Free God's War by Kameron Hurley

boldness of the look stopped him in his tracks. He
didn’t know if she wanted to cut him or kiss him.
    “I know you,” she said.
    “You’re a bel dame,” he said. He
knew it the same way he’d known the dog-faced girl had a bad hand, the way he
knew a magician or a shifter by sight on the street.
    “Was,” she said. “Not anymore. I’m
Nyx.”
    Husayn bounced over to the former
bel dame’s side and punched her on one of her substantial shoulders. “Let’s go,
huh?” Husayn said.
    “You’re a dancer,” Nyx said.
    “Was,” he said.
    Nyx let go of the ropes. She looked
out behind him, toward the entrance to the magicians’ quarters. Rhys followed
her gaze and saw Yah Tayyib in the doorway, watching her with black eyes.
    A broad smile lit up Nyx’s face. It
made her almost handsome. “You need a job?” she asked Rhys.
    “Doing what?” he asked.
    “Bugs,” Nyx said. “It’s what you can
do, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” he said. He’d discovered that
he could do little else. “I’m not the most skilled, but… I’ve been told it’s
enough for petty employment.”
    “I’m a hunter. I need a team.
Magicians get ten percent.”
    “On a two-person team? No less than
twenty-five.”
    “There’s three of us for now, but
it’ll be five, eventually. Fifteen.”
    “Five ways is twenty.”
    “That assumes we’re all equal.
Nasheen’s not a democracy, and neither’s my team.”
    “Fifteen. I won’t kill anyone for
you.”
    “Fifteen, you don’t kill anybody,
and you sign a contract today.”
    Rhys turned again to look at Yah
Tayyib. The old magician moved out of the doorway, back into the darkness.
    “Yes,” Rhys said.
    She squatted and reached through the
ropes for him. He started, expecting violence. Instead, she clasped his elbow.
He recovered quickly and clasped hers in turn. And in that one moment, that
brief embrace, he felt safe for the first time in more than a year.
    “You’ll do all right with me,” Nyx
said, straightening.
    “You think so?”
    She grinned again. Her whole face
lit up. It was dynamic. “If you don’t, I’ll cut your fucking head off. It’s
what I’m good at.”
    “Not so good as all that, if you
aren’t a bel dame anymore.”
    She caught hold of the ropes and
leaned back, still grinning. “A shitty magician and a shitty bel dame. We’re
two of a kind, then, aren’t we?”
    He wasn’t sure what scared him most:
that she was right, or that she was now his employer.
     

PART TWO
    IN THE DESERT

5
    Nyx came out of her year in prison
with all of her limbs and organs intact, though she had a new appreciation for
open sky and food that hadn’t been grown in a jar. After that, time licked by
in a blur of boys and blood. Seven years of putting together a crackerjack
bounty hunting team, starting with Taite, her com tech, then her Chenjan
magician. Seven years of boys and blood—girls too. Bounty hunters took up notes
on girls and women, and that’s all she had a license to be anymore, just
another body hacker. Another organ stealer. In Nasheen you hacked out a living
or spent your last days hacking out your lungs.
    She knew which she preferred.
    The war still raged along the
ever-changing border with Chenja. Nyx started up her storefront with the dancer
and com tech in Punjai, a border city at the heart of the bounty-hunting
business. While she was in prison, Punjai had been swallowed by Chenja for six
months, then “liberated” by a couple of brilliant Nasheenian magicians and an
elite terrorist-removal unit. Chenjan corpses burned for days. All of the
city’s prayer wheels were burned and the old street signs were put back up.
There had been air raids and rationing and a couple more poisoned waterworks,
but, as ever, the war was just life, just how things clicked along—one
exhausting burst and bloated body at a time.
    It was a fitting way to look at
time, Nyx figured, as she opened up her trunk one hazy morning while the yeasty
stink of bursts blew in