The Body Project Read online

  Of course, this one was dead now, which might indicate something at the operation had changed the night before.

  “I’m going upstairs to get his head,” Nyx said. “I need any codes or patterns to get access up there?”

  Henye shook her head. “The top two floors are still under construction. We’ve not locked them. Glorious God, this is terrible. Terrible.”

  Nyx made her way up six floors, passing two floors of convalescing quarters and two more floors locked off with additional security. She made a note to have Rhys sniff those out with a hornet swarm later. It also wouldn’t hurt to get Taite to do a search for the building records for the site. What people said they were to somebody they thought was a bel dame was sometimes a lot different than what they told a building inspector.

  The fifth floor was indeed under construction; buckets of broken tile and plaster lined the hall, and all the windows were uncovered – no screens or organic filters to keep out the cancerous light of the suns. She saw scattered patterns in the debris on the floor of the landing here – the scuffed impressions of sandaled feet. A neat spatter of blood made a fine arc against the far wall. She pulled out her scattergun, just in case, and ascended the final floor.

  She stepped into a wide open space, gutted to its raw bones of stout amber pillars. The windows were all broad, which was why it was so easy to see the head suspended in the one to her right.

  Jahar’s head floated in midair, three paces from the window. The sight of it just… hanging there caught her off guard. She expected more blood. Maybe more bodies. But it simply hung there like some kind of lost, semi-sentient insect that had lost pheromone instructions from its magician.

  She approached the head slowly, circled. No blood on the floor, or the walls – not even spatters like downstairs. Aside from being severed, the head was otherwise undamaged. Nyx did note some bruising around the eyes, which was a telltale indicator of sorasa use – military grade narcotics often prescribed to war-addled veterans. She’d been on them for a year after getting back from the front, and quit because living life on sorasa was like being wrapped in gray gauze and left to observe the world from the depths of some great pit.

  Nyx lowered her gun and went to the window. He’d been killed on the street, then, not up here. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to bring his head up. Why? A warning? A party decoration?

  She heard a scraping sound. Pivoted.

  “Stand down!” A woman’s voice, from across the room. Ventilation? Ventilation in old buildings like this was nonexistent, or extremely tight.

  Nyx stepped behind a nearby pillar for cover, brought up her gun.

  “You first!” Nyx said.

  A lithe woman slid out from behind a pillar at the far side of the room. She pivoted her hips, gun out and pointed down, presenting the smallest target possible.

  Nyx gritted her teeth. Foolish catshit, not to clear the room. She hadn’t thought there was anyone small enough to hide behind the pillars. Stupid mistake. It was a wonder she’d kept her head on a full five years after leaving the front.

  “I could shoot you again, if you want,” the woman said.

  Nyx recognized the voice. “Anneke?” she said.

  Anneke tilted her head to the side. Nyx caught her profile. Anneke, all right – she was a popular hired gun for other bounty hunters and mercenary groups working the border cities. She was also one of the few people who’d shot Nyx and lived to tell about it.

  “Who you with?” Nyx asked. “Come to put a bullet in me again?

  “Nobody gives a shit about you now you’re not a bel dame,” Anneke said. “I’m on my own. You know Jahar?”

  “I did. You?”

  Anneke took a few tentative steps forward, cautious as a cat. Her jaw worked; she spit chewed sen on the floor. Her teeth were bloody with the stuff.

  “Was in prison with her,” Anneke said.

  “One of you must have been a guard, then,” Nyx said. There were no coed prisons in Nasheen.

  “She and I shared a cell,” Anneke said.

  “Jahar was a man,” Nyx said.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Fucked him,” Nyx said. “So yeah, pretty sure.”

  “Well… she changed a lot, if parts matter. But Jahar was always ‘she’ to me.”

  “Reassignment is expensive.”

  “What do you want here?”

  “Figuring out who killed him. Was that you?”

  Anneke snorted. “Too easy.”

  “You going to put down your gun?”

  “When you put down yours. I know your rep.”

  Nyx eased herself out of cover, pivoting her left hip forward, like she was about to start a fight. “Listen, if you’ll ease up I’ll–”

  She heard footsteps on the stairs, then Rhys’s voice, “Nyx–”

  Anneke fired.

  Nyx got off two rounds in response. She slid back into cover, cursing. Unlike Anneke, she was far too broad for the pillar to provide good coverage.

  Rhys dropped to the floor, hands out.

  “Rhys?” Nyx said.

  “Is that a fucking Chenjan?” Anneke yelled.

  “You’re one to talk,” Nyx said. “I heard half your family owns a tea house on the other side of the border.”

  “Totally different.”

  “He’s with me, Anneke. Stand down for fuck’s sake.”

  “How do I know you’re not here for Jahar’s head?”

  “Because you’d be dead already.” Nyx bluffed. She was too far away from Anneke to use the scattergun, and with anything else, from any distance greater than twenty paces, she was a piss-poor shot.

  “Can I get up?” Rhys said.

  “I’m putting away my gun,” Nyx said. “Let’s have my magician look at Jahar’s head. We’re on the same team, Anneke.”

  “I’m on my own team,” Anneke said.

  “You’re on Jahar’s team,” Nyx said. “So am I.”

  Anneke lowered her gun. Stowed it at her back. Strode forward. Nyx let out a breath and holstered her pistol. She spread both palms, an old bel dame habit to show she was unarmed.

  They met at the center of the room and clasped wrists. Anneke was a head-and-shoulders shorter than Nyx, slim in the hips. From behind, colleagues often mistook her for a child. The heavy, double-barreled acid rifle at her back was plenty lethal, though. She wore a belt of acid-tipped bullets and two cylindrical grenades in banded leather cases. Her arms were marked in prison tattoos.

  “If you’ve decided to be friends,” Rhys said, “can I get up now?”

  “You know what happened here?” Nyx asked Anneke.

  Anneke walked over to the head. “No. Got here too late.”

  “Rhys?” Nyx said. “Can you figure out how this head is… floating?”

  He pushed himself up from the floor in one smooth movement, quick and spry as one would expect from a dancer. For all his complaining, he’d adjusted quickly to her line of work. She had seen him dance, and he was a far better dancer than he was a magician.

  Rhys passed a hand above and below Jahar’s motionless head.

  “Bugs?” Nyx said.

  “Magnetics,” Rhys said.

  “What?” Anneke said. “You a magician or organic scientist?”

  “I can sense strong fields, pheromones, gases,” Rhys said. “I need to in order to control the bugs.”

  Nyx grabbed Jahar’s head and gently pulled it forward. As she did, the full weight of it fell into her palms. She let out a breath. Stared into Jahar’s dead eyes. So strange, with the dead – when it was all over, they looked like dolls, for a time. Then… meat.

  “How’s she suspended?” Anneke asked, poking at the space where the head had been with the point of her gun.

  Rhys flinched. “Do please watch where you point that. There’s a magnet above and below. Must also have something in his head, which is why it levitates.”

  Nyx rolled the head over, saw nothing but festering flesh. “We’ll
have to crack it open, back at the storefront,” Nyx said.

  “Crap idea,” Anneke said. “Let me look after it.”

  “I have more resources,” Nyx said, “unless whoever your current employer is knows about your little side project. And I doubt that.”

  “Got no reason to trust you.”

  “No reason to trust you, either,” Nyx said. “But you’ve got information I don’t. I have resources you don’t. Truce, Anneke. For this run.”

  Anneke pursed her mouth. Then, “Fine. This run.”

  Rhys stepped into the space where the head had been. Stared at the ceiling. “They brought his head up to put it here. Right here.”

  “Warning or something?” Anneke said.

  “Ritual?” Rhys muttered.

  Nyx pulled off her burnous and wrapped Jahar’s head in it. “Let’s take him home and find out,” Nyx said.

  “What about the body?” Rhys said.

  “That too. Call Taite and have him drive the bakkie over so we can load up the body.”

  “There’s a problem,” Rhys said.

  “Shit doesn’t need more problems.”

  “I came up because the bel dames are here,” Rhys said. “The real ones.”

  Nyx swore. “You could have mentioned that earlier.”

  “When you were shooting at me?”

  “Are there order keepers too?”

  “Not yet, but Henye did call them.”

  “Stay here and call Taite. I’ll distract the bel dames.”

  She handed over Jahar’s head to Anneke. “Can you get out through this window, meet Taite on the street? If the bel dames get this head, we’ve got nothing.”

  “Sure. But how you gonna distract the bel dames?”

  “Serve them tea and halva?” Nyx said. “Fuck if I know.”

  “Shit,” Anneke said. “Signed with another genius boss, didn’t I?”

  “It’s all right,” Nyx said. “I’m good at pissing off bel dames.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

  #

  Two bel dames stood in the foyer talking to Henye. Nyx knew them both, which wasn’t uncommon. Bel dames were a tight, elite group. Even if she hadn’t met somebody, she’d know them by reputation. The skinny one with the deformed hand she refused to fix was Almira Sameh. Almira was Nyx’s age, mid-twenties – middle-aged, for Nasheen. She had a plump face and lean figure. Her bright red burnous looked too big for her, but Nyx expected it afforded her a lot of cover for the no doubt substantial arsenal she carried with her.

  The other, Dahab, was older. She was a broad, hefty woman who could bench her own weight - a hundred and twenty kilos, if Nyx remembered right. She’d lost an arm at the front, so her right arm was a lighter color than the left – she’d had it rebuilt in some place like this one.

  Nobody would mistake them for anything but bel dames. It was something about how bel dames took up a room, like they knew they were the most dangerous thing in it.

  “Nyxnissa so Dasheem…. I thought you were eaten in prison,” Almira said.

  “In more ways than one,” Dahab said, chuckling.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Nyx said.

  Dahab said, “Now, why in the world would a little bottom-feeding mercenary like you present herself to this fine businesswoman as a bel dame?”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “You did!” Henye said. Her face was livid. Mhorians could get alarmingly red.

  “Bit of confusion on everyone’s part,” Nyx said.

  “You tamper with anything up there?” Almira asked. She eased back the right side of her burnous, and rested a hand on the butt of one of her ivory-hilted pistols.

  “I didn’t touch anything you wouldn’t,” Nyx said.

  Almira waved her clawed left hand. Nyx heard it had been crushed in some machine at a factory, back before Almira had been accepted into bel dame training. The refusal to fix it always amused Nyx. She wished she and Almira got on better. Nyx would have loved to take her to bed and seduce out the story behind that hand. But bel dames fucking bel dames always ended badly. Nyx preferred not to head down that road.

  “I find myself un-reassured,” Almira said.

  Nyx heard Rhys come down the steps behind her, and resisted the urge to turn. Both bel dames watched him like hungry ravens.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Dahab said. “He with you?”

  “Sure is,” Nyx said. “You look at the Plague Sister’s body yet? Seems somebody blasted their way in.”

  “Meant to look that way,” Almira said. “Henye here says there’s a head upstairs. We still going to find it there?”

  “See for yourself,” Nyx said.

  Dahab drew her gun. “Almira could see from the street it wasn’t there, Nyx.”

  Nyx held up her hands, spread her palms. Forced an extravagant grin. “Go ahead and search us.”

  “We’ll do more than that,” Almira said. “The order keepers will be here in a quarter hour. Why don’t you two cool off in the rebuild room with the Plague Sister and me while Dahab checks things upstairs?”

  Nyx hated getting into situations she couldn’t shoot her way out of. Killing bel dames was illegal, though it took a lot to kill them. She knew.

  “You don’t have the authority to hold me,” Nyx said.

  “How about your partner?” Dahab said. “Looks like a fucking Chenjan terrorist to me.”

  “You’re the one holding the gun,” Nyx said.

  Almira motioned them both toward the rebuild room. Nyx glanced back at Rhys. She didn’t know him well enough to read him, and he kept his face pretty stoic. His gaze stayed on the floor. Nyx took stock of the room again. They could make a break for the blown-in wall at the back of the room, but she didn’t know where it led. The ceiling was low, unblemished. At the center of the room was a great stone tub with pulsing semi-organic hoses coming out of it, all attached to various broad glass jugs of viscous fluid teeming with different types of bugs. Nyx had spent more time than she cared to remember in a tub very much like it.

  She tried to catch Rhys’s eye again, but he wouldn’t look at her.

  The bel dames had just put a magician into a room filled with the tools of his trade. Nyx might not have an edge here, but he did. Did he have the guts to make a move?

  Dahab walked past them and up the stairs. They had maybe ten minutes before Dahab got up there and figured out the head was gone, and fifteen – fourteen, now - before order keepers swarmed the place. By then whatever tenuous lead Nyx had on figuring out who killed Jahar would get eaten up with bleeding all over paperwork and shitting in holding cells.

  “Why were you really here?” Almira asked. She blocked the doorway.

  Nyx put her hands down, but kept her fingers splayed to show she wasn’t carrying anything. Nyx herself had shot more than one person in holding for making fists.

  “Just passing by,” Nyx said. “Saw the body, had a look in case there was a bounty on it. You?”

  Almira shook her head.

  “What,” Nyx said, “you think I can’t hack a com? Who assigned you two to this one? It was a civilian call-in, not an assigned note.”

  “Bel dame council rep assigns all the call-ins,” Almira said. “That hasn’t changed.”

  “Who is that now?”

  “Nyx, I have a caravan of relatives coming in for a wedding tonight. Don’t pull me into this. It’s a simple grab and go and you’re messing it up.”

  “You were always softer than Dahab.”

  “And you were always a fucking psycho.”

  “That puts it mildly,” Rhys said.

  Nyx glared at him.

  “I’d get a new employer, gravy eater,” Almira said to Rhys. “You know all her partners end up dead?”

  Rhys finally looked at Nyx. “I didn’t.”

  “Dead in all sorts of interesting ways,” Almira said. “Eaten by organic filters, stuffed full of carrion beetles. Heads chopped clean off...” She smirked at Nyx
. “I saw the deserter’s file, Nyx. He served under you. Why am I not surprised he ended up dead here?”