The Book of Phoenix

by Nnedi Okorafor

  The elevator jerked upward. I grabbed the railing, pure terror shooting through me. At least, I would make it outside. I could take two breaths before they caught me. I sank to the floor. Saeed was dead, and I was still trapped. Tears dribbled from the corners of my eyes and hissed as they evaporated down my cheeks.

  The elevator jerked again. “Sorry about that,” I heard Mmuo say in my head. He sounded distant. The elevator started moving down. I jumped up. I still had a chance. I watched the numbers decrease, 28, 27, 26. A louder alarm started to go off. They’d realized I was missing. “I can get you to nine,” he said. His voice was fading, and I had to strain to hear it. “Two stairways in there. Run to the emergency one on the other side of the greenhouse, straight ahead when the doors open. You’ll be on the side of the greenhouse. Just go straight ahead! Do NOT go near the center! There’s . . .” His voice faded to nothing.

  Had my heat burned away his nanomites? Probably. As the elevator flew down, my feet began to burn the elevator floor. 12, 11, 10, 9. The elevator came to a sudden stop and the doors opened. The blare of the Tower 7 alarm assaulted my ears but the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen caressed my eyes. An expansive room full of trees, bushes, flowers, vines. In pots, on shelves, tangled within each other. A contained jungle that reminded me of the green roof of the building next door. I could see the city through the windows on my left. The sky was the deep rose of evening. I started quickly walking down the narrow path before me. Moss grew on the sides of trees. The humid air smelled green, fragrant, soily, I had never smelled anything like it.

  I heard a rush of footsteps from amongst the plants to my right. Between the foliage, I could see them. Big Eye guards. In tough black armor with shields, with guns.

  “Phoenix!” one of them yelled, spotting me. The voice pierced me, and I gasped, my eyes wide. I’d been hearing this voice all my short life. All their guns went up. “Put your hands up. We will not hurt you.” It was Bumi. Now I could see her clearly. My legs felt weak.

  Behind me I could hear the elevator rumbling. I still didn’t move. Saeed was dead. There was nothing for me here. I was two years old, and I was forty years old. The marble beneath my feet absorbed my heat.

  “Please, put your hands up,” Bumi pleaded. “You know what you are. We can stabilize you.” She paused, obviously considering how much to tell me. I knew enough, though. Saeed was dead, and I wanted to be free.

  “You’re a weapon,” Bumi admitted. “If you wanted to know, now you do. My job has always been to help you, to keep you alive. This wasn’t supposed to happen, you being like this. Please, let us help you. I can help you.”

  She is lying, I thought. I shocked myself. Why did her voice sound so different to my ears now? She’d always been lying. I heard the elevator beep then the doors open just as I felt the light burst from me. There was warmth that started at my feet. It rolled up to my chest and pulsed out with a wave of heat. My shoulders jerked back, and I stumbled to the side, getting a glimpse behind me. If I had blinked I still wouldn’t have missed it. My skin prickled as my glow became a light green shine. The light steadily radiated from me. It bathed every plant in the room.

  The guards behind me in the elevator and on the far right side of the room all ducked down and for a moment it was quiet enough that you could hear it. All the plants were growing. Snapping, pulling, unfurling, creeping. Thick vines and even tree roots quickly crept, stretched and blocked the elevator door. Leaves, branches and stems grew so thick around the guards to my right that they were blocked from view. This was something they didn’t know I could do. This was not something they had created.

  The entire greenhouse swelled and flooded with foliage. Except a few steps ahead to my right. There was what I could only call a tunnel through the plants. It diagonally passed the cowering Big Eye. I ran into it just as the guards behind and to my right began to shoot toward where I’d initially been. “Phoenix!” I heard Bumi scream. “You can’t do this to me! Stop!!”

  I didn’t stop. Were they shooting through the plants or shooting at me, I do not know. And in many ways these two things were one and the same.

  Mmuo had said to go forward to find the doorway. But I lost all sense of direction. So when I ended up standing before the giant glass dome I didn’t know which way to run. My first thought was of the same book that spoke of the treacherous apple of knowledge. The Bible. Except that the man with enormous wings was not held up by any wooden cross. He was suspended in mid-air with his arms out and his legs tied together. His eyes were closed. His brown-feathered wings were stretched wide.

  He was naked, his ebony-skinned body, muscled and very very tall, at least compared to my six feet. He had deep African facial features and a crown of wooly hair. He was magnificent. Behind the glass dome was a rough wooden wall. The trunk of The Backbone.

  Behind me, I could hear them coming. Hacking through the plants and calling my name. I wasn’t going to get out. I walked up to the glass and placed a hot hand on it. The glass was thick and very cool. Was there even air in there? Was that how they held him? Was it like being in outer space? What was space like for a creature made to fly?

  His eyes opened. I gasped and jumped back. They were brown, soft, kind, eyes.

  “Oh my God, Phoenix! Please! Step BACK!” one of the guards screamed, shoving aside a bush. I noticed the guard did not point his gun. Nor did the others who emerged beside him. I looked back at the man with wings. He was looking right at me, no expression on his face. I was surrounded by guards, all begging me to step away, pleading that this creature was “unique and dangerous.” However, none of them came to capture me. I didn’t move. Bumi appeared beside the guard. When she saw me, her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She reached for me with an outstretched hand but then brought the hand to her mouth. She was afraid to speak, to make too much noise. She recoiled, behind the guard.

  Seeing the Big Eye cower, seeing their fear and raw horror had a strange effect on me. I felt powerful. I felt lethal. I felt hopeful, though all was hopeless. I turned to the caged winged man and my hope evolved into rage. Even he was a prisoner here. I vowed that if I didn’t get out, at least he would.

  This time, I did it voluntarily. I was already so hot and I grew hotter when I reached into myself, into all that I was, all that I had been and all that I would be, I reached in and drew from my source. Then I turned to a nearby tree and let loose a pulse of light. I sighed as it left me, feeling relief. Immediately the tree’s roots began to buckle and creep toward the glass cage.

  CRASH! They easily forced their way through and the rest of the dome cracked in several places. The Big Eye turned and ran for their lives. I didn’t bother running. There was no better way to die. He burst through, knocking me aside with the intensity of his wake. Into the now dense foliage of the greenhouse. I saw none of what happened, but I heard and smelled it. Wet tearing sounds, screams, ripping, snapping, choking, not one gun was fired. The air smelled like torn leaves and blood. Was Bumi’s shed blood causing some of the smell? It was still happening when I spotted the stairway between the plants and ran into it. I fled down and down flights and came to a heavy open door and entered the lobby.

  For a moment, even after all that I had seen, I forgot what I was doing. Again, a sight took my breath away. Tower 7’s lobby was more spectacular than I’d ever imagined. No words could make up for actually seeing this place. This space. The ceiling was so high and the marble walls were draped with gorgeous flowering vines, the small trees and plants growing through the soil-filled holes in the floor. I fought not to fall to my knees. There was the base of The Backbone. Its trunk had to be over thirty feet in diameter.

  I was dizzy. I was burning up. I was amazed. I was exhausted. There was a freed angel beast massacring its captors nine floors above. I could hear more Big Eye guards coming down the stairwell. The alarm was blaring and the lobby was empty . . . except for a lone figure standing near
the exit doors. He was grinning. He’d been trying to get to this very spot unnoticed for nine years and my escape gave him the chance.

  “Hurry,” Mmuo cried. “Phoenix, MOVE!” I heard them burst through the stairway. I was running. I dodged small trees, scrambled around benches and leapt over plants. The door was yards away. I was going to make it. Outside, people walking by stopped to look.

  Then I saw the guards come running onto the tower’s wide plaza. They seemed to come from all directions. They shoved gaping people aside. They pulled up people who were sitting on benches enjoying the lovely evening. Then they formed a line blocking the exit and stood there, guns to their chests. I ran to Mmuo and would have given him a hug, if it weren’t for my heat. We’d both almost made it.

  “Go,” I told him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” I was having trouble thinking straight and I could smell the floor burning beneath me. I didn’t know marble could burn. “Saeed would have been proud. I am proud. I set an angel free.”

  His eyebrows went up. “You . . .”

  “Go!” I shouted, looking at the approaching Big Eye coming from the stairwell. They were flooding from doorways and were coming down an escalator on the other side of the lobby. “Don’t ever let them catch you!” I said.

  He sank through the floor and was gone.

  I stood tall. There were hundreds of them. Men and women armed with the guns I had seen them carry all my short life. No Big Eye guard went anywhere in the tower without them. I knew how they sounded. Nearly silent. I had been hearing shots fired all my life. For a multitude of reasons but always with the same result. Something or someone who’d gotten out of control was dead or severely injured. “Protect the scientist from the subject.” “Observe and learn.” “We will all be better for it.” “For the Research.” I was taking all the pieces I had read and finally putting them together. The Big Eye crowded around me, nervous with anticipation as if I were evil. After all I had done, to them, I guess I was evil. Or crazy.

  I held up my hands, feeling myself shining. The light bloomed from my body. The release felt glorious and I moaned with relief. Then more sighing than speaking, I said, “I give . . .”

  “No don’t! Hold your fire!” someone shouted. Bumi. There she was, a few yards to my right. The right side of her lab coat was red with blood and her cheek was shredded into wet ribbons. I could see the white of her twitchy eyes. Dragging her left leg, she limped toward me, stepping in front of three Big Eye guards, putting herself between me and their pointed guns. She coughed and said, “We don’t know . . .”

  But someone couldn’t stop his or her trigger finger. First one shot and then several more opened fire. “WAIT!” I heard Bumi scream. No one waited.

  It was as if I were punched with steel fists in every part of my body—chest, neck, legs, arms, abdomen, face. I was blown toward the door and my vision went red-yellow. I lay on my back. Everything was wet, the smell of smoke in the one nostril I had left. Smoke, but also the perfume of The Backbone. I was looking at it, gazing at how it reached, up, up, up, through the high marble ceiling, through the 39 floors above. Into the sky. Reaching for the sky.

  I felt the radiance burst from me, warm, yellow, light, plucked from the sun and placed inside me like a seed until it was ready to bloom. It bloomed now and the entire lobby was washed. The Big Eye covered their faces and dropped their guns. A few ran to the stairwell, others to the far side of the lobby. Most of them ran past my mangled body and out of the building. Those ones must have known what would happen next.

  I knew. I was burning as the light pulsated and pulsated from me there on the floor. My body convulsed with it as my clothes burned and then my flesh. There was no pain. My nerves had burned already.

  My light shined on the plants and tiny trees of the lobby and they began to grow wildly, stirred and amazed with life. Vines strained, lengthened, thickened. Flowers twisted open. Pollen puffed the air sweet. Leaves unfolded and widened. The stone floors were covered with green yellow white brown black, the strongest roots cracking its foundation.

  My light shined on the great tree that was The Backbone. Its roots groaned as they shifted, coiled, expanded, and caused the entire portion of the floor around its roots to buckle and fall apart. The tree’s colossal trunk twisted this way and that, shrugging off the building that was its shackle. Chunks of the floors above began to crash down around me. I was ashes being scattered by vines and roots when Tower 7 fell.

  The Backbone stood tall, stretching its branches and opening its enormous leaves over buildings and streets. At its base, a small lush jungle sprang from the rubble of Tower 7 like a wild miniature Central Park. Helicopters hovered, news crews streamed footage live, people gaped from afar. When the debris settled, there was a moment where my brilliant light shone into the now dark night time. The news cameras recorded the winged man flying out of the rubble, but not much else lived, except the man who could walk through walls. Mmuo walked out of The Backbone’s trunk and stood before it. “This is what you all deserve!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the eyes of the hovering cameras. Then he sunk into the ground and was gone.

  • • •

  No one in the city would approach what was left of Tower 7. So those ruins sat for seven days, a pile of those things Saeed used to eat: rubble, glass, metal and . . . ash. And then I realized the meaning of my name.

  CHAPTER 2

  Beacon

  Alive!

  Still alive.

  Alive again.

  I lay in a heap of rubbish in a jungle, and people were looking at me. What must they have seen? I did not move. It was night and the air was warm. I could feel it. The breeze blew and, despite my situation, I closed my eyes and let it wash over my face. It felt like silk. It smelled of sweet blooming flowers, stems and leaves, at first. Then there was an after-smell of dust and crushed rubble, disintegrated marble. Then it stank of raw gas, smoky rubbing alcohol, it smelled like suicide—this must have been the refuse of vehicles in the streets. This was the smell of car and truck exhaust.

  I’d smelled this only once in my life. The smell had been mixed with the stench of dead bodies as I stared through a porthole in time. I pushed the memory of the Holocaust away and inhaled the air of the outside world. I was free of Tower 7. I was like the soft sweet flesh that falls out of the cracked hard shell of a walnut.

  “We’ll be quick,” a young man in black pants and a black jacket told an anxious-looking group of about ten people. “They don’t like anyone lingering here. So for this leg of the tour, no digi-cams with flashes or cam-lights. Use night-vision or don’t take any photos at all.” His back was to me, and I could clearly see that on his jacket, it said, “Haunted City Tours.”

  His audience members held all kinds of devices that could capture photos. The camera eyes on their devices reflected the dim streetlights and the lights of distant passing vehicles. Eyes, I thought. Big eyes. I wanted to get up, then. I had no idea how long I’d been there.

  “Seven Days!” the young man said, with wide eyes and a big grin. “It’s only been seven days since LifeGen’s Tower 7 crumbled and this strange jungle sprung up in its place. And as you can see, not one dump truck, not one construction worker, not even a lawnmower is here to clear this mess. It’s incredible. Some people say that there is a dangerous alien ship buried in there that the government is terrified of disturbing. Others say that a live nuclear warhead is beneath the jungle and if it is moved, it will blow. Others say that those in the building were called The Big Eye, secret government workers owned and led by the Illuminati. All sorts of conspiracy theories are floating around.

  “The neighboring buildings have been evacuated but the mayor has still not sent a soul to dig up survivors or bodies. Of all the haunted places in the city where I can take you, this one is the most haunted.” He chuckled knowingly. “Well, for now. Who knows wh
at else the Rotten Apple has up its sleeve. Be proud to be only the third tourist group we’ve brought here. You’re likely the last. The city can’t possibly leave things this way much longer.” He looked around and then said, “And be glad to be the second group that has managed to sneak here without being quickly detected.”

  All the people started whispering excitedly as they held their hand devices. I assumed the things stole light somehow to make photos or recordings. Again, I wondered what they were seeing. No one pointed at me and screamed that there was a woman lying in the rubble.

  “People used to come from all around the world to see the building with the giant tree growing through its center called The Backbone.” He cocked his head and winked. “Now, you don’t have to go inside Tower 7 to see its magnificence. The Backbone is all that stands. Look up. You can’t see its top. Since the Tower fell, scientists say that the tree has grown another five hundred feet. Even before the tower fell, it was said that it grew at night and sometimes you could hear it groaning as it grew. Its noise would shake all of New York City like a minor earthquake. I have heard this noise a few times, myself. It is not a myth. It sounds like a giant monster.”

  “What will they do with this place?!” an old man suddenly asked. He was the only one not holding out a device. He had an accent that was strange to me. It was not African, Arab or American. “They can’t just leave it like this! It’s a great big rubbish heap in the middle of the goddamn city! How is this even logical?”

  The tour guide turned toward me and looked over the area. He was smirking mysteriously, as if the old man was adding to the guide’s obvious act. He turned back to his captivated audience and said, “That’s the mystery, sir.”

  The tour guide stood back as the others took more photos and stared blankly at me and the heap that used to be Tower 7. Then the tour guide said, “Shall we move on?”