Rapture Read online

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “I remember you saving my life when it was yours they wanted,” Mercia said. “I’d pay you for it again.”

  “Honey pot, you came all this way to offer me a job?” Nyx snorted. “I think that’s enough talk. Take your women out of here and go home.” She started toward the house, said over her shoulder, “And next time you come banging on a wanted woman’s door, think up a better story.”

  “Wait, please,” Mercia called after her.

  Nyx trudged up the steps. She should go out front and kill the bodyguards. She wasn’t too keen on killing Mercia—she was a diplomat after all—but there were plenty of places in Druce to stash a body. Thing was, she wasn’t so certain it was only Mercia and the bodyguards who knew where she was now. How long until some other bakkie full of women came along and bombed out the house? How many more of Anneke’s children would blister and bleed to death before it was done? Seven years. She thought she might just die out here, forgotten, presumed dead. But once they found you out, there was no turning back. She would have to kill a dozen people to keep this place quiet and safe now. Kill a dozen people… or go back to Nasheen with Mercia.

  “You know how long it took me to find you?” Mercia said. “Finding Eshe took many months, and I had to tell him the fate of the world was at stake before he’d even give me the name of the nearest town. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”

  Nyx got to the top of the steps. She heard two of Anneke’s kids—Avava and Sabah—arguing inside about which of the three squads of kids was making dinner that night. Anneke’s remaining dozen were almost thirteen years old now, and there were few things more mentally aggravating than a house full of hot-and-bothered thirteen-year-olds. Most of them were wickedly good shots and passable at putting together mines, thanks to Anneke and Nyx, respectively, but more and more these days, Nyx was asking herself what the hell they were doing teaching kids to fight a war that everybody said was supposed to be ending.

  “Nyx!” Mercia pleaded.

  Nyx started to push through the filter that kept the worst of the bugs and contagion from the house.

  “Fatima sent me!”

  Nyx stopped cold in the door. Turned back.

  Mercia had followed her to the edge of the porch. Mercia’s look was less composed now, on the edge of panic. Why? Why was it so important to bring a bloody anachronism back to Nasheen? Weren’t there enough bel dames and mercenaries to keep the streets running red?

  “And what does Fatima have to say?” Nyx asked.

  “She has… a job for you.”

  “And you couldn’t say that up front?”

  “She didn’t think you would come. And if it had been her or another bel dame at your door, you would have killed them outright. But she said that if you wouldn’t come… She said she has a job for you. She wants you to be a bel dame again. She says now that the Queen’s pardoned you and she’s leading the council, she has the authority to redeem you.”

  Nyx felt something flutter inside of her, something that had been dead a good long time.

  “She must be very desperate to send you here with an offer like that,” Nyx said. “Or she must think I’m very stupid.”

  “Things are bad, Nyx.”

  “How do you profit from this?” Nyx knew enough about politicians to know that even Mercia was likely a fine one at this point, and fine politicians didn’t do anything unless they stood to profit from it.

  “It’s not about me, exactly, it’s about… saving Nasheen.”

  “Of course it is,” Nyx said.

  She raised her gun and aimed it directly into Mercia’s face. The little diplomat had the sense to tremble. The color bled out of her face.

  “Get the fuck off my porch,” Nyx said.

  “You going to fuck her or kill her?” Anneke asked when Nyx sent Mercia off with her bodyguards. “You never look that close unless it’s one or the other.”

  Nyx stood with Anneke in the prayer room on the second floor, watching Mercia and the bodyguards get into the bakkie. Downstairs, the rest of the kids had come home and joined Avava and Sabah, still arguing about who was going to make dinner. Nyx supposed their choices would be fried locusts, yam noodles, or something unsavory that they had fished out of the ocean. They had pulled some globular one-eyed monster out of that seething, viscous sea the week before, and the thought of it still gave Nyx the dry heaves.

  “Not sure yet,” Nyx said.

  Anneke sighed. She had a stooped way of walking now, something to do with the degeneration of her spine. Genetic, the magicians had told her. Shouldn’t have hauled around forty kilos of gear for twenty-five years of mercenary work, either. But what was done was done, and though bone regeneration was possible, eliminating the root cause of her disease was not, and no matter how often Anneke went in to get it fixed, her body would just fail again. Anneke’s hair was shot through with white now, and her pinched, Chenjan-dark face was the face of an old woman, though she wasn’t much older than Nyx.

  “You gotta make a decision sometime,” Anneke said.

  Nyx said, “She upstairs?”

  “Who? Oh. Yeah.”

  “Mercia see her?”

  “No.”

  “You tell Mercia about her?”

  “Fuck no, why’d I do that?”

  “Mercia’s got a pretty story,” Nyx said. She watched Mercia’s bakkie roll off down the rutted drive. “I just don’t know that I believe it.”

  “Believe her or not, they know where we are now,” Anneke said.

  “I got that.”

  “You going to risk it?”

  And Nyx heard the real question behind that. It wasn’t fear for Anneke’s own life, no—Anneke knew she didn’t have long left—it was fear for the kids, and for everything and everyone they had come to care for here. It was a mistake to let her guard down, to let anyone close, even after all this time.

  “Just got to tear it all down,” Nyx muttered.

  Anneke pursed her mouth. “She’ll understand. She knew what you were before you hooked up with her.”

  “Nobody really knows what I am,” Nyx said. “Not until I put a bullet in their head.”

  Nyx went upstairs. Opened the bedroom door. There sat her lover, Radeyah, sketching the view of the sea from the balcony on a foolishly expensive slide that devoured each stroke. She was joyously lit up in that moment like a woman at peace with God.

  Radeyah turned as Nyx entered, and the light went out of her face.

  “It was one of them, wasn’t it?” Radeyah said.

  “They’ve asked me to go back to Nasheen.”

  Radeyah and Nyx had grown up together in Mushirah, a farming settlement on the Nasheenian interior. Friends first, lovers later. Then they fell apart when the boy Radeyah fancied came home from the front with half his body missing. Radeyah stayed on in Mushirah, and Nyx went to war.

  Nyx thought that was the end of it, until a boozy night in Sameh, now thirty years later, when she saw Radeyah sitting out on the levee sketching the sea. Nyx had known her immediately. Radeyah was older, and plumper, but her face was still warm and her body, if anything, more inviting. Nyx knew it could only end badly.

  It’s why she was so shocked when Radeyah came to her two weeks later at the local tea house and said, “I’ve been wondering all week why you were staring at me. But you’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem, aren’t you? Do you remember me?”

  In answer, Nyx had ordered her a fruity drink, and asked if she had finally bought the seaside house she always talked about. Radeyah laughed, and it was a liquid laugh that stirred something long since dead and buried inside Nyx—some whole other life that she had to forget in order to lead this one.

  Radeyah ceased her sketching. “Tell them no,” she said. Nyx admired the nimble way she held her stylus. She imagined Radeyah would have been a fine swordswoman, if she ever had a mind to pick up a sword. But Radeyah had spent her entire life on a farmstead in Mushirah. Afte
r her family died, she said she came to Druce to paint the sea, but when Nyx saw her moth-ridden flat with the leaky tub, moldy ceiling and surplus of drugs in the bathroom, she suspected Radeyah had not come to Druce to retire. She had come here to end it all.

  Nyx didn’t like that idea. When she was with Radeyah, she dreamed less of the ring.

  “I have to go,” Nyx said.

  Radeyah’s jaw tightened. “I suppose we’ve been playing at being lovers a year now. Like children. It was bound to end soon enough.”

  “You know what I am. What I’ve done—”

  “That was all a long time ago—”

  “The Queen has a very long memory.”

  “Just tell them—”

  “They know I’m here now. They’ll come for you. All of you. They’ll burn it up and scatter your corpses. That’s who I deal with. That’s the kind of person I am. If I don’t go with them now, you’re dead.”

  “How long?” Radeyah said.

  “Could be two or three months. Could be a year. I don’t know.”

  Radeyah wasn’t good at hiding her emotions. She never had to. The pain that blossomed on her face made Nyx’s gut clench. She had to look away. Had to start cutting out that part of herself again, the one that cared about a thing because somebody else did. I’ve gotten soft, she thought. This woman made me soft.

  “I waited for a man most of my life, and when he returned, he was little more than a hunk of charred meat. Is that what you’ll come back as? Or something worse? I have spent my whole life waiting to live, Nyx. I’m too old to wait.”

  “I’m not asking you to wait.”

  Radeyah closed her slide and stood. “I should go.”

  “Stay for dinner.”

  “I should have known you would go.”

  Nyx walked up to her. Took her by the arms, leaned in. “If I didn’t give a shit about you I’d tell them to fuck off. I’d wrap you up and cart you off to some other house and fuck you on the porch all day until they burned it around us. But I do give a shit. And I’m too fucking old to see everything me and you and Anneke and the kids built destroyed because I couldn’t do one last job.”

  Radeyah wrapped her arms around Nyx. Nyx pulled her close. They made love there on the floor as the light purled through the billowing curtains. Nyx traced Radeyah’s scars from her two births, all dozen children lost to the war. When Radeyah came, she bucked beneath Nyx’s hand, revealing the twisted collection of scars on her backside where the magicians had pulled shrapnel from her after a commuter train accident north of Mushirah. There were more scars, more blemishes, a lifetime of Nasheenian living mapped out on her body. Nyx loved her for it, a little. And feared for her—far too much.

  Radeyah stroked her hair, after. “I won’t wait for you,” she said.

  “I know,” Nyx said.

  Even as they lay together in the cool breeze, Radeyah soft and comforting next to her, Nyx felt herself pulling away, boxing herself back up, until soon she was nearly numb, and the spidery tattoo on Radeyah’s ankle that still bore Nyx’s name no longer gave Nyx the same flutter of affection. It was easy to become everything she hated again. Remarkably, maddeningly easy.

  Nyx closed her eyes, and stepped into the ring.

  2.

  Eshe put his shotgun down on the battered table between him and the priest. The priest was a fastidious little man, clean and neat, with long limbs and balding head that put Eshe in mind of a dung beetle. He was Ras Tiegan, flat faced and broad nosed, with a pale as piss complexion that was a little ruddy in the nose and cheeks. He was already halfway through a pint of hard ale, and Eshe guessed he’d started drinking well before Eshe showed up.

  The priest’s eyes bulged at the shotgun. Eshe figured the old guy had never seen a gun up close. Eshe was prepared to get him a good deal closer to it.

  “You have a license for that?” the priest asked, hissing around his drink like there was anyone else in the tavern who cared about their business.

  The sticky sweet smell of opium seeped in from the bunkhouses upstairs. A woman wearing a muslin habit with the back torn out slipped into the front door and scurried into the kitchen on bloody, swollen feet. Someone cried out from the gambling room in back. The distant gong of church bells called the faithful to midnight prayer. Just another dark Ras Tiegan night at the edge of the protected territories.

  “You think I’d need a license here?” Eshe said.

  The priest mopped his brow with a yellowed handkerchief. “There’s no need for that, boy. I came here, didn’t I? What kind of whore’s dog are you, to throw weapons around at a holy man? I need another drink.”

  The priest had come wearing the long brown robe and tattered cowl of his order. His was one of the less popular sects, populated by cowardly little men instead of the more fit, robust types Eshe was used to. He had a golden cord looped about his waist and neck, fashioned into a crude X at his collar, but the garb didn’t mean much out here. In the larger cities, the less contaminated ones, maybe, a priest’s robe was enough to save a pious man’s life. But when bugs crawled through your filters every night to lay eggs in your flesh and noxious air killed off your babies if you kept them too close to the ground, there was less reverence for a man of God who did not also wear the bloody apron of a magician. Magicians saved lives. You only called on a priest when you knew your life was over.

  Eshe leaned toward the priest. “Tell me what I need to know or your next drink will be leaking out a hole in your gut.”

  “I only meant—”

  “It’s my people in this place, old man. I could skin you alive right here and they’d help me chop you up and feed you to the flesh beetles.”

  The priest swallowed. “They’re moving her next week, before the Feast of the Blood. I don’t know where they’re keeping her, but I know where she’s going.” His gaze lingered on the gun, darted away. “It’s Jolique so Romaud’s house. You know it? He has a… collection… of those like her. He felt that, with her mutation, she would be an excellent addition to his collection.”

  Eshe should have known. Jolique was cousin to the Queen of Nasheen, and all but untouchable in Ras Tieg. No magistrate or God’s Angel would dare raid his house looking for captive shifters. Abuses committed by the rich and powerful were overlooked in Ras Tieg, just as they were in every country.

  “What road?” Eshe asked.

  “Rue Clery. She should arrive around fifteen in the morning.”

  “Staff?”

  “Four men and a wrangler.”

  Eshe leaned back in the chair and lifted the gun off the table.

  The priest sighed. The shadow of a smile tugged at his lips. He didn’t know that he’d been dead from the moment he sat down.

  Eshe pointed the shotgun into the priest’s mealy little face and pulled the trigger.

  The gun popped. The priest’s head caved in. Black, bloody brains splattered the wall behind the priest.

  Eshe stood and wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve. The mostly headless torso of the dead priest slumped sideways. Eshe expected he’d feel happier about it, after all this man and his kind had done.

  The bar matron, Angelique, tsked at him. “Did you need to do that?” she said. “That’s four priests in as many weeks.”

  “That’ll keep them from coming around, then, won’t it?” Eshe pulled on his hat and pushed toward the door.

  “Godless heathen,” Angelique muttered.

  “I know all about God,” Eshe said. “These men don’t. Or did you forget what they did to Corinne?”

  “It’s just… you Nasheenians—”

  “Nasheenians don’t murder their own people for being born shifters. They don’t kill their own babies. And they sure as fuck don’t—”

  “Shut it, Eshe,” a man at the end of the bar said. Eshe had seen him around, but couldn’t place him. Angelique’s hired muscle, ever since the Madame de Fourré started using the place for meetings for her rebel shape shifters. Angelique’s son was a
member of the Fourré, but it didn’t mean they liked Eshe’s half-breed face. Sometimes he wondered if his heritage was more offensive to them than his ability to change into a raven.

  Eshe bristled. “Sorry about the mess,” he said to Angelique. “It won’t happen here again.”

  He would find a new tavern.

  Outside, the Ras Tiegan night was cool. It was a rare clear night in the city of Inoublie during the rainy season. He could already smell the promise of more rain on the wind, mingling with the scent of curry and dog shit. As he hustled through the narrow streets, swarms of mayflies and cockroaches choked his path. A ragged, mewling desert cat in a cage whined at him from a high balcony.

  Along the edges of the horizon, just visible through the occasional break in the buildings, was the swampy jungle—a dark, ragged stain. Odd hoots and cries and drones muttered at the edge of the city, barely muffled by the spotty filter that kept out the worst of it. What Ras Tieg had managed to build out here had been hacked out of contaminated jungle—a jungle that ate cities nearly as quickly as the Ras Tiegans could put them up. He passed the hulking wreck of a former church, now a recreation hall. Old, twisted slabs of metal protruded from the exterior—corroded, half-eaten. Metal was not known to last long on Umayma, but the Ras Tiegans had been entrenched there only twelve hundred years or so. Even their poorly put-together, non-organic ship skins took a while to break down.

  He climbed up into the clotted, ramshackle district tenement he called home; swung down into the guts of his apartment. It was a tight little room: raised bed, mud-brick oven. Most of the important stuff he kept in the walls or in the pockets he’d burrowed out in the floor.

  He took off his coat and stowed his gun. Then he unrolled his prayer mat, faced north, and went through the salaat for evening prayer. There was no call to prayer here, only the bells for midnight mass and the weekly call to services every ninth day. It was a lonely thing, to pray alone, to speak to God alone. Salaat always calmed his nerves, though, and when he finished the final recitation, he remained on his knees for some time, breathing deeply. If someone had asked him seven years before what he thought he would miss most about leaving Nasheen, he would not have thought about the call to prayer. Mostly, he missed the sense of being part of something larger than himself. Praying alone every day just reminded him of how different he was here.