Lithe little Anneke crouched next to the crumpled body of a blue-eyed boy still covered in feathers and mucus. Anneke jerked her head and rifle up when Nyx came in but relaxed when she saw who it was.
Nyx saw a dead dog with two naked human legs sprawled near the broken lattice of the window.
“Where’s Khos?” she asked.
She heard a stir outside the window, and a big blond dog leapt inside. In dog form, Khos was only about as tall as her hip. The dog shook off the dust and started to shed dog hair all over the floor. Watching shifters change generally put Nyx off lunch, so she looked away as Khos shifted. When she looked again, he was wiping mucus off his immense naked body. Khos was a head and shoulders taller than she was, broad in the face and chest, and when he shook his head, the last of the dog hair purled out around him in a cloud, leaving him with a head of thick blond dreadlocks.
“What the fuck happened?” Nyx asked.
“Raine’s team moved for the—” Anneke began.
“I don’t give a fuck what Raine did. Which of you moved off point first?”
Anneke spit on the floor and looked over at Khos.
Nyx regarded him. A fine webbing of spidery blue tattoos—the same color as his eyes—wound around Khos’s pale limbs and torso. Some kind of Mhorian thing. He was still wiping mucus from his face. In a quarter hour, he was going to be starving for protein. Shifters were fucking expensive.
“They were going to sweep that bounty right out from under us,” he said. “I moved because—”
“And did you get a transmission from Rhys or Taite telling you I wanted you off point?” she said.
She heard somebody come in behind her and turned, pistol in hand. But it was only Rhys, the hood of his burnous drawn up, a cloud of red beetles circling his head.
“Taite says Raine and his crew are already headed toward the Cage. With the bounty,” Rhys said.
Nyx grimaced and looked at the body on the floor. “Can we get anything for this one?”
“Yeah, boss,” Anneke said, “but he isn’t worth so much as the others.”
“He’ll have to do. Somebody’s gotta feed Taite’s sister this month. Bundle him up.”
“Boss?” Anneke said.
“We’re taking him to the Cage,” Nyx said. “Any more questions or suggestions? I don’t run a democracy here. This isn’t some Mhorian brothel, you get that, Khos?”
He made a face and looked down at the body. She had another body to talk to him about, later.
Nyx holstered the pistol.
Khos sighed over the body and muttered, “God be merciful.”
“You’ll find I’m bloodier than He is,” Nyx said.
“I don’t doubt that,” Khos said.
“Prove it,” she said, and walked outside to get the trunk ready for the next body.
6
Nyx dropped Rhys off at the keg and then followed the old elevated train tracks uptown to the Cage. Khos rode shotgun, but it was Anneke who rode armed. She sat up in the bowl of the roof, her feet dangling over the trunk, a shotgun over one of her lean shoulders.
Punjai’s border security office and bounty reclamation center—aptly known as “the Cage” by those in the business—was in the heart of upper Punjai, on the other side of the city from the Chenjan district.
They pulled up outside the Cage. Raine’s bakkie was already there, along with half a dozen others belonging to rival hunters.
As she waited for Khos and Anneke to unload the body, Nyx looked across the parking lot to the other reclamation office. The bel dame collection center was a tall four-storied building with a façade of painted mud-brick and amber. The motto above the lintel of the main entrance was in the raised script of the old prayer language: My life for a thousand.
She remembered swearing an oath with that at its core: My life for yours, for ours, for Nasheen. My life for a thousand.
“Boss?” Anneke said.
Nyx looked back at them. Khos had the bundled body in his arms—the body of some dumb half-breed kid who’d run with the wrong crowd—but he’d keep them in bread for another day.
My life for a thousand.
She didn’t risk her life for all that much, these days.
Nyx reached into the bakkie and palmed some sen from her stash, then squared herself in front of the low building. Hunters were slipping in and out, gutter feed in tow. Little operations like those had to take in half a dozen terrorists a week to make a profit. She’d gotten out of the small time years ago. She wanted to stay out of it.
Nyx spit red, and led her team in.
Shajin was working behind the lattice of the front desk. She was a squat, serious woman with flinty eyes and a bad complexion. She sat gazing stonily at a new hunter who sounded like she was having trouble understanding the monetary restrictions on her catch.
Shajin, unimpressed, replied in her booming monotone, “Read the fine print. Says here you only get sixty if this particular catch is live. They preferred him dead and would have paid you a hundred for it. I’m not killing him for you, so you take him out back and shoot him or take your sixty. If there’s something you don’t understand about that, you need to go back to state school. Get your skinny ass away from my desk. Move.”
The hunter pulled out her pistol and then dragged her catch out the door.
Nyx stepped up. Shajin relaxed in her seat.
“And what do you want, my wandering woman?” Shajin asked.
“How’s business?” Nyx said.
“Poor. Full of men and self-righteous mercenary runts. They upset my digestion.” She patted the great swell of her stomach.
“I’ve got a poor piece for today, then.”
“File number?”
Nyx told her.
Shajin grimaced. “You’re in the dregs again, my woman.”
Shajin passed the file number on to one of the little desk clerks—a betel-nut-colored, boyish girl named Juon who had a sassy walk.
Nyx leaned over the desk so her nose nearly touched the latticework. “When are you coming home with me, Juon?”
Juon marched into the back.
Shajin grinned. “She’ll have none of you, my woman. She just got a letter from that boy of hers at the front.”
Nyx snorted. “Probably six months dead. The flies have him.”
Amid the low murmur of exchange and the occasional outburst from an irate hunter or wheedling bounty came a deep, familiar voice.
“So the huntress returns,” Raine said.
Nyx took half a moment to loosen up her suddenly rigid body. She turned and showed her crimson teeth.
Raine stood near the main door with three of his crew. On a good day, he had a dozen veterans and half as many irregulars.
She saw Raine around the Cage a lot and more around the local pubs, but—not being half a fool—he avoided her personally. He usually sent out his veterans to harass her. She had sent the last one back without an ear.
“I see you’ve gotten better at eavesdropping on our com,” Nyx said.
“Taite’s security is terrible,” Raine said. “I taught him everything I know.”
“Which must not have been much,” Nyx said.
“There is much more I could teach you, Nyxnissa, if you could set aside your arrogance.”
“You’re the one who thinks he’s some fucking prophet ’cause he had a shitty time at the front. I heard you got arrested during a protest in Sahlah. I’m surprised nobody’s put you in prison yet for blasphemy. Why hasn’t your mother gutted you, the way she did the council?”
“I know faith and belief are concepts you have a difficult time understanding, Nyxnissa, but some of us have an interest in righting wrongs, not perpetuating them.”