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.

Most Nasheenian politicians were First Family matriarchs—snobbish, inbred, smooth-skinned folks with a taste for languages and distrust of anything that hadn’t passed through an organic filter. They wouldn’t be caught dead inside a shoddy seaside compound in a backward Nasheenian vassal state.

Nyx circled around to the back of the house and listened for the kids. They were always up to some shit in the garden or on the grounds. But out here, behind the fence and filter, she didn’t hear a damned thing but the thrashing sea.

She crouched next to the rear gate. She didn’t see any footprints around the back. No sign of anything being tampered with.

The gate was coded for her and Anneke’s family. They’d invested in the filter and the codes first thing. Trouble was, you exiled yourself long enough and you started to get comfortable. You started getting drunk and going to fights. You started bringing women home. Nyx should have known somebody would find her.

She pressed her palm to the faceplate. There was a brief prickling as the plate extracted and verified her blood. Then the gate clicked.

Nyx shoved the door open with the end of her scattergun. She waited a half breath before chancing a look into the compound, gun first.