Anneke opened the passenger door, and Khos-the-dog jumped inside and settled onto the seat, tongue lolling. He was a yellow, blue-eyed dog now, cleaner than the wild mutts that scrounged for garbage in the streets but otherwise no different in appearance.
Nyx sidled up closer to Rhys and crossed her arms, and the two of them watched Anneke and Khos drive out of Husayn’s garage and into the violet double dawn.
Rhys took a step away from her, to give himself some room. He was angry at her again, angry about this, about all of it. He wanted to find some way to tell her why he was angry, to explain it, but she tended to believe that every conversation involving strong emotion was full of words and resolutions that were not meant, as if he were a raving drunk. She saw every stated emotion as an admission of weakness.
“So where are we going, Nyxnissa?” he asked.
She spit sen on the garage floor. “The morgue,” she said.
Rhys closed his eyes and prepared himself for horror. The last eight years had been an unending nightmare, starting with his flight across the desert. And it will end with my flight back into the desert, he thought. The globe the queen had given them had included a detailed summary of what she was willing to pay them in return for Nikodem—alive or dead. Nikodem, the alien with the big laugh. He had known her immediately upon seeing her stills but was uncertain about how he felt about hunting her. She was just an alien, and the sum to bring her in—even split five ways—was indeed enough for all of them to retire on. If they completed this note, he could leave Nyx, and this bloody business, forever.
He had no idea what he would do, after.
When he opened his eyes, Nyx had gone.
The dead that came back from the front were processed in filtered containment facilities expressly designed for the purpose. Chenja and Nasheen had signed and broken—and signed and broken and signed again—treaties requiring the return of the dead to the processing centers—the morgues—within thirty days of a soldier’s death. The morgues were run by magicians who identified, cataloged, decontaminated, and burned the dead. The sterile remains were placed in ceramic jars and shipped home to mothers or sisters or merely sent to the war memorials on the coast—vast, shining walls of smooth metal that faced the sea. The largest of them was the Orrizo in Mushtallah, a monument dedicated to unidentified soldiers—dead boys and patriotic women.
After being reconstituted, Nyx had worked at the containment center just west of Punjai. She had to pay back the magicians for putting her back together, and the dirty, dangerous work in the containment center was the only work they had for her at the time. She had spent her mornings loading bagged corpses onto carts and her afternoons sorting piles of body parts that the magicians insisted all went to the same body. More often than not, the magicians were wrong, and she’d have to take out an extra arm or leg or the remains of a foot and throw it into another pile made up entirely of “unidentified” parts that were later burned up and dumped in the Orrizo.
It had been shit work, and she’d been hosed down and swept for organics three times after magicians suspected her of being exposed to contaminated bodies. Chenjans and Nasheenians alike had been known to plant bug-borne viruses in the flesh of the dead before sending them back over the border.
Even the dead were participants in the war.
Nyx still had some contacts at the morgue, so she and Rhys hitched a ride with a caravan going to Punjai, waiting out the hottest part of the day at a little cantina before walking the rest of the way to the center. An old woman named Ashana met them at the gates at dusk, after Rhys had finished his prayers and Nyx had finished her sen. Ashana brought them in through the filter at the rear of the compound, where the bodies selected for contamination—as opposed to decontamination—resided.
She led them to the containment room.
“You can’t be serious,” Rhys said as he stared out at the neatly numbered bags of the Chenjan dead, the ones the Nasheenians had taken from the field and planted with viruses to be trucked back into Chenja. These bodies would be stacked up and mixed in with the rest of the Chenjan bodies pulled out of the field that day and then delivered back to Chenja, carrying tailored viruses and nests of bugs primed to burst after they reached a populated area.
Rhys, as a magician, would be immune to just about everything. It was why only he and she could get across this way.
Even so, Ashana held out a beetle whose clear shell was filled with an orange fluid.
“Eat it,” Ashana said to him, in Chenjan.
Rhys replied in Nasheenian, “Nyx first.”
“I was inoculated against everything they have to offer when I worked here,” Nyx said.
“And you’re assuming they haven’t come up with new viruses?” Rhys said. “I’m sure they have, but there’s a base contagion Nasheenian magicians use in all of their concoctions, and, yes, I checked to make sure that’s still their base. It’s the base that they inoculate all of their workers against. My body recognizes the base and destroys anything attached to it.” She winked at him.
“You aren’t supposed to know that.”
She supposed he could take a risk and try to save a few Chenjans by passing someone his now inoculated blood sample, but then he’d have to let them know why he’d been in Nasheen and who he was, and one call to the local security forces would turn up his name on their wanted list. Even if he avoided the security forces, the Chenjan magicians he gave the sample to would lock him up for conspiring with the enemy and then put him in quarantine for fourteen months. He knew that as well as she did.
If all went well, one of Anneke’s kindred—six of her sisters had converted and married Chenjan half-breeds over the years—would haul them out of the mass of others based on the numbered tags that Ashana put on the bags. The driver would then give Rhys and Nyx false security badges so they could ride up front with her as far as the Chenjan border city of Azam. Nyx could pass for a eunuch when she needed to; castrated Nasheenian captives were sometimes used as a form of slave labor in Chenja. Once they were off the truck, she could pass for Rhys’s servant if the two of them had to wait around the pick up point for a while if Anneke was delayed.
The containment room smelled only faintly of death. The tiny bugs that had been released into the chamber ate up all the bacteria that broke down the bodies, at least until they left the holding room. The ride out across the desert among the bags would not be pleasant.
Nyx looked over at Rhys. In the cold light of the holding room, he looked slim and fragile and more than a little sick. He had followed her for a long time, through some shitty situations, but she knew this was a lot to ask. She was not yet so much of a monster that she did not realize that.
“You don’t have to do it,” Nyx said. “I can run this without a magician.”
He turned to her. Ashana began unzipping their bags.
“Is this how you’re getting me back out?” he asked.
“Sure,” she lied. She hadn’t sorted that part out yet. Getting a Chenjan body into a holding center for Nasheenian dead would be tougher than getting a Chenjan body into a holding center for Chenjan dead. She needed another way to get him back into Nasheen. Her conscience had picked a hell of a time to nag at her.
“I hate it when you lie to me,” he said.
“Sometimes I can get away with it.”
“You won’t be able to hold off bel dames without a magician, even a poor one,” he said.
“No, probably not.” That part wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t the most talented of magicians, no—but no standard could get her the communications and security he could. If somebody got poisoned or had a limb chopped off, well… he was less useful. That’s what real magicians were for.