Rapture
“Hurley’s world-building is phenomenal... (she) smoothly handles tricky themes such as race, class, religion, and gender without sacrificing action.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“…where some writers might focus on high-tech weapons or explosive battles in space, Hurley brings things down to a personal level, recalling more the toughminded realism of Chris Moriarty’s
Spin State
…”
—
New York Review of Science Fiction
“
God’s War
was part slow burn, part explosive action... in the end the novel was utterly compelling.”
—
Tor.com
God’s War
is one of the most thought-provoking debuts I’ve read so far this year.”
Locus Magazine
“Hurley indeed creates in her lead character a thoroughly unlikeable, but wholly independent, female Conan. Actually, that’s wrong: Nyxnissa would quite clearly kick Conan’s ass. In her own words, ‘Women can fight as well
Strange Horizons Magazine
“An aggressively dark, highly original SF-fantasy novel with tight, cutting prose and some of the most inventive world-building I’ve seen in a while.”
—
Fantasy Literature.com
“
God’s War
is a clever reinterpretation of the war novel. Hurley takes on issues of gender roles, violence, and religion and does it all with a deft hand.”
—
Staffer’s Musings
God’s War
is a violent tale set against the backdrop of a centuries-old holy war. But beyond all the blood and violence, it’s a beautifully crafted work of art that keeps astonishing you when you least expect it.”
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
“Hurley belongs in the new class of Sci-Fi authors we’ve been waiting for to invigorate the genre along the sides of Rajaniemi, Bacigalupi, and Yu...”
—
The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf & Book Review
The Ranting Dragon
“Are you frustrated with Mary Sue heroines? Well, here comes
God’s War
to rock your face off... If you like rough, battle-scarred women who know how to regulate, you’re going to love Nyx... She makes Han Solo look like a boy scout.”
—
i09.com
God’s War
is a fine piece of writing, and not one that its readers will easily forget.”
Escape Pod
God’s War
is remarkable not because it pushes the boundaries of science fiction, but because it is a novel in which those boundaries are already gone.” —
Pornokitsch
“If you want a down-and-dirty book that takes a hard look at the consequences of religious intolerance and the idea of what ‘feminine’ is, read
God’s War
.”
—
SFF Divas
“Budding authors take note: you want to know how to do that ‘show me don’t tell me’ trick? Read this book. Read every sentence. Hurley’s writing is full of descriptive wonder, of an almost M. John Harrison-y, Jeff VanderMeer-y appreciation for intense color, smell, and sound.”
—
The Little Red Reviewer
Other books by Kameron Hurley
Bel Dame Apocrypha
God’s War
Infidel
Rapture
Rapture
© 2012 by Kameron Hurley
This edition of
Rapture
© 2012 by Night Shade Books
Cover art by David Palumbo
Cover design by Rebecca Silvers
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
For Jayson
Thanks for the meat suits.
“Then We which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall We ever be with the Lord.”
(Bible, Thessalonians 4:16–17)
“Whoever works righteousness, man or woman, and has faith, verily, to them will We give a new Life, a life that is good and pure, and We will bestow on such their reward according to the best of their actions.”
(Quran, Chapter 16, Verse 97)
CONTENTS
1.
E
very time Nyx thought she’d gotten out of the business of killing boys, she shot another one.
He lay bleeding at her feet as the spectators for the weekly fights streamed past, muddying the dusty street with his blood. She had not meant to shoot him, but she was drunk, a common condition during her exile. The boy had grabbed clumsily at the knot of her dhoti where she kept her currency. Her response had been unthinking, like breathing. She had pulled the scattergun from her hip and shot him in the chest. It was the only weapon she carried, these days, because she was generally such a poor shot. After nearly seven years in exile without incident, she hadn’t expected she’d ever use it. What a boy his age was doing on the street instead of at the front, she didn’t know. He was likely a deserter anyway.
As he squealed in the dirt, trailing blood as he scrabbled away from her, a few curious passersby raised their brows, but no one interfered. This was Sameh, a scaly, contaminated, know-nothing little Nasheenian town bordering the vassal state of Druce, populated mainly by speculators and mad magicians. People stayed out of each other’s business here. It was why she’d come.
Nyx worried someone might call an order keeper, but the boy had already turned into a neighboring alley, spitting and cursing and bleeding. The pop of the organic rounds in the gun hadn’t been loud enough to get much attention, so in a few minutes the incident was forgotten, one more anonymous Nasheenian shooting among a crowd of spectators hoping to see a far more dramatic show of violence inside, in the ring.
A passing woman shook her head at the blood and said, “He’s one of those surplus boys just come home from the front. They’re stealing us blind. Wondered who’d do him in.”
Nyx hadn’t heard much about any “surplus boys,” but then, she preferred to avoid the belchy, misty images spouting from the local radios whenever possible. The present and the past mixed together too much. Muddled her head.
Nyx did what she always did after she shot a terrorist or garroted a deserter. She carried on. She stepped inside the fight club. She ordered a drink, and sat down to watch the fights. Among this bloodthirsty crowd, she was just another touchy, trigger-prone spectator.
Throughout Nyx’s exile, she didn’t think much about all the men and women she’d beheaded, or the mullahs she’d pissed off, or the mines she’d planted, or the battles she’d lost. She thought about the ring. A bad left hook. Poor footwork. Blood in her eyes. Hornets on the mat. Because everything that happens after you climb out of a boxing ring, one-half of your face ballooning into a waxy blue-black parody of death while you spit bile and blood and some fleshy bit of somebody’s ear on the mat, slowly losing sight in one leaky eye, dragging your shattered, roachbitten leg behind you… is easy. Routine. Just another day breathing.
After the fights, she sobered up a little on the three-hour drive back to her mercenary buddy Anneke’s homestead, just across the Drucian border. Anneke and her family had picked up house when Nyx was exiled from Nasheen and moved across the border. They gave her a place to stay and built up a new life from scratch. They never once complained about it.
The homestead site had been Anneke’s pick, a seaside compound with whitewashed walls and tangled, sandy gardens. The sound of the wailing ocean kept Nyx up at night and the contagion sensors sounded off more times a day than the muezzin in Mushtallah. They usually lost everything in the garden to giant beetles and blight. It’d been a season since she ate a green vegetable.
Nyx turned off the rutted main road and onto a logging trail halfcovered over in massive evergreen branches. The trees here before the land turned to dunes were tall as a Nasheenian tenement building. They made Nyx claustrophobic. A single fallen branch had pulverized one of Anneke’s kids two years before. Just like that, and Anneke’s baker’s dozen had been culled to an even twelve.
Nyx drove through the towering seaside grove and down the long drive to the house. Eight-foot walls squared the compound.
As she pulled around the circular drive, Nyx saw a foreign bakkie parked in the yard. It was a sleek blue-black hybrid. The whole front end pulsed purple as it sucked up the sun, feeding the bugs in the cistern that powered it. She’d seen fuzzy images of bakkies like this one playing in the background on the radio at a bathhouse in Sameh. They were some new thing out of Tirhan. Expensive, but efficient. No need for juice. The bugs had chlorophyll that fed on solar. At any rate, the tags were foreign on this one. Foreign to Druce, anyway… Familiar to Nyx.
Nasheenian tags.
Government.
Nyx slowed her bakkie to a crawl and killed the juice to the cistern. She pulled her scattergun from behind her seat.
Nobody drove a Nasheenian government bakkie over the border, not unless they were part of an armed caravan of politicians headed for the interior. That said, even caravans didn’t cross the border at the coast—it was too contaminated. They would have come down the Sunskin Way E., from Mushtallah. Fifty kilometers from here.
Nyx pulled on her hat and slid out of the bakkie. She held the scattergun at waist height. The big white compound fence gave her some cover. She got close enough to the foreign bakkie to make out the footprints scuffed across the soft, sandy ground.
Three sets of prints. Two heavy folks, and somebody a lot smaller. Heavy bel dames—the Nasheenian government’s preferred assassins— didn’t use vehicles with government tags. So the little one had to be some government official—and young. All the old ones were soft and fat.