Drucian. We don’t know them well. Listen, this girl is smart. She may not seem like much, but she has… she has tact. And she can handle herself when things get bad.” He remembered pulling the sack off her head after he killed the priest and seeing the shock on her face when she saw the priest’s body. But she hadn’t gone to pieces.

Nyx chewed on that awhile. Shook her head.

Fuck, he thought.

Nyx said, “She comes with us, blood’s on you. And so’s her loyalty. That honey pot turns on us and I’ll have you kill her. You understand me?” She reached out, took his chin, the way she had when he was a kid stealing bullets from the hub. She made him look at her. Hard black eyes. “I understand you,” he said.

Nyx walked back to camp.

Eshe went to Isabet. She was packing up her things. Some food, a copy of the Ras Tiegan Good Book stuffed with documents of some sort, and a small camping stove. He thought the documents were a little odd, but didn’t say anything.

He crouched beside her. “I have a deal for you,” he said. “If you come with us, you need to do everything Nyx says. Everything. Maybe you’ve heard some stories about her. Maybe you know not everything we do is going to be good. But you do exactly as she says. Do that and when this is all over, I come back to Ras Tieg with you. Deal?”

“Where are you going?”

“We’ve got to bring in a politician who was kidnapped.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

“Yeah, well… you’ve never tried bringing in a bounty with Nyx.”

“Bounty?”

“It’s not like she’s doing it for free.”

Isabet sighed and squinted at the eastern horizon, toward Ras Tieg. “What does she want me to do? I have some experience in—”

“Just… do as she says. Trust me on this, Isabet.”

“Trust you? Well, I won’t go that far. I’m just here to bring you back, as Inaya told me.”

“She promise you a raise or something? Better quarters?”

“Michel said I need to prove myself,” she said. “It’s a test.”

It was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “You think you’re ready for that?”

“Of course,” she said, nose turned up, tone haughty.

He picked up her gun. Pointed it at her. Pulled the trigger.

Isabet jumped like a startled lizard.

He handed the gun back to her. “First tip. Get a new gun. As soon as a Ras Tiegan gun gets sand in it, it’s useless. They don’t work out here.”

Isabet’s hand was trembling as she took the gun back. “You seemed very certain of that.”

“Nyx unloaded it while we were arguing,” he said. “If you want to keep up, you’ll need to start paying attention.”

A
t the edge of the white desert, a tangled forest of massive insect-tailored mounds littered the undulating landscape for as far as Rhys could see. He paused the thirsty caterpillar in the sand and tried to sense some life or movement from the mounds, but to his senses they were just dead things—relics of some vast termite-like colony that had once thrived here, the woody substances that had once sustained them long lost to dust.

As he led the caterpillar into the shadows of the mounds, he found that the mounds were so tall that they blotted out the sky. He kept the caterpillar headed north, pausing every few minutes to gauge the angle of the sun. In this desert, traveling at night was best, but he had pushed himself to go another hour in the early morning light so he could reach the cairn before he camped. Cairns marked the caravan route, Abhinava had told him, so if he kept moving south from the location of each, he should find water within five or six days from the one before. Abhinava had also shown him the secret to uncovering the wealth of water beneath.

And Rhys had repaid his kindness by running away.

Amid the mounds, Rhys searched for a particular hand-shaped protuberance. He expected it would be something made of the same bugcemented sand as the rest of the mounds—but no, the hand-shaped figure he found was made of dusty gray stone, seemingly carved from a solid piece. It was twice as tall as Rhys, and half the height of the nearest mound. It stuck up from the now reddish-brown sand as if it had simply been grown there. When he reached out to touch it, expecting the cool, gritty texture of stone, he found instead that it had a subtle give to it, like a live thing—a fungus or lichen.

The cairn was half-buried in the sand to the left of the obelisk, just a tumbledown of rotten stone bound with bug secretions. He climbed off the chariot and knelt at the edge of the cairn. He began removing stones to reach the guardian below. A waft of cool air met his face. It was the most delicious thing he’d felt in days. The sun was already high and hot, and even with the hood of his burnous up, the heat was oppressive. In the darkness beneath the cairn, he sensed the guardian—a wormlike insect as big around as his head, quietly resting in the cool dim. It took a few minutes to find the right combination of pheromones to affect it. When he finally felt it respond and go inert, he carefully reached his water bulb inside. He filled four more and then began replacing the stones.