God's War Part 21

Nyx tried to measure Rhys's reaction, but he was staring off into the air.

"Taite, I'll need you to stay here and work the com, keep an ear on what's going on in Nasheen. All right?"

"Sure thing," he said. "Does Husayn play cards?"

The siren started to mute out, then died.

Clear.

"No, but she can teach you to box," Nyx said, looking pointedly at Rhys. He didn't react, but Taite made a face at her. The idea of Taite doing anything involving vigorous physical movement was a running joke.

"Anneke," Nyx said, "let's go get that bakkie running properly. We'll need to give it new paint and put on the new tags. Rhys?"

He looked over at her. "Yes?"

"You here?"

"I'm here," he said.

"Good," she said. "We'll need you. I want to talk to you about some things."

Nyx pushed Khos and Taite away from the com and laid out the papers she'd taken from Kine's office. She motioned Rhys over. He walked up next to her. She opened her mouth to say something stupid about him, about gravy or prayer wheels or picnicking on the graves of the dead, but she realized she was too tired, and all she really wanted to say was that she'd missed him and his b.u.t.toned-up coat.

"When I went over to Kine's, I saw that they'd gone through her papers looking for something," Nyx said. "What they didn't know is that she doesn't keep her private papers in plain view, not when it has to do with her work in the compounds."

"So what is this?" Rhys asked, paging through the ciphered sheets.

"Her private papers. I figured you and Taite could decipher them and see what my bel dame sisters wanted from her. It could have been a hit on Kine just to get to me, but... well, they knew Kine and I weren't close."

"They aren't all ciphered," he said, pulling out a bound record book. "Looks like compound records. I'd have to know more about the technology they're using."

"Taite can look that up. You'll try?"

"I'll try."

"Good." Nyx made to move away from the com. They had a tight deadline, and she already had the litany in her head: papers, bakkie, call the contagion center, go to the bank, pick up gear and supplies.

"Nyx?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry about Kine."

"Me too," she said. She saw the body again when she blinked: the sightless eyes, the rusty water, the white feather. "I'm going to go help Anneke with the bakkie."

"Nyx?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm a dead man in Chenja."

Something inside of her hurt, something she kept trying to dull with sen and whiskey. She pressed her fist to her gut.

"We'll be all right. n.o.body out there knows you anymore. I can get you over the border and back." When she said it out loud, she almost believed it.

The way you got Tej over the border?

Rhys pursed his mouth and went back to the papers.

Nyx took Anneke by the collar, and the two of them went down into the garage and looked over the bakkie.

"Who the h.e.l.l did you have go over this?" Anneke asked. She unshuttered the overhead light. The worms in the gla.s.s were dying, and the light was bad.

"Local mechanic in Jameela."

"I can heal up the front end, maybe replace the b.u.mper if you want to spend the cash."

Anneke wrenched at the hood. It hissed open. She rolled up the long sleeves of her tunic, showing off the jagged black lines of her prison tattoos, the most prominent of which was a shrieking parrot clutching a b.l.o.o.d.y heart. She leaned in. She swore. "s.h.i.+t, how'd you get this back here? You need a new cistern. And your brake line is leaking. f.u.c.k, that coagulant stinks. Who cut this line? You sewed it up twice."

"Rasheeda. The tissue mechanic patched it the second time. I didn't have the cash to replace it."

Anneke sighed and straightened. "You should just get a new bakkie, boss. A proper one with a real flatbed instead of a trunk, one of those ones with the reinforced cistern."

"Can't afford it."

"Can't afford the repairs neither."

Nyx handed her a portable light. "Lucky for me, my labor's cheap."

Anneke grinned. "Yeah, I know. I get the receipts."

"At least we know you're a good shot."

"Naw, if I was a good shot you'd have died in Faleen, proper."

"I hired you anyway."

"Bad judge of character."

"I know."

"Huh." Anneke moved to the back of the garage and pulled out a giant needle, some hoses, and a pair of clippers from the supply cabinet. She had to stand on a box to reach it. "You think you can get the boys back over the border?"

"Raine did."

"Raine had a lot of contacts."

"Yeah, I remember."

"Hand me some clips and some lube," Anneke said.

Nyx handed them over, and Anneke disappeared under the hood. Nyx heard the wet slurping of organic tissue as Anneke slid her hands among the guts.

"Why'd you keep running with Raine, after?"

"After what? The thing with you?"

"Yeah."

"Eh," Anneke said. "I've seen him do worse."

Anneke reappeared, poked her head around the hood to look at Nyx. She was covered in lube and bakkie bile up to her elbows. "We won't be able to get Rhys back over the border."

"Don't be so dry."

"I know your count. You never got a guy back over the border."

"I'll get Rhys back over."

"Yeah. Huh." Anneke leaned back into the guts of the bakkie.

"I'll get him over."

"Doesn't sound like it's me you're trying to convince. Hey, I get some cigars for doing this, or what?"

"Just remember to fix the window," Nyx said. She set the new tags for the bakkie on the front seat. "And put the tags on. I'm going to go look into getting a cistern."

"Hey, Nyx?"

"Yeah."

She straightened. "I've seen Raine do a lot lot worse." worse."

"Me too," Nyx said.

"So how are are you getting us across the border this time?" you getting us across the border this time?"

"It's a surprise," Nyx said.

Anneke grunted. "I hate surprises, boss. The last surprise I got, somebody died."

"Yeah, well, the last surprise I got, I went to prison," Nyx said. "I sympathize."

17.

Rhys woke in a bad mood, and morning prayer didn't make him feel much better. He needed a clear head, but even after going through the salaat, his mind was still stuffed with list after list of chemical compounds and vat numbers and bug secretions. Kine had been a copious note-taker, but none of the names and numbering in her records made much sense to him-it likely wouldn't make any sense to anybody outside the breeding compounds. And he was out of time to decode it. He left most of it with Taite so he could work on it in their absence.

At least his immersion in Nasheenian organic tech had kept him from dwelling on the border crossing. Nyx kept telling him that she had a way to get over the border that wouldn't involve any of them inhaling chemical vapor and burning out their lungs.

But somehow, he doubted it.

Anneke-who was dark to begin with-rubbed herself down in bug secretions to stain herself even darker. Anneke was skinny in the hips and flat-chested and could pa.s.s for a boy. She had done the same a half-dozen times with Raine's crew, she said. She and Khos could drive right over the border-a particularly low-tech, low-security part of it, in any case. She had a couple of her relatives on the other side scout out a good stretch and a.s.sured everybody twenty times over that she could handle herself.

They were packed at dawn.

Rhys stood with the others around the loaded bakkie. He had his Kitab in one hand. He watched Nyx standing next to him, her face a cool blank.

"You keep your head down and report any deviations to Taite, got it?" Nyx told Anneke. Anneke rubbed down her gun while they all waited for Khos to s.h.i.+ft.

"Yeah, boss. Me and Khos'll meet you in Azam, bright and s.h.i.+ny. You gotta take care of that wheel spinner, though." She winked at Rhys.

Rhys watched Khos stow his clothes behind the front seat and start his s.h.i.+ft.

Rhys had to look away when he did it. The contortion and contraction looked obscene. Wrong Wrong. As a magician, Rhys could feel the wrongness in the air, the bending of matter in ways it should not bend.

Anneke opened the pa.s.senger door, and Khos-the-dog jumped inside and settled onto the seat, tongue lolling. He was a yellow, blue-eyed dog now, cleaner than the wild mutts that scrounged for garbage in the streets but otherwise no different in appearance.

Nyx sidled up closer to Rhys and crossed her arms, and the two of them watched Anneke and Khos drive out of Husayn's garage and into the violet double dawn.

Rhys took a step away from her, to give himself some room. He was angry at her again, angry about this, about all of it. He wanted to find some way to tell her why he was angry, to explain it, but she tended to believe that every conversation involving strong emotion was full of words and resolutions that were not meant, as if he were a raving drunk. She saw every stated emotion as an admission of weakness.

"So where are we going, Nyxnissa?" he asked.

She spit sen on the garage floor. "The morgue," she said.

Rhys closed his eyes and prepared himself for horror. The last eight years had been an unending nightmare, starting with his flight across the desert. And it will end with my flight back into the desert, he thought. The globe the queen had given them had included a detailed summary of what she was willing to pay them in return for Nikodem-alive or dead. Nikodem, the alien with the big laugh. He had known her immediately upon seeing her stills but was uncertain about how he felt about hunting her. She was just an alien, and the sum to bring her in-even split five ways-was indeed enough for all of them to retire on. If they completed this note, he could leave Nyx, and this b.l.o.o.d.y business, forever.

He had no idea what he would do, after.

When he opened his eyes, Nyx had gone.

The dead that came back from the front were processed in filtered containment facilities expressly designed for the purpose. Chenja and Nasheen had signed and broken-and signed and broken and signed again-treaties requiring the return of the dead to the processing centers-the morgues-within thirty days of a soldier's death. The morgues were run by magicians who identified, cataloged, decontaminated, and burned the dead. The sterile remains were placed in ceramic jars and s.h.i.+pped home to mothers or sisters or merely sent to the war memorials on the coast-vast, s.h.i.+ning walls of smooth metal that faced the sea. The largest of them was the Orrizo in Mushtallah, a monument dedicated to unidentified soldiers-dead boys and patriotic women.

After being reconst.i.tuted, Nyx had worked at the containment center just west of Punjai. She had to pay back the magicians for putting her back together, and the dirty, dangerous work in the containment center was the only work they had for her at the time. She had spent her mornings loading bagged corpses onto carts and her afternoons sorting piles of body parts that the magicians insisted all went to the same body. More often than not, the magicians were wrong, and she'd have to take out an extra arm or leg or the remains of a foot and throw it into another pile made up entirely of "unidentified" parts that were later burned up and dumped in the Orrizo.

It had been s.h.i.+t work, and she'd been hosed down and swept for organics three times after magicians suspected her of being exposed to contaminated bodies. Chenjans and Nasheenians alike had been known to plant bug-borne viruses in the flesh of the dead before sending them back over the border.

Even the dead were partic.i.p.ants in the war.

Nyx still had some contacts at the morgue, so she and Rhys. .h.i.tched a ride with a caravan going to Punjai, waiting out the hottest part of the day at a little cantina before walking the rest of the way to the center. An old woman named Ashana met them at the gates at dusk, after Rhys had finished his prayers and Nyx had finished her sen. Ashana brought them in through the filter at the rear of the compound, where the bodies selected for contamination-as opposed to decontamination-resided.

She led them to the containment room.