Free Infidel by Kameron Hurley Page A

avoid a fight.  
    But this morning they weren’t up there for a picnic. Nyx and Eshe had spent the predawn hours digging up a weapons cache Nyx had buried the year before. She had some stashes in the border towns, too, but this one had some sentimental items—stuff she didn’t have room for at the storefront.  
    Nyx crouched in the cache hole and passed a pair of specs and a z22 carbine rifle up to Eshe.  
    “What do we need all these for?” Eshe asked for the third time.  
    Nyx waited until he reached for more, then handed him a bag of fever bursts. “Careful with those. They crack open and we’ll be snorting our brains out our nose.”  
    Eshe took the bag in both hands and made his way toward the bakkie. When he returned, the blue light of the first dawn touched his face. The call to prayer rolled out over the desert.  
    “I have to pray,” he said.  
    Nyx swore.  
    “I’ll be right back!” he insisted.  
    Nyx crawled out of the cache and sat at its edge. She took a long pull on a water bulb. She’d tried drinking whiskey earlier, but had retched it all up. Nothing had sat well with her since the fried plantains at lunch the day before. She’d vomited the fight night dinner she and Eshe had shared with Mercia, too.  
    Eshe lay prostrate on a prayer rug on the other side of the bakkie, his fingertips stretched toward the base of an old willowren tree that clawed at the sky with barren, charred branches.
      She had another two hours before she was due at the gym for some conditioning. That gave her just enough time to clean up the storefront’s security. She’d been expecting bel dames to come after her for a long time. Trouble was these weren’t proper bel dames with notes for her head. These were rogues, and rogues were—at best—unpredictable. What protection could Fatima and her corrupt little circle give her?    
    Nyx walked over to the bakkie. She turned on her transceiver and punched in Suha’s personal code. The bug casing used for the diplomat job belonged to the diplomat. She would miss that bit of high-end tech. It was hard to come by a secure com method that didn’t require a magician to run it.  
    “You got me?” Nyx said.  
    “Yeah, I’m here. Just hitting the gym,” Suha said.  
    “You deliver that note to the bounty office?”
    “Addressed for the Queen’s eyes only, yeah. I don’t know how you expect to get a note to the Queen that way, but yeah, I did, right when they opened.”  
    “She’ll answer,” Nyx said. The Queen would be just as interested in what the bel dames were up to as Nyx was. And the Queen might know why it was a bel dame who had tried to kill Nyx was running around the palace meeting diplomats. “Thanks.”  
    She liked to keep transceiver conversations short. Unlike a magician-bugged communication, archaic radio signals were easy to hack. She hadn’t had a com specialist on her team since the year before, when she found out the girl was selling zygotes and venom out of the storefront on fight nights. She didn’t much care what her team did in their spare time, but using Nyx’s hard-won resources to do it was one step to the left too many.  
    So until she replaced her com specialist or hired a hard up magician, her com was dodgy at best. The most secure way to get the Queen anything was through the bounty office. Best case, she’d get a list of recent bel dame visitors to the palace. She knew the Queen’s head of security, Kasbah, and figured her records would be meticulous. She hadn’t seen either Kasbah or the Queen in six years, not since she took their note on an alien gene pirate, but they’d remember her. Nyx was a lot of things, but forgettable wasn’t one of them.  
    Nyx leaned against the bakkie and watched the second sun rise. Eshe straightened and rolled up his prayer rug. He walked toward her, an awkward and gangly kid. Neither of them wore their burnouses, but in another hour the sun would get too hot to stand.