“Eternal . . . ?” Aisha Rose had asked.
Mama tilted her head and watched Aisha Rose’s face. “You would live forever.”
“Where?” Aisha Rose had gestured at the ruins spreading outward from them in all directions. “Here?”
Mama had laughed. “No one ever was quite sure where, I think,” she’d said.
Suddenly, she’d looked distant, sad. “Amazing what people believed back then,” she said.
Aisha Rose had looked around, trying to imagine. Please don’t let it be here, she’d thought. Please.
The closest she’d ever come to a prayer.
* * *
I’M NOT GOING to find out if there’s an afterlife, Aisha Rose thought now, surging toward the surface like a hawk in its killing dive. Not here. Not yet.
Yet only ten feet from the surface, the shifting silvery sheet so close, she couldn’t keep her lungs empty any longer. She took a convulsive breath, a breath full of water that shocked her system and almost stopped her in place.
But only almost. If the ocean wanted to keep her, this was its last best chance, and it wasn’t quite strong enough. Her arms flailed, her legs kicked more wildly, but still she rose. Less like a falcon than a hornbill or some other awkward creature, but she could see salvation, and it was close enough to touch.
Her head burst through the silver sheet and into the air. The sun was so warm on her face that it was as shocking as if it had been freezing cold.
Coughing and spitting, she spun around, expecting to see some toothy creature rearing out of the water at her. But there was nothing but the green-blue surface, the high blue sky with the sun burning in it, and a white bird diving into the water, emerging with a wriggling silver fish in its beak.
And a face. A young man’s face.
Wanting to think, to remember, she swam the short distance through the gap in the reef and into the coral shallows. Then, floating on her back in the calm water, her heart rate returning to normal, she called the image back to her mind.
It was him. It had to be.
The first time, when she’d shown him the lion, it had just been a whim. A moment of loneliness leading her to a near-catastrophic decision.
But this time, she’d done it on purpose. She’d called out to him, and he’d answered.
She’d had no choice. She’d had to show him her face. Her true face.
Now she could go on.
* * *
THE BOY THOUGHT about what he’d just seen, about what he’d done. And, standing there in the little lake, alone, so consumed by loneliness that he thought it would tear him in two, he wept.
TWENTY-ONE
Manda Island, Kenya
“WHY ARE WE here?” Kait asked him.
They were standing beside one of the two enormous, swollen-trunked baobab trees that towered over the sixteenth-century ruins that Malcolm knew so well. The baobabs, perhaps five thousand years old, had probably not even registered the fall of the Last World, while the ruins of the Takwa settlement, built of pinkish gray coral, were perhaps only a little more weathered and crumbled than they’d been when he’d last seen them.
Malcolm felt something twist, wormlike, in his stomach at the question. It was time to tell her the truth, just as he’d told Trey, Mariama, and Shapiro.
About Chloe.
But he’d told the three of them years and years ago, and he found that he couldn’t, not quite yet. As if speaking the words, revealing his hopes, would jinx them.
He knew he’d have to get over his superstitions. Everyone was going to learn about it sooner or later.
Still . . . he’d wait a little longer. So he merely said, “You know why.”
His gesture took in some of the crew members out beyond the mangroves that fringed Manda Island, fishing from the two dinghies that had brought the rest of them ashore. Others were getting water from a deep, still-functioning well at the edge of the ruins or picking ripe cashews from a tree laden with them, while still others were hiking around in the low bush that covered the island just to stretch their legs before getting to work.
Ross McKay, who’d barely said a word since their stop on Madagascar, was standing off on the periphery. He was not even bothering to survey the wildlife here, not that there seemed to be much of it.
Malcolm looked over at Clare Shapiro, who was standing in the arched doorway of what had once been Takwa’s great mosque. By the way her eyeglasses reflected the sunlight, he could see that her eyes were on him and Kait as well. But she was staying away because she knew what he had to do here, the news he had to give.
He shifted his gaze to Kait. She’d been leaning against the other baobab, but as he watched, she walked over to him, bearing a remote, unreadable expression.
Noting her careful, slightly awkward stride, Malcolm had a stray thought: She’s pregnant.
But he dismissed it before it even took hold. As far as he knew—and everyone knew nearly everything in Refugia—Kait hadn’t had a boyfriend in . . . well, forever. Plus he’d heard her say many times that she would never bring a child into this world.
And even if she changed her mind about that, it wouldn’t be just before a voyage she’d dreamed of for more than half her life.
Still—
“No,” Kait said, coming up beside him. “That’s not what I mean. Why are we here?”
Malcolm shrugged. “The crew was gonna string me up, I didn’t give them some time ashore.”
Her unblinking gaze held his.
He wriggled his shoulders. “Anyway, you know as well as I do, our next leg is going to be a fucking nightmare.”
Their next leg being a voyage thousands of miles eastward to the vast island of New Guinea. A destination where some believed, on the basis of fragile, two-decades-old evidence, that a remnant of human society might have survived.
More hope than evidence, in truth. The valleys of New Guinea were so remote—and the mountains surrounding them so imposing—that many of the indigenous communities living there had remained undiscovered by the outside world until just decades before the Fall.
And then they’d proven uncompromisingly warlike. Papua New Guinea had been an Australian protectorate, and the western half of the island “owned” by Indonesia, but protected from what and owned how were good questions. All the Huli, Dani, Asmat, and others, with their ages-old rituals and countless generations of grudges, wanted was to be left alone to fight their own battles.
Battles against the elements, against each other, and, most of all, against outsiders. Human outsiders and, as the world teetered on the brink, thieves as well.
By invading even New Guinea, thieves had proven that there was no populated area they could not reach. But they’d also revealed their inability to thrive in cold, isolated highlands—and, most importantly, that they could be defeated when confronted head-on by a foe as willing to sacrifice its own as the hive mind was to sacrifice an individual thief.
Defeated once, at least. And maybe forever? Or at least for two decades?
That was where the hope came in. Trey’s hope, fading as the years passed, as he himself did, that his brother, Kit—who’d retreated with his wife and daughters to Papua New Guinea just before the Fall—might still live.
Malcolm feeding Trey’s hope, however forlorn and wishful. Using it as one spur to drive the building and outfitting of the ship even as his own hope lay here, six thousand miles closer to home.
He wondered if his own hope was any less forlorn than his dying friend’s had been.
“Malcolm,” Kait said. While his mind had been elsewhere, she’d been watching his face. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
He looked at her.
“You give yourself more credit for secret-keeping than you deserve,” she said.
After a moment, he shook his head. Maybe she was right, and he�
��d always been more of an open book than he’d thought. Or maybe it was just that they were so close to his goal now that she could smell it on him.
Whatever the reason, it was time. Time to share with her and everyone else on board. It would be easier to start with her.
So, taking in a deep breath, he told her that he’d had a daughter. That she’d lived near here. And that he’d left her behind to go to Refugia.
“Remember the way it felt at the end?” he said. “When we were all so effing certain what the thieves were going to do, but they were lying low, so everyone else thought we were galah?”
He saw Kait nod. Of course she remembered.
“Well, Chloe was one of those ‘everyone else.’”
Kait was looking him with an intent expression he couldn’t figure out.
“So anyway,” he said, after a moment, “when Trey called and told me to come help—help build Refugia—”
“You were in Kenya,” she said. “I remember.”
He nodded.
“Here. With Chloe.”
“Yeah.” He paused. “And here I was going to stay, even if it meant the Fall was going to take me with it. Until Trey called.”
Kait’s eyes were wide. “But he said you were enthusiastic about helping.”
He just looked at her, and after a moment, she flushed.
“What was I going to say? Trey said the colony needed me.” He shrugged. “And where else were they going to find a pilot as good as me?”
There were still spots of color on her cheeks. “You must have known you’d never get back here.”
“Not for years, if ever.” He smiled at her. “I knew that, yeah.”
“But Chloe refused to come with you.”
He was no longer smiling. “She thought I was mad as a cut snake. Best I could do was get her to promise to grow the vine. Make her own vaccine.”
Saying the words out loud filled Malcolm with an unexpected hopelessness. Now that they were so close to the destination, it all seemed worse than unlikely. For a moment, he closed his eyes, as if to keep his doubts hidden from this girl who seemed able to see into him.
But when he opened them again, he saw that Kait’s face had turned an almost ghostly white. “What’s wrong?” he said. Then, “You planning on fainting, let’s wait till we get closer to the group, okay?”
But far from fainting, she was staring at him with an unnerving intensity. “Exactly where did Chloe live?” she asked. “Where did she plant the vines?”
Malcolm blinked at her tone, then pointed across the narrow channel past the moored ship and to the mainland, a white strip of beach and a row of ruined resort hotels. “Just a little north of there. In her garden in Lamu Old Town.”
Kait put a hand over her mouth.
“Where we’ll be going tomorrow morning,” he said. “Some of us.”
He wasn’t sure what reaction he’d expected, but not the one he got. Kait reached over and grabbed his forearms, holding on so hard her hands felt like clamps. She was the one who looked as mad as a cut snake now.
“God, Malcolm,” she said. “No.”
* * *
YET SHE WOULDN’T tell him why. He asked, requested, demanded, in every way he could think of, but all she did was look at him through those dark eyes in that bone-white face and ask him to promise not to go. To stick with the original plan and head off for New Guinea.
“You don’t get it, Kait,” he said at last. “That was never the original plan. This was. And it’s what we’re doing.”
Some of us.
She was silent.
“That’s the other reason we stopped here,” he said. “Not just so I could bash in your ears, but to get the lay of the land before we head across.”
Not waiting for her to reply, he turned. Years earlier, one of the baobab’s giant branches had cracked and bent to the ground. Now he pulled himself onto it and went up until he reached the first of the horizontal branches. Staying close to the bulbous trunk, he pulled himself up from one to the next, until he was standing above the ruins, the mangroves, and the island’s smaller trees.
Never looking back, but knowing by her labored breathing that Kait was following. And it was she who saw it first, when they were standing on a thick limb perhaps forty feet off the ground. He heard her say his name, and when he finally turned his head he saw she was looking west over the channel.
He followed her gaze, seeing the frigatebirds soaring past at eye level, the afternoon thunderclouds building over the horizon, the ship’s crew scattered below, the dark line of the mangrove forest that fringed Manda Island, the rusted, skeletal wreck of a freighter jutting out of the channel’s turbid water, and—
And, to the north, rising above Lamu Island, a column of gray-black smoke rising a hundred feet into the air before being blown north by the wind.
Malcolm was silent. But his heart thudded in his chest.
“What’s causing that?” Kait said. “A wildfire?”
Malcolm squinted against the angled sunlight, and said, “Looks like it’s coming from Lamu Town, maybe even right at the fort.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t be anything burnable there by now—never was much—and the fort itself’s made of coral. No, that’s no wildfire.”
“It looks like the smoke we saw near Refugia,” she said.
He’d had the same thought.
She was silent for a few moments. Then she said, in a changed tone, “Is that where your daughter lived? Near the fort?”
“Not far.”
Kait’s eyes were on the column of smoke. Her face was still very pale.
“It’s a beacon,” Kait said. “Calling us in.”
Malcolm was quiet.
In a gesture that seemed unconscious, she reached a hand out toward him.
And spoke the words Trey had spoken to her so many years before.
“Please don’t go,” she said.
He was silent.
“Malcolm—”
* * *
ALL THIS TIME, all these years when the Trey Gilliard had been just a dream, then a skeleton, and finally a seaworthy ship. When the great voyage had been in the planning stage, lines on a map, the empty spaces emblazoned with the words, “Here Be Monsters.” When the final preparations were being made.
All these years, and Malcolm had imagined what it would be like to tell Kait that she wouldn’t be allowed onshore when they arrived at Lamu. When they went to seek the first human population beside their own.
She would yell, beg, even cry. Or perhaps she would burn with a cold rage, arguing coherently that dictates issued even by Trey Gilliard, her beloved father, should carry no weight now. That Trey was long gone, and regardless of what he’d seen—or guessed at—during his long, slow slide into death, he did not rule over her.
Kaitlin Finneran Gilliard, a survivor of the Last World and this one, was capable of making her own decisions.
Regardless of her reaction, Malcolm had known that he was going to have to overrule her. Lock her in her cabin. Tie her to the mast if he had to. He’d promised Trey, and that was a promise he intended to keep.
* * *
BUT IN THE end, back on the ground, when he told Kait that he, Ross, Shapiro, and a few others were going ashore to see what lay under the column of smoke—but that she would not—she merely nodded.
Said, “All right, Malcolm.” And turned away.
As if she’d given up and could no longer even bear to look at him.
TWENTY-TWO
STILL AFRAID.
Or, rather: Afraid again.
Jason and Chloe stood on the roof of the fort and watched the thief swarm rise into the still, damp evening air. But not in the usual flight of dominance, of power, the one they’d taken nearly every single evening since establishing the slave camp.
No, this
was the behavior they’d first demonstrated only weeks ago, and three times since, tonight most of all. Evidence of disturbance. Disquiet. Fear.
Once again, something was scaring them. And worse tonight than ever before.
Even as he watched, Jason still had trouble believing—comprehending—it. Often enough over the years, he’d witnessed individual thieves in the last moments before their deaths. He’d seen them trapped in the thick unyielding webs of the button spiders—Africa’s version of the black widow—that infested the fort’s shadowy nooks and rotted doorways. Snapped up by big, brown praying mantises, another insect that seemed to shrug off the thieves’ venom. Held by a pouched rat that, in the madness of captivity or the agony of its last stage as a host, had made a sudden, suicidal grab with its agile claws.
In each case, the thief had died. In each case, Jason had thought it had known it was going to die, or at least had recognized the danger it was in. Even as the trapped wasps tried to escape, they showed nothing but determination and calculation and strength.
And then, at the last moment before falling, before the killing bite, a kind of acceptance. Watching, Jason had thought that was the moment they’d been abandoned by the hive mind. The mind cutting its losses, shifting its focus to the millions—billions?—of thieves with more useful information to impart.
But this was different. Again and again, the wasps’ spinning cloud shredded and re-formed. The choirlike sound of their wings increased in volume and pitch, sometimes accompanied by a chattering sound Jason hadn’t heard before. A sound of increased distress.
And as this all happened, the ridden and host slaves always seemed unmoored, cut off from their masters. Empty shells. No, empty packages of meat and bone, so vulnerable in their stillness that Jason thought he could kill all of them—or, at least, as many as he needed to—with only a single sharp machete.
And he knew where to find the machete, in a storeroom on the roof, not far from the ovens. Machetes and hoes and shovels and other farming tools that he and Chloe and a few others had gathered during the first days of the slave camp’s existence. When they realized how crucial it was to prove to the mind that they were worthy of being allowed to stay alive. And, so much more importantly, to remain human.
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