Rapture Read online

  Critical Acclaim for Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame Apocrypha

  “Hurley’s world-building is phenomenal… (she) smoothly handles tricky themes such as race, class, religion, and gender without sacrificing action.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “…where some writers might focus on high-tech weapons or explosive battles in space, Hurley brings things down to a personal level, recalling more the toughminded realism of Chris Moriarty’s Spin State…”

  —New York Review of Science Fiction

  “God’s War was part slow burn, part explosive action… in the end the novel was utterly compelling.”

  —Tor.com

  “God’s War is one of the most thought-provoking debuts I’ve read so far this year.”

  —Locus Magazine

  “Hurley indeed creates in her lead character a thoroughly unlikeable, but wholly independent, female Conan. Actually, that’s wrong: Nyxnissa would quite clearly kick Conan’s ass. In her own words, ‘Women can fight as well as fuck, you know’ (p. 64). Coarse and inelegant, but bold and pungent: Nyx’s retort might be this punchy, refreshing, and imperfect novel’s grating, gutsy epigram. Just what the genre ordered.”

  —Strange Horizons Magazine

  “An aggressively dark, highly original SF-fantasy novel with tight, cutting prose and some of the most inventive world-building I’ve seen in a while.”

  —Fantasy Literature.com

  “God’s War is a clever reinterpretation of the war novel. Hurley takes on issues of gender roles, violence, and religion and does it all with a deft hand.”

  —Staffer’s Musings

  “God’s War is a violent tale set against the backdrop of a centuries-old holy war. But beyond all the blood and violence, it’s a beautifully crafted work of art that keeps astonishing you when you least expect it.”

  —Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist

  “Hurley belongs in the new class of Sci-Fi authors we’ve been waiting for to invigorate the genre along the sides of Rajaniemi, Bacigalupi, and Yu…”

  —The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf & Book Review

  “This beautifully crafted novel is truly a work of art—bloody, brutal, bug-filled art.”

  —The Ranting Dragon

  “Are you frustrated with Mary Sue heroines? Well, here comes God’s War to rock your face off… If you like rough, battle-scarred women who know how to regulate, you’re going to love Nyx… She makes Han Solo look like a boy scout.”

  —i09.com

  “God’s War is a fine piece of writing, and not one that its readers will easily forget.”

  —Escape Pod

  “The ostensibly ground-breaking, jaw-dropping ultra-progressive newness of God’s War is remarkable not because it pushes the boundaries of science fiction, but because it is a novel in which those boundaries are already gone.”

  —Pornokitsch

  “If you want a down-and-dirty book that takes a hard look at the consequences of religious intolerance and the idea of what ‘feminine’ is, read God’s War.”

  —SFF Divas

  “Budding authors take note: you want to know how to do that ‘show me don’t tell me’ trick? Read this book. Read every sentence. Hurley’s writing is full of descriptive wonder, of an almost M. John Harrison-y, Jeff VanderMeer-y appreciation for intense color, smell, and sound.”

  —The Little Red Reviewer

  Other books by Kameron Hurley

  Bel Dame Apocrypha

  God’s War

  Infidel

  Rapture

  Rapture © 2012 by Kameron Hurley

  This edition of Rapture © 2012 by Night Shade Books

  Cover art by David Palumbo

  Cover design by Rebecca Silvers

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-432-5

  Night Shade Books

  www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Jayson

  Thanks for the meat suits.

  “Then We which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall We ever be with the Lord.”

  (Bible, Thessalonians 4:16–17)

  “Whoever works righteousness, man or woman, and has faith, verily, to them will We give a new Life, a life that is good and pure, and We will bestow on such their reward according to the best of their actions.”

  (Quran, Chapter 16, Verse 97)

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  1.

  Every time Nyx thought she’d gotten out of the business of killing boys, she shot another one.

  He lay bleeding at her feet as the spectators for the weekly fights streamed past, muddying the dusty street with his blood. She had not meant to shoot him, but she was drunk, a common condition during her exile. The boy had grabbed clumsily at the knot of her dhoti where she kept her currency. Her response had been unthinking, like breathing. She had pulled the scattergun from her hip and shot him in the chest. It was the only weapon she carried, these days, because she was generally such a poor shot. After nearly seven years in exile without incident, she hadn’t expected she’d ever use it. What a boy his age was doing on the street instead of at the front, she didn’t know. He was likely a deserter anyway.

  As he squealed in the dirt, trailing blood as he scrabbled away from her, a few curious passersby raised their brows, but no one interfered. This was Sameh, a scaly, contaminated, know-nothing little Nasheenian town bordering the vassal state of Druce, populated mainly by speculators and mad magicians. People stayed out of each other’s business here. It was why she’d come.

  Nyx worried someone might call an order keeper, but the boy had already turned into a neighboring alley, spitting and cursing and bleeding. The pop of the organic rounds in the gun hadn’t been loud enough to get much attention, so in a few minutes the incident was forgotten, one more anonymous Nasheenian shooting among a crowd of spectators hoping to see a far more dramatic show of violence inside, in the ring.

  A passing woman shook her head at the blood and said, “He’s one of those surplus boys just come home from the front. They’re stealing us blind. Wondered who’d do him in.”

  Nyx hadn’t heard much about any “surplus boys,” but then, she preferred to avoid the belchy, misty images spouting from the local radios whenever possible. The present and the past mixed together too much. M
uddled her head.

  Nyx did what she always did after she shot a terrorist or garroted a deserter. She carried on. She stepped inside the fight club. She ordered a drink, and sat down to watch the fights. Among this bloodthirsty crowd, she was just another touchy, trigger-prone spectator.

  Throughout Nyx’s exile, she didn’t think much about all the men and women she’d beheaded, or the mullahs she’d pissed off, or the mines she’d planted, or the battles she’d lost. She thought about the ring. A bad left hook. Poor footwork. Blood in her eyes. Hornets on the mat. Because everything that happens after you climb out of a boxing ring, one-half of your face ballooning into a waxy blue-black parody of death while you spit bile and blood and some fleshy bit of somebody’s ear on the mat, slowly losing sight in one leaky eye, dragging your shattered, roach-bitten leg behind you… is easy. Routine. Just another day breathing.

  After the fights, she sobered up a little on the three-hour drive back to her mercenary buddy Anneke’s homestead, just across the Drucian border. Anneke and her family had picked up house when Nyx was exiled from Nasheen and moved across the border. They gave her a place to stay and built up a new life from scratch. They never once complained about it.

  The homestead site had been Anneke’s pick, a seaside compound with whitewashed walls and tangled, sandy gardens. The sound of the wailing ocean kept Nyx up at night and the contagion sensors sounded off more times a day than the muezzin in Mushtallah. They usually lost everything in the garden to giant beetles and blight. It’d been a season since she ate a green vegetable.

  Nyx turned off the rutted main road and onto a logging trail half-covered over in massive evergreen branches. The trees here before the land turned to dunes were tall as a Nasheenian tenement building. They made Nyx claustrophobic. A single fallen branch had pulverized one of Anneke’s kids two years before. Just like that, and Anneke’s baker’s dozen had been culled to an even twelve.

  Nyx drove through the towering seaside grove and down the long drive to the house. Eight-foot walls squared the compound.

  As she pulled around the circular drive, Nyx saw a foreign bakkie parked in the yard. It was a sleek blue-black hybrid. The whole front end pulsed purple as it sucked up the sun, feeding the bugs in the cistern that powered it. She’d seen fuzzy images of bakkies like this one playing in the background on the radio at a bathhouse in Sameh. They were some new thing out of Tirhan. Expensive, but efficient. No need for juice. The bugs had chlorophyll that fed on solar. At any rate, the tags were foreign on this one. Foreign to Druce, anyway… Familiar to Nyx.

  Nasheenian tags.

  Government.

  Nyx slowed her bakkie to a crawl and killed the juice to the cistern. She pulled her scattergun from behind her seat.

  Nobody drove a Nasheenian government bakkie over the border, not unless they were part of an armed caravan of politicians headed for the interior. That said, even caravans didn’t cross the border at the coast—it was too contaminated. They would have come down the Sunskin Way E., from Mushtallah. Fifty kilometers from here.

  Nyx pulled on her hat and slid out of the bakkie. She held the scattergun at waist height. The big white compound fence gave her some cover. She got close enough to the foreign bakkie to make out the footprints scuffed across the soft, sandy ground.

  Three sets of prints. Two heavy folks, and somebody a lot smaller. Heavy bel dames—the Nasheenian government’s preferred assassins—didn’t use vehicles with government tags. So the little one had to be some government official—and young. All the old ones were soft and fat.

  Most Nasheenian politicians were First Family matriarchs—snobbish, inbred, smooth-skinned folks with a taste for languages and distrust of anything that hadn’t passed through an organic filter. They wouldn’t be caught dead inside a shoddy seaside compound in a backward Nasheenian vassal state.

  Nyx circled around to the back of the house and listened for the kids. They were always up to some shit in the garden or on the grounds. But out here, behind the fence and filter, she didn’t hear a damned thing but the thrashing sea.

  She crouched next to the rear gate. She didn’t see any footprints around the back. No sign of anything being tampered with.

  The gate was coded for her and Anneke’s family. They’d invested in the filter and the codes first thing. Trouble was, you exiled yourself long enough and you started to get comfortable. You started getting drunk and going to fights. You started bringing women home. Nyx should have known somebody would find her.

  She pressed her palm to the faceplate. There was a brief prickling as the plate extracted and verified her blood. Then the gate clicked.

  Nyx shoved the door open with the end of her scattergun. She waited a half breath before chancing a look into the compound, gun first.

  Anneke was waving her arms around like a woman on fire, caught up in some animated conversation with a Ras Tiegan woman. It took Nyx a minute to recognize the foreigner.

  The Ras Tiegan was Mercia sa Aldred, a diplomat’s daughter who Nyx had been charged with keeping alive six or seven years before. Mercia was a slim young woman now, with the flat face and tawny complexion of a Ras Tiegan. Her eyes were big and dark, half-lidded. As she turned to Nyx, the corners of her wide mouth moved up. Paired with her flat forehead, the broad nose, and strangely delicate frame, she was not a handsome woman. Mercia kept her hair uncovered now, but Nyx noted the scarf wrapped around her neck, stitched with the little x-shaped symbol that marked her as a follower of the Ras Tiegan messiah. No doubt she’d prayed to some minor god of diplomats before coming here. Ras Tiegans had minor gods for everything.

  Behind Mercia stood two government-issued bodyguards. Nyx recognized their type. Former vets—underworked and overpaid. They wore loose, dark trousers and matching tunics. Their burnouses were less somber. Smoky gray instead of black. Both women had cropped hair and the peculiar hyper-awareness about them that came from spending too much time at the front. Veterans were always the first pick for government security.

  A delighted smile lit up Mercia’s face. She made the leap from unremarkable to handsome when she smiled. Mercia stood in one clean movement, and even if Nyx hadn’t known her, the polite, easy way she stood to greet her with that plastered-on smile would have given her away as some kind of diplomat or politician.

  Nyx hated diplomats and politicians almost as much as she hated babysitting their kids.

  “Mercia sa Aldred,” Nyx said.

  The smile broadened.

  “You remember,” Mercia said.

  “Where is everybody?” Nyx asked Anneke.

  “How the hell should I know?” Anneke said. Her dark little face was scrunched up like a cicada husk. “It’s fight night. You don’t think the kids are going to hang around here with a couple old women, do you?”

  “Anybody follow you?” Nyx asked Mercia. “Or can I take out you and your nannies and be done with it?”

  Mercia’s smile vanished. “I—”

  The bodyguards moved forward.

  Nyx cocked the gun and leveled it at them. “Who’s first?”

  “Lay off,” Anneke said. “She’s got something worth hearing.”

  “There are a good many people back in Nasheen who’d pay for my head,” Nyx said. “I like it just where it is, thanks.”

  “You’ve been taken off the lists,” Mercia said, quickly. Her hands were up now, gesturing rapidly as she spoke. “They’re even sending Chenjan terrorists home. Mhorian spies. Mercenaries, too. And bel dames. Anyone who moved against the Queen during the war has been pardoned. It’s part of the armistice.”

  “Catshit,” Nyx said. “There have been ceasefires before. One of them lasted twenty years. The war’s not ending. No such thing as peace. Somebody’s paying for my head. Who?”

  “There’s no bounty, Nyx. And the war is ending.”

  Anneke grimaced. “Ease off. Eshe sent a message and vouched for her.” Anneke reached for an empty glass sitting on the sandy stone of the yard and poure
d a drink. Nyx hadn’t noticed the drinks before. How long had this sweet-tongued diplomat been lapping at Anneke’s ear?

  “Oh, Eshe the Ras Tiegan rogue called, did he?” Nyx said. “Well, let in every wandering creeper who caught his eye, then.” Then, to Mercia: “Who sent you? Bel dames? Queen? Your slick diplomat mother?”

  “My mother’s dead,” Mercia said.

  “Well, sorry about your mother,” Nyx said. She wasn’t sorry at all, in fact. She had never liked Mercia’s mother, but the old cat bitch’s death likely put Mercia next in line on someone’s hit list.

  “You don’t listen to the news?” Mercia asked.

  “Not if I can help it,” Nyx said. She hadn’t sought out news of home in three years. All the news was the bloody same. “I’m not in Nasheenian security anymore. I don’t give a cat’s piss for politics. So tell me why you’re here or go home.”

  “I’m Ambassador sa Aldred until my mother’s replacement is appointed,” Mercia said. “Things in Nasheen are very bad.”

  “Things in Nasheen have always been bad.”

  “And there is good money to be made when things are bad.”

  Anneke thrust a glass of whiskey at Nyx. Nyx considered it. She eyed the bodyguards again. “You want to talk? Send them back outside.” She nodded to the guards.

  “No way in hell,” the smaller of the two guards said.

  “I could shoot you now,” Nyx said.

  “Please wait in the bakkie,” Mercia said.

  “I have to respectfully—” the bigger one began.

  “I said wait there.”

  The bodyguards mulled for a bit. Then started for the gate. Nyx kept her gun trained on them. The bigger one eyed Nyx as she passed, said, “We’ll burn this place down you do anything to her.”

  “It’ll be a little late then, won’t it?”

  The woman bared her teeth.

  When the gate was closed behind them, Nyx lowered her gun.

  “Nasheen is on the brink of revolution,” Mercia said. “There are discharged boys with nothing to do but start fights and steal bread. Women are running raids on their own into Chenja, in defiance of the ceasefire. The bel dames… I have never seen them so openly hostile to their own people. The streets are bloody. Bloodier than I’ve seen them, and I spent half my life in Nasheen. I’ve had three bodyguards murdered in as many months.”