Read Online Rapture by Kameron Hurley - Free Book Online Page B

terrified—him or her. Worse, he wasn’t sure what any of that proved.
    Ahmed had worked for a lot of smart, sadistic fucks. They had hidden the sadism behind military intelligence badges and security protocols, but their arrogance and lack of compassion were harder to tuck up under a prayer rug. They had taught him everything they knew, and he had used it ruthlessly, relentlessly. It had kept him alive, yes. But his reward for fifteen years of service and putting a knife in the eye of every good soldier he knew was this.
    Six weeks ago, he’d known very little about the world outside the military. Now he knew enough to be certain that the man he was at the front no longer existed. Assholes lived a long time, but if that was living, he wanted none of it. It was time to let go of all the catshit, and learn how to be a man on his own terms, in a new world that had no idea what to do with him.

6.
    E she wore somber colors to the wake, darkened by the warm rain. He stood well back from the gravesite, now clogged with mourners and pall bearers and swordsmen. The whole steaming, chanting, incenseheavy affair reminded him of just how stubbornly conservative many parts of Ras Tieg still were. All the rest of the people on Umayma had learned not to bury their bodies three millennia ago, back at the beginning of the world. They cut off their heads and burned them, no matter the prescriptions set down in any holy book. Those instructions were for people on some other world.
    But Ras Tiegans on the frontier thought differently. Cutting up a body and burning it was still sacrilege, desecration. It had something to do with ashes and dust and prophets who didn’t stay dead, and how that was holy. Eshe didn’t really follow it. But it meant that this crowd waited for something far more dramatic than just seeing a man’s body covered over in dirt.
    The priest’s grave was about as deep as Eshe’s arm was long. The body was covered in a white muslin shroud that trembled and shook. Beetles and midges skittered along its surface. The trembling and writhing beneath the shroud was likely still just the bugs, doing what bugs on Umayma did—devouring, destroying—transforming.
    Three priests walked around the edges of the fresh grave garbed all in their silver-and-gilt finery. The robes, by now, were soggy and just a little transparent. Many Ras Tiegan priests had some talent with bugs, having been conscripted as soon as their talent emerged. They also tended to be lean, muscular fighters in their youth. So even after an hour walking around in the mud swinging pots of incense and flogging themselves with strings of holy beads while intoning the same monotonous prayer about resurrection, they were holding up pretty well. The little red dots drawn onto their foreheads with ink—the symbolic eye of god donned by this particular sect—had begun to tear and run, leaving crimson rivulets dripping into their faces like bloody tears. Only the very rich could afford this many priests for a wake. Most folks got an anonymous beheading by some underpaid graveyard swordsman. Eshe watched a man of just that sort trekking down the far side of the graveyard, long sword over one shoulder. A shimmering trail of bloody entrails sloughed off the sword as it bounced along.
    Eshe stood on a low rise well behind the funeral party with his reluctant partner, Isabet Softel. She was pensive in the gray morning. Some of her dark hair had escaped her white wimple. Her loose hair clung in delicate tendrils to her pale face—pale even for a Ras Tiegan. He once asked her if she was part Mhorian, and she’d been offended. Most things he did or said offended her. Why it was the Madame de Fourré kept pairing them together was beyond Eshe. He had caught her without her wimple once, and the spill of her hair reminded him so strongly of Corinne that his heart ached.
    But Isabet was not Corinne. Isabet had a head full of honey and strong convictions, and where he was