Rapture Read online

  “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.”

  15.

  At 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 bug-cemented 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 ha
lf 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.

  He raised his head.

  Women emerged from the world around him.

  They seemed to come up from the sand itself, like Nasheenian women did in his dreams—half a dozen of them, wearing calf-length dhotis, breast-bindings, and heavy turbans the color of fresh blood, that wound about their heads and faces. The ends trailed out behind them like tattered flags. The clothing was the same color of the sand in this part of the desert, as if it had been dipped in blood and left to age in the sun.

  The women were nearly the same color, reddish-brown, darker at the knees and elbows. But it was their height that impressed him. They were tall as giants—the tallest rose above him by a full head and shoulders.

  Rhys froze. His bullets were deadtech—difficult to replace out here—and he was down to his last four. Two short of what he needed.

  “What happens now?” Rhys asked, in Khairian.

  The women said nothing.

  He began searching for a swarm. He felt something stir beneath his feet. Something large. Not at all the type of thing he wanted to wake up and try to control. But it was there, waiting. A few others clung to the edges of his awareness—fire ants, scarabs, and wilder things, bugs he had no names for but the impressions and scents they used to differentiate themselves from one another.

  “I’m employed by a man named Hanife,” Rhys said. He knew they had not come for that. Knew they did not care for that. But he had to say it anyway, to everyone he encountered. If the man was as Payam said he was, he would be loved or despised in equal measure. Best to play a bet on finding the man’s allies. “He lives north of here. I was separated from my caravan during… a sandstorm.”

  But the women were unmoved. They stayed still for so long that Rhys wondered if they were truly live things, or a hallucination. He passed his hand in front of his eyes, but the women remained rooted to the spot. Watching.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said. “I just needed water.”

  The woman nearest him said, in Khairian, “We have come to collect blood debt for Circle Bavaja.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rhys said. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “You have defiled one of ours,” the woman nearest him said. She was fleshy in the face, soft compared to her taut, lanky body. “You have fed a body to the sand that was not yours to take. We have come to claim vengeance.”

  Rhys took a deep breath. He flexed his hands, preparing to draw his pistols.

  “There has been a mistake,” Rhys said. “It was an accident.”

  “It is not an accident to spill blood. Vengeance must be taken. We are the avengers of the blood.”

  They moved toward him like a desert wind over hard stone—fast and fierce.

  He drew his pistols. He was a fast draw, and a good shot. But he got off only one round. In the next breath, one of the women had his wrist twisted behind him. His pistol was on the ground, and pain screamed up his arm. He fell to his knees and lost his grip on the other pistol. She released him. He let out his breath and shook the pain from his twisted arm.

  The women made a circle around him. The fleshy one said, “Your blood debt will be paid, stranger.”

  “I have nothing to give you,” he said.

  “You lie about that,” she said. “There is always your blood.”

  “The bodies of our kin lie ten days back at the Rovanish water cairn where you slew them as we came to reclaim that which is ours. Now we have come to collect blood debt for your crime.”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Avengers,” the woman said. “We have come to avenge the lives you took.”

  “There has been some mistake.” My God, Rhys thought, I am a thousand miles from Nasheen and they have bloody bel dames out here? Would he never be free of them?

  “We don’t pass judgment. We merely collect,” the woman said. “Your fate will be decided by Circle Bavaja.”

  “And if I don’t agree to come with you?”

  “You will come with us.”

  He glanced from one set of dusty desert eyes to another. Their expressions were all shrouded, indecipherable.

  He tensed. Then he turned. Tried to break away from their circle.

  He wasn’t sure where he was going, what he would do. He just needed to get away. Far away. Back to Elahyiah. His family. He meant to put it all right.

  Something heavy thudded into his back before he got three paces. He stumbled. Fell. Pain radiated deeply across his lower back. It was like someone had skewered him with a flaming brand.

  He tried to claw forward, but the women were already there, one at each elbow. Black pain bit at his consciousness.

  “Elahyiah,” he said, and that was all.

  16.

  When Kage dreamed, it was of cool, dark spaces. Soft voices. Walls that hemmed her in, close enough for her to reach out and touch. Comforting. Her perfect world was a smooth crevice at the back of a cave. She knew her way around the dark. For her, the nightmare was the desert. Wide-open, unobstructed views. Big, bold sky.

  As the road turned to gravel, then hard-packed sand, it was still dark outside, and comforting. But as the sun rose and the way smoothed out she realized they were headed toward a vast expanse of absolute nothingness. It was like being devoured by some great-mouthed monster with an unfathomable appetite. The desert scrub grass and rocky protrusions quickly became hard-baked brown playa. Flat. Limitless. The vast lavender sky met the brown desert in every direction, as far as she could see. It was terrifying and unsettling. She gripped her gun close. After a time, she found that the most comforting thing she could think to do was stare hard at the seat in front of her.

  The first time Kage slept under the open air, she was thirteen and still raw and sore from her blooding the day before. It all started happening at once, for girls, after the blooding.

  She slept under the vast sky that night with a handful of other women, all of them older than her, if only by a few years. She felt completely exposed, vulnerable, for the first time in her life. Yes, certainly, she was small, even for someone of her people, but she was fast and limber. She knew where to hide in a fight. Knew exactly where to hit to land the most amount of damage with the least amount of effort. Her mother had taught her that—tricks she picked up from the Nasheenians she watched in the factories.

  “When you’re old enough,” her mother told her, “you will do your time in the factories. Learn Nasheenian. Make enough money to earn the right to a spouse. Perhaps a pair of them.”

  It was a rite of passage, of sorts, to go out into the factories and return with the goods and currency her people needed to survive. Everyone left, but not everyone came back. It was those who did not come back that made her most nervous. Where did they go? Did the sky eat them? Did they fall into it, explode like stars? Or was it the Nasheenians that ate them?

  Now she traveled across a landscape so alien that waking to it each morning gave her vertigo. When Nyx asked her if she was all right as they rode along in the spitting organic contraption the
y called a bakkie, she half thought to claw open Nyx’s face and scream about how the sky was going to eat them. The feeling came over her most at dawn. It was a breathy, oppressive thing. Like holding on to a great flying beast that you knew you could not hold.

  “You all right?” Ahmed asked. He sat beside her at the wheel of the bakkie, as unconcerned as the others about the limitless space as the suns came up over the desert.

  She nodded, once, and gripped her gun a little tighter.

  The bakkie ground to a halt the next day. Sunk deep in the sand. Nyx had them work an hour or so to try and free it. When that didn’t work, she told them to unload all they had and start walking. To where, exactly, Kage was not certain. All she cared about was that it was very far from her country, Dei Keiko, the country the Nasheenians called Druce.

  Kage raised her head and stared at the unending landscape. She had not anticipated this. What she expected, she wasn’t sure. Maybe riding in a bakkie or caravan the whole way. Perhaps taking a series of trains. Or trekking up and about mountains—solid, massive hulks of stone to hide on and within. She had not expected this insecure place.

  “Won’t we be exposed out here?” she asked softly as she pulled on her pack.

  “Caravans are few and far between,” Nyx said. “So hitching a ride isn’t much of an option, but we might run into one. Bakkie isn’t much good anyway. Easier to spot than a group of people in dusty burnouses.”

  But Kage knew that Nyx was wrong about that. Groups of people were very easy to spot at a distance. What she must have meant was that they no longer presented just two targets. Now they were six—seven counting the Ras Tiegan girl. On foot, it was less likely they would all be taken out at once. The others would serve as decoys, letting Nyx and her boy escape. Kage sometimes wondered if this strange woman knew she was so transparent in her self-preservation.

  Ahmed asked Kage to help clean out the bakkie’s cistern of bugs. They collected them into jars and packed them away for seasoning up meals later on. It was easy enough work, and she enjoyed crooning to the insects as they worked.

  Their newest member, the arrogant little Ras Tiegan girl, was standing behind the second bakkie, hopping from foot to foot on the hot sand. She had not brought proper shoes. She and Eshe were arguing. They had been arguing all week, ever since Nyx pushed the girl into camp and announced she was coming with them. Kage still didn’t understand why, and each day they traveled with her, her unease grew. Ras Tiegans were not trustworthy people. She hadn’t slept properly since the girl joined them. All her dreams were murky with blood and the ominous purring of Ras Tiegan-talk.