God's War by Kameron Hurley Page A

have Yah Tayyib,” Rasheeda said.
    “Yah Tayyib’s taken an oath. He
wouldn’t testify. About black work or anything else.”
    “Wouldn’t he?” Fatima said. “He
knows the place of a bel dame. He knows we’re just as happy to haul in rogue
magicians as black sisters. We used to hunt magicians when they went rogue too.
Black bel dames ruin our reputation.”
    Nyx lay back on the bed. Yah Tayyib,
who had mended her when she was barely human, who recalled her body and mind
from the front when she thought she had lost both there. The man who taught her
to box.
    “He wouldn’t make a charge,” she
said.
    “There was another complaint,”
Fatima said. “Not as potent as Yah Tayyib’s, but a formal complaint
nonetheless.”
    “Raine,” Nyx said.
    Fatima raised her brows. “You
expected it?”
    “I’ve been expecting him to file a formal
complaint ever since I cut off his cock.”
    “It was deserved,” Rasheeda said.
    “Deserved or not, he’s filed a
formal complaint about a bel dame doing black work,” Fatima said.
    “Lucky you left him his balls,”
Rasheeda said, “or you’d get a fine for reproductive terrorism.” She waggled
her index finger and snickered.
    “So what happens now?” Nyx asked.
“You give me some kind of probation?”
    “No,” Fatima said. “We terminate
your contract and send you to prison.”
    “What?” Nyx said. Prison was for
draft dodgers and terrorists. Prison was for men .
    “The sentence came from the queen.”
    “I’m bored,” Rasheeda said. “Where’s
my soda?” She went naked into the hall, calling for Luce.
    Nyx stared into her skinny, veined
hands again. It was like she’d woken up with someone else’s body.
    “How long do I serve?” she asked.
    “A year, maybe less. We could have
had you sent to the front.”
    “How did you find me?”
    “We had Rasheeda posted at Jaks’s
residence.”
    Of course. She’d seen only three of
them at the fight. “So you knew about Jaks?”
    “We looked up your note,” Fatima
said, then wrinkled her nose. “You look and smell like death. I’ll get you
something to eat.” She walked into the busy hall.
    Prison, Nyx thought, with all the
criminals Raine and people like her had put there.
    Nyx tried to pull her legs off the
bed. They were numb. How long had she been here? The window overlooking the
street was barred, and the walls were solid stone. How the hell could she get
bars out of stone?
    But Fatima was coming back into the
room with a Plague Sister bearing a tray of something that smelled a lot like
food, and Rasheeda had her arms full of bottles of soda. If there was a way out
of this one, Nyx couldn’t think of it. Didn’t even know if she wanted it. Her
body was done.
    “Here,” Rasheeda said, throwing her
a bottle. Nyx’s reflexes were off. She ducked instead of catching it. “You
won’t get any of those in the box.”
    “When she’s done eating,” Fatima
told the Plague Sister, “I have a team coming to get her.”
    Nyx didn’t finish eating, but they
still came for her.
    And prison was pretty shitty.
     

4
    “It’s time,” Yah Reza said.
    Rhys entered the plague hall. Yah
Tayyib and two other magicians sat at a large circular stone table at the
center of the room. Three Plague Sisters, the hems of their white robes dripping
with spiders, sat across from them. Like Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, the
plague hall was a cavernous room lined with jars of mostly human organs. And
like the magicians’ quarters, the whole room hummed with the sound and feel of
bugs. Rhys’s skin prickled. He had waited some time for this.
    Yah Reza followed Rhys inside and
bid him stand next to her within a pace of the table.
    Three months after Rhys saw his
first alien, Yah Reza had deemed him ready for a magician’s trial. He had come
to the interior and been independently tested by the Plague Sisters. He had
read his performance in their faces, in the hard line the bugs themselves drew
against him. The