“But that’s, that’s—”
“And he’s suing Moon, too.”
Mother and son: “What?”
“Yes,” said the lawyer. “Apparently this Jacob Needle came here in the summer and you lit him up, Raptor.”
“Yeah, so? He was about to hurt my mother!”
“He’s saying Moon corrupted you. That you two, actually, you three, had a great relationship until Moon turned you against him and trained you in martial arts so you’d assault him.”
“Thatt’s complete bullshitt!” said Araweelo. For the first time that night, Maã smiled. But hearing his mother curse wasn’t new for Raptor. He’d heard her do it in three languages, many times.
“Surely he caan’tt win on something so aatterly—”
“He doesn’t need to win.” Maã, smile gone, with such exhaustion he actually apologised for it.
“Needle might want to settle, or he might want to bankrupt Moon with legal costs. Right now, everthing else swirling around, Moon’s blood is in the water, and the Devourer can smell it a whole Nile away.”
12.
Next evening. A dozen pairs of bare feet on the vinyl mats of the Street Laboratory. Assembled not in dojo rows, but in a shenu. A smaller class than usual for Sanuces-Ryu. All of them in their gis.
Moon tapped Raptor to lead the warm-up. A surprise. Raptor began the stretches, stumbling over the occasional Japanese phrase but getting most of them.
Never’d been asked to lead the warm-up before. No one had.
Roll-outs across the room and back, and then Brother Moon stepped up to model a combo: wrist-grab reversal, double locked-arm shove-down, single arm-bar flip.
Moon started flipping Senwusret like a pancake, even thought the Sen’d put on a good twenty pounds of gym muscle since joining the Falcons, and was solid before that.
“Any questions?”
“Yes.”
Everyone turned. What with recent events choking morale like smog blotting sun, no one expected questions. Least of all from Wa-Wa.
“Sbai, I’m wondering, and I don’mean any disrespect—”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, that combo, it looks so, so complicated. I mean, I was watching this Muay Thai YouTube, and . . . like, it’s just a couple of knee-strikes and the guy’s down.”
Moon: “Sometimes you can’t afford to break a guy’s nose, or you don’t want to. I don’t teach you to use maximum force. I teach you to use the righteous amount.”
“Okay, but . . . if you tryinna save your life, isn’t suh’m like Muay Thai better?”
Faces twitched. Even people who’d never been schooled at any other dojo, kwoon or gym knew: you did not question the house art.
Raptor’s fingers itched. Wanted to text Wa-Wa to STFU so Moon wouldn’t pulverise him just to prove his art’s worth. With everything he was under, any second, Moon would have to explode: Who the fuck do you think you are, Wa-Wa?
Moon asked everybody to sit down. He stood.
Orbited the shenu. On the outside. Behind their skulls.
Talking so softly that anyone on the opposite side had to strain just to hear.
“Whether it’s a martial art, a culture, a religion, politics . . . unless it’s completely worthless, which one you choose . . . honestly, it doesn’t matter much in the end.”
Kept walking, kept whispering.
“In fact, not even choosing Alchemy is any guarantee. Not like you can’t find successful people who aren’t Alchemists.”
Raptor scanned the shenu: in everyone’s eyes and eyebrows, shock.
“It’s not so much what you study,” continued Moon, “as it how you act upon it. Your level. Of conviction. And ambition. Say it with me. Conviction—”
“CONviction . . . ”
“—and ambition.”
“—and AMbition.”
“We teach you to be righteous. And being righteous is the only way to banish isfet, and master your own soul so you can rise nearer to the Supreme.
“But take any individual, any country, any religion that achieves greatness, it’s because they believe in their destiny. That they deserve greatness, that if they only stand up, they’ll reveal themselves like the titans of Ramses at Abu-Simbel.”
Stopped walking. Right behind Wa-Wa. “Whatever they claim their ideology is, whatever creed they swear to, what really counts is their gravity. They’ve got an organising mission. Makes everything fall into place around their sun. That they’ve got their own language, so they can talk around outsiders and keep their plans secret, just like we’ve got Somali or Amharic or Hutu, or, yeah, Falconic. That they’ve got their own institutions so they can continually transform themselves and the world—revolution—so they can gather as much gold as possible without jealous eyes seeing it all.”
Raptor saw it in the shenu’s eyes: confusion.
Moon maybe didn’t see it. So what did he see?
“There’s one thing some of these ambitious groups have that we can never have. Any ideas?”
Suggestions popped up. As usual, Moon didn’t say no to any of them, and no one waited for him to. They did as they practiced: kept offering ideas until he could say yes.
“Camouflage?” suggested ’Noot.
Raptor’d been avoiding her for days, but there she was, wearing her Alchemical gi, her matching black hijab tucked into its jacket.
“Exactly, Sister ’Noot. The Destroyer’s men all carry his mark, like a tattoo: that old anteater. Doesn’t seem scary, unless you’re an ant, in which case he’s gonna destroy your whole civilisation.
“And what about Hru? He and all his people, they all carried the emblem of the Falcon.
“So with those markings, how many of the righteous could ever infiltrate the ranks of the Destroyer?”
What did any of this have to do with Sanuces-Ryu versus Muay Thai? Moon was rambling. Off on something he’d said one other time, when somebody asked him why some people thrived after oppression but Africans were still suffering in Savage Lands across the world.
But for all he knew, nobody else in the room had a clue about that topic.
Around the shenu , faces showed loss: lost the topic, lost their way, lost their Master, and Raptor knew their sbai was orbiting less like a planet than a comet, ellipsing way the hell out into interstellar space.
Moon’s own eyes: fear.
That he couldn’t control his trajectory, that he saw them all receding while he went shooting past them into the deeps and the Oort Cloud beyond.
And angry. That they weren’t following him. Or that they couldn’t.
“Forget about ‘being equal to’ and ‘as good as’!” Sneering, like he was gonna say what he had to say, regardless. “You think any of these people who reach the top bothered two seconds with that talk? It’s loser talk! You wanna win, you focus on getting to the capstone of that pyramid! And we’ve been losing a long time! You feel me?
“You think, what, Oprah, Mo Ibrahim, Sankara, Maathai, Mandela—you think any of them got down on their knees, begging the Pyrites, ‘I’m as good as you! Please, please let me be on the team!’
“Naw, naw! They told themse-e-elves ‘I am gold! True and living gold! And I’m gon shine so bright the whole world will hafta flip on visors!’”
Smacked his hands together. Made Raptor’s ears ring.
“Now, I’m not telling you to be a bunch of raving egomaniacs.” Started walking again. “Nobody likes a brag-boy. But whether it’s one person focused on a golden destiny or an entire people saying it’s the chosen one, the elect, the middle kingdom, the master race, the true believers, the greatest country on earth, the hundred-and-forty-four-thousand, whatever, you either see yourself as lead and stay that way, or see yourself as gold and transform into it!”
Moon raked everyone’s eyes. His own were quivering. Neck muscles cabled. Sweating like a fever was throttling him.
He looked—it was like something Ãnkhur’d said once about her Baptist church: their
new minister had “caught fire” but his parishioners hadn’t ignited with him. Call-and-response died on call. She liked that minister and never knew why the congregation didn’t. She told Raptor with rare somberness, “It was like he was preaching to an empty tabernacle.”
The Street Laboratory was silent.
“Forget it,” said Moon, defeated. “You want power techniques? You got it. Half of you, strap on pads, partner up. Knees and sidekicks, fifty of each, each side, each partner. Hard as you can!”
13.
At the end of class, ’Noot cornered Raptor and he knew he had no choice.
Alley behind the Street Laboratory. Evening. Both teens stood sweating.
“I thought I’d be the reluctant one,” she told him.
She told Raptor they had fifteen minutes before her father would show and she had to be at the front door.
Everything was bizarre. Nighttime, in October, and hardly even felt like fall at all. Like late spring. Cool air and warm breeze.
’Noot: “You can’t just keep avoiding me like this.”
“I know.”
“Is it because I’m Muslim?”
Didn’t say anything.
“I mean, plenty of Muslim girls have boyfriends,” she said, and then pre-emptively. “Not me, understand. But just even friends of mine. And they’re just quiet about it. We can just be careful, okay?”
Chewed his lip.
“I mean . . . don’t you care about me? Or am I just making an idiot out of myself here?”
Wanted to run away. Forced himself to stay.
Finally he blurted, “Sometimes, when I’m really, y’know, depressed or angry, the only way I can replace-elevate myself out of it is to gold-mind about you.”
She gasped a little. Blushed a fragile smile.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Like . . . how? I mean, what do you—”
“Not like that—”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“I just visualise us . . . talking. Walking together. Me, like, making supper for you—”
“Oh!” she chirped, just like Ãnkhur. “That’s so sweet . . . .”
Would’ve felt patronised by the word sweet except that she’d grabbed his hand.
His heart: pulsing all the way from his ribs to his fingers, beating him like a sockful of billiard balls, pounding like a bass string as thick as his leg, tha-whump . . . tha-whump . . . .
“What else do you visualise?”
“Just, like, us . . . you know . . . .”
“No, what?”
So he told her what he knew he should never have said in thirteen-point-eight billion years.
“ . . . married.”
Her eyes: double suns on the horizon.
“Rap, I—”
“No, look, don’t, I shouldna said that—it was stupid, I’m stupid—”
“No, Rap!” Grabbing his other hand so he had to face her. Even while he squirmed not to.
Knew she wanted him to kiss her. And he wanted to.
Would’ve bolted except that her phone rang.
“Damnit! It’s my dad! I’m sorry—”
She ran through the back door and left him by the Dumpster.
14.
Raptor, at home in the Palace of the Moon, raiding the freezer for ice cream. At the back of the freezer, something forgotten and buried. Like golden treasures of Tutankhamen hidden in three millennia of darkness.
Wrapped inside aluminum foil and sealed inside a jar for more than a year, since that apocalyptic thunderstorm and blackout.
The hailstone. The one the size and shape of an egg.
He re-wrapped it, then put it back gently and closed the door.
Eleven PM. Moon was already asleep. That’d never happened before.
Raptor searched the My Pictures folder on Moon’s PC, finally found the faces and names he was looking for.
Searched Facebook. Found only one of them.
Of course, the profile photo didn’t match her pictures from when she was a kid. She was all grown up now, long braids, dark eyes, gorgeous.
Made a Friend request. Wrote:
Dear Sister Kiya, you don’t know me, but I’m great friends with Yimunhotep Ani. He’s practically a father to me. I know that he and your mother separated a while ago and that there are probably some hard feelings, but he’s having a really tough time right now and I’m sure he’d love to hear from you. Please write back to me.
Stayed up online, reading random sites, cheering himself up with the FAIL blog, writing lyrics, blogging, Facebooking Falcons. Kept checking his inbox to see if Kiya’d written back.
Nothing.
At 3 am he tried finding her so he could message her again. But he couldn’t find her. Double-checked the spelling, but nothing. Surely she hadn’t . . . ?
He logged in under his other FB account, Supreme Raptor. Found her on his first search.
She’d blocked him!
15.
Moon was already on the computer when Raptor woke up. Hoped Moon didn’t have any operational net-tracking software, revealing Raptor’d been digging in his photos and searching for his ex-step-daughter.
But he wasn’t spying on his spy.
“Look at this!” said Moon.
Onscreen: a crude cartoon. Two cops, both with smoking guns, standing over a dead chimp. Caption: “When Moonkeys attack.”
“What the hell!” said Raptor.
“Brother Maã sent it,” he said. “Someone on the inside leaked it. Freaking cops. Maã said it all goes into the suit.”
Moon got up. Hadn’t shaven in two days. Shaggy. He hobbled like his back was hurting.
Three hours after Raptor Facebooked Jackal asking him to reach out to Kiya, Jackal wrote back five “words”:
WTF? She blocked me 2!
16.
Got home from martial arts—not just warming everyone up but actually leading class, as Moon had asked him—and found Moon asleep on the couch. It was only 10 PM.
Raptor called his mother.
“He’s been carryingk two hundredt teenagers,” she said. “Who wouldn’tt be exhaustedt? Let him restt.”
The TV was still on. Wasn’t like Moon, a pathological light-turner-offer and picture-straightener.
A DVD, paused.
Webcam footage of the street peregrines that once lived on the roof.
Raptor unPaused it, FFed. Next was footage from the rocket-cams, springtime at the Strathcona Wilderness Centre. And then from a separate trip, just Moon, Jackal, and Raptor, when they’d gone out to launch three-stage rockets, just the three of them.
Other DVDs were scattered and out of their boxes on the arms of the couch.
The Warrior Within documentary featuring the founder of Sanuces-Ryu, Master Musa Powell. The Motorcycle Diaries. Paradise Now.
But a ripped Blackhawk Down? Moon hated that film.
Books like a Jenga stack on the coffee table: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and books by Mao, Che, Robert Taber, and Anthony James Joes, all on guerrilla warfare.
His mind: a rope of firecrackers. Moon the mental patient, Moon the publicly disgraced leader, Moon the victim of police brutality, doing . . . something . . . he could never take back—
Breathe.
Breathe.
What else? What else?
Other books in the stack, all with multiple book marks: Steven Biko’s I Write What I Like. Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed. Benjamin Karim’s Remembering Malcolm. Claude McKay’s Selected Poems . . . .
Whirling and turning, whipped . . . getting sliced to feathers, bones, and meat in the widening spiral, in the radioactive methane hurricane of millions and millions of years, the Ujat, the Great Red Spot, Jupiter’s Eye, and he was screaming and couldn’t hear his own voice getting ripped away, and roaring below him, a gut bigger than a thousand Earths and surging with a blood-dimmed acid tide, burning, burning the innocent—
—above him, the stars, and a glittering golden chain
—
—spoke his words-of-power, renewed his wings and body, hurtling down into the maelstrom of ice and charcoal fogs lit only by lightning, guided by the beam of his Shining Eye—
—there!
—streaking downwards, reaching downwards, clasping, grasping him, falcon finding falconer, and straining hard enough to rip even renewed wings from his back, cleaving up the hurricane tunnel towards the stars—
—and both were reborn among them in the blessed and eternal darkness . . . .
Would it be enough, when poison scrolls had yet to be unfurled, and the Devourer of Millions of Souls was swimming upriver to the Holy City . . . to gorge?
17.
Friday night, bursting outta the Hyper-Market, barely four minutes before he was sposta be teaching his third class, glancing behind and choking—
Headlights, near-silhouette—right in front of Data Salvation Laboratories, and zero doubt this time—
Lexus and Marley.
(They hadn’t seen him.)
Flew to the Street Laboratory, mind blinking back to one of the refugee camps he’d fled—maybe one in Ethiopia?—when they’d had to hide out in the forest, running past the carcasses of burnt cows and limbs and torsos and half-split human skulls. Hiding out there, and bees, bees, bees stinging everyone again and again, and him, just a silently-sobbing eight-year-old, but if he’d cried out even once, militia men would’ve found them, raped them, butchered them all—
Inside the Street Laboratory, on the mats, twenty students, all of them in gis already.
“Everybody! Shoes, now! The shooters Brother Moon took out? They’re standing right in front of the DSL!”
Jackal grabbed him by the right biceps. Quietly: “You sure this time?”
“Sure as a sword in my hand.”
Bravado, or flair, or freestyling. He didn’t know. But Jackal barked. “Weapons! Only if you’re trained!”
Raptor: “Wa-Wa, choose a squad of seven, and take your cell phone!” He pointed to the Lab’s back door. “Flank round the back. When you’re in position, phone me and hang up after exactly two rings. I’ll be on vibrate. We’ll be right behind the street-bend, you know, the diagonal? Right in front of Chip Yick Printing. They won’t be able to see us.”
The Alchemists of Kush Page 38