Rapture (27 page)

“The fuck you doing?” Ahmed said.

“Can’t piss,” Nyx said. “Blood’s got more salt than urine. Still, might keep us going another couple kilometers.”

“You’re fucking mad as she is.”

“Was,” Nyx said. She finished filling the bulbs and attached them to the bandolier again, all but one. The last, she offered to Ahmed. White static juddered across her vision, and she blinked rapidly.

On the sand in front of her, Eskander shuddered.

“What are you doing?” Khatijah stumbled, fell, just short of Nyx’s arm. Nyx shrugged her away.

“What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck!” Khatijah howled.

Ahmed shook his head.

“We’re just about fucked,” Nyx said.

“I’d rather be fucked,” he said.

“Bloody traitor!” Khatijah said. “Monster! Oath-breaker!”

Nyx brought the warm blood to her mouth, and drank two swallows of salty, coppery blood. It was enough to wet her mouth and throat and trick her body into anticipating—for the barest of moments—that water was coming. With any luck, it would make her urinate, and that, at least, could gain her another day.

She capped off the rest of the blood and snapped it to the bandolier.

“Fucking mad,” Ahmed said.

Khatijah started keening.

Nyx didn’t bother pulling the burnous from Eskander’s body. It was a cheap one, not organic, and wouldn’t be saving any of them.

Kage came down the dune, then. When she saw Eskander’s body and Khatijah’s trembling shoulders, she came to a halt. Swayed a little.

Nyx took Eskander’s full bulb from her pocket and tossed it to Kage. Kage didn’t catch it, just let it fall to the sand at her feet. Kage stared at her, unmoving.

“That’s yours,” Nyx said. “Don’t worry. By the time you fall over, we’ll be too far gone for blood.”

Nyx turned away, easily slapping off Khatijah’s weak grab, and went back to Isabet’s body. She didn’t watch to see if Kage drank, or if Ahmed and Khatijah fought over it. Never knew how people would react, about this time. Whatever you did about now could be forgiven.

Nyx heaved Isabet up onto her back again, the coppery aftertaste of the blood still thick in her mouth.

Two down, she thought. Wonder how many more to go?

She slogged. Time passed.

“Can’t see,” Ahmed murmured. His voice sounded distant.

She turned, saw him rubbing at his eyes, blinking, squinting out ahead. She was surprised to see him still walking. She couldn’t see anyone behind him.

“Just desert blindness,” she said. “It’ll pass. Just follow after me. You can hear me, right?”

“I can’t see, Nyx.”

“Just follow after me, Ahmed. Just follow.”

Time stretched. She must have blanked out for a while, because when Nyx glanced up next, she was walking alone, dragging Isabet behind her with her hands looped up under the girl’s armpits.

She paused, swung her head up. Khatijah knelt in the sand not a dozen paces distant, swaying softly. Ahmed’s body made a muddy S-shape in the desert behind her, just an arm’s length away. There was a low wind blowing, and it piled up sand along the edges of their bodies. It wouldn’t take long for the desert to conceal them. Far behind Ahmed, she noted a suggestive black clump at the top of a dune—Kage, long since given up the fight.

Nyx squeezed her eyes shut. Survival, up to a point, was just a mind game. Your body could do more than you thought it could. But when you reached your body’s breaking point, well, it was just that—the end. If she dropped Isabet she might make it another kilometer. It was possible. She could see a break in the dunes now, and just a stroll away the crunchy sand became hard playa again, and she could see the soft, comforting breasts of mountains in the distance. Logic told her she would never make the mountains. Thirst and delirium said otherwise.

Her head hurt. The sun was blinding. She was thirsty enough to consider carving Isabet up and drinking up all the coppery liquid that spilled from her fragile little body, the way she had with Eskander. Had that really happened? She wasn’t even so sure.

She dropped Isabet. Shed a great burden.

She yanked one of the bloody bulbs from her bandolier, uncapped it. Brought it to her lips. The blood had congealed. Her stomach roiled. She dry heaved, and the bulb fell onto the sand, oozing Why am I carrying her? Nyx thought. She gazed off toward the mountains again. She could make it. Surely. Alone, she was much stronger. Alone, she could make the mountains, and the promise of water. She could achieve so much more, alone.

She would never have come here if she’d been smart, and lived out her exile alone. It all came apart once you starting caring for something outside yourself.

She stumbled forward, half the distance to the playa, before she fell headfirst into the sand.

She grappled back up. Dragged herself forward.

The sun was moving off into afternoon. She heard the hiss and scuffle of some insect, and a giant amber beetle reared up at her in a gush of sand.

Her foot caught at the edge of the seam of the playa. She fell again, this time on the hard, cracked red surface. Her head thumped against the dirt. Her legs went numb. She tried to move her arms, to claw forward. They didn’t respond. The beetle pounced. She yelled and smacked it with her head; it scuttled off.

Dying always felt so peaceful.

She came to in the dim blue light of dusk. The ground was still warm, but the air had turned terribly cold. A sharp wind blew sand granules into her face. She coughed, and realized with a surge of hope that she had a terrible urge to urinate.

Nyx yanked her collapsible stew pot out of her pack and pissed in it. She brought the pot to her lips without hesitation. It wasn’t the first time she had to drink her own urine.

After, she lay on her side, chewing on her last strip of sunbaked worm until the final sun went down.

Then she was up again. How, she wasn’t so sure. One minute she was on the ground, and when she came to next, she was walking again, plodding forward like some half-dead, cancerous wanderer.

Then she raised her head and saw a black form winging its way across the night, just there at the edge of the surge of blackness in the northern sky, visible only because as it moved south the stars carpeted the sky behind it.

It was a raven. It alighted on her shoulder.

She blinked, and the bird was off again. For a moment, she wondered if she’d just made it up. Some blotchy darkness that her mind had turned into a bird.

“Bring water, you fuck!” she wheezed.

But it kept cawing, kept circling.

“Fuck you! I had to drop her! Wouldn’t have made it… made it this far.” She was out of breath. Wheezing. Her heart pounded in her chest.

She caught herself drifting, swimming through a cool waterfall in Druce with Radeyah.

She fell again. Fell hard. The breath left her body this time, and she gasped for air, rolled onto her back, faced the star-studded sky.

Dying wasn’t so bad, so why did she keep trying so hard to live?

She stayed down.

Closed her eyes.

She was back at the waterfall again, laughing with Radeyah like some drunk school kid. She had never laughed so much as she had in Druce. How was that possible? It was a contaminated little slice of exile, with oozing bugs and rot that ate Anneke’s first three gardens and secretive little people who all pretended they couldn’t speak Nasheenian. But there was also a whole lot of quiet there—outside Anneke’s shooting range, at any rate.

When she opened her eyes, her whole body was moving. She was covered in bulbous armored bugs, big as her fist. They were chewing at her bloody chest.

Nyx let out a yell, pushed back. A few of the bugs lumbered off her, slow as some fat inlander. They were chewing at her bandolier. They’d broken open the containers of blood, and were lapping it up with thorny proboscides that needled at her skin beneath her tunic.

She tried to push them off, but her hands weren’t responding again. One of them crawled up the length of her: dainty little feet across her neck, her cheek. She gritted her teeth. It perched there on her face, waving its antennae. It came up on its hind legs, waved its front legs like a charging beast.

Nyx snapped at it with her teeth. It was like crushing a grape, or a balloon. The thing just burst, and warm, wet fluid spattered her face, wet her mouth. She choked on bits of the thing, spit it out.

Her fingers twitched. Responded. She grabbed one of the ones on her chest. Mashed it with her hand. It popped, spilling warm, clear liquid across her hand. Nyx slowly brought her hand up to her face, sniffed at the liquid and shattered carapace. It was odorless. She licked it. It was clean and clear, like… water.

Or tasteless poison.

But for a woman who had slurped down another woman’s blood and her own urine just a few hours back, that possibility wasn’t enough to put her off.

Nyx grabbed another of the bugs making a meal of Eskander’s blood, and twisted open the end of it, like pinching off the end of a woody fruit. She sucked out the liquid inside.

It might not have been water, but it was close enough. She grabbed another one, and another, until the sluggish little fuckers began to catch on. As they started to pile off her and go lumbering off toward some rounded mounds in the sand, she scrabbled to her feet, still dizzy, and shed her burnous. She looped the end of it into a sack, and started collecting the bugs and tossing them in. When it was full, she tied it off and collapsed again.

Water, after a very long time in the desert. The feeling was better than any fuck, better than good whiskey, better than dying.

The raven was watching her from the top of another of the mounds, head cocked.

“Eshe?” she said.

No answer. Just the quizzical stare.

She peered, again, at the mound the raven perched on. There were at least a dozen or more mounds beyond it, all about the same size and shape. More ruins? More desert garbage?

She slumped onto the ground again, lost some time.

When she woke, the raven was pecking at the top of her head. She growled and snarled, tried to bat it away. The bird jumped back three hops, cocked its head.

It was still dark. She thought of something Yah Tayyib once told her. It was the secret to winning any contest, he said, in life or in the boxing ring—you just had to get up more often than you fell down.

There was a rising wind, then a clattering racket, like a thousand voices raised in the market, or some mess hall.

Nyx raised her head. Above her, the sky was full of ravens.

Some primal fear filled her, something far more terrifying than dying. She scrabbled to her feet and stumbled toward the mound the raven was sitting on. She hoped to dig into it and find some shelter.

She got within arm’s reach—and fell again.

She put out her hands, expecting to meet resistance.

Instead, she fell right through the mound—and into cool darkness.

T
hey left her for six days.

It was a blessing, though Inaya did not realize it until the third day, as she sat against the roughhewn wall, staring at the narrow shaft of light that brought in cool air during the day and buzzing insects at night. She had large, swollen bumps on her arms, legs, and face. Late summer heat soaked the humid air; there was no temperature control at all. She sweated during the day and shivered at night. There was a single refuse pail in one corner, caked in some specious gunk that made her gag. The pail had yet to be emptied, and her slop spilled over the lip of the bucket now and pooled in one corner. Her clothes were filthy. She, like her cell, stank.

During the day, Inaya listened for voices, conversation, to try and glean some hint of where she was. The type of holding cell was important. This one had a filter instead of a door, which was expensive. It was where an important prisoner would go—one suspected of being a shifter. If she was in some central city cell, they likely had an idea of who she was. But if she was still in Inoublie, there was hope that she could play at being falsely accused. Of what she was accused, of course, she still had no idea. Repeated attempts to talk to those who deactivated the filter long enough to pass her food and water—all of it infused with saffron—met with failure. The guards were all men—older, experienced men with sour, grimacing faces that told her exactly what they thought of her and her kind. She begged and pleaded with them like an innocent woman. In her situation, shedding tears wasn’t difficult.

But not one man spoke to her.

It made it easier, in the end, to sort out her story before they came for her. She knew what an interrogation looked like. Her second husband, Khos, had been a mercenary—a very good one—and he had worked for one of Nasheen’s best bounty hunters. God’s Angels, however, were not as… blunt as Nasheen’s bounty hunters. They would only use force against a woman if they had to… or if they could prove she was a shifter. If they knew she was a shifter—without a doubt—she would no longer be human in their eyes. And from the cheerless faces of the men who brought her food, her humanity—if not in question—was already suspect just for being here. She had to convince them otherwise.

On the fourth day, they threw another prisoner in with her. Inaya did not know her, and her first fear was that it was some trick—put two shifters together and hope they incriminate themselves.

But the girl was young, only fourteen or fifteen, and not a shifter at all. Not unless she was playing the same game Inaya was.

“I don’t know why I’m here. There were riots. Did they take you in the riots?” the girl asked.

“What riots?”

“They say it’s the misborn”—Inaya could not help but grimace at the use of the derogatory term for shifters—“and a bomb went off at the Angels’ headquarters in the capital. There have been retaliations. It’s horrible. Really horrible.”

Inaya felt a wave of fear, but kept her tone neutral. “How terrible.”

“They’re going door to door. That’s why they took me. But it wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with anything. It’s all just a terrible mistake.” She wrung her hands.

Inaya stopped asking questions. She was afraid what the girl would reveal.