Read Online Rapture by Kameron Hurley - Free Book Online

have cursed the woman who’d taken him here, but the thought of speaking made his stomach churn. If he spent another day in Sahar, he would be dead. It didn’t matter much what he had to sell to get out.
    So he slogged back into the fleshpots, and traded his right kidney for the remainder of what he needed for his train ticket. Still drooling and stumbling, he picked the first train headed to the interior. The woman at the counter spent twenty minutes reviewing his discharge tattoo and accompanying paperwork, then asked for an additional personal fee.
    “I don’t understand that request,” he said, his words coming out garbled, sloppy, as if he were chewing on the worm with every word. He gagged again.
    The ticket agent smiled, brazenly, the way all the women did who weren’t at the front. She told him men weren’t permitted on the interior without a special pass. “You won’t get past the filter, even with a face like that.”
    He had no interest in being reminded of his fucking face.
    “I’m not aware of that law,” he said, and spit blood and some yellowpink mucus on her counter.
    “You are now,” she said. “One hundred notes, or you stay here at the front with the rest of the boys.” She leaned away from the ticket counter, still grinning. “I suppose you could walk across that desert. Plenty of other boys have, I hear. Mushtallah looks like some magician’s slab, bunch of pretty boys all standing around waiting to get put in jars.”
    He had spent far too many nights on the sand already. His slick was going bad, starting to stink, and they had relieved his entire platoon of weapons before getting their discharge tattoos. Aside from the slick and his other kidney, he had little left of any value. If only they’d taken his face.
    Ahmed took a deep breath. He started to recite the ninety-nine names of God, the way he had the time he saw his first squad torn apart by a hornet burst. It was the calm that kept you whole, when a hornet burst started biting. He had spent an hour in perfect stillness as his squad screamed and died around him, their faces and hands swelling and bursting, bloody foam at their mouths.
    He thought, again, of his face. Tried to tame his new tongue. “Is there some other arrangement we can come to?”
    It was easier to make the proper words this time, but it still felt grotesque, as if he were swallowing some live meal with every word.
    The woman laughed. A big laugh, full and fearless, like the rest of her. “I have plenty of those offers, thanks.” She waved at the packed platform beyond the station, filled with boys and men, many of them still in their tattered standard-issue slicks, just as he was. “I work for currency. Blood, bugs, or notes. No exceptions.”
    Ahmed considered that. “I can pay you a pint of blood and three locusts.”
    “What kind of locusts?”
    “Khairian.”
    “Deal. Come here in the back and Samara will take care of you.”
    He had no locusts, but it took him only a few minutes to call some. She was no magician. It wouldn’t be until she presented the locusts to a buyer that she would discover they were just some local variety. He had promised not to use his skill again after leaving the front, but it was like trying to put down any other weapon—once you became accustomed to it, you picked it up again, easy as breathing.
    Samara, the woman waiting for him in the back, was a pleasant sort of woman, beefy and generous. A quick glance behind the ticket counter told him there were no magicians there either. Samara happily took his locusts, and more. Despite her colleague’s insistence that no other services were of value, her friend Samara had other ideas. Not even his wormy little tongue would dissuade her.
    She seemed only mildly disappointed his cock wouldn’t cooperate, but did not ask why. He wondered how many others she had brought back here, and how many had been in any state to satisfy her with something other than a tongue or a hand.
    She