The Body Project Read online

  The Body Project

  By Kameron Hurley

  The man’s rugged visage–hanging from the upper window of the tenement building–was captivating. The rest of him was less so, as it was a mangled wreck of shattered limbs and shredded torso strewn all over the street at Nyx’s feet.

  Nyx toed at the burst flesh of his admittedly once-fine form, now split and oozing a sour blend of offal that brought to mind the pungent stink of rotten bodies at the front. That memory, paired with the profile of the man’s head, sparked a sudden familiarity. She had a powerful feeling that she knew him.

  Nyx squatted next to the body. Turned over the sunbaked left wrist with some effort. The stiffness told her the body had been there most of the night.

  A familiar purple tattoo in the shape of an unblinking eye stared back at her. A wave of remorse rolled through her, more intense than she expected. She rubbed at the loose skin absently. Gazed back up at the swinging head.

  His name was Jahar, and he was already supposed to be dead. She knew, because it was her mistake that killed him.

  “Is he a deserter?” Her contracted magician, Rhys, stood just behind her, speaking low in his thickly accented Nasheenian.

  “A man under forty in the city?” Nyx said, rising. “Sure is.”

  “We’re here for a parole violator, not a deserter,” Rhys said, paging through the slick green papers of his little book of bounty contracts. “Should I update Taite on the delay?”

  Taite was Nyx’s com tech, responsible for monitoring and hacking into chatter conveyed through other hunters’ communications. She had picked up a lot of free tips on other hunters’ bounties by having him monitor their communication streams.

  “Not yet,” she said. Taite was securely nestled away in the dilapidated upper level of the storefront she’d been renting for the last eight weeks. He was probably eating take-out curry and confessing his worries to some Ras Tiegan idol. She wasn’t sure how deep this was going to get yet, and didn’t want to involve any more people than she had to until she understood why a good man who died a thousand miles from here lay mutilated on the streets of Bahora.

  She glanced at Rhys, and wondered if she was going to have to bag him and dump him after this run. He had only been in her service for three weeks, and she was already reconsidering her choice of magician. Nobody liked dealing with Chenjan refugees, and it would be worse if she started looking into the death of a military man. Rhys had better manners and a better head for numbers and paperwork than she did; she got her letters backward, and hadn’t attended the state school for more than a couple years. His education, best she understood it, had been a bit more lavish than hers. Every good bounty hunter had a magician on their team. But she suspected she was the only hunter foolish enough to have a Chenjan one.

  “Maybe it’s best we leave deserters to the bel dames,” Rhys said.

  “You aren’t scared of a few bel dames, are you?” Nyx said. “This sort of kill isn’t their style. And this soldier didn’t deserve it.” Though killing Jahar and other deserters like him was pretty much the entire job description of bel dames these days, they generally cleaned up what they put down.

  Nyx knew. She used to be a bel dame, before she’d pissed them off enough to get blacklisted.

  Rhys sighed. “I didn’t say they did it. I said we best leave it for them to handle.” The hood of his burnous was pulled up, hands tucked neatly into its broad pockets. A single cicada clung to his sleeve; one of a coterie of useful insects he kept at hand to send messages, sniff out traps, open locked doors, and perform other tasks that Nyx couldn’t manage herself with a gun, fist, or a sword. It was broad daylight in the bustling border city of Bahora, and men with the darker cast of a Chenjan, like him, were likely to be treated even less hospitably than a deserter like Jahar. If not for Rhys’s grating Chenjan accent, he might have been mistaken for a Tirhani on pilgrimage – they looked about the same, on first glance. All he needed was a pilgrim’s pass prominently displayed on his chest. But he nattered on too much to hide his accent. People figured out what he was very quickly.

  “You know him?” Rhys asked.

  “I served with him,” Nyx said. “Taught him to be a sapper.” And a good many other things. She found herself looking at Rhys’s slender hands. Wondered if he would be as skilled at putting together an IED with a bug cistern, secretion spool, and household carrion beetle colony as Jahar had been. Probably not.

  “Doesn’t appear to have done him much good,” Rhys said.

  “I expect blowing things up wasn’t involved in whatever this was.”

  At street level, Nyx couldn’t tell how Jahar’s head was suspended in the window six stories above them. A noose, maybe, or some trained bug swarm. From the look of what remained of the body, the head and limbs had been torn or chewed from the body, not cut or hacked. Not a butcher’s job, then. Nor a bounty hunter’s. Looked more like some kind of bug attack orchestrated by a magician – one with a lot more skill than Rhys.

  “Seems the body spent the night with dogs,” Rhys said.

  “It was bugs,” Nyx said.

  “I’ve studied every kind of bug injury,” he said. “This isn’t one. Not even those roving packs of beech creepers leave marks like this. These are teeth.”

  “You aren’t exactly the world’s most skilled magician.”

  “And you’re a butcher, not an investigator,” he said coolly. “Yah Tayyib told me all about what you’re good at, and it’s not details. Could you sign a more skilled magician? Certainly. But not one with a better eye for detail than me.”

  “Are all Chenjans so humble?”

  “Honesty is a virtue, even in this blighted country. Or have your mullahs further twisted the words of the Kitab to make liars into martyrs?”

  Nyx chanced a look at the suns, hoping for some respite, but it was still hours from afternoon prayer. The only peace she got from his preaching was when he was at prayer.

  “You add a seventh prayer today?” she asked. “Or is this little rant just for me?” She hadn’t knelt on a prayer rug since she got back from the front, burning God behind her along with her men. Fuck the war. Fuck Rhys and his self-righteous talk.

  “Those are the marks of a dog’s teeth,” he said, less aloof this time, “and he has something in his other hand that you missed.”

  She frowned. “I was getting to that.”

  In truth, she’d missed it. She had been looking for defensive wounds and chemical residue.

  They were alone on the street; the suns were too high and hot for reasonable people to be outdoors. But even in cooler weather, Nyx suspected the body would not draw a crowd. Bahora acted as a conduit for goods from the interior to the border cities that lined the raging warfront between Nasheen and Chenja. Merchants did well here, as did butchers and organ dealers. Plague Sisters also trained here to serve casualties from the front. Many underwent their metamorphosis here, shedding their lower limbs for something altogether more unsavory, but useful for assisting in the rapid reanimation of the half-dead and dying. The more bodies the Plague Sisters saved, the longer the war raged. The market for fresh limbs and organs was strong, and it led to both legal and illegal trading in blood and bugs. Nyx herself had sold off most of her organs for cash at one time or another.

  Nyx massaged open the body’s other fist. It clutched a dead locust, the guts smeared across Jahar’s palm.

  “Can you get anything off that?” she asked Rhys.

  He crouched beside her. “Did all your men desert, or just this one?”

  “The rest are dead,” she said. No need to mention Jahar should have been, too. Rhys was staring at her with his big dark eyes, but she avoided meeting his gaze. Better to think of him as a means to an end, li
ke everyone else.

  Rhys gently took the crushed locust into his palm. For a long, dark moment she wondered what kind of a Nasheenian she was, to offer an employment contract to a man whose people she had spent so many years slaughtering. She had signed him away from Yah Tayyib, his mentor and sponsor, in a fit of spite. Tayyib had crossed her once too often, and an old friend bet Nyx the Chenjan with a magician’s waiver of amnesty wouldn’t sign with her fledging bounty hunting team.

  Nyx liked a good wager.

  Rhys murmured something over the locust’s body. Nyx smelled saffron and vanilla. The locust trembled, then stilled.

  “Whatever it recorded is salvageable,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave this for the bel dames? This could get very bad.”

  Someone called to them from the amber-tiled doorway of the building. Nyx saw bullet wounds above the door, and fresh shattered tile littering the stoop. But the door itself was intact, a green slab made of bug secretions, shot through with shards of stone. Someone opened that door. Nobody forced it. She wondered if Jahar had opened it, or the woman. Or someone else.

  “You the bel dame?” the woman in the doorway called in a Mhorian accent. Her dusty brown hair was pulled up into a riot of dreadlocks. She wore a colorful scarf around her neck, and neat short trousers and a long-sleeved tunic and lace-up vest; clean, merchant-class garb that looked out of place on this side of town.

  “Sure am,” Nyx said, rising.

  Rhys said, low, “You can’t just tell people you’re a government assassin.”

  “It’s not important what you are,” Nyx muttered. “It’s what people think you are.” Then louder, to the Mhorian, “Who are you?”

  “Henye bhin Heshel. Come quickly.”

  “If she finds you out, she could kill us,” Rhys said.

  Nyx patted his arm. He flinched. “I’ll protect you.”

  “From order keepers? From bel dames?

  “I’m scarier than both.”

  “Only because you’re somehow less hygienic.”

  “He’s one of my men,” she said. “My responsibility. I wouldn’t expect a man who’d never served to understand that.” She’d fucked it up once – she wasn’t going to do it again.

  Nyx pulled away and went to the door. Henye ducked inside, beckoning.

  “Wait, Nyx. Don’t go in there,” Rhys called.

  Nyx stepped into the building. From the outside, she assumed it was just a bank of low-rent apartments. But she had not guessed its residents. Walls of trembling mucus lined the corridors. The mucus crawled with white and brown larvae. She saw glassy blue butterflies trapped within the viscous goo, and shiny green jewel beetles. The circular doors along the corridor were covered in fine webbing, sprayed with old magical hexes for various types of restorative amalgamations. Above the lintel of one doorway she saw a mummified human arm.

  “It’s a bug farm,” Rhys said, stepping up beside her. “I could sense them from the street.”

  “Could have mentioned it.”

  “Didn’t know you were just going to barge in,” he said.

  “Do you have a bag for this corpse?” Henye asked. She stood just behind a low reception desk, arms crossed. She had a face like a hatchet; Nyx suspected the bel dame ruse wouldn’t work for long. The woman would nose her out soon enough.

  “How’d he die?” Nyx asked.

  “What does it matter? He’s a deserter, isn’t he?”

  “Paperwork,” Nyx said. “Humor me.”

  “I don’t know,” Henye said. “I came to the shop this morning after breaking fast and there he was, all over the street.”

  “And the head?”

  “Haven’t gone up yet. Called you straight off.”

  “You rebuild people here?”

  Henye’s eyes widened.

  “Rebuilding?” Rhys asked. “What is that?”

  “I’ve seen a rebuild shop before,” Nyx said.

  “I run a clean operation,” Henye said. “I have all my permits. We even have a registered Plague Sister.” She reached under the desk.

  Nyx placed a hand on the butt of her pistol. She wore a coiled whip on the other hip, a scattergun behind her, and a sword across her back. Those were just the visible weapons. The razor blades in her sandals and poisoned needles in her hair were for seriously deteriorating situations. She doubted this would end up one of those. But you never knew.

  “Getting my permits!” Henye said, jerking her hands out from beneath the desk and placing them flat in front of her.

  “I don’t care about your permits.” Nyx nodded at the severed arm over the door further down the hall. “I know that mark means you rebuild here, and not just broken limbs, right? This man come here to be rebuilt?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Who would?”

  “Meiret was working last night. She closed up.”

  “Who is she?”

  “My daughter. She works the night hour. If you need help to mop up–“

  “I’m not here for a bribe,” Nyx said. “Just information. Open the rebuild room.”

  “I will not. I have my permits.”

  “Then I’ll force the door.” Nyx pulled her scattergun from her back, and raised the heavy butt of the gun to the door’s weaker hinges.

  “Don’t! I’ll open it.” Henye leapt forward, faster than Nyx thought a plump little woman like that could move, and pressed her palm to the door’s faceplate. The door opened. A bitter almond scent wafted into the corridor. Nyx had a powerful memory of another dark room that stank like this, and her own burnt, blackened skin being peeled from her body by serious-looking magicians. She’d been riding a morphine and black beetle juice high, then, when they rebuilt her body and brought her back from the edge of death.

  Nyx pushed through. Reached for the light.

  Something skittered in the darkness.

  Nyx had just enough time to swing her gun forward. Four giant fox spiders, legs as long as her arms, broke away from a crumpled figure on the floor and mobbed her.

  She kicked the first in the face and blasted the scattergun at another. The massive spider ruptured, spattering eyes and guts and limbs across the room.

  “I have them!” Rhys said behind her. He moved into the room next to her, hand raised. Four cicadas had crawled out of his sleeve, and made an annoying buzzing sound.

  The two remaining spiders stopped, motionless, two paces from them, their massive jaws working at nothing.

  “Can you control them?” Nyx asked.

  “They aren’t under the hold of another magician,” he said. “They’re just wild intruders. I can turn them away.”

  “Do that.” Nyx didn’t like giant bugs any more than the next person, but fox spiders were useful scavengers.

  Rhys flicked his wrist. The spiders obediently trundled back toward the rear of the room, crawling over the dark shape they’d been huddled around when Nyx pushed in.

  Nyx palmed the light. Above, the glow worms in the ceiling lights squirmed, emitting a dull orange glow over the rebuild room.

  The spiders squeezed out through a broken section of the far wall, its edges rimmed with scorch marks. Nyx followed the stain of smoke up along the shelf-lined wall. Broken jars littered the floor; spongy hearts and lungs, tongues and eyes, fingers and ears lay among the glass, as did another body – the crumpled form the spiders had been feeding on was a woman dressed in the white muslin habit of a Plague Sister. Her lower limbs were just visible – a tangled collection of six appendages that looked more spider than human.

  “This woman yours?” Nyx called back to Henye.

  Henye crept inside. She put a hand to her mouth in horror, and said something that sounded like an oath or prayer in Mhorian. “That’s Siraji, the Plague Sister assigned to our operation,” she said.

  “She assigned to work here last night?”

  “No, I… She was still here when I left, but said she’d only be another hour.”

  “Then it looks li
ke we need to talk to Meiret,” Nyx said. “Because whatever happened here happened on her watch.”

  “Glorious God, this is terrible,” Henye said. “I must call the order keepers now. This is far worse than a deserter.”

  “Wait a minute on the order keepers,” Nyx said. It was bad enough that real bel dames were on the way. Once order keepers locked down the scene, she wasn’t going to be able to get back in. “Rhys, check out her permits. Make sure she’s really allowed to do rebuilds here.”

  Having a Plague Sister on staff lent legitimacy to Henye’s story, though. Plague Sisters were a guild of magicians that specialized in rebuilding the mangled bodies of soldiers. The sisters were only assigned to reputable rebuilders. If anyone here had been giving deserters new faces, even the most lax Plague Sister wouldn’t stand for it. Anybody a Plague Sister patched up went back to the front until they’d served their time – two years for women, and twenty to twenty-five for men.