Rapture by Kameron Hurley

bel dames, certainly. But not likely. Between your… theatrics in Tirhan and our cleanup here of the rogues, the bel dames are more united than ever before.”
    “But you people sure do have a dog in the fight, don’t you?”
    “Everyone does, Nyx. Anyone with a vested interest in Nasheen is about to get fucked. The Tirhanis aren’t happy. The Ras Tiegans aren’t happy. The Families aren’t happy. And no, not all of the bel dames are terribly happy either, I admit.”
    “You have to have some idea of where he’s gone.”
    “I thought you weren’t interested.”
    “I’m not interested in working for you. But I’m interested in Raine.”
    “Make no mistake, Nyxnissa. If you go after this man without bel dame authorization, you’ll receive no support from me. You become a bel dame or we do not back you. Do you really want to go up against a hundred bel dames or the most powerful families in Nasheen? Alone? I can give you an entire team if you’re one of us. Our best. Good, fast, fierce women.”
    “And whoever took him will see that coming, won’t they?”
    “Don’t do this alone, Nyx. I’ve seen plenty of assassinations backfire. You kill the leader of a revolution instead of bringing them home alive because you think it all just dies with them. That might work when you kill somebody who doesn’t have many followers yet, but you take a man like Raine who easily has the sympathy of two hundred thousand men, and you know what you get? A man made into a martyr. It’ll spur those men out there to start some violent regime and new, repressive government that puts bel dames and all other women back under some archaic law they carve out of the Kitab. No, we’ll have no martyrs here. Not while I’m serving on any council. He needs to come back alive. Dying is the absolute worst thing that could happen to Raine al Alharazad. You understand?”
    “That’s why I let his mother live, Fatima. And look how well that turned out. Sometimes I wish I had come in here and blown up the whole bloody lot of you.”
    “A proper bel dame only kills when she knows the kill will make a difference,” Fatima said. “That is where you always had trouble. You never believed in anything.”
    “No. And I never pretended otherwise.”
    “Let me help you with this. I can’t have you do this on your own.”
    “I won’t be on my own,” Nyx said. “I have old colleagues, and you said yourself there are plenty of boys out of work.”
    “And wouldn’t that be lovely?” Fatima said, biting. “Hauling along some men’s sympathizer with you?”
    “Better than letting them all think it’s a bel dame job. You ever consider that giving this to a bel dame would send a message to those boys that we don’t intend to bring Raine in alive?”
    Fatima frowned. “It’s more dangerous to send someone who’s not one of us.”
    “I disagree,” Nyx said. “I’ve worked with a lot of boys, and they fucking hate bel dames. They hate what we do and they hate what we stand for. You want a chance at this, you let me run it my way.”
    “No.”
    “You’re the one who called me back,” Nyx said. “Tell me what you know.”
    Fatima gritted her teeth. She proffered the paper again. “Sign it.”
    “No.”
    “Don’t make me play this card, Nyx.”
    “I’m not going to be owned again.”
    Fatima sighed. She pulled a gun from beneath her desk.
    Nyx raised a brow, interested.
    Fatima laid the gun on the table. “You said something to me, once. When I was torturing you, admittedly. But I’ll never forget it. You said you’d take everything from me, the way you had from Raine. My face, my license, my lover, my daughters. You know what I did after that? I joined the high council, so if I lost my bel dame license, I wouldn’t lose my livelihood. I stopped taking serious lovers, so there was no one to care about. And I happily sent my daughters off to war, so you could not take them from me. Last year I got word that the last of my