He waited. She waited. Ashana stood over the open body bags and waited.
“I need you to come with me,” Nyx said, finally.
“Then I’ll go,” Rhys said.
“Good on you all, then,” Ashana drawled. “Now get in the damn bags.”
From a small hole in the body bag, Rhys could see the double dawn turn the sky gray-blue, then violet, then bloody. Punjai was still quarantined, and the body bakkies circumvented the city. A couple of miles west of Punjai, the veldt turned to flat blinding-white desert. Rhys was pressed up against the slatted side of the bakkie flatbed, half a dozen bodies below him, a couple on top of him, and Nyx next to him, at her insistence.
“Best we keep close,” she had told him.
They passed signs warning travelers that they were on an unpatrolled road. The air started to turn sour. He could smell the yeasty stink of spent bursts, and he caught a faint whiff of geranium and lemon. There were no other vehicles on the road.
Rhys widened the slit that Ashana had cut for him to breathe through during the long ride. The bags were good at keeping their contents cool; they were all organic and fed off the body’s secretions and the heat of the sun. Under the sun, the black bags turned green.
He saw a long column of smoke off to their left, too far away for him to see what was burning. Sometime later he saw the first burst, a green spray of light against the violet sky. He could feel the low thump of the bursts in his chest as the ground rumbled with the blast.
At the border station, the truck stopped for the drop-off, and Rhys held himself still and waited. He heard a couple of people speaking fluent Chenjan, and felt a swarm of wasps buzz by. Ashana helped with the transfer, and he felt the weight of the bodies above him ease as they were offloaded.
Someone grabbed hold of him by the hips and dragged him across the flatbed.
“Praise be to God,” a male voice said from outside the flatbed, in Chenjan. Hearing the language spoken out loud so freely left Rhys with a feeling of half dread, half relief. “Where are you all headed?”
“Praise be to God,” Ashana said. “I’m dropping this batch with your girl. Came straight from the front.”
“Careful how you lift them, woman! Pay them some respect,” the male voice said. The person holding Rhys let him go, and two big hands grabbed at him and pulled.
Rhys froze. He was lifted up and slipped carefully onto another flatbed. Another body was pushed on top of him.
He wondered what they would do to him if they found him out. Kill him quickly, he hoped. He closed his eyes. It must have been time for prayer. There was no call to prayer out here, no call that he could hear. Submit to God, he thought, and God will attend to the rest.
Ashana and the man began to bicker. He heard something thump on the ground.
“You tell me to show respect? I’m not the one dropping bodies, you fool,” Ashana said.
“What are you packing these bodies with, woman?”
“Nothing you don’t pack yours with. Cut it open if you want to find out. Half your bodies are contaminated with your own bursts.”
Rhys felt something bump his feet again. He kept his eyes shut. Would they take him out and cut him open? He held his breath and sent out a call for bugs, but the tailored colonies inside the bodies were too complex for him. He could feel them but couldn’t alter or direct them. Poor magician, indeed. He swore softly.
Ashana and the Chenjan spoke a few more heated words. Rhys heard the sound of a bag opening. More bickering. Then the sound of the body being dragged across the packed sand.
Then the bakkie started to move.
Rhys let out his breath.
They drove for what seemed like hours. They passed a couple of burned-out farmsteads. Every few decades some hard-up family, a man and his ten or twenty wives, would move out close to the front and try to make something grow, but most of Chenja’s agricultural land was still along the coast, like Nasheen’s. It was safer there, and less toxic than the wasteland in the north or the spotty, poisonous swampland in the south inhabited by Heidians and Drucians and Ras Tiegans.
When the bakkie stopped again, someone grabbed him by the feet and pulled.
The bag came open, and Nyx’s sweaty face blotted out the hot white sun. She was grinning. He had never been so relieved to see her.
“You still in one piece?” she asked.
Rhys sat up and eased out of the bakkie and onto the hot sand. A tall, skinny Chenjan woman stood next to him, wearing work trousers, sandals, and long sleeves. Her face was half-veiled, and her eyes were black. She wore a pistol on one hip and a machete on the other. Rhys felt suddenly vulnerable. He and Nyx had left their gear behind. Anneke was smuggling it over.
“This is Damira,” Nyx said.
“Your clothes are in the back,” Damira said in Chenjan, “and your badge. You’ll need to wear it in case we’re stopped along the road.” She didn’t meet his eyes. It was the drop of her gaze, more than the language, that convinced him he was back in Chenja. No Nasheenian woman would lower her eyes in his presence.
He and Nyx changed into long trousers and dark vests with red bands around their arms signifying their role as ferriers of the dead. Damira was a quiet woman, and she left the radio silent. The inside of the cab was strung with gold-painted beads, and a prayer wheel hung from the rearview mirror. Rhys had the sudden urge to open up the prayer wheel and see what prayer she kept there. One was not supposed to ask God for anything, only submit to His will, but there were sects in Chenja who believed that God enjoyed granting favors. Chenjans had divided themselves into roughly two sets of believers and perhaps a handful of minority sects. This woman with her prayer wheel was a purist, not an orthodox. She would have been cut and sewn at puberty, bearing the marks of her faith and submission on her body while courting God for private favors during prayer. Rhys found the idea of female mutilation and begging favors from God distasteful, if not repulsive, but as an orthodox, he also believed in allowing others to worship as they willed, so long as their people respected God and the Prophet, performed the salaat, and respected God’s laws about marriage—seclusion, respect, and moral purity.
And so long as they weren’t Nasheenian.
The desert was still flat and white, and they passed burst craters and abandoned vehicles along the road. He expected the air to be different somehow, now that they’d crossed the border, but the air contained the same yeasty stink. Nyx sat near the window, a scarf pulled up over her face to keep away the dust and to obscure her appearance. She had cut her hair with Damira’s machete when they changed clothes. It was a bit of a botched job, a ragged mop of thick, dark hair that did nothing to soften her face. She looked like a wild desert orphan, someone who’d grown up on an abandoned farm near the front after her family was slaughtered.
He sat in the middle, trying to give Damira some space. It meant sitting closer to Nyx, but after spending the morning inside a body bag, the idea of pressing himself against someone alive didn’t seem so indecent.
Too long in Nasheen, he thought, and watched the flat desert rolling out before him. How long until it looked different? Until it wasn’t just some long stretch of Nasheenian desert but the land of his birth? His father’s land, the land they bled and died and prayed for?
Rhys glanced over at Damira again, then at the prayer wheel. He had opened his mouth to form the question in Nasheenian when he realized he could speak Chenjan freely. The words came out a little stilted. “Can I ask what you pray for?” he asked.
She kept her eyes on the road. “I pray for an end to the war.”
He could barely hear her over the sound of the tires on the gritty road and the chitter of the bugs.