God's War by Kameron Hurley Read Free Book Online Page A

and a handful of
house brothers. Her mother was on the dole, the waqf ,
and not well off.
    “Boxing keeps me in bread,” Jaks
said, polishing off her third whiskey. Like Nyx, she drank it straight. “And
it’s good for picking up girls,” Jaks added.
    “I don’t have a place,” Nyx said.
“You empty tonight?”
    “Mostly,” Jaks said. She was
grinning like a fool now, like a kid. She was probably sixteen. She’d never
been to the front, never been a bel dame. You could see the difference in the
grin, in the eyes.
    Jaks leapt from her seat and bounced
around. She paid the tab and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
    Nyx hunched and shifted her weight
to alter her usual walk as they crossed the bar. Jaks moved out the door, and
Nyx looped an arm around her narrow waist and turned to press her lips to
Jaks’s neck, letting her hood shield her profile. She saw a stir of figures
hanging around outside but couldn’t catch their faces in the dim night. Her
sisters would be figuring out soon that she had bet house credit on the wrong
boxer and wouldn’t be showing her face at the betting booth to collect.
    Jaks was only a little drunk; the
liquor made her happy.
    “Listen,” Jaks said as they stumbled
down the alley, groping at each other. “We need to be quiet. I’ve got company.”
    “I’m a spider,” Nyx said.
    Jaks took her down a dead-end alley
near the Chenjan district. Something hissed at them from a refuse heap. Nyx
reflexively pushed Jaks behind her. Three enormous ravager bugs, tall as Nyx’s
knee, scurried out from the refuse pile. One of them stopped to hiss at them
again. It opened its jaws wide. Nyx kicked it neatly in the side of the head,
crushing an eye stalk. The bug screeched and skittered off.
    Jaks laughed. “I should have warned
you. They don’t spray around here. Lots of mutants.”
    They climbed a rickety ladder to the
second floor. Nyx felt like she’d been running forever, since the dawn of the
world. Time stretched.
    A boy’s sandal hung from the top
rung of the ladder. In that moment, Nyx saw the pile of Tej’s things again, the
detritus the Chenjan border filter had left of him. A sword, a baldric, his
sandals.
    Nyx caught her breath as she peered
into the little mud-brick room. A couple of worms in glass lit the place. There
were two raised sleeping platforms on either side of the room. A boy looked
down at her from the one at her right. He looked nothing like Jaks. He was
large and soft where she was small and hard. His hair was curly black and too
long for a boy his age.
    “My house brother,” Jaks said.
“Arran. Sorry, he doesn’t do tea.”
    He didn’t look like he’d spent a day
at the front, but he was the right age. Nyx had expected to feel something when
she saw this one. Rage, maybe; bloodlust. But he was just another boy. Another
body. Another bel dame’s bounty.
    Along the far wall was the kitchen
space: a mud-brick oven, all-purpose pot, two knives, and a sack of what must
have been rice or maybe millet, knowing a boxer’s take.
    Arran rolled back into the loft.
    “Come up,” Jaks said.
    Nyx came.
    She kissed and licked Jaks in a
detached sort of way. It was like watching two people she didn’t know having
sex.
    Nyx lay awake after, until Jaks
slept. She was aware, vaguely, of being hungry. She moved like a dream,
smelling of Jaks, and slunk down the ladder and into the darkness near the
oven. She reached for the biggest of the kitchen knives and put it between her
teeth.
    She climbed up the ladder to Arran’s
loft.
    He came awake before she reached
him. She heard the straw stir. She took the knife from her mouth, cut her palm,
and as she met the top of the ladder, said, “Arran.”
    Following Jaks to find this boy had
cost Nyx a kidney, her womb, and a year’s worth of zakat from Yah Tayyib.
    It had cost Tej his life.
    Nyx shoved her bloody hand against
the boy’s mouth and brought up the other hand with the knife.
    When infected boys came home,