Three more steps, and I might reach the lever for the lead blinders.
Two.
One.
I reached a weary hand out and clawed at it till I snagged the lever, setting the luxorite device swinging. Tears ran down my face as I tried again, catching it and flipping the shutters closed.
The throbbing in my head stopped almost immediately, but the nausea and weariness would take time to pass, more time, perhaps, than I could hang on. I unhooked the device and hitched it to my belt, knowing full well that the xipuku was waiting for me at the bottom and able to do exactly nothing about it. I looked up again. The rope ran all the way to the roof of the big top, to the vent in the outside.
Ten more feet.
My body protested, but I pulled myself up, feeling the stiff, warm breeze flowing through the gap at the top. I reached it, leaned across through the hole in the canvas and pushed my head and shoulders through. For a second I was holding on to nothing, inches from sliding back through the hole and falling to the sandy ring below, but then I was out in the air and trying to slow my sliding roll down the sloped angles of the big top. I saw flashes of smoggy sky and Nbeki rooftops, and then I was scrabbling for a handhold on guy ropes as they whipped past, as I tumbled over the roof and fell the last twelve feet to the weedy ground.
The luxorite device slipped out of my hands with the impact and popped open, and I lay on my back, all the other feelings of sickness suddenly overwhelmed by the simpler pain of falling. For a moment, I couldn’t move or think. It might have been a minute before I gingerly began isolating the pain and testing my body for serious damage.
My right side had taken the worst of it, and I feared I had broken a couple of ribs. My cheek was cut, but my arms, legs, and shoulder felt whole, if bruised. I was about to laugh with relief when the shadow of the xipuku fell across my face. I tried to get up, but my body cried out in agony, and I couldn’t twist far enough to draw my kukri.
The creature loomed over me, its eyes misty and its red muzzle dripping. It extended one massive fist, and I shrank away from it, as much as my sickly and battered body would let me, hiding my eyes. I felt rather than heard the massive beast moving close to me, and then I was scooped up, limp and bloody, and pulled absently into the creature’s arms. Stricken with terror, I opened my eyes and saw the animal looking away from me, and dimly I heard voices.
People were gathering.
I turned as much as I dared and saw, among the huddle of gawkers, a uniformed squad in blue.
Andrews.
The xipuku set me down and revolved to face them as rifles leveled and pistols raised.
“No,” I said. “It’s sick. It’s not going to—”
But my words were lost in the roar of gunfire.
CHAPTER
27
I WOKE IN SAINT Auspice’s hospital, a dressing on my face and my ribs strapped. There were three other people in the ward. The only one awake was an elderly black woman who eyed me over the top of a hefty, religious-looking book.
“Sister Beth!” she called, watching me as if I might make a run for it. “She’s awake. The new girl.”
A young Mahweni nurse looked in, then came to my bedside and took my pulse, checking it against a clockwork device she wore upside down on her apron front.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
I shrugged noncommittally, feeling the tightness of the bandages with even that small motion, but said, “Better, thank you.”
“Good,” she said. “You’ll be wanting something to eat.”
I started to say that I didn’t but found that wasn’t true.
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
“Just since yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” I said. “What time is it?”
“Almost lunchtime.”
“I’ve been asleep almost twenty-four hours?” I said, aghast. Anything could have happened in that time. I threw the bedclothes back, but the nurse replaced them.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” she said. “Have something to drink.”
She poured a glass of water from a jug and put it in my hands. I looked at it and waited, counting the seconds, feeling the woman across the ward watching me from her bed.
I needed to get out of here.
The doctor arrived minutes later, with Andrews in wary tow. He watched me too. I felt like a bomb everyone thought might go off at any moment.
“You did well,” said Dr. Mendelson. “Probably saved a lot of lives. And your own injuries, in the circumstances, are minor.”
“I have to go,” I said.
My voice sounded cracked and strained. I took a sip of the water and moistened my lips.
“I’d give it a day or two,” said the doctor.
“I don’t have a day or two,” I said. “I’ve already been here too long.”
“You were exhausted. That kind of exposure, up close to the device … You have to rest.”
“So I rested. Now I leave.”
“Not yet,” said the doctor. “I want to run some tests.”
“Listen, Ang,” said Andrews, “I’m sorry to have to say this—”
The inspector looked haggard, but I was in no mood to soothe his feelings.
“You didn’t need to shoot it,” I said.
“What?” he said, momentarily confused.
“The xipuku,” I shot back. “You didn’t need to kill it. It wouldn’t have hurt me. It was used to people, and it was sick and … Wait. What were you going to say?”
Andrews looked down, his brow furrowing, and in that moment, the ward door burst open and Sureyna came in.
“Is she awake?” she said.
The doctor nodded, and Andrews opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it and took a step backwards, allowing her access to me. I shifted painfully so that I could see her properly and every thought went out of my head as I took in the expression on her face. Her eyes were red and wet. She was ashen with shock and grief, and the hands in which she clutched a ravaged copy of the Bar-Selehm Standard trembled visibly.
“What?” I said, dreading her answer, my mind racing.
They accelerated Willinghouse’s trial or passed a new set of laws …
“He’s…” She tried, but could not find the words.
I stared at her, watching as all other emotions gave way to a sudden and overpowering sadness while Andrews and the doctor seemed to recede, their faces lowered ominously. Something terrible had happened.
“What is it?” I said again. “Tell me!”
Sureyna sank onto a chair and rocked forward, burying her face in her hands and clamping her hands over her mouth as if to hold back the wail that boiled out of her. Tears ran down her face, and she crumpled as if stabbed in the gut.
“Sureyna…” I began, but then I saw the newspaper headline.
Her tears had already spilled onto the paper so that it tore as I pried it from her hands, staring in horror.
A police spokesman confirmed this morning that, apparently despairing of his failed political ambitions, noted black activist Aaron Muhapi hanged himself in his cell overnight.…
As my own tears started to fall, I heard myself saying, “No. He wouldn’t. It’s a lie.”
* * *
BUT IT WASN’T. OR not entirely. In under an hour, the news that Aaron Muhapi was dead was everywhere. The Citizen confirmed it through black orderlies who had seen the body after he had been taken to the hospital, but their report also confirmed the lie I had recognized instinctively. He had not hanged himself. He had been beaten. Everywhere. It had begun with the soles of his feet, the small bones broken with truncheons, but it had progressed to more visible areas. The blow that killed him had partially crushed his skull.
The cover-up had been halfhearted at best. Richter’s government stood by the official suicide story, using it to imply not just the innocence of the policemen who had beaten Muhapi to death, but also the inherent moral weakness of the dead man and the failure
of his political movement. But privately, according to Sureyna’s journalist friends, they didn’t seem to mind that the truth had leaked out, as if they assumed it would scare Muhapi’s supporters into silence and passivity.
I didn’t think it would. In my mind’s eye, I saw the fury in Peter’s face; the disciplined righteous devastation of Muhapi’s grieving widow, whose awful premonitions had all come true; the sorrow and anger of all who had stood peacefully behind the man at The Citizen, at his rallies; those who had danced at his house and delighted in his little boy …
Blood would run in the streets like rivers before they took this news silently, passively. But then perhaps that was what Richter and his cohorts wanted too, an excuse to bring the race war they so longed for to Bar-Selehm once and for all.
Richter was prime minister. Willinghouse was in prison. The Brevard party was in retreat, and the one man likely to unify the blacks, Lani, and moderate whites—a good, intelligent and charismatic man with a wife and a young son—had been beaten to death by a regime that felt so secure they did not even care that everyone knew. The city—my city—was collapsing. I held my tear-streaked face and drew my knees up to my chest, breathless with weeping, hugging myself and rocking back and forth like I did the day my father died.
I had failed, and all was lost.
CHAPTER
28
AGAINST THE DOCTOR’S ADVICE, and with no sense of what I was supposed to do next, I did go home, or what passed for home: my lodging house was still, mercifully, just west of the redistricted line. I wished Dahria were there waiting for me, and though I’d known she wouldn’t be, I was still disappointed to get home and find the place empty. Why had I wanted to see her so badly? I was not entirely sure, and the question confused and upset me. My desire to be close to her in the midst of all that was happening, lost as it were in the spell of her, was perplexing, and I went upstairs with a still greater sense of distress. Resolving to consider the matter no more, I took medicine for the pain, knowing it would make me sleepy and—combined with the lingering effects of the luxorite poisoning—I found that by the time I got to my room, all I wanted to do was rest.
A nap, I thought. An hour at most, and then I would wake rested and think through what had to be done. If there was anything …
But I didn’t nap. I slept for three hours and would have slept considerably longer had it not been for a distinct tapping at the door around the time the evening lamplighters had begun their rounds.
I drew the bedclothes to my chin, trying to climb out of my weary sadness, at least for form’s sake. Perhaps the maid needed to know if I would be leaving the room so she could clean.
But when I got up and opened the door, it wasn’t the maid. It was my landlady, Mrs. Topesh, looking about as excited as her carefully restrained demeanor would allow. I stood to attention, feeling—as I always did in her presence—like a guilty child.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Topesh,” I babbled. “I thought it was the maid. I’m sorry to be in bed so early but—”
“You have guests,” she said. Mrs. Topesh did not like guests, particularly when they were unannounced, but while I might have expected her manner to be frostily formal, there was something cautious and watchful in her manner, which was almost impressed. “They insist upon your immediate attention.”
I frowned, and my confusion was chased by panic. I had made no secret of my presence at Muhapi’s rally and the party at his house that followed. As I had not hidden my association with Dahria. Yet the authorities—if that was what Richter’s goons now were—had insufficient knowledge of my investigation or other secret activities to want me arrested. Muhapi’s death had proved that. Still half asleep and drained from everything, the words came out before I could stop them.
“Am I in trouble?”
I heard myself, the defeated, hopeless childishness, and I felt absurd for ever thinking I could make a difference in this awful place. Mrs. Topesh looked at me as if startled. Instead of scorn, her face melted slightly, and she managed a weak smile. For a second, her eyes sparkled, and something of her rigid manner softened.
“No, my dear,” she said. “No more than the rest of us, though that, I fear, is not saying very much. Now, get dressed. Your guests—whom I have ensconced in the withdrawing room—are most insistent.”
I nodded gratefully, but with that last sentence, she had recovered her usual poise, and she merely inclined her head a fraction before slipping soundlessly out.
* * *
EVEN IN MY HASTE to see who had come to visit me, I paused to pick up the early edition of the evening paper from the side table in the downstairs hall. Several related stories dominated the front page under the heading
UNASSIMILATED TRIBES MASS FOR ATTACK!
TROOPS DEPLOY TO MEET MAHWENI THREAT
So it had begun. My eyes flashed over the smaller print—eyewitness accounts of hundreds, even thousands, of Mahweni bush warriors less than fifty miles north of the city, their certain connection to Willinghouse’s attempted coup and to “the disgraced black activist leader, Aaron Muhapi, who killed himself yesterday.” The warriors had surely been trying to starve the city of news and supplies during the past few weeks by attacking trade convoys and railway lines as they prepared their all-out attack on the city.… Their allies in the city, professing disbelief over the police account of Muhapi’s death, had clashed with the civilian militia in rioting all over the city.…
It was all wrong. All nonsense. And my plan to buy Willinghouse a little time had played right into it, feeding Richter’s thirst to spill the blood of Mahweni, whether they were of the city or of the Unassimilated Tribes.
For a moment the news drove all other concerns out of my head, and I pushed the door to the withdrawing room open with no idea what to expect on the other side. I instantly understood Mrs. Topesh’s strange, awed mood, because the people waiting for me—seventeen-year-old Lani steeplejack that I was—formed as strange and uneven a group as Bar-Selehm had seen in many a year.
Inspector Andrews, in uniform, sat on one ladder-back chair with Captain Emtezu on another beside him. Emtezu was dressed not in the patrol or combat attire, which had been confiscated, but in the dress uniform he kept at home. Opposite him was Madame Nahreem, draped in an austere black sari. Beside her, playing the elegant—and seemingly white—aristocratic lady about town, was Dahria, in resplendent mauve with matching parasol. And next to her was Mnenga, in formal tribal robes, sitting beside Lomkhosi, her breasts demurely covered, but still bedecked in beads, her hair raised in the same sculpted tower as before. Watching them warily from his position, cross-legged on the floor, was Tanish.
I stared, but only for a second, then I thrust out the paper I had brought with me from the hall and said to Mnenga, “What are you doing here? You need to get your people out of there!”
“That is done,” he said. “My people had moved west before this was printed.”
“Very well,” I said, relaxing a little. “But why aren’t you with them?”
“Because he has news,” said Madame Nahreem crisply, her usual self. “Be quiet and listen.”
“What is it?” I said, dragging my eyes off her and staring at Mnenga, feeling the tension in the room mount.
“I said my people were not responsible for the attacks on the railroads, on the trade convoys or on the journalists,” he said. “Now we know who was. There are Grappoli troops ten miles from the city and moving toward you. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. They will be here by moonrise.”
“The deployment of the white garrisons to the northeast has left the city largely undefended,” said Emtezu, “and Mnenga’s tribal contacts”—he nodded to the Mahweni woman, who inclined her head seriously—“say that a fleet of Grappoli war vessels were sighted off the western coast moving south toward the cape a week ago.”
“So they will attack from the south as well?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Emtezu. “If they came by ship, it doesn’t make s
ense to disembark on the cape and march a hundred miles north, risking discovery with every step. With the city as poorly protected as it is, I think they will sail round the cape, up the east coast, and into the city via the river mouth.”
I stared at him, aghast.
“What about the coastal defense batteries?” I said. “There are guns overlooking the bay. They would shred a navy that tried to enter the city that way.”
“The forts north and south of the river mouth went strangely quiet last night after reports of a strange contagion gripped them,” said Andrews. “The green luxorite devices were not merely a way to target the blacks and coloreds. They were designed to bring the city to its knees.”
“So we tell the garrisons what we know,” I said, “get in, find the devices before the Grappoli ships arrive.”
“The silence from the forts suggests more than sickness,” said Emtezu. “I think the enemy has already exploited the weakness of the soldiers.”
Mnenga had taken to whispering translations into Lomkhosi’s ear as we talked. She nodded, earnestly.
“You think the coastal forts have been taken by the Grappoli?” I exclaimed. “How? If troops had come into the city we would have seen—”
“Not ordinary troops,” said Emtezu. “We got uneven civilian reports saying that strange people had been seen scaling the walls of the Ridleford fortress. No shots were fired. If there’s any truth in it, I think we are dealing with specially trained soldiers skilled in assault tactics, climbing, hand-to-hand combat.”
“Troops who were already in the city,” said Andrews. “In disguise.”
I gaped, and the truth hit me at last.
“The circus,” I said sitting down heavily in the room’s only unoccupied chair.
“I’m afraid so,” said Andrews. “They may even be using those damned baboons.”
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