Rapture by Kameron Hurley Page A

children had died on the frontier, defending some mealy little outpost in Khairi.”
    “That’s not my—”
    “I’m not finished. Now I’m telling you the same. You will work for us this final time, Nyx, or I will take everything from you. I know where your house is. I had Mercia tailed, though the sorry little kitten thought us beat. You bleed on this page or I hunt down Anneke and her militant brats one by one and burn that place to the ground. The woman, though, I’ll save for you. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about your little lover? Your little happy home? I’m a fucking bel dame. I can sense one of ours going soft on sight.”
    Nyx stared at the gun. Then the paper. She felt as if she was watching everything from a great distance. There was a story, she knew, about bargaining with Iblis, and how the promises made meant nothing.
    She had a choice. Die here, now, trying to murder Fatima. Or take the job, and see how deep this well went.
    Fatima tapped the paper with the gun.

8.
    T he cell was dirty, bare, and dark. The withered husk curled against the wall had been a person at some point in the hazy past, though it did not often recall it. Once, the world had been full of light—blazing, blistering, blaring light—like a chorus of angels burning in the sun. It had showered the world in stars, and danced on the graves of a thousand screaming points of life, and been content.
    They fed it oranges in the mornings and rice and saffron at night, year upon year. The tainted food made the world even more muted, as if covered in a soft, gray shroud. Time yawned and stretched and twisted back in on itself, meaningless. The blinking syringes wielded by pleasant, humming Plague Sisters pinched and measured. Weighed and calculated. Plague Sisters only cared for the best and the worst of Nasheen’s monsters. But it did not remember which it was.
    Time drifted. Ate itself.
    And then, one day, they opened the door.
    It garbled at them and laughed, the way it did whenever it conversed with those misty-honey illusions it summoned up for company. Memories always flickered, just there, at the edges of the gray world.
    Brief images. Fighting. Blood. And that blazing, ethereal light. She… yes, she remembered a world eaten by plague and contagion and rebuilt into some other world’s image. Whether it was the world outside her cell anymore or if that world had become something else, she did not know. “Not this time,” they said, and clawed at her.
    She twisted and fought. Dug fingers and teeth into flesh. But they pricked her, doped her, and her body went limp, like a fresh caught mock parrot. She tried to snarl—but that, too, had left her, so she snarled at them silently.
    I had a name, once. Fear me.
    I.
    They dragged her into the light.
    +
    After a few days of detox, they lashed her to a chair in a dim, dry room. There was a large devotion mounted in a scarab carapace on the wall. No windows. Just the door. When the door opened this time, the world was not quite so gray, and she had a sense of herself. Knowledge.
    I have a name. The bitches took my name.
    Two slim women entered. Bug women. They wore long, shapeless tunics, aprons, and hijabs of the same off-white color. One had a soft smear of blood on her apron. She could smell it. The women had three sets of blinking butterfly syringes peeking out from the front of their aprons. She flinched at the sight of them. A shadow moved through the door behind the women.
    She lifted her head, regarded the shadow. “You’re not like the others,” she said. Her voice came out broken and raspy, not at all the way she remembered. When she once spoke, so long ago, people thought the sun was singing.
    The new woman was slender at the waist, but broad in the arms and shoulders; top heavy. She wore dark trousers, tunic, burnous, but no weapons. They wouldn’t have allowed it here. She stood a little closer than the women who held the syringes, easily confident. No fear.