"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 My life for a thousand.

She wanted a new life: a life she could trade for something more worthwhile than twenty b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.h.i.t. Taite's in charge. If he says f.u.c.k 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 s.p.a.ce. He kept a firm footing, though creepers b.u.mped 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 carca.s.ses of pretty holiday beetles, insects known for their cowardly aversion to loud noises.

Nyx shouldered past, and the look she gave the green-clad women was enough to make both of them jerk their hands away from her, withdrawing their insulting little beetles.

Once inside the station, Nyx found some room by the empty fountain and shuffled around the tickets.

Rhys looked at her dubiously. "You do know how to use those, right?" he asked.

Nyx turned the tickets over a couple more times until she matched the gate numbers at the station to the ones on her card.

"f.u.c.k off," she said.

They got lost on one of the platforms and had to double back. Once they were on the right platform, Rhys bought himself a purified water. Nyx bought a whiskey, straight.

Rhys watched her take a swig with his usual distasteful eye.

"I can get you a soda," he said.

"I've had enough of soda," Nyx said. She wanted to be drunk by the time the train arrived in Mushtallah. She knew Mushtallah. She had done all of her bel dame training there. Most magicians and bel dames worked out of the capital, and she expected she was going to run into a lot of women she knew. In the border towns she was somebody to fear, to loathe-a former bel dame who brought in every bounty with the same determination and brutality she'd taken in her bel dame notes. But in Mushtallah, she was just another criminal. n.o.body. Nothing. Just like she'd been when they threw her in prison.

Rhys pulled out a slim volume of what looked like poetry from his robe.

A voice came on over the platform radio, and a misty woman's head came into view just over the train tracks.

"There will be a slight delay due to unrest along the Bushair line running north-northwest. This will affect lines Zubair, Mushmura, and Kondija. Thank you for your patience."

Somebody had blown up another track along the Bushair line, then. Nyx allowed herself a minute to wonder how many people had died. She wondered if it mattered.

She sipped her drink and watched Rhys while he read.

"Would you mind reading out loud?" she asked, hoping she sounded nonchalant. It felt too much like she needed something.

He raised his gaze above the ends of the pages and looked at her.

Nyx kept staring at the tracks. She wanted to do something with her hands.

"You nervous?" he asked.

"I'm never nervous."

"Of course not," he said. "This is Petal Dancing Petal Dancing."

"Oh, G.o.d, this isn't something soft, is it?"

"Not everything that's beautiful is weak."

"No, it just makes you that way."

He smiled. "We disagree, then."

"We do," she said.

Nyx cupped her gla.s.s in both hands. Rhys began to read, in that voice that could calm her during the worst days-days when bugs got into the money bin and bodies piled up in the freezer like cheap popsicles. Time stretched. His accent had gotten better since she'd started asking him to read out loud. It had been a couple years now, she supposed. She insisted he read in Nasheenian, not so much to improve the accent but because hearing him speak Chenjan-hearing him speak the same language as the people she'd spent two years throwing bursts at on the front felt obscene, and there wasn't much anymore that made her feel so f.u.c.ked up down to her bones.

After a time, Nyx stopped her fidgeting. She let herself forget some of the worst of the fear. Another announcement came on over the station radio. The delay had been extended.

She finished her drink.

They boarded the train two hours later and found their way to a private first-cla.s.s cabin whose bench seats were nonetheless so close that if they sat directly across from each other, their knees touched. They didn't sit that way.

Rhys opened his copy of the Kitab, and Nyx fixed herself at the window and watched the Nasheenian desert roll past them in a blur of umber brown and violet blue. The sky was a pale amethyst today, bruised purple along the western horizon, the direction of the front.

"How fast do you think these go?" she asked.

"A hundred, hundred and twenty kilometers an hour," Rhys said.

"Huh," Nyx said. She wasn't going to argue. "You know anything about courts and royalty?" she said.

He did not raise his eyes from the Kitab. "I thought bel dames held intimate soirees with queens and politicians all the time. You should be an old hand at this."

"We don't flirt and wh.o.r.e ourselves out like dancers," she said. He flinched. Why did she always want to twist the knife with him?

"Just make it look good, all right? It's bad enough you're Chenjan."

"I didn't ask to go along. If you take offense at the-"

"It's your f.u.c.king accent I can't stand." Something roiled up in her, something old and twisted. She hated it even as the words slipped out. She pressed her fist to her belly.

He shut his book and stood. "Excuse me."

"Sit down."

"I signed an employment contract with you," he snapped. "You did not obtain a writ of sale. I'll be in the dining car." He rolled open the door. It banged behind him.

Nyx rubbed at her face. The worst of her troubles always started with what came out of her mouth.

She heard a knock at the cabin door. She stood and slid it open, trying to come up with something that sounded nice but not like an apology.

But it was not Rhys at the door. A young woman wearing a blue Transit Authority uniform offered her a complimentary newsroll.

The scrolling text that slid across the translucent projection of the newsrolls was even tougher to read than static text, but Nyx figured Rhys would want to read it when he got back. An offering. She could look at the pictures. Her teachers at the state schools had called her dead dumb because she got all her letters backward. Some of the better newsreel companies had an audio option, but this wasn't one of them.

"Thanks," she said, taking the roll.

She sat back down, but before she twisted the news back into its thumbnail-size roll, she looked over the projection. Bundled between two articles about border skirmishes near Aludra was a picture of the gates of Faleen. The nose of a star carrier reared up behind them.

Nyx stared at the carrier a long time. She'd seen that carrier before. She tried to find an article with it, but all she noted was a short blurb before the picture scrolled over to the next image of three beaming young boys heading for the front.

Star carriers didn't get lost in Faleen twice, and even if it was a different carrier than the one she'd seen the last time she was there, it was the same make as the last one. Aliens interested in boxers were back in Nasheen. What the h.e.l.l was up with that?

Nyx spent a long while staring at the scrolling pictures, but the image of Faleen didn't pop up again.

What did an off-world carrier want in Faleen? What did the queen want with her in Mushtallah? Being a bel dame had taught her that there were no coincidences, only cause and effect.

She was going to need another drink.

8.

Rhys could recite the Kitab by heart, but he never quoted it at Nyx.

He sat in the dining car reading for hours, yet no one came to wait on him. He even stayed long enough for the wait staff changeover. Three women gave him openly hostile stares as they pa.s.sed his table. A Transit Authority agent asked to see his papers. The few times he'd dared to go off on his own outside the Chenjan district since joining Nyx's team, he'd been beaten up, cut, and much worse. He didn't travel alone anymore. Much as he hated it, knowing Nyx was just two cars away was somewhat comforting, though her sharp tongue was not.

What finally drove him back to the cabin was the conductor's announcement that they were nearing Mushtallah and were about to go through customs. Customs agents were as violent with Chenjan men as security agents and order keepers.

Rhys put his things away and pa.s.sed between cars. The stricken Nasheenian landscape rolled by. The world outside did not look so different from Chenja here: There were fewer minarets, and some of the older, mostly untouched villages were tiled in ceramic and still bore huge gold-gilt inscriptions from the Kitab above the lintels to all of their village gates, groceries, and the wealthier houses. He saw old contagion sensors sticking up from the desert, half buried, some of them with the red lights at their bulbous tips still blinking. There were fewer old cities in the Chenjan interior. The oldest relics, Rhys supposed, would be farther north, in the Khairian wasteland, where the first world had been created and abandoned. Out here, though, was the most he had seen of old-world Nasheen. He had never been to Mushtallah.

Rhys knocked at the compartment door. As Nyx pulled it open, a pa.s.sing member of the Transit Authority paused in the hall at the sight of him and asked Nyx if Rhys was bothering her.

"It's all right," Nyx said. "He's mine." The Transit Authority agent gave them both a good long look before moving on again.

Rhys shut the door.

"Here, I kept the news for you," Nyx said. She tossed him a newsroll. He pocketed it. She had the red letter in her hands again. He pretended not to notice. He had spent six years with her-five and a half longer than he'd expected. She was supposed to be his way out of the boxing gym and on to more lucrative contracts with universities and First Families. But even with an employer on his resume, his middling talent was not great enough to make up for his ethnicity.

Rhys glanced out the window and decided it was almost thirteen in the afternoon, about time for noon prayer. He rolled out his prayer rug. Nyx went off to find the bathroom.

Despite-or because of-her prison record, Nyx had a good reputation with just about every border agent inside Nasheen. Rhys had crossed into enough cities with her to know. During his more cynical moments, Rhys wondered if she got through customs so easily because she'd slept with all of the agents. It had taken him some time to realize just how terrible Nasheen's problem with same-s.e.x relations had become. Though s.e.x between two men was not only discouraged, but illegal, what pa.s.sed for s.e.x between women was actively celebrated, and Nyx used s.e.x as freely and easily as any other tool on her baldric. What women found appealing about her, he could not say. She was coa.r.s.e and foul-mouthed and G.o.dless. She was also the only woman who would employ him.

The customs agents slid the door open. They both stared hard at him and told him to raise his arms.

Rhys felt a gut-churning moment of terror.

Nyx appeared just behind them and leaned against the doorway. She smirked. The fear bled out of him.

"Go easy on him," she said. "He's mine."

She said it like he was her bakkie or a prized sand cat.

The bigger woman asked for Nyx's pa.s.sbook.

"I'm already coded for Mushtallah," Nyx said. "I'm Nyxnissa so Dasheem."

The woman clucked at her. "Who'd you kill to get you back in Mushtallah, Nyxnissa?"

"All the same sorts of people," Nyx said.