Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 25
“Good job,” she said.
“What?” he said, heaving himself inside. He fumbled under the seat for a water bulb.
“The bursts,” she said.
“I didn’t find anyone,” Taite said. “I was coming back to try and rescue you myself.”
“Well,” Nyx said, “glad that wasn’t how it went down.”
She spun the bakkie into reverse and did a wide turn. She slammed two of the four pedals, filling the cistern with so much juice that a lot of live bugs spit out the back end along with the dead ones. It had been Nyx’s lucky day—bursts from some other raid had given her the cover she needed to bag her catch.
They drove in near silence for some time, listening only to the whir of the bugs in the cistern and Abdiel’s hacking.
Nyx leaned out the window and yelled for Anneke as they wound closer to the border. Anneke would stay out of sight of the road, but not far from it.
A figure leapt out of a dune ahead of them, and Nyx slammed on the brakes.
Taite opened the door, and Anneke got in. She was dusty and thirsty. Her bottle was empty. She dug around in the back for water. “Fuck of a run, boss,” Anneke said.
Nyx powered the bakkie down the road. “Got lucky,” she said.
“Good thing,” Anneke said. “Shit, I was making shit time.
You’d be dead.”
“I know,” Nyx said. She wondered if that’d be better. Abdiel spit up blood and shrieked.
“She all right?” Taite asked.
“No,” Nyx said. “She’ll need a magician.” “Can Rhys do it?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“That’s a long drive,” Taite said. “It’s a long night,” Nyx said.
Nyx drove and drove, until the light in the sky was only a memory, a flashing at the edges of her vision, like every other piece of her past.
“I don’t understand,” Abdiel said.
They sat in the back of Nyx’s storefront back in Mushmura. Khos was still healing up with real magicians, and they wouldn’t be able to pick him up for another day or two. The bodies they’d recovered from the little shit town were laid out on the floor. Abdiel was sitting upright on a cot, holding a foamy cup of green bug juice in her hand. She had gotten some color back in her face, but her hands still shook. Rhys leaned in the doorway at the front of the store, arms crossed, pistols visible. Nyx liked it when she could see the bone hilts of thos pistols. It reminded her he was only completely useless when it pleased him. As it was, she wanted to slap the shit out of him. Abdiel stared across the floor at the open chest cavity of the body she had partially autopsied. “I wanted it to be more than that,” she said. “There needs to be more than this, doesn’t there? But all these spines are clean. No luz. How could so many get it all so wrong?”
“Maybe the soul’s just somewhere else,” Nyx said.
Rhys tried to catch her eye, but Nyx turned away from him and pulled on her burnous.
“I need some air,” Nyx said, but Rhys followed her out to the porch. They had settled in here for another night and a day, and it was dusk again. She hadn’t slept in all that time. Two days now, without sleeping? She’d lost count. Maybe that was what all the hallucinating was about. Why the past was clawing at her more than usual.
Rhys stood beside her, so close she could feel the heat of him. She wanted to take his arm and bury her face in his chest and breathe in the scent of him for the rest of the night. “I couldn’t believe what I heard in there,” he said.
“Yeah, djinn are real,” Nyx said. “So were the Seven Sleepers, and also that guy with the green teeth I dreamed about last night.”
“Were you trying to soothe her? ‘Maybe the soul’s just somewhere else’? Really? You?” His tone was far too full of mirth.
“I don’t believe anymore, Rhys. Big empty place where God used to be—in me and in the world. But I remember what it was like. Not my place to take it away from some kid. The world does that well enough on its own.”
“God doesn’t go away,” Rhys said, “even if you do.”
“Oh, spare me the shit,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it. “You wouldn’t take God from her, but you try and take him from me?”
“Rhys,” she said, and she turned so their arms touched. “I take the piss with you, but when have I ever told you to leave God like I did?”
He stared at her with his big, dark eyes, and for a long moment she let herself get lost there. Then the fear cut through her. The fear that if she didn’t look away now, and shit on him, that he’d look at her the way Khos did, and then she really would have to leave him and his God in a ditch somewhere the same way she was willing to leave Khos. And then how would Rhys look at her, after she let him think she had a soul and then broke his heart?
So she looked away. The evening was cool and dry, and Nyx felt invincible. The world felt a little brighter. She stepped lighter, here. Breathed deeper. Fuck, she felt so good after a close job where she’d almost bitten it. So fucking alive.
The call to prayer sounded. She shifted away from Rhys, so she could no longer feel his heat.
Saved by prayer. Always, prayer.
Nyx left Rhys at prayer and went to join Taite out in the back where he sat hunched up on a tattered wicker chair as the bloody purple-red of the day’s first sunset smeared the sky. He turned one of his little saint statues over and over in his hands. Nyx didn’t know which one it was—they all looked the same to her.
Nyx slumped into the seat next to him as the call to evening prayer sounded across the valley below. She tucked a little sen into her mouth from the bag at her hip. She still needed a fucking bath.
“Solid job,” she said. “They’re sending in somebody to pick up those bodies tonight. Get rid of that smell. I’ll have Anneke wash out the bakkie in the morning. You’ll get a good cut for this job.”
“Every day we don’t die is good I guess.” “You don’t sound like it.”
He rubbed the saint’s face; the features had been smoothed into obscurity some time ago. To her eye, the head was a lumpy yam. “We all know Rhys is the only person on this team you give a shit about,” he said.
“Where’d that come from?”
“I tell myself that’s all right,” he said. He kept his gaze fixed on the sky, and spit the words like he was at some Ras Tiegan confession. “It’s all right because shit, when I worked for your old boss there wasn’t a single one of us he’d sacrifice anything for. We were all alike, to a guy like that. But I won’t lie, Nyx. It gets to me. It gets to me that I could live with you all these years like we’re some fucked-up family and you’d just leave me to die on some rooftop somewhere if you thought I’d inconvenience a job.”
“Never pretended to be anything but what I am,” Nyx said. And she wanted to add, “not like you,” but that felt too much like digging into his past, and she’d sworn not to do that with anyone on her team. She cast about for some whisky, but it was all still inside, and she’d have to get up and miss the bleeding sunset. “We’re all mercenaries,” Nyx said, instead. “You just as much as anyone.” Then, before he could whine anymore, she yelled, “Anneke!” back into the house. “Get me a drink!”
Taite finally turned to her. “She’s at the shooting range,” he said. “You can’t just drink everything away.”
She pointed at his little statue. “You numb all this catshit with your little toys. I numb it with booze. No different.”
“Whatever, Nyx,” Taite said. He stood. “I wish . . . No, never mind. I just. I get what Rhys has against you, sometimes. I mean, I like my job. But . . . I get it.”
Taite pushed inside.
“Fuck you, too,” Nyx said, softly. To herself. To the wind.
To a world that didn’t fucking care.
Nyx was already drunk by the time she stumbled down the low hill behind the storefront and joined Anneke at the shooting range. It was almost midnight prayer. The whisky bottle between them was three-quarters empty. Anneke was still putting pithy little holes in the targets at the other end of the field while Nyx shot off her pistols wildly, hooting and hollering, stomping at the ground like a woman on fire. Maybe she was.
Anneke shot off another round. Nyx snatched up the bottle and threw herself on the cool ground, and gazed up into the black patch in the sky, the great darkness of the celestial plain where no stars were visible. She drank, and gritted her teeth, and wondered at the fact that she was still alive. It felt so fucking good.
“I don’t think I have a soul,” Nyx said.
“Eh?” Anneke said. Another shot, two more, then six in quick succession.
“No soul,” Nyx said. “I got rebuilt, after the front. You know that. The magicians rebuilt me.”
“Sure,” Anneke said. “Catshit. You didn’t.”
“Sure I did,” Anneke said. “Your eyes are off.” “What?”
“Your eyes are two different colors,” Anneke said. “I mean, other shit, too. You’re mean and crazy. But mostly, you got two eyes it’s clear ain’t yours. Other parts, too.”
“You say that like you ain’t mean and crazy, too.” “Didn’t say I ain’t.”
“You get rebuilt?”
“Naw,” Anneke said. She brought her gun over to a stone slab near the little gun house. Far off, a brilliant amber burst went off. Some skirmish at the front. But the booze had numbed up Nyx enough that she barely registered it. “But I get what you mean, about having no soul. The war steals a little from all of us, you know. Leaves that big patch of empty.”
Nyx pointed up at the darkness. “Like that.”
“Sure,” Anneke said. “Like that. You gonna shoot, or you gonna drink?”
“Both,” Nyx said. She closed her eyes and soaked in the heat still lingering on the sand. “Ain’t nothing like the feeling of being alive after you almost died, you know?”
“I know,” Anneke said. “You get addicted to it.” “That why you run with me? You sick on it, too?”
“Why you even need to ask, boss? Sounds pretty close to asking about dead shit.”
“No dead shit,” Nyx said, and pushed herself up. She took a slug from the bottle, then handed it back to Anneke. Nyx pulled her pistol again and took another couple wild shots at the sandbag targets out there.
“Someday I’m going to teach you to shoot,” Anneke said. “What’d be the fun in that?” Nyx said. “I can’t be fucking perfect at everything.”
Anneke cackled like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Nyx couldn’t imagine why.
Another burst broke along the horizon—deep purple, tinged in orange stars. It was beautiful. Everything was so goddamn beautiful, with or without a soul, with or without God at your hip.
Nyx took another shot.
THE WAR OF HEROES
THE HEROES LEFT THE MAN dying on the field, one of the thou- sands they pitched overboard from their silvery ships at the end of each battle with Yousra’s people. Yousra brought him home and had him castrated, to ensure he spread no contagion, and put him to work in the village. The Heroes’ men tended to eat little and work hard, and with so few people left in the village, his labor was welcome.
Plague had killed most of the village men when the Heroes first came. In those early days, Yousra’s people had welcomed the cast- off men the Heroes dropped at the edge of every battlefield as some kind of tribute delivered from the sky. Now they recognized them for what they were: plague-ridden bags of pollution, another weap- on of war, their seed meant to sour wombs and turn babies into monsters. But her people still needed the labor, so they castrated them and hauled them home regardless.
It was Yousra’s task to kill the children resulting from such rot- ten unions; the plague ran deep now, rewriting the map of each child, so even now, three generations after they understood the threat, their children were still rotten. The children Yousra killed were already rotten and gangrenous in the womb. Killing such mon- sters did not frighten her.
The Heroes did.
The Heroes’ man had big, bloodshot eyes set deep in a broad, flat face. Black blood clotted his cropped genitals. His wrists were rubbed raw. She saw bruises on his face and thighs, put there by his own people, no doubt, or perhaps some of hers, before she de- cided she wanted him. When she looked at him she was reminded of her own dying men on the hill of battle, the ones who tried to fight the Heroes when their big ships came overhead. Those men, she could not save. She settled for this one. They were not so dif- ferent, the Heroes’ men and hers. The Heroes might have come from some other star, but Yousra’s people, too, had been born from the sky.
She took the man inside her house. He flinched under her hands. No one had ever seen the Heroes without their big suits of armor, only their men, so she supposed it was possible that the Heroes, too, looked much like Yousra. But she had always suspected they resembled insects, like the hard shells of their suits. It had taken eight of Yousra’s people with machetes to overtake a Hero, once, but even when they did, the Heroes’ reinforcements beat them away from the body before they could peel away the scaly layers of their suits. Why they left their men behind now, when all knew they were diseased, was uncertain. Perhaps they simply wanted to get rid of them, and could not bear to kill them any more than Yousra could.
“You’re a wreck,” she told the man. He whimpered. She pushed open his eyelids to examine his eyes. Gray eyes, unremarkable. Like her people, he had a clear, vestigial eyelid on the inner corner of his eye. Useful for the relentless sandstorms that wracked this part of the world . . . useful for the day when their crops were finally blown away and her people were cast back into the desert from which they came.
Prophetic times. End times. She did not expect to be alive by the time the desert reclaimed them.
She fed him milk of poppy mixed with afterdrake for the pain, then cleaned him up as he drifted in and out of consciousness. It was a wonder he had not bled out. Most did. She had to pinch and dig to find his urethra. She inserted a hollow bamboo tube to keep it open while the wound healed.
He did not recover quickly, or well. Yousra bathed him each day with water and diluted tea tree oil. She kept his wounds packed in precious honey to combat infection and ward off fever. At night, she woke to his cries, and soothed him like a child. As she held him, it reminded her of her own childhood, when she would hush her brothers’ cries so they would not draw the scavengers. The man babbled in some unknown language. It sounded mushy, as if he were chewing a gob of sap, sticky and sweet. Every time they thought they understood the Heroes’ language, they sent them men who spoke differently.
A few weeks later, when the village priest and his brother en- tered into an agreement with the potter woman on the edge of the village to form a marriage, Yousra was called to organize and bless the wedding, and the bride, and her most-likely rotten womb. Why her people married anymore, she did not know. She would bless this girl now and kill her monsters in a few months. Round and round, as their numbers dwindled, and the Heroes came through, building shining cities of glass and amber where once there were sprawling towns.
The bride dressed in the white of a martyr. Yousra had the He- roes’ man bring her tools into the bridal tent. When Yousra was a child, weddings took months or years to plan. Now the time of engagement was a matter of weeks.
She called the Heroes’ man simply “Boy,” and he answered to it. He could walk, after a fashion, and that was good, because she had no use for a broken man. She bore some affection for the boy—how could one not bear affection for one you nursed and comforted? But she had borne affection for monsters, too, the ones that went bad days or weeks after birth.
And she had killed them just the same.
The bride, Chalifa, was lovely. Her mother was one of the first births Yousra had tended after her predecessor, the village head- woman and priest, had died in childbed.
Yousra had always hoped to be headwoman herself by the time Chalifa married, so the girl’s wedding night would belong to her. Instead, Yousra merely outfitted the bride and gave her blessing.
“Will it hurt?” Chalifa asked as Yousra placed a circle of holly above her brow.
“It’s a ritual unblocking,” Yousra said. “It will make your first coupling much easier.”
Chalifa took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean the unblocking of the womb. I meant . . . the birthing.”
“That’s some time away,” Yousra said carefully.
“If it’s . . . If it’s gone bad . . . I don’t have to see it, do I?” “No,” Yousra said.
“You’ll kill it?” “Yes.”
“Good.”
Yousra opened her mouth to tell Chalifa what a fine choice she had made, what fine children she would have—the same speech she had given a hundred doomed women—but as she did, a dull, vibrating hum stilled her speech. The holly leaves on Chalifa’s head trembled.
Yousra looked to the entrance to the bridal tent. The Heroes’ man had paused also, water bulb in hand. The fine hairs on his arms and neck stood on end.
The hum grew to a tinny whine. It was like nothing Yousra had ever heard. She felt the air tremble. Heard a heavy whump-whump, far off.
Yousra gazed outside the bridal tent. Something silver streaked across the lavender sky, like a giant thrush. The other villagers had come out of their tents. They, too, looked up—rapt, open faces gaz- ing skyward.
“What is it?” Chalifa asked. The world went dark.
Smoke. Heat.
Yousra flailed in the darkness, pinned by the cloying weight of what must have been the bridal tent. She clawed for daylight. The air was bad. She gasped. Then screamed. Screamed and screamed and clawed at the tent, ripping and tearing at the hemp cloth. It wasn’t until the hilt of her machete knocked her hip that she real- ized she still carried it.
She pulled out the machete and sliced open the shroud of the bridal tent. Smoky air rushed in.
