Nyx didn't know the coast well, and unlike the cities, the place was wide open, no cover. About all the cover she had were the hills, and some woods, if she could find them. She switched pedals again, reached for the clutch. She hadn't had to use the clutch in a long time. She wondered if it still worked.

The dark bakkie kept just within her rearview mirror range. They knew they'd been seen. Either they didn't know where she was going and wanted to pin her there, or they were waiting for a good turn in the road to take her out.

She sped up. They sped up.

She watched the image of the black bakkie grow larger in the mirror.

She f.u.c.ked with the clutch. It made a nasty grinding sound. The bakkie wheezed.

"Come on, you f.u.c.ker," she said.

It clicked.

She switched pedals. The bakkie shuddered. The speedometer climbed. She saw a turnoff on her left that went up into the hills. Nyx did a neat brake, twisted the wheel, and hit the speed as she came out of the turn.

The bakkie screamed under her. She caught the smell of burning bugs, death on the road. She glanced back and saw smoke and dead beetles roiling out from the exhaust. The way was narrow and twisted, and as she climbed, the gra.s.slands turned to a forest of oak hybrids. She took the turns too fast.

Nyx kept checking the mirror. She spent a moment too long looking and nearly lost herself on a narrow turn. She'd seen the other bakkie.

They were still behind her.

She kept a sharp eye out for turns off this road. She didn't want gravel tracks or logging roads. The bakkie would get stuck, and she'd be for s.h.i.t.

The black bakkie was right behind her. She could just see their faces now. The big woman in the driver's seat was definitely Dahab. Not a doubt in her mind. Dahab had a new team with her-and not bel dames from the look of them.

And she had a real good feeling they weren't with Rasheeda. That threw a whole other contagion into the mess.

Nyx twisted around another curve. Raine had taught her to drive when she was nineteen. It was the first thing he taught every member of his crew. She knew how to pedal her way out of a tight spot.

Nyx heard a shot, and ducked. Checked the mirror again. The woman riding shotgun with Dahab was doing what people riding shotgun did.

Nyx dared not take her hands off the wheel. Even if she could clip off a couple shots with her pistol, the odds of her hitting anything in or around that bakkie were slim.

She reached a crossroads. Right would take her further up into the hills. Left was down into the coastal valley. Down meant she would have to put a lot of faith in her repair of the brake line.

f.u.c.k it.

She veered left and barreled down the hill. She disengaged the clutch.

Heard another shot.

Something exploded against her back window.

That wasn't good. Organics. A fever burst? Something worse?

She grabbed at one of the bursts on the seat next to her and lobbed it out the window. Heard a satisfying pop as it exploded on the road.

The bakkie squeezed around another narrow turn. The cover of the woods was thinning out. She saw a house set back away from the road. If she couldn't lose them, she had to fight them.

Fight Dahab.

Nyx ignored the house and kept on the road.

She came down a long stretch and turned. The road abruptly changed from pavement to gravel. Logging road.

The bakkie skidded on the sudden raw stretch. Nyx hit the far left and far right pedals, and all four wheels twisted sharply, giving her some traction.

She looked back. Missed a turn. She spun the wheel and tried to recover, but she was trying to recover on gravel.

The bakkie slid clean off the road.

For a long, hopeful moment, she thought she'd be all right. But as she braked and twisted the wheel, she saw she wasn't going to avoid the big tree in front of her.

The bakkie smashed into the oak hybrid with a loud, wet crunch: a giant crushed melon. Bugs exploded from the hood. A rain of leaves dropped onto the windshield. Nyx's torso thumped into the steering wheel, knocking the breath from her.

The sound of hissing beetles and spitting fluid filled her ears.

Adrenaline flooded her body. Nyx pushed at the door but couldn't find the handle for some reason. She leaned over and reached for one of the bursts on the floor.

The barrel of a very large gun pointed in at her through the pa.s.senger side window.

"Don't f.u.c.king move," Dahab said.

14.

Nyx didn't move. She was still trying to get her breath. Her fingers clutched empty air.

Dahab's two squirts were opening up the driver's side door.

"Let her out," Dahab said. "Watch her hands."

Dahab was an imposing woman-not just tall, but broad and fat. She could bench about a hundred twenty kilos, if Nyx remembered right. She'd lost an arm at the front, so her right arm was a lighter color than the left, courtesy of some dead foreigner. She had a wide flat-cheeked face and piercing eyes. Her teeth were stained red.

Dahab gestured with the gun. "Out, Nyx."

The squirts each took one of Nyx's arms and hauled her out of the cab. The council had moved a lot faster than Nyx antic.i.p.ated, but she didn't know yet what the decision was. Dahab hadn't blasted her face off in the cab, so they probably wanted her alive. But there was a lot you could do to a woman and keep her breathing.

And she still wasn't sure where Rasheeda fit.

Nyx's chest hurt-a dull, throbbing ache. She hadn't heard anything break, but what would she have heard above the crunch of the bakkie?

She loved that f.u.c.king bakkie.

Beetles crawled over her feet.

While the women held Nyx, Dahab reached into the cab and pulled out Nyx's pack. Nyx hadn't brought anything with her relating to the off-worlder, but then, Dahab likely knew more than she did about Nikodem Jordan.

"Rasheeda and Luce told you to f.u.c.k off, Nyx," Dahab said.

Nyx sized up the women next to her. One was a stocky battle-scarred runt who looked like she'd just come off the front. The other one was a pretty half-breed woman who could have sold blood to bel dames. What was she doing collecting notes? She could have been a radio star.

Something buzzed at Dahab's hip. She grabbed at it, shook it, and put the transceiver to her ear. "Yeah," she said. "Uh-huh. We'll be there." She put it away, said, "Put her in the trunk of the bakkie. We're late for a meeting."

"Leave her here?" the pretty one said.

"You're staying with her. Suha and I will meet up with you in an hour. I can't have her going where we're going. They'll check our rig. Get her weapons off first."

The women took off Nyx's pistols, took her extra ammunition, took her whip, found the dagger and pistol strapped to either thigh.

Then they dragged her to the trunk and popped it open.

Nyx thought about trying an escape. Instead, she looked down the barrel of Dahab's rifle and got in.

It was a tight fit. Nyx lay curled up on one side. They shut the trunk. It all went dark except for a rusted-out patch in the floor near her head. She pulled at the blanket covering the rest of the hole and peered through. She couldn't see anything but the churned soil around her bakkie's tires.

A sharp edge dug into her shoulder from behind. She twisted around so that she faced the rear of the trunk. She pulled back the blankets and kicked the toolkits down around her feet. Sometimes Anneke's manic obsession for collecting guns did more than empty Nyx's bank account.

Nyx felt a jabbing pain in her sternum and stopped and took a deep breath.

Dahab had known Nyx when she was a skinny little bel dame without any idea of how to arm herself. Dahab had cleared her of the obvious weapons, the sort of stuff some young kid would carry, but Nyx had learned a thing or two since then.

Nyx brought her heels up behind her and reached her hands back. She worked one of the razor blades out of the sole of her sandal and used it to cut open the package.

She heard the other bakkie start up, heard m.u.f.fled voices.

She pulled open the package and reached inside. Her fingers met cold metal. She unwrapped the gun and ran her hands over it to get a feel for what it was.

X80 scattergun, dual organic acid barrels.

Tirhani made, if she guessed right. Those f.u.c.king sheet-wearing martyrs had claimed neutrality for more than a century and still sold the best firearms on the planet.

Nyx checked to see if it was loaded. No, but when she shook it, she could hear liquid in the barrels. The acid part worked, anyway.

She held the gun to her chest and waited until she heard the bakkie pull away. When it was well gone, she got to work shifting both her body and the gun toward the other side of the trunk.

The squirt pounded on the trunk. She froze.

"You're kinda quiet!" the girl yelled.

Nyx didn't answer.

Nyx waited and listened. When nothing else came, she went back to moving.

Organic acid wasn't a fun thing to use in a tight s.p.a.ce. She pulled her burnous over her face and torso. She took a deep breath and wedged her feet up against the trunk.

She pressed the barrel of the gun against the trunk lock. The other end got stuck on the trunk hinge in the back.

Nyx flipped the trigger mechanism to what she hoped was acid-only and squeezed.

The gun went off.

Fluid from both barrels. .h.i.t the trunk and hissed as the compounds came together.

The blast sent a splatter of fluid back at her. She kicked at the trunk. Kicked again. Acid was eating through her burnous.

"G.o.ddammit!" Nyx yelled, and kicked again.

The trunk popped open, and she came out gun first, tossing away her burnous as she did.

The girl had her gun out.

Nyx shot first.

The girl squealed and clawed at her face.

Nyx grabbed the girl's discarded gun and shot her in the face again, this time with bullets. It was red and messy.

Nyx pulled out her toolkits and wiped them down. She wiped the trunk clean too. She took out the other mystery package and found a second weapon, a 42.40 sniper rifle. No ammunition, though.

She searched the dead squirt and came up with some change and some extra rounds for the gun. No paperwork, no transmissions. Dahab wouldn't have left that sort of thing on a squirt. Nyx wiped the blood off her sandals.

She put the bakkie in neutral and pushed it away from the tree and surveyed the damage. There were a couple of broken hoses and a giant red gash in the cistern that bled bug juice and lube. She could work a temporary patch, but from the look of all the dead and dying beetles floating in the pooling organic feed at her feet, she wasn't going to have much of a colony to work with, and she needed more coagulant. The gash in the cistern wasn't healing over right.

She needed to work fast. Dahab would be back.

It took just under an hour to get the bakkie sewn up enough to start and another half hour to let the bugs rejuice. Even then, Nyx had to push the bakkie onto the road. Her chest hurt, and she had to stop and rest twice to catch her breath and ease the ache.

Dahab had taken the duffel bag out of the cab, but Nyx still had a buck in notes sewn into her dhoti and some cash stowed under the dash. The bag had contained the last of her sen, though. She was going to have to finish this trip sober.

She walked around the front of the bakkie to get in and came face to face with a giant, flat-backed millipede busily devouring the spilled contents of her cistern. The insect was a good meter long. It reared up at her and hissed.

Nyx reflexively jerked the acid spray on her rifle. The insect made a high-pitched whirring sound and started to smoke. She finished it off by bashing in its fist-size head with the b.u.t.t of her rifle.

f.u.c.k, she'd be glad to get back to the interior.

Nyx got the bakkie moving. It broke down twice. She stopped at a farmhouse and asked for directions to Jameela. She hadn't had a chance to see her face, but it probably didn't look great. The bakkie was worse. It was no wonder the coastal folk looked at her funny.

She finally turned in to Jameela, a bustling seaside town that supported the towering breeding centers looming behind it-row upon row of barracks, courtyards, labs, health centers, mess halls, and a single mosque. The first time the Chenjans blew up a breeding center, Nasheen had nearly given up the war.

Nyx dropped her bakkie at a local tissue mechanic's and walked the rest of the way to Kine's complex.

Kine lived in a tenement three blocks from the breath of the ocean. Nyx didn't know how she could stand the salty death stink of the sea. After Nyx followed her brothers to the front and their mother died at the compounds, Kine had retired to the coast and gone into organic tech. She studied reproductive theology, working on a cure for the war.