Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 23
Khos was keening.
Anneke slid up next to Nyx, rifle out. Nyx put her hand up and batted the barrel away. “Just watch her,” Nyx said, raising her voice over the sound of Khos’s pain. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything else stupid.”
Nyx went over to where Khos lay in a pool of blood and piss. He was a big man, and his writhing had left smears of runny crimson all over the grimy floor. The blazing shrapnel from the buzz gun had torn open his left side, shredding his left arm and seeding it with green, gooey spores that were rapidly sinking their tendrils into his flesh.
Rhys knelt over Khos, one hand on Khos’s right shoulder, the other hovering over the wound. “He’s going necrotic,” Rhys said.
“No shit,” Nyx said. “Can you fix it?”
“Not on my own. I need to evacuate him.”
Nyx glanced back at Anneke, and the little cowering clerk, Khalida, who had positioned herself under the sink, making herself as small as possible. Good plan on her part.
“I need a three-person team to retrieve those bodies,” Nyx said to Rhys. Khos was still yowling, but she tuned it out. She had gotten very good at tuning out cries of distress. “You drive him over to the squat where Taite is and have Taite drive him to Kashan. They’ve got a good magician’s gym there run by a woman named Tabriza. She owes me a favor.”
“Taite’s just a kid,” Rhys said. “You can’t put him in a bakkie with Khos like this. Who will keep this wound stable? I’ll go with Khos.”
“I need a magician,” Nyx said. “Nyx—”
“You’re always saying my name when you talk to me, like I don’t know it. You work for me, not Khos.”
Khos jerked on the floor, flailing his bad arm. Blood spurted.
Rhys pulled off his burnous. “Help me get this around him,” he said to Nyx, and she did.
Khos was both heavy and strong, a bitter combination in his current state. He took a swing at Nyx with his good arm, meaty and clumsy, and she easily ducked it. Anneke came over to help, but Nyx waved her back. “I need you to clear the way up there,” Nyx said. “Take point. I don’t want to be ambushed by magicians.” Then, “Abbi,” Nyx said. “A little help. You, too, Khalida. Make yourself useful, you little shit.”
Anneke loped up the steps to clear their way.
Nyx could have dragged Khos’s deadweight up the steps, but fighting him while he bled and howled was a little much for her to tackle on her own. Nyx wrapped her arm around him and pulled his good one over her shoulder. Foamy blood oozed from his wounds and spattered his mouth. He heaved, spewing vomit that reeked of rancid milk. How he still had anything in his stomach was anyone’s guess. He jerked in her arms.
“Little help!” Nyx said, again, and Abdiel and Khalida finally came up behind and gripped him as he keeled over. Abdiel was shaking like a thorn bug. Nyx figured cutting up bodies all day required a different sort of stomach than hauling around live, bloody ones.
The five of them hauled Khos up the stairs and loaded him into the bakkie half a block away. It was the longest half block Nyx had walked in some time. She kept hearing the whine of artillery. She scanned the sky, saw nothing, figured it was phantoms again. She sometimes saw boys with their faces mashed in, and a bloody river spouting from her own arm while a magician sobbed and told her how sorry he was, so sorry, but she had to be rebuilt . . . Ghosts from some other time, some other life, dusty as funeral ashes.
“Drive,” Nyx told Rhys, and slammed the bakkie door. She leaned into the open window, said, “And you come back quick. We’ve got four more notes to bring in. You got it?”
He said nothing, but the look he gave her was ice. He pressed the juice pedal, and the bakkie barked away into the street.
Nyx sat down on the curb. Anneke took position next to her. They were both covered in sticky blood, rancid puke, and the little green spores that had settled into Khos’s open wounds. Nyx wanted a bath and a whisky and a fuck, not necessarily in that order.
“Think he’ll make it?” Anneke said.
“Shifters are cheap,” Nyx said, but her memory disgorged an image of Khos between her legs, his big hands on her ass, and she had to fill her mind again with his souring body, resigning herself to the likelihood of his death. Plenty of people on her teams died. Plenty of people she had fucked died. This was Nasheen. This was what it was to be alive in this place, in this time. You accepted it or you went crack fucking mad and died an old woman in the desert, babbling to her ghosts. “I don’t care,” Nyx said. She pushed herself to her feet and pointed at Abdiel. “When Rhys gets back, we’re going hunting.”
But Rhys didn’t come back.
Taite did.
When Taite walked into the front of the general store where they were all eating, Nyx threw a pan full of yams at him. He ducked. The clay pan broke neatly into two big pieces, spraying mashed yam all over the store counter. Abdiel clapped her hands over her mouth and tumbled out of her seat. Khalida, the little clerk, shrieked. Anneke kept eating, undeterred, her rifle leaning against the table at her elbow.
“Bloody hell!” Taite said.
“It sure will be if Rhys isn’t behind you,” Nyx said.
“He’s taking Khos to a magician’s theater. He’s half dead.
Did you see him?”
“I saw him,” Nyx said. “Fuck.” She sat back down at the stained table at the back of the store, rattling the rest of the cookware. Anneke put out a hand to steady the pot of softened dog meat.
“You saw what happened to Khos and you’re still running this note?” Taite said. Taite was a skinny, pock-marked kid, all knees and elbows, not much out of his teens. He was supposed to be her com tech, kept safe behind a com console where he could spy on and transmit messages sent by bug pheromones, beetles, and other secretions. This wasn’t a great place for him. She had absolutely no use for a com tech on the battlefield. He’d get shot immediately. But once again, Rhys was fucking up and giving her no choice. She needed to fire the little shit magician and get somebody who would fucking listen.
“Don’t ask questions right now,” Nyx said. “You have the bakkie? You bring guns and com equipment?”
“Yes, but Khos—” “Stay focused, Taite.”
“A team member is down, I—”
“He’s being treated,” Nyx said. “We carry the fuck on. There are four death magicians out there and this little fuck over here knows where they fucking are. So shut up and make yourself useful. You’ll drive. And you,” Nyx said, jabbing her finger at Abdiel. “You ride up front with me.”
They all piled into the bakkie, minus Khalida, who slammed and locked the door the moment they were all in the street.
“That was not fair payment!” Khalida wailed after them. “Not for what I went through!”
“You’re lucky you lived,” Nyx shouted back, because she couldn’t stand ungrateful people.
“West,” Abdiel said from her place up front, squeezed between Taite and Nyx on the torn front seat. Bullets slid around on the floor with a couple of food wrappers and half a can of lubricant.
“That narrows it down,” Nyx said.
Anneke slammed the door in the back and set her rifle beside her.
“Drive,” Nyx said.
Taite fumbled with the starter. Nyx tapped her fingers on the dash while he sweated it out. Finally, she snapped, “Get in the back. I’ll fucking drive.”
He ducked out and slid into the back next to Anneke, her rifle now set between them. Nyx hit the juice and they were off, spewing dust and dead bugs behind them.
Taite crowded up behind Nyx. She felt his hot breath on her neck as he said, “So what the hell are we doing?”
“Hunting sin,” Nyx said.
“The seat of the soul,” Abdiel said.
“She says there are other bodies out there,” Nyx said. “Prob- ably our magicians. Already dead, even.”
“West is the front, though,” Taite said. “Bloody piss, this is the third suicide mission in as many months. Some of us like being alive.”
“Real perceptive crew I have here,” Nyx said. She tapped the steering wheel and reached for the radio. The radio hissed and spit watery yellow images of talking heads, then cut out. Just her luck.
“Shit,” Taite said. “Rhys didn’t say it was the front. That’s why he didn’t come. You know he’s probably not on the right side of Chenja.”
“Yeah, well, we sure as fuck aren’t either,” Nyx said. “We got any liquor?” Anneke asked.
“Under your seat,” Nyx said. It was half the reason she couldn’t wait to get back on the road. Anneke yanked out the bottle, took a swig, and handed it over to Nyx.
Nyx drank, and passed it back. Something whined over- head, and Nyx peered out over the street. She swerved around a dead dog and turned out past a big sign that said, Seven kilometers to contested territory. Go with God.
No other place to go out there than with God, Nyx thought. “Why are you looking for souls?” Taite said, still leaning up on the back of the front seat.
“It’s my vocation,” Abdiel said. She played with the edge of her yellow Mhorian robe, which was frayed and dusty. “My research, in Mhoria, is on the soul, and where it resides in our bodies. But as your . . . your Mhorian man said, they don’t allow autopsies in Mhoria. They do in Nasheen, though, of course. So I came here to complete my research.” She reached into her robe and pulled out a little book. Nyx glanced over at it as Abdiel thumbed it open. Inside were detailed drawings of dissected bodies. Spines featured prominently.
“So have you found the soul?” Taite asked. He pointed at one of the spines. “It’s there in the spine?”
“Well . . . there are some . . . differences, between Nasheenians and Mhorians.”
Nyx snorted. “Is that so? You think you haven’t found this place where the soul is because Nasheenians don’t have souls, is that it? Blaming us because you believed some rumor in your holy book?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s what I heard,” Nyx said.
“Let’s be logical,” Abdiel said. She tucked her book away again. “All of our holy writings discuss the presence of the house of the soul, the luz. It’s thought it may be at the base of the spine. In a similar area where you pulled out those black bags of toxins. I think the two are related.”
“Those were just border cats,” Nyx said, “you know, people who smuggle things in their bodies. People doing black work. I’ve done work like that. It’s got nothing to do with clearing sin out of the soul, or whatever mystical organ you think houses the soul. If it did, you’d have found this lux or whatever—”
“Luz,” Abdiel said.
“Right,” Nyx said, “you’d have found it right there, or Rhys would have. But you haven’t. So it’s just a story.”
“It’s not that crazy,” Taite said. “Ras Tiegans have been looking for where the soul is housed for a long time. I mean, no one’s found it, obviously. But lots of people still talk about it. The heart, the brain, and there are all sorts of other organs that we don’t even know much about. Why couldn’t they house the soul?”
“Because if you took them out,” Nyx said, “that person would be soulless. Better question is, what makes somebody soulless? How do you say I’ve got a soul and you don’t?”
“Or the other way around,” Taite murmured.
“We’re all from different worlds, originally,” Abdiel said. “Certainly we are all very different looking people, with very different views of the world. Why is it so strange to posit that our anatomy is different? The skeletal structure of Drucians is highly abnormal—”
“What, are we comparing them to you, or Nasheenians?” Nyx said. “First Families, or grunts? Like, what’s your defini- tion of normal? Man, woman, somebody in between? You tell me. I’ll need a pretty firm definition that’ll probably only fit five people anyway.”
“For a grunt, as you say,” Abdiel said, “you get very tangled up in specifics. What do you care about my research? You said you only care about the bodies.”
“I’ve seen how First Families use the idea of good breeding to justify sending us all off to war,” Nyx said, “to get ground up by the machine while their smooth-faced kids lounge around at home eating figs. So yeah, I know your kind.”
“My kind?”
“The kind that needs to justify all the shit they do. At least I’m honest. I kill people for money. I don’t pretend it’s something prettier, like looking for a fucking soul. You go cutting out parts of people to see if they have any soul left, you pretend it’s a noble cause. But it’s no nobler than mine. You’re just a butcher.”
Taite leaned over to Anneke. Nyx watched him in the rear- view mirror.
“Half a note says Nyx sleeps with her,” Taite said.
“I’m not taking that bet,” Anneke said, taking another pull on the whisky bottle.
“Oh, shut your shit,” Nyx said.
The season was spring, but most of the rain out here in the central desert came in the fall, not the spring. That meant it was bearably warm but parched-mouth dry. When dusk hit the dry air was going to get bitterly cold, and Nyx didn’t want to be out here when that happened. She watched the horizon while Abdiel nattered on about her research, eagerly answering Taite’s questions. The People of the Book always had more things in common than not. Nyx wondered when they would all just give up and admit that. Too easy, really. There were certainly plenty of people she would never forgive for old ills, no matter how much it would benefit her. Because fuck those people.
Anneke had her gun propped up on her lap now, whisky bottle between her legs, window rolled down, doing her own surveillance in the back. The desert scrub turned to pitted dunes as massive as First Family housing complexes. Fragments of burnt-out old cities and abandoned weapons, ancient contagion sensors, and mangled military vehicles lay scattered across the contested ground. Nyx had yet to see a military blockade, but there could be rogue squads hiding out behind any of these dunes.
“I love the desert here,” Abdiel said. “The dunes are like mountains.”
“I like an unobstructed view of where the fuck I’m going,” Nyx said. She chewed at the dry, ragged skin of her lips, wishing she had more sen to dull the increasing sense of unease she was getting this close to a hot zone.
“This turn, up here,” Abdiel said. Nyx saw smoke in the distance for the first time, little fingers curling skyward. The tracks here along the road were fresher, and there were signs of recent fighting. The air smelled of burnt copper and saffron, and that got her skin crawling. They were still a good way off from the official front, but this was heavily contested territory. As she turned off the track she slowed down and finally stopped once she saw the black smear of the village in the distance. Little settlements like this were routinely gutted and overrun every five or six years. The sort of people who came back and resettled tended to be those who traded in guns and illegal genetic material, as well as the very poor and the very desperate. The magicians had likely been here to make some kind of contact where they could turn over the toxic bags in their guts for cash, or whatever else they wanted. “We’re walking the rest of the way,” Nyx said, cutting the juice to the bugs. “But—” Abdiel began.
“If this town was taken, the road’s likely mined now,” Nyx said. “Even if it isn’t, you know, better safe than splattered on the road.” She glanced back at Taite. “See, now? Not so suicidal.”
“You just don’t want to go out stupid,” Taite said. He wasn’t wrong about that.
Nyx popped open the trunk, half expecting to see her captured magician friend asphyxiated in there, forgotten, but Rhys hadn’t fucked her over completely. He’d removed their captive and stuffed the trunk full of guns, bursts, water, and other desert gear. Maybe she wouldn’t fire him just yet. She could be merciful when it suited her.
Nyx tossed Anneke a bandolier of additional ammo and refilled her pistols. She hefted a big acid gun and gave Taite a shotgun.
“What should I use?” Abdiel asked.
“Your wits,” Nyx said, and shut the trunk. She didn’t need another team member obliterated by Abdiel’s poor trigger control.
Nyx put Anneke on point. She was little and had better vision and better aim than Nyx. Nyx came next, and had Taite take the rear, behind Abdiel.
“Try to stay about fifteen paces apart,” Nyx said. “That way if we hit a mine it won’t take us all out.”
“That’s reassuring,” Taite said. “Should be,” Nyx said.
When it came to roadside bombs, there were signs to look for. Sometimes you’d see kids out there watching the roads who’d stick their fingers in their ears when you got close to a mined section, anticipating a blast. Chenjans liked to stick bombs inside piles of dead Nasheenians, so anybody trying to do body retrieval would get taken out, too. Magicians who triggered bombs generally had to have line of sight, so she scanned for robed figures with hands outstretched or lips moving, staring far too hard at their current position.
But it was eerily quiet out here. Even as they advanced on the village and the acrid smell of smoke got thicker, Nyx heard and saw very little. The suns were still up, but the first sunset wasn’t more than an hour away. She really didn’t want to lose the light.
“My sister served so I didn’t have to,” Abdiel said.
Her voice sounded loud in the quiet, making Nyx start. “What the fuck?” Nyx hissed. “Figured you were raised in Mhoria. And what the fuck does that have to do with shit now?”
Abdiel lowered her voice. “My father is Mhorian,” she said. “We were born here, but went to school there, and of course, my studies extended much longer than my sister’s, but only because she took my place here. I could have been extradited and made to serve. I’m just saying this because . . . you should know I haven’t done this before. I mean, I just drove out here on a tip. I didn’t think about bombs or anything.”
“You didn’t have to tell me,” Nyx said. “Your poor gun safety already gave away how much experience you have.”
