Nigella Vibra's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The road out of Shiver Valley opened into flat red pan, and Duncan drove with the empty truck bed rattling behind them. Nigella watched the second city-state rise on the horizon by dusk. Its towers caught the low sun and threw it back in blue and gold. She had bought one day with ice cream. Now she needed a way through a gate with nothing in her hands. They stopped a mile out. The gate was a slit between two mirrored spires, and a line of carts waited in the sand. Nigella walked the line and listened. Every envoy showed something at the gate: a crate, a sealed letter, a pouch. Guards turned away anyone who came empty. One woman argued for ten minutes and was walked back at rifle point. Duncan leaned on the camper and said what Nigella already knew. They would not be let in. A figure sat apart from the line on an overturned crate. Older woman, grey hair cropped short, red leggings, black corset stiff with road dust. She was eating a strip of dried meat and watching the gate the way a card player watches a table. Nigella sat down beside her. The woman did not look over. She said her name was Mea Ivory and asked what an android wanted with a city that ate androids for parts. Nigella told her the truth in three sentences. Peace council. Two more stops. Nothing to trade. Mea chewed and looked at the spires. She said she had files. Papers she had carried out of a place that would kill to get them back. She said one page named a council member of this very city as a paid asset of a foreign power. She said the council would pay to bury it, or the rival faction inside the walls would pay to wave it. "Why give it to me," Nigella said. "I need to disappear. You need a door." Mea pulled a thin envelope from inside the corset and set it on her knee. "One page. Not the stack. You walk it to the gate captain and ask for an audience. You do not say my name. Ever." She looked at Nigella for the first time. "The person who helped me get these is dead. I will not add you to that list if you keep your mouth shut." Nigella took the envelope. She walked to the gate alone and handed it to the captain. The captain read two lines, went pale, and waved her through without a word. Duncan followed with the camper. Inside the walls a runner met them and led them to a side hall of the great spire, where a nervous aide poured water and asked what the envoy wanted. Nigella asked for a signature on the accord and a sealed letter of passage to the third city-state. She got both before midnight. She also got a quiet instruction, delivered by the same aide at the servant's door: leave before dawn, and never come back through this gate. Nigella folded the letter into her chest plate. She had bought the second city. She had made an enemy of the first.