The shantytown was far bigger than she’d imagined, and empty. At least she didn’t see many bones. After nearly twenty years, most of them had already returned to the earth. And if some were hidden away, under the crumpled metal or crumbled stone . . . well, she had no desire to go looking for them.
But they had lived here once, the humans. How many, though? How many had lived inside the vanished tumbledown shacks under the sheet-metal roofs? Aisha Rose couldn’t even guess.
“Knock a hole in an ant mound,” Mama had said. “A big hole. How many white ants will come spilling out?”
Aisha Rose had no idea. She’d knocked her share of holes in ant mounds, of course. Simply to watch the ants, with their naked white bodies and twitching black jaws, swarm out of the hole, looking for something to bite.
She knew it was a lot, though. Too many to count. And that was the point.
“As many white ants as there are in a mound, that’s how many people lived in the shantytowns of Nairobi,” Mama said. “And not just Nairobi. Many cities had them. Or slums. Miserable places to live. You’d be in this city with tall apartment buildings, expensive stores, fancy restaurants—”
“Like in the pictures,” Aisha Rose said.
“Yes, just like that. But just a stone’s throw away, people lived with no electricity, no working plumbing, rats in the walls.”
Just like they’d had—and didn’t have—since the end of the dreamed earth, Aisha Rose pointed out. In Naro Moru and in Hell’s Gate, the only running water came from streams.
“That’s true,” Mama acknowledged. “But it was different then because you could see the way other people lived. You could see what they possessed, and know that you could never have it for yourself.”
Aisha Rose could understand that. She had felt echoes of those feelings, that envy, that desire, just by looking at the pictures. What must it have been like to witness them for real, to be living close to the dream but not be part of it?
“People were sick at heart,” Mama said. “No: sick in their souls.”
“In the shantytowns?”
“Everywhere.”
* * *
AISHA ROSE COULDN’T imagine what a Nairobi filled with an ant mound of people had sounded like. But the real Nairobi was quiet. When she held her breath, she could hear only the sound of the wind worrying the ruins, the whispery sound of the plastic, the distant call of a crow.
Oh . . . and the panting of the terrified creature hiding behind a tall, tottering pile of rubble opposite the spot where she stood.
The creature she’d come all this way to find.
* * *
THE CREATURE: THE second human Aisha Rose had ever seen.
More accurately, had almost seen, because she’d caught only a quick blur of movement as she’d come around a towering pile of bricks and fractured glass and rotted wood. But she knew it was there, and not only because it couldn’t control its panicky breathing.
She’d always known, before she’d even left Mama behind. It, or at least the dim light it had cast—a light like Mama’s had been, not far from the end—was the reason she’d come to this sad, endless, lifeless place.
And now she was waiting, knowing how much of a shock her appearance here must be. Waiting for it to calm down, to show itself.
But the creature’s breath was now coming in little gasps that sounded more like cries of anger.
Aisha Rose very rarely experienced fear, but she felt the hairs on her arms and back of her neck prickle. Her heart thudded against her rib cage.
The fear telling her to turn away. To leave. To retreat, and once out of sight, to run as fast as the sharp metal edges and piles of crumbled rock would let her.
To understand that this trip, this mission, had been misconceived from the start.
But she couldn’t. After all this time, all this time alone, Aisha Rose had to do what she did next.
She had to see it. The thing that cast the light.
* * *
THE BOY STOOD at the foot of the colossal ruined bridge that had once spanned the churning river.
When he had last come here, years earlier, the bridge had still been intact. Now its ends still stood, one towering over him, rusted metal and chunks of stone, the other sprouting from the far shore. But in the middle the spans dipped toward and into the river’s surge, forming sharp angles like the bent wings of an enormous, skeletal bird.
Back then, the boy had thought about crossing the bridge. But he hadn’t. What would be the point? He could see the opposite shore, and it looked just like the one he stood on. The same wounded land, the same stone and steel, undoubtedly the same hulks of cars and bones and other bits and pieces of the past. He had no interest in those.
As far as the boy knew, the whole world was made up of wounded land. Whatever the world was, however big it was—and he had no idea—he thought it would all look the same. Except for his precious patch, the green lands.
So he’d turned his back on the bridge and retreated to his home. He had no need to go anywhere else. There was food and shelter, enough to live on, and as the years passed, he didn’t even think about the world outside. Years without ever dreaming of returning, of seeing what lay beyond.
Until he learned about her. Until she revealed herself to him.
That had brought him back here, only to find that this route had been taken away from him. The river wasn’t so wide here, but the other shore might as well have been as distant as the stars. He had no way to cross the swirling water.
And even if he’d been able to, what then? She could be anywhere. It had been a stupid idea, coming here.
The boy wasn’t used to having stupid ideas, then wasting his time on them.
Being alone was dangerous.
No. He’d been alone his whole life and done just fine.
It was knowing you were alone that was dangerous.
* * *
AISHA ROSE TOOK a step forward, another. Then she opened her mouth and tried to speak, but her throat felt half-closed. She was suddenly afraid in a new way: afraid to make a sound.
Still, somehow she choked out the words. The beginning of her nightly ritual: “My name is—”
But that was as far as she got. At the sound of her voice, harsh in the silence of the dead city, the other, the creature, finally revealed itself to her.
Aisha Rose had thought she was ready. But when it came bursting out from behind the rubble, it was so much faster, so much more agile, than she expected. More like a sandgrouse or a guinea fowl flushed from the tall savanna grass than any mammal she’d seen. But, unlike those birds, it did not vault upward toward the skies, to safety, but came straight for her. Like a hunter, an ambush predator.
This must be what the prey animal sees, right at the last instant, Aisha Rose thought.
She had time to take a single step back. Then her heel caught on something, and she fell, barely getting her hands behind her to break the impact. She felt a jolt in her right shoulder, a muscle wrenching somewhere deep inside. And a hotter, more intense pain on her left palm, where something sharp had cut her.
In her fall, Aisha Rose had dropped her barricades, the walls that protected her. Overwhelmed by the creature’s fear and anger, she lay there, stunned and infinitely vulnerable as it crouched beside her, its face in deep shadow. She could see only its wide-stretched eyes, yellow-white in a dark, wizened face that was still, barely, human.
Human but far beyond her reach. An open hole of a mouth containing crumbled yellow teeth. Hands like talons clutching at her.
Forcing herself into movement, she began to scramble away. But with a strange, disoriented spasm of its right arm, the creature hit her in the face, so hard that she went down flat again, bruising the back of her head. Sparks seemed to fly in front of her eyes, like the embers rising and spinning upward from a brush fire, an
d her thoughts became vague and disorganized.
The creature came for her again and, without thinking, her barricades still down, she did the only thing left to her to do. She reached out to it, just as she had done with the other one, the one who was like her, and just as she had done so often with Mama.
And saw inside it: a maelstrom. Nothing coherent. Just . . . a torrent of anger and fear and hatred.
The creature rocked back on its heels and gave a hoarse cry. And then it was on its feet. Running, crablike, but fast, so fast. As if to escape her intrusion. As if a little distance could protect it.
Then it was out of sight, its footsteps echoing, dwindling. But before it was beyond the range of her hearing, she heard it give a cry, its final one, an ascending shriek that again raised the hair on the back of her neck.
And, once again, she was alone in the abandoned city.
* * *
THE BOY STOOD still. He would never see her . . . but he could still bring her close. The walls she’d erected to keep him out would crumble in an instant.
But he might harm her. He knew that. He had to be so careful.
With ultimate caution, he reached out to her. And was shocked to find that her defenses were already down, exposing what she was feeling.
Fear. Not of him, but of something else.
And pain.
At first, he didn’t know what was causing it, but he knew she was dangling on the edge, helpless against something that might be about to end her.
Then he could see the thing that was threatening her. And anything he could see he could end.
Shifting his attention in an instant, he ended its life. That thing that had been threatening her.
It was as easy as a thought.
* * *
AT FIRST THE realization of what he’d done, his gift to her, filled him with warmth. Perhaps she would recognize it and leave her barricades down. Show him another lion, or maybe even show him her face.
But minutes passed, and she did not acknowledge him. And then he saw her walls go up again, the ones meant to keep him out. His loneliness came flooding back over him, and along with it his anger.
He raised his hands to cover his face. Wishing she’d never known he was there. Wishing he’d never known she’d existed.
Wishing most of all that his mind would go back to what it had been. When all that occupied it was what he saw in front of him: the wounded lands, the green. The world he lived in.
Not this other, this other like him, this other who was out there somewhere, reaching out to him, hiding from him. Reminding him every moment that he was alone.
There was only one solution.
Realizing this, he felt his heart unknot. It would be so easy, ending her. As easy as it had been with the other thing, as easy as it was when he played his game.
It wouldn’t take more than an instant.
* * *
THE BACK OF Aisha Rose’s head hurt. Her shoulder, too. And the nasty cut on her hand, a broad slash across her palm filled with particles of stone and dirt, hurt worst of all.
Still, she thought she’d cut it on rock, not the metal edge of something. Which meant she probably wouldn’t die of lockjaw.
Of course, as Mama had warned her often enough, she could die just as easily from infection. Infection was something Aisha Rose had seen in animals. The swellings, the smell when they burst, the maggots writhing in the dripping flesh.
“You need to find clean, running water to wash that out,” Mama would have told her. “And make a paste of the sumeito plant and cover the cuts with it.”
Mama had shown her this plant, the sumeito, a pretty flowering vine that had grown on the crumbling walls of the compound in Naro Moru. But Aisha Rose knew she wouldn’t find it here, not in the shantytown or anywhere in this blasted city where—even after all these years—not much grew.
She knew she’d be able to find it outside the city. Clean water, too. If she got to them in time.
But before she could take more than a couple of steps, she stopped and stood still. Around her, inside her, the world suddenly seemed crystalline. Fragile.
And beyond the crystal clarity, a wave. A wave building, gathering force and power.
Aisha Rose waited. There was nowhere she could hide, nothing to do but wait, as the wave’s strength grew. A darkness that obliterated the stars and constellations and towered over her. All she could do was stay still, stare up at it, and wait for it to sweep her away.
But then, just as it curled toward her, a gigantic hand coming to flatten her, to flick her away, the wave swept past her. In an instant, the city, the shantytown, went back to looking as they once had. And Aisha Rose was alone once again.
* * *
AISHA ROSE WATCHED the progress of the wave. Watched in amazement, in awe, marveling at its breadth and power.
And at that moment she began to understand the purpose of her hejira.
What it meant, and where it had to end.
* * *
HE’D STOPPED JUST in time.
He’d wanted to finish it. Wanted so badly to go back to what he’d once been. But at the last instant, he understood something: that even ending her wouldn’t allow him to unremember her. No matter what, she would be there, inside him, all the rest of his life.
Anger and frustration rose in him then.
But at least he could still play the game. The game he’d been playing ever since he could remember.
Taking in a deep breath, he closed his eyes. Each time he played, he had to reach out farther, but that was never a problem. There was no place beyond his reach. No ruined bridge could stop him, no river, not when he traveled this way.
Soon enough, he found the nearest one. There. There it was. And soon, just beyond it, more. So many more. More every year, despite him, despite the game.
And he was suddenly everywhere among them. Between them.
They knew it. They were aware. Alarmed.
Afraid.
He had felt their fear many times before. He knew how the game would end, how it always ended, and so did they.
Only this time, he wanted more.
So he did it differently. He didn’t end them where they stood, where they flew. Instead, he summoned them. Called them to him.
Stood in his spot by the river and filled their mind, and the spaces between, with his command, until he knew that they were helpless to do anything but obey, to flow toward him in a vast tide.
That’s what they always did, obey. Follow. It was what they’d been designed to do.
He stood still for hours, until just before the sun set over the wounded lands behind him. Until the air was filled with the sound of their wings, and he opened his eyes to witness the whirlwind above him. Swirling there like fog, some already pattering to the ground around him in exhaustion, the rest tied together, yoked to his command, unable to escape.
He could have ended them all this way, by doing nothing else but waiting a little while. But he was bored of waiting. So, with a single stroke, he disposed of the desperate whirlwind then and there.
As he walked home, their bodies crunched under his feet, and their odor rose and wreathed around him, as thick in his nostrils as smoke.
FIFTEEN
EVEN AFTER ALL these years, most Fugians still weren’t very easy in Mariama’s company. They tended to give her a wide berth, to end conversations abruptly, to discover something else they needed to do when they saw her coming. Though no one was outright rude, she could tell they thought her strange, unpredictable, and possibly even a little dangerous.
She wasn’t offended. Because they were right: She was all those things. Strange and unpredictable. And more than a little dangerous.
It was who she was. Who she’d been since childhood, growing up here in the Casamance. The region in southern Senegal that had been th
e site of a decades-long insurgency against the government in far-off Dakar.
The insurgency had been about many things, but—like most such conflicts before the Fall—the focus had been religion. The Muslim north battling the Christian and animist south.
And, like most such low-simmering revolutions, there had been no real end to the struggle. It had gone on and on, until the thieves demonstrated the meaninglessness of such conflicts, solving them far more decisively than humans ever could.
So Mariama had been raised in a world where snipers could shoot you from a thousand yards away, killing you before you even knew you were a target. Where your after-school activities could include laying snares in the rain forest or clearing mines planted by the soldiers from the north. And (as if that wasn’t enough) where, long before the rest of the world had any idea the thieves existed, you had to live side by side with them.
A mine had taken the life of her father Seydou’s older brother. Thieves had killed two of her young cousins. The insurgency itself had claimed several of her friends. And she’d witnessed more than her share of the deaths of people she would never know or care about.
Witnessed and caused.
If this all made her someone to be avoided if possible, so what? Her job in Refugia wasn’t to make friends. It was to keep everyone, all those naïve, willful, idealistic people who’d gathered here to make a new world, alive long enough to see the world they hoped to create.
Idealism was a good thing, she supposed—though, in truth, she thought the greatest murderers in history had often been its greatest idealists—but it was useless if you perished in its pursuit. You needed someone around who was a realist. Someone who understood that survival required strength and the willingness to deal in death.
Was that a paradox? Maybe. Mariama didn’t know.
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