Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 37
“Are you coming then?” Nev said. His throat closed, and his voice shook. He cried as he rubbed the little pig’s waggling butt.
After a time, Nev stood. Pig gazed up at him adoringly. Nev took a few hesitant steps forward. He called for Pig, still afraid he would not come. But Pig trotted after him, content to follow his new family. Together they forged across the road as the suns broke through the trees.
CROSSROADS AT JANNAH
“The world is a prison for the believer and a paradise for the unbeliever.”
—Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2956
THE FIGURE IN THE DOORWAY was missing half her face and most of her left arm, which had been replaced with a green glowing claw with a texture and sheen that reminded Nyx of a scorpion. More impressive was the bowed length of metal that served as the woman’s left leg. What made it impressive was the fact that the woman hadn’t been jumped in the street while she waited in the doorway, and been divested of her conspicuous wealth. No doubt anyone who considered stealing the pure metal had second thoughts on seeing the woman’s shredded face. Nyx certainly wouldn’t have tangled with her, and Nyx had been hunting down deserters, wrangling with gene pirates, and boxing with mullahs for half of her life. The one remaining eye that the woman turned upon Nyx was steely, cold, set back in the ravaged flesh of the face.
“You’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem,” the woman said. “That’s what the sign says.”
“Not technically, no,” the woman said, and sat down on the rickety chair across from Nyx’s desk. The day was hot, and she was perspiring heavily. She pulled out a sweat rag and wiped it across her face, then tucked it back into her burnous. She wore a breast binding and loose pair of trousers. Her gut was the sort acquired over long nights of drinking to excess, which paired well with the broken veins across her nose.
Nyx took the hint and pulled out a bottle of whisky from the drawer at her left and poured them both a drink.
“Ah!” the woman said, smacking her lips. “I am Hafeez Arwa. You come well recommended as a woman good at find- ing things.”
“Folks with problems always seem to find me.” “You do run a problem-solving business.” “Never thought of it as anything so refined.”
“It’s all in how you spin it,” she said, polished off the drink. Nyx capped the bottle and cocked her head at Hafeez.
“Let’s talk business before you polish off the rest.” “I need to find a data lake,” Hafeez said.
Nyx let that idea roll around in her head a minute. Maybe the heat was getting to her, too. Her magician, Rhys, and her com tech, Taite, had retreated into the basement to escape the heat. She was starting to wonder if she should have done the same. She’d have missed this visitor, and her drink would be a lot colder. “A lake . . .” Nyx said, testing it out, “full of data. Right.”
Hafeez plumbed the depths of one of her burnous pockets with her pincer arm and came up with a handful of beetle casings. She spilled them onto the table like dice. “I get you’re used to finding bodies,” Hafeez said. “This time, the bodies are the bugs that used to store information.”
Nyx picked up one of the transparent rectangular cases. Inside was a shiny yellow beetle surrounded by threads of silky organic filament. “I know what they are,” she said. “My com tech stores all recorded conversations on them. And I’ve seen them plenty in interrogation rooms when we’re pulling up recordings.”
“Ever wonder what happens to them when they’re no lon- ger needed?”
Nyx snorted. “Not once.”
Hafeez said, “Most are destroyed properly, put in bins of acid that dissolve the casing and everything inside. But that’s expensive. Others simply feed them to bugs tailored to the purpose. They’re a form of flesh beetles, and they’ll simply consume and excrete what’s left.”
“So what happens to the rest? Sticky fingers?”
“Laziness,” Hafeez said. She tapped her glass on the table, but Nyx didn’t think it was a conscious gesture. “There are firms that say they will collect your old casings and destroy them en masse. They haul them out into the desert and bury them in acidic lakes. Because there are so many casings, it takes a long time for them to break down. There are people, like myself, who take advantage of this. We go data fishing, scooping up casings from this acidic slurry to see if they can be salvaged or repaired and the data subsequently retrieved.”
“I take it this isn’t exactly legal.”
“Ah, well,” Hafeez said, swiping her claw in front of her as if turning off a radio image, “is that enough for another drink?”
Nyx obliged. She found the woman strangely likeable.
Surprising, because Nyx didn’t like most people. Hafeez reminded her of an old commander of hers, from the front, right before she was blown up for the third and final time.
“Good, good,” Hafeez said, smacking her lips. She went slower with the second drink. She collected up all of the casings and dumped them back into her pocket. Then she reached into her breast binding and pulled out a slippery casing, holding it out to Nyx. “Your people can use this to find the others from the same facility,” she said. “I know it can be done, as I have hired private contractors before who do such work. I’ve even done it myself, of course, but . . . I need you to go to the data lake and pull out everything that came from the same place this casing did, in whatever condition it’s in. Then return it to me.”
Nyx took the casing from her. It was a pretty little thing, she supposed, a captured blue beetle suspended in fluid and trapped by a casing made of transparent bug secretions; little bubbles of air made dewy patterns on the beetle’s spidery legs, and beaded the looping threads of the yellow filament that encircled it.
“You not going to tell me where it’s from?” Nyx asked. “Better you not know,” Hafeez said. “The less a contractor
such as yourself knows, the better. All you need to know is that I want others from the same place. Easy enough. In and out.”
“If it was easy, you wouldn’t hire me.”
“Not so,” Hafeez said, and she smiled like a particularly pleased cat, “easy is fine, it’s the . . . questionable legality that isn’t.”
“How much it pay?”
Hafeez said, “A thousand notes.”
“I could get more for that metal leg of yours.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Hafeez said, and she chuckled, sending her belly rolling.
“You serve at the front?” Nyx asked.
“This?” Hafeez said, waving her claw at her mangled face. “Ho-ho, no, but that’s a pretty story, isn’t it? This was an oc- cupational hazard. But it did keep me from the front lines. I pushed a lot of papers with this limb!” She chuckled some more.
“I’ll talk to my com tech,” Nyx said. “If he can do what you think he can, then we’ll put something together, and I’ll have you sign a contract. I want half in advance. If he can’t do it, no deal. I don’t contract out anything on my team. I can tell you right now that he’s probably not going to like this job at all.”
“Fair enough,” Hafeez said, “you can find me at that curry- stinking hotel, that Mont-plier place, until next week. The job must be done, the data turned over, before prayer day next week. Otherwise, I have no use for it, yes?”
“Sure,” Nyx said.
Hafeez stood. Her metal leg creaked.
Nyx considered that leg for a long moment, wondering how spry this old woman really was. Hafeez caught her looking, and tapped at the leg. “You try me,” Hafeez said. “You’ll sleep better.”
“I’ll sleep a long time,” Nyx said. “Exactly that.”
“I love it!” Taite said. “Well, shit,” Nyx said.
Taite bounced back on his heels. He was a spry, pock- marked kid, too young to go to the front even if they drafted half–Ras Tiegans like him, which they didn’t. His dark hair needed a cut, and hung into his face in greasy tangles. A cut and a wash, Nyx amended.
She had joined him and her magician, Rhys, in the base- ment. Rhys was going through afternoon prayer, forehead to his prayer mat, murmuring his prayers to the north. Down here, the air certainly felt better, but smelled like a barracks. The freezer behind Taite’s workbench where they kept bodies they were bringing in on bounty was empty, and had been for three weeks.
“We need the notes,” Nyx said, “so I guess I should be happy you can pull it off, eh?”
“We’d make more money off that woman’s metal leg than the job,” Taite said.
“You’re free to try and get it off her,” Nyx said. “I think she’d cut off your head, and she most certainly wouldn’t use my services anymore. Thing is, Taite, you go murdering your clients and word gets around and all the sudden you don’t have any clients anymore. Got that? Cause, effect. You’re a com tech. You should get that.”
“Sure, sure,” Taite said, rolling his eyes.
“You roll those eyes at me again and I’ll cut them out,” Nyx said.
“You say the nicest things,” Rhys said as he rolled up his prayer mat.
“And then your tongue,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Rhys stood, and she let herself watch him do it. He was a lean man, tall, about her height. The pretty in him was always tough to quantify; some combination of beauty and humility that was difficult to find. He shaved his head, which she hated, but it did emphasize his features: the pouty lower lip, the long, slender nose, the broad cheekbones, and the dark eyes that did not meet her gaze now, but remained on the floor, as they usually did when she wasn’t wearing any- thing but her breast binding and dhoti. Even her feet were bare.
“If you can fish out what she needs,” Nyx said, “all I need to do is get us in there.”
“Easier said than done,” Taite said. “Those data lakes are heavily monitored, even one that’s shabby.”
“Let’s hope for a shabby one,” Nyx said. “It’s fasting season, you know, time of miracles.”
“I don’t think that’s the expression I’d use,” Rhys said.
Nyx ignored him; when it suited her, she pretended he was a buzzing insect without a stinger, which wasn’t far off from the truth, she supposed.
Taite flipped the casing over in his hand. “I can figure out where the data was created using the com,” he said. “Once we know that, we’ll need to figure out where that place sends its casings to be destroyed. Then fish it out.”
“Easy,” Nyx said, warming to the idea.
Rhys shook his head. “Another easy little adventure, is it?” “Aren’t they always?” Nyx said.
Rhys sweltered in the front seat of the bakkie, wondering how he’d gotten himself a starring role in yet another one of Nyx’s dangerous schemes. Taite sat next to him, tilting the buzzing fan of beetles that provided the only moving air in the bakkie closer to him. They had rolled down the windows, but the air outside was so still it put Rhys into a trance if he allowed himself to tune out to his surroundings for any length of time.
Outside, the blue-tinged cargo bakkie they had been waiting for all day finally rolled up outside the security gates of the building.
“You realize we need to get inside,” Taite said, face inches away from the beating wings of the beetles.
“Why?” Rhys said. “The name of the place is on the trunk. We’ll look them up at the public com.” He let out a little wisp of a command to the beetles to slow their wings. Simple tasks with common bugs weren’t easy for him, but they were pos- sible, and it did amuse him to see the look on Taite’s face.
Taite shook the cage of beetles. “I think they’re broken,” he said. He raised his head and met Rhys’s look.
Rhys burst out laughing.
“You shit,” Taite said, and grinned back. He huffed the cage at Rhys.
Rhys caught it. He waved his hand over the cage, sending out a little threaded signal to the bugs, and they began their fanning once again. “It does give me an idea,” Rhys said, “if you want to get inside and impress Nyx with all your fancy investigative work.”
“Something even you can do?” Taite said. “Indeed,” Rhys said, “even I can do it.”
Rhys exited the stifling bakkie and opened up the trunk where they kept weapons and gear like specs, cooling blan- kets, water, food, and antidotes to common contagions. Taite joined him, rubbing his hands together.
“Are we going to stage a break-in?”
Rhys raised a brow. “I’m not Nyx.” He picked up a pair of specs. “We’re going to be an honest pair of com tech repair people. You’ve done it before, right?”
“I’ve contracted at places like this, sure,” Taite said. “Let’s do it.”
Taite piled cooling blankets into Rhys’s arms and put the cage of beetles on top. He grabbed a mess of identification papers from a locked box under the trunk liner, and pulled out one of his old batches from his time, as he put it, “honing my skills under some tables.”
Rhys sent a quick communication to Nyx via a red beetle swarm to let her know they were proceeding inside. He de- cided it was best not to wait for an answer and hear all about her thoughts on their plan’s success.
They strode up to the front doors of the facility, which bore a great flickering sign composed entirely of red midges:
ARWA WAR BONDS
Taite wandered up to the front counter. The sound of trickling water filled the space; water moved through the walls, cooling the whole building. Rhys wasn’t able to hear what Taite said because a massive woman was making her way toward him, and he responded by making his way as quickly as possible away from her.
“You, hey!” she said, and that’s when Rhys started to run. He couldn’t say why he ran. He was conditioned to it, now.
When women in Nasheen went after you, you ran until your legs gave out or your lungs burst.
“Rhys!” Taite yelled, bolting after him.
Rhys ran up the great stone stairwell, pushing past women in white-and-yellow outfits and perfectly folded hijabs. He sprinted down a long hallway.
Taite barreled after him, breath coming hard and fast, already winded. “Where the fuck—” Taite began.
Rhys followed the pull of the insects. Insects crowded in a few places, but the one he was looking for was . . . there. He pushed up a panel in the wall, and a malodorous stench wafted out, part dog shit, part vomit, part death. Garbage left the building. Garbage would get him out.
“Go,” Rhys said, gesturing to the pit of stench.
Taite gazed back at the corridor. The big woman was getting closer, and she had brought friends. “I should have just stolen the leg,” he said, and jumped into the garbage chute.
Rhys tumbled after him, regretting it even as he hauled himself inside. He slammed the chute shut behind him and lost his grip, falling after Taite into the darkness. He landed with a soft, wet plop and promptly began to sink into the filth, like quicksand.
“This is shit!” Taite said. “Waste of time, again. Nyx is going to have it out with us over this.” The darkness was absolute. Rhys batted his hand in the direction of Taite’s voice, but only smacked his hand against soiled papers and refuse and old, melting furniture made of bug secretions that was slowly being reclaimed by the mire.
Rhys searched for a swarm. He sensed one flying midge, a handful of cockroaches, mayflies, lice, gnats, flies, and smaller, stranger things. Finally he locked on a small swarm of red beetles, one just released from a communication, and called them.
They buzzed just overhead. Rhys gasped at them, “Garbage chute. Follow the swarm back. Haste?” And let them go.
Rhys waited awhile before trying to make his own way up, but the chute was too slippery. Sitting at the end of it did get him out of the pit, but that was a temporary respite. Every- thing stank.
“Found some other chutes over here!” Taite said. They mucked about in the darkness for some time, but there was no way back up.
After a while, tired and hungry and thirsty, they both went quiet.
“She won’t come,” Rhys said, finally.
“She will,” Taite said, “but only because you’re here.”
A shaft of light appeared at the far end of the pit. Rhys squinted, shielding his eyes. A rope tumbled down.
“Hey down there!” Anneke’s voice.
Rhys followed Taite up to the edge of the chute, navigating the churn. Taite grabbed the rope, went up first, then Rhys. When Rhys broke the surface, he found that they were out- side the walls of the compound, in some kind of courtyard. Nyx and Anneke stood there wearing the white-and-yellow uniforms of the facility, complete with hijabs.
“Should have thought of that,” Rhys said.
“Should have,” Nyx said, spitting sen. Her teeth were blood-red with it. “You’d look pretty in a hijab.” She wrinkled her nose, and said to Taite, “You got no excuse not to take a wash, now. Shit, kids.”
Nyx stood out on the sidewalk of her storefront, waiting for Anneke. Rhys was next to her, smelling sweet as a spring breeze on the interior. He had a massive map tucked under one arm, and he still would not look at her after his rescue from the garbage.
“I can’t imagine it’s so easy to hijack a cargo bakkie,” he said, with a little sniff.
“Certainly tougher than getting the name off of one,” Nyx said, “but the complexity of a task really depends on who’s doing it, right?”
“Fuck you, Nyx,” Taite said from behind her, and she grinned.
Her Mhorian shapeshifter, Khos, sat in a bakkie idling in the street, smoking from an oversize pipe. It was a habit he had picked up at some tea house, and whatever it was he smoked had a bitter, acrid tang to it that hurt her eyes. He had tied up his mass of yellow dreads with a red scarf, a style she found even more conspicuous than the Mhorian dreads alone. He dressed like a practical Nasheenian, at least, in a dhoti and burnous, a couple of bandoliers around his neck, a pistol at his hip. He was a big man: big head, big hands, and as Nyx knew, lots of other important things, too. She was musing about that as Anneke drove up in the blue-banded cargo bakkie, honking the horn like a fucking maniac.
