And, on top of the mattress, four bodies. Two larger ones, a man and a woman’s, and two small ones.
Not skeletons in scattered pieces, disordered by animals and weather and time. Not grinning skulls melting into the soil, as Aisha Rose had seen so many times before. Bodies. Whole bodies, though shriveled and black inside their drooping clothes, the skin on their exposed faces and hands shrunken over the bones beneath.
Aisha Rose knew at once what had happened. What had led to this scene.
The day the dreamed earth came to an end, Mama’s friends and their boys had hidden here. Safe from the majizi in this windowless room—or safer, at least, than they thought they would be anywhere else.
So they’d stayed here, making this room their whole world. Eating the food they’d been smart enough to store and . . . what?
And waiting. Waiting for a rescue that never came.
Perhaps they’d chosen to starve to death over risking what they feared lay outside. Or maybe something else had killed them—the air or their food. Or maybe they’d taken poison on purpose and chosen to die here.
But what did it matter? They belonged to the dream now.
* * *
AND, WHEN AISHA Rose returned to the guttering fire, she found that Mama had joined her friends. Her friends and Papa and all the countless others who died when the earth awoke.
The light had vanished from her eyes and from inside Aisha Rose’s head as well.
* * *
AFTERWARD, AISHA ROSE barely remembered the rest of that day. She knew she carried Mama, insubstantial in her arms, up to a rocky outcropping that overlooked the farmhouse, the fields, and the valley below. She placed Mama there, on her back, looking up at the giant African sky. Then she went back down to the stone wall where Mama had spent her last afternoon and sat there, waiting.
Sitting in silence, not moving, not thinking, for hours. Until late afternoon, when the first of the vultures noticed Mama and came down to the rocks to see what she was.
Then Aisha Rose stood and walked away. Heading back down the mountain. Beginning the next stage of her hejira, the one she knew would soon bring her and Mama back together again.
THIRTEEN
EVERY NIGHT, JUST as the sun fell behind the horizon, beyond the great continent that lay between the slave camp and the Atlantic Ocean beyond, and beyond that North America and Jason’s vanished home and murdered family, the thieves rose into the sky in a great cloud.
No, not a cloud: a whirlwind. An enormous dust devil ascending to form an ever-changing black silhouette against the orange or bloodred clouds. Spinning and twisting, seeming to form a single creature that was heart-stopping in its vastness, then suddenly splitting into its component parts, even more terrifying in its overwhelming abundance.
Jason had witnessed it, the whirlwind, for two decades now, and he still wondered what its cause or purpose might be. He had a vague memory that some other creatures possessed by the hive mind—flocking birds, schooling fish—engaged in similar daily rituals, but not why. Perhaps it was an act of bonding, a way for each inconsequential individual ruled by the mind to come together, to act in concert, to refresh and renew their place as a component of the greater whole.
Or maybe it was something much simpler. Maybe the ritual always took place just before dusk so the wasps, which were largely diurnal, could expend unnecessary energy before settling in for the night. One last explosion of activity before they spun down to cluster in great carpets on the cell walls and the bodies of their slaves.
Maybe the whirlwind just helped them sleep better.
But Jason didn’t think so. Even though he’d been trained as a scientist, and he knew that the explanation of the thieves’ behavior—whatever it was—would likely be the simplest, most scientific one, the one that most closely followed Occam’s razor. Find the most obvious explanation, and you’d almost always found the right one.
What the thieves did every night, he believed, was a declaration of strength. He believed that all over the world, thieves took these moments every day to proclaim their dominance over the planet and all that lived on it. They ascended in their great whirlwinds at sunset over slave camps, above the ever-dwindling population of humans and the mushrooming number of born slaves—the next step in hominid evolution—to celebrate their victory.
* * *
AND EVERY NIGHT Jason had paused in whatever job he was doing and watched the whirlwind, and felt a spark of the rage he’d felt at the beginning, when he’d first been enslaved, reignite. He’d stopped and watched so it could reignite, so he could be reminded that he still had the capacity to experience emotions, human emotions. That he could still become angry. That he still existed.
So every night the thieves ascended in the whirlwind that was their victory dance, and every night Jason watched and felt a surge of human rage that was soon drowned in helplessness. Hopelessness. Twenty years of this, and always the same.
Except . . . not tonight.
Tonight something was different.
* * *
CHLOE NOTICED IT, too. Jason, having just disposed of the stiffening corpse of a fox, was standing near the ovens, taking a moment to scan the horizon as he always did, when he saw her come up the stairs and walk across the roof toward him.
This was unusual—early on, they’d discovered that ridden slaves (and even, increasingly, other humans) would always keep them apart if they tried to meet during the day. It had taken a few beatings before the two of them learned that lesson, but since then, they’d rarely challenged it.
Jason would have put up with the beatings if it meant he got to spend more time with Chloe. Ten minutes—two minutes—of conversation could be enough to get him through another day, and if he had to risk his life to gain them, that was a chance he’d take a hundred times out of a hundred.
A risk he’d take for himself . . . but not for her.
And that was the slavemakers’ strategy: They terrified you—and kept you in line—by threatening the people you cared most about. And not just with beatings.
Jason had known this about the thieves even before the world came apart. He’d read the literature. But he’d never quite believed it until he’d seen it here in the early days of the camp, when a man—a builder by trade who was helping Jason make the oven—ran away with his two children. He was brought back a day later with a rider, but left conscious, aware, for just long enough to see his children implanted with eggs before his eyes.
Children being least useful to the thieves as anything other than hosts. But most useful as a warning.
Even after all this time, Jason could recall the expression on the man’s face. A warning that didn’t dull with time.
* * *
SO WHAT WAS different about the whirlwind tonight? Why did something about it give him . . . a flicker of hope?
With just a glance at the ridden slave standing nearby—with its rider up in the cloud of thieves above, it was unmoored, still—Chloe came to stand beside him. Her eyes, always expressive, were narrowed, and her lips were pursed, deepening the furrows the sun and age had left on her face but making it clear that a mind and an imagination were at work.
It was amazing how much you came to treasure such simple things as imagination, creativity, even a sense of humor, in a world where they were going extinct.
“Look at them,” she said, “their knickers all in a twist.”
Jason took a quick glance around. Remarkably, no one seemed to be watching them. No one was coming to pull them apart, to punish them.
He turned to look up at the thieves above. He saw what she meant. The spinning cloud above their heads was tearing apart and re-forming more quickly than usual. Shreds and wisps would break away, then rejoin, but for just an instant, the integrity of the whole would be marred. Only in seeing these tiny flaws in the pattern was Jason reminded of the usual power of the
hive mind, the way it could direct a thousand slaves, or a million, with effortless precision.
Even as they watched, the funnel cloud spun more tightly, the deep, almost choirlike humming made by the wings of countless thieves rising just a touch in pitch.
“I think—” Chloe began.
Then she stopped, making a sound that was either a cough or a laugh. Disbelief. Excitement.
A new possibility, one she’d never before considered.
“I do believe,” she went on, “that they’re nervous.”
Jason looked away from the spinning mass, turning his gaze to the darkening channel. As dusk fell, everything to the east—water, sky, mangrove-lined Manda Island beyond, was one or another shade of gray.
Soon full darkness would fall, only the glimmering reflection of starlight revealing the channel’s presence, but for now there was still enough light left for Jason to see that his long-dreamed-of rescue force was nowhere in sight. No armada of warships, no hazmat-wearing soldiers wielding flamethrowers. Nothing but the usual calm water, the day’s last swallows and night’s first bats flickering low over the water.
But . . . even so. Above them, the cloud tore apart, formed once again. The thieves’ wings sang their uncharacteristic song. A song of unease, of—
Jason found himself crossing his arms over his chest, as if to keep the emotions he hadn’t felt in so long from spilling out. “No. Not nervous,” he said, and he knew she heard the exultant edge to his voice. “They’re afraid.”
Chloe was silent. Feeling her gaze on his face, he lowered his eyes and looked at her. Even in the gathering darkness, he could see that she looked far from exultant. Her expression held something different. He wasn’t sure what it was.
“While they’re not paying attention,” she said, “let’s go.”
He knew at once what she meant. Chloe’s defining characteristic: the gambler’s mix, the quick calculation of the odds fueled by adrenaline and the irresistible urge to take the risk, the leap, the chance.
“Now,” she said.
* * *
“GO WHERE?” JASON asked.
She looked disgusted at his lack of comprehension. “My villa.”
Then he understood. But that didn’t make it any better.
At the beginning, it had been such a tempting possibility that they’d risked beatings to grab every chance to discuss it. To find a way to escape across Lamu to the villa and gardens where Chloe had lived.
The gardens where she’d begun to grow the vine her father had brought her, the vine whose seeds and fruit could protect you from the thieves.
It had seemed like a fantasy to Jason. If such a vaccine had existed, he told her, he would have heard about it. But even though, scornful of her father’s belief in the coming apocalypse, she’d never taken the pills he’d given her, she was unshakeable in her faith that they’d work.
But did it matter? No one ran away from the camp without being brought back, and no one was brought back without being punished for the act. Chloe’s villa and its gardens might as well have been a thousand miles away instead of two or three, and even back then, Jason hadn’t been willing to take the chance.
It had been years since he’d considered the possibility. Clearly, though, it had never left Chloe’s mind. Now she was standing there, staring at him, as if itching to take off at the merest word.
“Chloe,” Jason said, “there’s no way it’s still there, the vine.”
Her shoulders went up in an angry shrug. “Why not?” she said. “It’s a weed, Jase. It was already growing everywhere before—”
She stopped short, but Jason knew the rest of the sentence. Before I went to the Lamu Café one day to open up early and never went home again.
“And there’s bound to be plenty more dirt for it to grow on now than there was back then,” she said. “Cleaner air, too.”
Jason was quiet. It still sounded like a fantasy to him.
“The vine will be there. The vaccine,” she said. “Imagine, Jase—we’ll be able to set ourselves free. All we need to do is go now, and we’ll be untouchable.”
Even this wasn’t precisely true. Human slaves—or slaves in human form—might still pursue them. But, in truth, those ones didn’t frighten Jason. They wouldn’t be much harder to kill than squashing a single thief, and unlike the slavemakers, there weren’t an infinite number of them.
“Jase,” Chloe said, and her voice was more urgent, “let’s go.”
But even as she spoke, the whirlwind broke apart one last time, and the mass of thieves came streaming back down to earth. Whatever had frightened them had released its hold, and in that instant their behavior was back to what it had always been.
The rider reassumed its place on the ridden slave nearest to where they stood and inserted its stinger back into the slave’s neck. Before Jason could take more than a few steps, he found himself falling to the ground under a deluge of blows, rolling into a ball and covering his face with his arms, as he’d done so often before while being beaten.
Not fighting back, no matter how much he wanted to.
Especially after hearing Chloe give an angry cry as her own arms were grabbed and twisted behind her. Jason got a glimpse of who was holding her, pulling her away from him, and saw that it was a human slave. A human man, yet acting no differently than a ridden one or a born slave would have.
Kenneth. That had been his name. Kenny.
Or that would have been his name if he’d still deserved to have one. To possess a human name, and therefore be considered human. But he’d given up that right when he’d become the thieves’ enforcer. When he’d learned the same lesson that he and Chloe had, that by making yourself useful to the thieves, you could stay alive. Alive, unridden, uninfected.
But you had to be strong, and have a way to use your strength. At six-two and at least two hundred pounds, Kenny, who’d been a longshoreman in the vanished world, was extraordinarily strong. And, along with a handful of other men who’d quickly cottoned to his plan, willing to employ his strength to a different purpose.
More than willing, joyful. To become a joyful slave.
Jason felt his rage ignite once again, more fiercely than ever. Like the coals in the oven, that was an emotion whose embers might stay banked, but would never be extinguished. Yet still he restrained himself.
* * *
LATE THAT NIGHT, in the dank, stinking chamber where they slept, he and Chloe lay in each other’s arms. Cradling each other carefully, aware of the new bruises they each sported, but not willing to forgo physical contact.
She didn’t seem angry with him for having hesitated, and even though they didn’t have the chance to talk about it, he thought she understood what he did: Their window of opportunity had been too small. They would have died trying to escape.
This time. But even now, the thieves’ behavior was subtly different. There were as many as ever in the chamber, taking advantage of their captives’ body heat, but they seemed concentrated at the tops of the walls and the peak of the room’s ceiling. As far from the slaves below as they could get.
Chloe shifted in his arms, bringing her lips close to his ears. “Still afraid,” she murmured, just a breath, and he knew she was smiling.
“Yes,” he said, as quietly.
Still afraid.
But of what?
FOURTEEN
AISHA ROSE STOOD in the ruined shantytown in Nairobi and thought, Now I understand.
Mama had shown her pictures of so many places on the dreamed earth, so many cities, but none of Nairobi. “I hated it there,” she’d said in explanation. “So much dirt and noise and . . . anger. There were terrorist attacks, people shooting other people or blowing them up with bombs, and for what?”
She’d paused, and for a moment her eyes had become hazy. “I can hardly remember why.”
Then she’d come back to the present. “And the shantytowns!” she’d said.
When she first heard that word—shantytowns—Aisha Rose liked the sound of it. It was cheerful: “Shanty!” But what would a shantytown look like? The pictures of big cities in books showed only giant skyscrapers, smooth roads like twisting snakes, and masses of people in colorful clothes flooding this way and that.
Aisha Rose was most fascinated by the people. The shirts they wore, the long dresses that flowed like waves around their legs. And their shoes, with toes so pointy and heels so tall that they made Aisha Rose laugh. Just imagine trying to outrun a cheetah in those, she thought. You couldn’t even outrun a warthog.
And the people themselves! The men and women under the clothes. They were so strange and fascinating.
The strangest things was that their complexions, like their clothes, were all different colors, all different shades of brown and tan and pale white and almost yellow. If she hadn’t seen the pictures, Aisha Rose would never have guessed that men and women on the dreamed earth came in so many different colors and shapes and sizes.
On this earth, the real one, Aisha Rose had only seen one person. One living person: Mama.
Until now.
* * *
SHE’D BEEN WALKING through the ruins for hours. She could see that it had once been mile upon mile of sad, hopeless houses and stores built from wooden planks and sheets of metal and hardened mud.
Aisha Rose tried to imagine what it must have been like back on the dreamed earth. During the dry season, with the sun assaulting the metal roofs. And during the long rains, when people’s huts must have been washed away and every path became a sticky, stinking mess.
Today, she had to pick her way over a rubble of crumbled brick and the last fragments of rotten wood and the rusted metal sheets that she had to be careful not to cut herself on. (“You’ll get lockjaw!” Mama had warned her.) And plastic, reduced to fragments and blown by the wind, accumulating in the spaces around the rubble piles. So much plastic that Aisha Rose wondered what people could possibly have needed with it all.
Slavemakers Page 11