Khos shrugged. If the seat had a back, he would have slumped.
“It was side work. I forgot about it.”
She climbed into her chair and perched up on the back, her feet on the seat. She leaned forward.
“You were supposed to wait on me and Rhys. Instead, you panicked and moved too soon, and we lost our take.”
“I told you, Raine showed up and they were heading out. We would have lost all of them if I hadn’t gone in when I did.”
“So instead, all three of them lit out the back window, right into Raine’s ambush, and we ended up with some dumb kid who was worth more alive than dead.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Is this your crew? Did I sign a contract of yours, or did you sign one of mine?”
He grimaced.
“Answer me.”
“No, it’s not my crew.”
“You know how many hunts me and Anneke have been on? A hell of a lot. There’s nothing we haven’t seen.”
“Nyx—”
“I don’t want to hear about Mhorian chivalry. You don’t like working with women, you shouldn’t be in Nasheen. As I heard it, it’s your love of women that got you here in the first place. Women can fight as well as fuck, you know it?”
He shifted in his seat, looking toward the window. She knew he hated it when she swore. Mhorians were a strange bunch of refugees, a late addition to Umayma. They’d been given some of the shittiest, least developed land in the world, and the vast majority of them had died within the first year of landing. A thousand years worth of hard living had made them a prickly, stubborn sort of people. Most of them were religious zealots, worse than any Chenjan, obsessed with laws and prescriptions about marital relations and the segregation of men and women. A full three-quarters of their Book dealt with rules about marriage, sex, and birth. Nyx had been with Khos the first time he saw a topless woman on the streets of Nasheen, burning an effigy of the Queen in protest of some new regulation about births completed off-compound. The look on his face had been worth a thousand notes.
Mhorian women also cost money, like bugs. Nyx supposed that in a society where most of you were dying and you didn’t have much initial bug tech, women’s wombs would go for more. Khos had lit out of Mhoria looking for a good wife he didn’t have to pay for, and he hadn’t had much luck in Nasheen. Who wanted to shack up with some Mhorian shifter and push out useless half-breed babies? Half-breeds didn’t get free government inoculations. The vast majority died within the first three years as a result. Nyx figured it was why Khos spent most of his time in brothels. Maybe he thought those women were hard up? What he didn’t seem to get was that women in Nasheen who made a living as prostitutes were usually doing so for political reasons, not because they were desperate for money or anxious about having husbands. Women in Nasheen didn’t grow up looking for husbands. They grew up looking for honor and glory.
“I need to know you’ll follow the plan,” Nyx said. “If I can’t count on that, I cancel your contract. I can get another shifter, you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Go sit with the others in the keg. We’ve got to prep for another pickup.”
He heaved himself out of his seat, and shut the door softly behind him. For a man his size, he moved with surprising quiet.
She took a deep breath, exhaled, and pulled the letter out of her dhoti.
Recompense for the apprehension of the terrorist is negotiable.
She closed her eyes. She was thirty-two years old, and every bone in her body hurt, every joint, every muscle. Some mornings, she woke up so stiff she had to roll herself out of bed and stretch for a quarter-hour just so she could stand without pain.
Nyx sat on the edge of the desk. She didn’t have the money to replace any more body parts, and she wasn’t so sure that any magician could tell her what needed replacing even if she could afford it. Yah Tayyib once told her she needed a new heart.
She’d thought he was serious.
This bounty wouldn’t buy her a new heart. It wouldn’t fix anything she’d broken. But it might get her out of this hole and working closer to the wealthy Orrizo district in Mushtallah, dressing real fine, getting patched up by the best, and getting all the good notes. My life for a thousand.
She wanted a new life: a life she could trade for something more worthwhile than twenty bloody notes and the contempt of a bunch of refugees.
7
At dawn, Nyx made Khos drive her and Rhys out to the central train station in Basmah, following the long scar of the elevated tracks the whole way. The local, intercity trains didn’t run anymore, and hadn’t in about three years. The Chenjans had taken out the main line between Punjai and Basmah so many times that the Transit Authority had stopped sending out tissue mechanics to fix it. They used to come back at least one woman short after every run. Most of the busted tracks were planted with mines and bursts now.
The threat of Chenjan terrorism kept train tickets on the working long-distance lines exorbitant. Nyx had ridden the train only twice in her life—to and from the front.
Khos got them within a hundred yards of the station before the crowd of bakkies, rickshaws, and pedestrians brought them to a standstill. Half a dozen security techs dressed in red burnouses prowled the station with enormous sand cats on heavy chains.
Nyx shouldered her pack and slammed the door. She said to Khos through the open window, “Don’t give Anneke any shit. Taite’s in charge. If he says fuck off, you do it.”
“He knows where to find me,” Khos said, and grinned. He and Taite were fast friends, disparate brothers from foreign countries who went to mixed brothels together, back before Taite had a boyfriend. Nyx wasn’t sure why the friendship annoyed her. Maybe because she didn’t understand it. When had she ever had a friend close enough to go to brothels with? Not since grade school.
“Just don’t blow all your money on girls and wine. I need you to keep your head clear for whatever I bring back. Don’t throw it all away on some green girl.”
“I like them green.”
“Virgins are boring,” Nyx said. “What is it with Mhorians and virgins?”
She caught Khos blushing before he turned away. It was remarkable how red he could get. Nyx waved him off. He gave a blast of the horn and backed away from the station. She watched him go. She was worried about what all that time at the brothels meant. She was worried, too, about the team, about how long she could keep them working for so little. It had been a long time.
Nyx turned and saw Rhys standing at the edge of the crowd. They didn’t give him much space. He kept a firm footing, though creepers bumped into him with their nets and at least one child spit at him. He was the only black man in view for as far as Nyx could see—a black roach skittering along a sea of sand.
The station reared up behind him, gold-colored stone perched on a series of pointed arches that the bustling mob slowly pushed through on their way to the platforms and ticket desk.
Nyx elbowed her way into the swarm and looked back once to make sure Rhys was following unmolested. The arches leading into the station were plastered with martyrs’ letters from women who’d volunteered for the front. A couple of pushy women dressed in the prophet’s green were handing out copies of the latest propaganda sheets and shiny carcasses of pretty holiday beetles, insects known for their cowardly aversion to loud noises.