Free God's War by Kameron Hurley Page A

on the wind. She and her team were still three bounties
short of rent.
    She found a headless body inside the
trunk.
    “You should have put some towels
down,” Rhys said. It had been worth the look on Yah Tayyib’s face the day she
signed Rhys, though his cut was still substantially more than anybody else’s on
the team.
    And she liked his hands.
    There had been dog carcasses in the
alley behind her storefront this morning, fat rats squealing over tidbits, old
women netting roaches for stews. The accumulated filth of rotting tissue,
blood, sand, and the stench of human excrement had sent Rhys out onto the veldt
for dawn prayer, and Nyx had grudgingly agreed to take the bakkie out to pick
him up. She made sure to arrive well after the end of prayer, because watching
Rhys praying was about as uncomfortable as the idea of catching him
masturbating—if he even did that sort of thing.
    In any case, she hadn’t thought to
check the trunk.
    “Whose is it?” Nyx asked. She was due
to pick up a bounty in a quarter of an hour. She needed the trunk space.
    The body was draped in the white
burnous of a clerk, gold tassels and all. The feet were bare. Though he had no
head, a red newsboy cap was cradled under the left arm.
    Nice touch, that.
    “Khos’s,” Rhys said.
    She should have recognized his work.
    Nyx glanced over at Rhys, trying to
read him. His dark face was pinched and drawn.
    She watched him gather his gear.
“I’ll put this in the cab. I forgot about the body,” he said.
    “Khos won’t get anything without the
head.”
    “He says the body’s got a
birthmark.”
    “Khos is an idiot.” Khos, her big
Mhorian shifter. Substantial in so many ways. She
teased that thought back out of her mind. Shit, it had been a while.
    Rhys pinched his mouth. Nyx waited
for a word of affirmation, but he said only, “Khos said this one was on the
boards for black work. He had me open a file.”
    Nyx shut the trunk.
    “Somebody’s going to revoke my
hunter’s license ’cause Khos can’t burn his bodies,” she said. It wouldn’t be
the first time. She’d had her bounty hunter’s license revoked twice in her
seven years as a hunter—once for accidentally shooting a diplomat’s assistant,
who’d been within range of her actual target, and again for employing Khos
without a shifter’s license. Shifters were expensive.
    Nyx moved around to the cab of the
little bakkie, kicked the latch loose, and propped open the door. She took the
driver’s seat, adjusted the sword strapped to her back to make it easier to
sit, and pumped the ignition pedal. A growl came from under the hood. She’d
gotten the bakkie off a hedge witch working in the fleshpots on the Tirhani
border. Nyx knew all about what it was like to be hard up for bugs and bread.
    “Hit the grille,” Nyx said.
Sometimes you had to get the beetles riled up before they’d feed.
    Rhys banged the flat of his hand on
the grille. Not much weight behind it. Fucking dancers .
    While she waited, Nyx watched a
burst from the front ignite across the sky over Punjai. One of the anti-burst
guns stowed in the minarets along the perimeter fired. The heavy whump-whump of the guns made her ears pop. The burst
burned up over the city. Bursts were a lot prettier from a distance.
    “Would you put some shit behind it?”
Nyx yelled. “You want to go back to whoring-out portraits?”
    Rhys kicked the grille. Better.
    The bugs hissed, and something
inside the semi-organic cistern belched.
    “In, in, let’s go!” Nyx called.
    Rhys leapt in as the bakkie began
rolling down the dusty hill toward Punjai.
    There was a hot desert wind blowing
in from the western waste, pushing out the city’s black shroud of smog and
settling a misty cloud of red silt over the cityscape. The double dawn had
risen; the orange sun overpowered the wan light of the blue sun, and the
silt-filtered light caught the world on fire.
    Nyx shifted pedals as the road
straightened out. They hit gravel, and a couple