“Let’s go,” she said.
She and Anneke walked out to the bakkie. Nyx did a quick check for explosives, then they both got in and drove to a local teahouse.
Chenjans dressed far more conservatively than Nasheenians, and it was probably the reason they suffered from fewer cancers. The people they drove past and shared the road with wore brightly colored vests and long coats and trousers and aghals and burnouses, and even some of the men veiled their faces. She expected to see more men in Chenja than she did in Nasheen, but unless there was a political rally or she stood outside a mosque around prayer time, the people on the street were still mostly women. All of the women wore veils and covered their hair, and most wore chadors. The few men she saw were swaggering old men or boys young enough to be the grandsons or great-grandsons of the old men. In Chenja, all of the street signs were in the prayer language, not local Chenjan, which was a similar script but not identical. Nyx’s Chenjan wasn’t the best, but she was better with the prayer script.
Luckily, Anneke knew the streets of Dadfar pretty well. She and Raine had worked in Chenja for a couple of years, and she had family in the city, so when Nyx said they needed to find out about a boxing gym—violent sports and gambling were outlawed in Chenja—Anneke knew the right teahouse.
The tea house sold tea and marijuana, and business looked slow. A couple of prayer wheels hung in the window. Most of the patrons were men either too young to be at the front or too old to get sent back. The old men played board games and smoked marijuana. The boys talked about weapons and girls. A gaggle of chador-clad women sat at the back, laughing in high, loud voices. Like all Chenjans, they wore clothing in gaudy, mismatched colors, as if making up for the fact that they had to live without liquor.
Nyx found a table close enough to the rear door to comfort her and sat with her back to the wall. Behind her there was a massive flaking gilt frame with a picture of some Chenjan martyr on it. Maybe the owner’s son. Nyx wondered why it was that the prescription against images of living things didn’t apply to martyrs, just the Prophet and everything else.
“You sure this is the right place?” she asked Anneke in her broken Chenjan.
Anneke waved over the older woman standing behind the counter and started chatting to her in Chenjan. The woman, unveiled and pushing fifty, brought them tea and sat down and drank it with them. Nyx could follow most of what she said. The bar matron knew one of Anneke’s sisters. She’d been widowed. Owning the teahouse paid the bills. She and her daughters kept it running. The man on the wall was her husband. He had been one of the suicide soldiers who bombed the Nasheenian breeding compounds three decades before.
Nyx looked up at the image on the wall again, examined the eyes. She wondered if she’d ever looked like that: the absolute faith, the grim purpose.
They exchanged a few more words about abandoned buildings and boxing, and then the bar matron lowered her voice and nodded.
Anneke said to Nyx, in Nasheenian, low, “Yeah, she’s heard rumors of fights. Doesn’t much like the idea of fighting in this town, but her husband used to do some of it.”
They finished their tea, and the matron left to tend to the others. Anneke stood.
“We’re good?” Nyx said.
“Yeah. There’s supposed to be a fight in a few days about three or four kilometers from here at an abandoned waterworks. They hold a lot of illegal fights there.”
“Good,” Nyx said.
Anneke shrugged as they stepped back out into the heat of the day. “Well, that was easy. Let’s get lunch. She owns the bakery next door.”
“I’m not in the mood for sweets,” Nyx said.
They picked up a couple of stuffed rotis at a food cart in the town square. It was market day, and the square was choked with merchants selling prayer rugs, scarves, hijabs, burnouses, baskets, dried meat, protein cakes, rotis, braided bread… just about anything Nyx could think of, and more besides. There were butchers and pseudo-magicians and what Nyx figured were probably gene pirates selling their services—real magicians didn’t advertise in markets—and one of the fakes was hawking what he said were human organs in jars laced with ice flies.
She saw a long line of people—men and women—dressed from head to toe in white, making their way across the square. The white marked them as Tirhani pilgrims, and they bore their temporary visas around their necks. Dadfar was the death place of the Tirhani martyr, Manijeh Nassu, one of the daughters of the Chenjan caliph, back when they had one. She had led southern Chenja in revolt against the north and died trying to get water for her group of fighters after they were cut off from the only well for miles. Nyx remembered the water on the streets the night before, and wondered now if it had been some kind of Tirhani pilgrim thing.
“Bloody fucking dung beetles,” Anneke muttered, following her look. “You watch them. Someday they’re going to show up here, guns hot, telling us they’re our bloody liberators come to save us from ourselves.”
“After selling guns to both sides,” Nyx said. “It’s real easy to sit out there on the coast playing holier than thou and getting fat off someone else’s war.” It was Chenja’s reliance on Tirhani weapons that kept Tirhani pilgrims getting visas, and Nasheenian reliance on the same that kept them ferrying bug tech and magicians by the boatload to Tirhan. Fucking dung beetles.
Across the square was a mosque, and the muezzin called out mid-morning prayer, bringing most of the activity in the market to a halt. Anneke dusted off the sidewalk in front of her and pulled the prayer rug from her back. Going into the mosque would have been risky. Always better to pray outside official spaces when you were cross-dressing in Chenja.
Nyx wandered through the market as it cleared out. She bought a couple of mangoes—Rhys liked mangoes—and another roti. Most Chenjan food was shit, but there was nothing better than a good roti.
She looked over the stalls nearest her and saw Anneke still prone on the sidewalk. She walked a little more until she came to the other side of the square, where a veiled woman sold prayer rugs. On the street behind the woman, a bakkie sat idling, its windows opaqued. Nyx started eating a mango as she watched the bakkie. Strange to leave your bakkie idling while you hopped into the mosque for mid-morning prayer. Chenjans weren’t any more honest than Nasheenians, no matter what Rhys said. Somebody was liable to steal their transport. If not Nyx, then somebody like her.
The veiled woman who owned the stall was praying. The day was going to be hot. Nyx smelled curry over protein cakes and grimaced. Chenja.
She turned again to look for Anneke. As she did, she saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye. She ducked and thrust her elbow behind her. She caught somebody in the gut.
A bag went over her head, and the light bled away.
Nyx kicked out, but she was already off her feet. Something hard hit her in the head. She let out a long scream, hoping somebody around her would note that she wasn’t being kidnapped willingly.
Somebody shouted something. Nyx got hit in the head again.
A bakkie door opened, and she was shoved inside. Her captor took the bag off her head. Nyx had one dizzying moment to look into Rasheeda’s grinning face before her sister thrust a toxic scarab beetle into her mouth and gagged her with a rag.
Nyx choked on the beetle as its poison trickled down her throat, turning the world gray and hazy, making her too drugged to move.
20
Nyx forced herself to focus. The poison was wearing off. She’d eaten most of the beetle while trying to breathe. Her head felt too heavy to hold up. She was strapped to a chair bolted to the floor. She was naked. She hadn’t recognized the other women who stripped her and searched her, but she knew Rasheeda was working this with another sister. If Rasheeda had been working alone, she would have just killed Nyx.