Slavemakers

by Joseph Wallace

“It’s all going wrong,” Kait said, and this time it wasn’t a question.

  Aisha Rose put her palm against Kait’s cheek. Kait’s eyes opened at the touch, but after a few moments, they closed again. Soon after that, she was asleep.

  Beside her, Aisha Rose watched the lights and made her plans until she heard the sound of voices and movement from other cabins and the passageway outside and knew that the day had begun.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  NIGHTTIME. SOMEWHERE DOWN below, hidden by the boughs and thick rain-forest foliage and the rising mist, something was moving around.

  Something or someone. Mariama wasn’t sure.

  But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she and Sheila were up here, that the rest of the survivors of the onslaught, the massacre, were scattered around the forest, and that the thieves and their slaves now had control of the ground. The ground and Refugia and time.

  Time most of all.

  * * *

  MARIAMA LOOKED DOWN at her meager arsenal and sighed. It was still not enough. Not nearly enough.

  She went through it again, as if somehow she might have missed something. As if there might be a dozen canisters of tear gas, or a dart gun, or even a pistol equipped with a silencer, hidden in the small locker in the corner of the blind where she and Sheila were still holed up.

  Mariama had never thought about that term. “Holed up.” It always had seemed to her to have a positive connotation, as if it meant you’d escaped a threat and were now regrouping, planning, plotting your counterattack.

  But that wasn’t what it meant at all. Holed up was what your enemies wanted you to be. Holed up meant being stuck in a hole, giving them the chance to regroup, plot, plan. To fill your hole with smoke, or pour poison down it, or send down some invading predator that would tear you apart as you cowered at the far end of your hole, trying desperately to fight back.

  Or they could just wait. Let the clock tick down while they went about their lives and didn’t even have to lift a finger to ensure your death.

  Being holed up meant you were trapped. Treed.

  Treed like a bear or a mountain lion or one of the other animals people used to hunt with dogs and horses. Back in those ridiculous days, when survival was so easy that people had the time to stage competitions for which they trained animals to tree other animals, then rode up at their leisure for the kill.

  So here they were, Mariama and Sheila.

  Sitting there, waiting for the hunters to ride up and finish the job.

  * * *

  LAST NIGHT, AT dusk, the air had turned unusually chilly, with a stiff breeze blowing in off the ocean. Weather systems like this—Trey had called them friajes, though that was a South American term—were rare over Refugia, but hardly unheard-of. They were never severe enough, or lasted long enough, to harm the crops. And though they suppressed the activity of protein sources like birds and small mammals, in a well-run colony this had been no more than an annoyance.

  Mariama, sensing the friaje’s arrival, had thought that the cold might even work to her advantage, especially just before dawn. The chill, wet hour before the sun rose and warmed the earth and sent the heavy mist spiraling up through the trees.

  The hour that diurnal mammals were most deeply asleep. And nocturnal ones, at the end of the long, perilous night, at their weariest.

  And not just mammals. Thieves, too. Because mammals, at least, could generate their own heat, while wasps could not.

  Giving her a chance, at least, to see what had happened down there. Maybe help some of those who were imprisoned.

  Or, at the very least, to die on her own terms. Not just sitting up here, treed, waiting for her immunity to wear off and the thieves to feast on her.

  * * *

  SHE CHOSE TWO knives. The first, her bayonet, she wore on her hip. The other, a smaller, double-sided, slightly hooked blade, went into a sheath on her right ankle.

  And one more weapon. Something she’d never seen as she was growing up, even though her childhood had been spent in a war zone. Brass knuckles.

  She had no idea where Malcolm had found it, this set of ridged metal loops that fit over her four fingers and nestled in her palm. With her thumb wrapped around it, she knew she’d be able to deliver a strong blow, strong enough to disable a human, and perhaps even a last-stage host.

  That might be useful.

  Then she straightened and looked across to the other end of the platform, where Sheila, wrapped up in the jacket Mariama had included in her cache, was finally asleep.

  The other reason that Mariama had waited till now to leave the platform. So she wouldn’t have to say good-bye.

  Moving in silence, she climbed down the ladder.

  * * *

  THE WATCHER-THIEF WAS perched on a broad, dew-slick leaf of a philodendron vine spiraling up the kapok’s trunk. It was hunched over, resting low on its legs in the early-morning chill.

  Mariama picked it off the leaf and squeezed its thorax. Its mandibles gaped wide, its stinger slid out, and the wasp writhed between her fingers.

  She squeezed a little harder. Some liquid welled between its jaws, and a drop of thick venom pulsed from the tip of its stinger.

  Even in its final moments, it turned its head to look up into her eyes. Passing information on to the hive mind. But Mariama didn’t care. She had never expected to return to Refugia unseen.

  One more squeeze, and the thief died, dripping from both ends. She tossed it to the ground. The ants and bacteria and fungi were welcome to it.

  Mariama sniffed her fingers. The thief’s odor, as familiar to her as her own, made her feel more alert.

  No. That wasn’t it. The smell ignited her anger. It was the anger that made her fully awake.

  * * *

  SHE WENT OVER the wall at a spot she knew would be at least somewhat screened from view. Located near the southwest corner, it allowed her to drop to the ground behind a row of equipment sheds that hid her from the main plaza and the rows of residences.

  Even so, she’d expected to be met on this little patch of bare ground between the walls and the row of sheds. Even at this dead time on a cold morning, she’d expected the hive mind to have planned an attack to greet her arrival.

  Deep down, Mariama had thought she’d die right here.

  Instead, there appeared to be no one around. The compound was silent, as if it had emptied out overnight.

  No: a different kind of silence. A waiting silence.

  It was so strange, so inexplicable, that for the first time Mariama felt cold. The chill of the unknown proving that she, at least, hadn’t become immune to fear.

  But she wasn’t crippled by it, either. She went on.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A man out past the sheds. No rider on his neck. A guard? It was impossible to know.

  Nor did it matter. Not to Mariama as she came up to him silently through the shadows.

  No. That was a lie. It did matter.

  That had been the most intolerable revelation about the invaders, Mariama thought. That among them were some who were still human. Men and women who had traded in their freedom for survival.

  And who had killed out of choice, not by command.

  Ridden slave or human? Yes, it did matter.

  * * *

  THIS ONE, WITH no rider, was just turning toward her when she clubbed him with her brass-knuckled fist.

  She felt his skull crumble from the force of her blow, and he fell straight to the ground without making more than a tiny moan swallowed up by the cold, still air.

  Mariama was impressed. No wonder Malcolm had added this weapon to the stockpile.

  The man on the ground was still alive for now, still moving his legs and arms in uncoordinated motions. Mariama stood above him for a moment, thinking. And then, reaching for her belt, she squatted and completed the
task with a knife. Showing mercy he didn’t deserve.

  Then she headed into the shadows once more.

  But she was still possessed by an eerie sense of confusion. The expression on the man’s face in his last instant had revealed shock, fear, and—most of all—surprise. He’d had no idea she was coming, and the continued absence of anyone who would have known made no sense at all.

  But while just a few moments before, this bizarre lack of response, of awareness, had spooked her, now she felt a new emotion ignite inside her. Hope.

  Something had changed. Mariama didn’t have a clue what or why, but she didn’t need to. She didn’t need to know what was going on to take advantage of it.

  She moved forward, knife in her hand.

  * * *

  THE PRISONERS WERE being held in the Refugia’s community center. Where else? It was the only space where more than a few could be kept together.

  The door was guarded by four of the invaders. Mariama, across the plaza, thought that they were a mix—last-stage hosts, ridden ones, willing slaves—but at this distance, she couldn’t be sure.

  That part didn’t much matter. Whatever they were, they’d all die the same way, and just as quickly, by her hand.

  When the time came.

  * * *

  KNOWING SHE HAD only a few moments before the rising sun made her transit obvious to all, she slipped behind the building. The windows had all been boarded up, but the job had been done quickly and roughly enough to leave plenty of gaps—none big enough to climb through, but easy enough to see into.

  Bending to get the best angle, Mariama got her first look at the prisoners. Then she closed her eyes for an instant, not in shock or horror at what she’d seen but to quell her anger.

  Taking a deep breath, she looked again at the slave quarters straight out of ones she’d seen elsewhere, on Gorée Island north of here, and at Cape Castle in Ghana. Places where many of her own ancestors had been taken, less than two centuries before the Fall, and where some had died.

  The room had been designed for twenty people at most, but there were dozens packed into the small space. Eighty? A hundred? She couldn’t tell.

  She saw young, old, children. Babies. All people she knew. All she’d considered hers, under her protection.

  Some were standing upright with no place to move, not even to take a single step. Others were lying in the corners in small piles where they’d fallen. Mariama couldn’t tell if they were dead or still barely alive, or if that even mattered.

  Heat from the living bodies inside the room emanated through the gaps in the window. So did the smells: vomit, urine, shit, thief.

  * * *

  MARIAMA HAD SEEN enough. Full daylight or not, she knew what her next destination would be: the front of the building. The four guards. Undoubtedly, she would lose the battle, and her life, before she could open the door to let the slaves escape, but at least she would die trying.

  But when she straightened and turned, she found herself looking directly into the eyes of a last-stage host. A second one was coming up just behind it.

  * * *

  THE BATTLE, FOUGHT in near silence, was quick, but not quick enough.

  Mariama plunged her bayonet into the closer one. She’d aimed for the eye, but at the last instant it twisted away from her and the blade struck its neck instead. The eruption of blood slowed it, but also blinded her.

  And as it went down, it took the bayonet with it.

  Scrubbing the blood out of her eyes with the back of her right hand, Mariama bent, reached—losing the brass knuckles—and got her other knife out of its sheath. Before she could straighten, though, the second host was on top of her, its hands like claws tearing at her back, its jaws snapping somewhere just above her head.

  At the same instant, she felt a fierce pain in her right calf. The crunch of teeth through her flesh as the dying host below fastened onto her.

  Mariama knew she was very close to losing this battle, to forsaking those she’d hoped to rescue. With a last, violent effort, she pushed off the ground, headfirst. The leap dislodged the jaws of the fallen host, and at the same instant the top of her skull made contact with the second attacker’s chin. She felt and heard the bones of its jaw shatter, and it released her and fell back.

  Her vision was blurred, the pain in her leg intense as an electric current, but she still had the knife. One quick step forward, and she’d put the blade in the throat of the second host, tearing upward and sideways. Blood spurted and flowed, and it went down. She stepped out of the way as it rolled and spasmed beside the other, whose own movements were already growing feeble.

  * * *

  MARIAMA TOOK A deep breath. How long had the fight taken? Fifteen seconds, perhaps. Long enough for three of the guards to come around the corner of the building, to hesitate—even then, Mariama wondered why—before coming for her.

  Three was too many, and more were joining them with every moment. She turned and ran. No, tried to run, only to have her injured leg almost go out from under her.

  She forced herself to overcome the agony and move, half dragging her leg, already planning her next strategy. She would lead them away, around to the rear of the building, then double back and—

  But it was hopeless. Before she’d gone a dozen strides, they had her surrounded. Contained. Four of them, no, six now. And still more coming.

  The sun rose above Refugia’s eastern wall. Touched by the sudden warm light, mist writhed upward from the dew-drenched ground. As the nearest two reached for her, Mariama drew a breath, steadied herself, and raised her knife.

  Then a cloud obscured her vision, and a high-pitched screaming filled her head.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THEY’D COME ASHORE at dawn, not because there would be any element of surprise—of course they’d be seen, of course they’d be expected—but because possibly, just possibly, attacking during those chilly, dead hours might have given them the slightest advantage.

  The thieves, with their cold blood, would be sluggish. And even the slaves might be at low ebb at that hour, either not yet fully awake or tired after a long night.

  Kait remembered Mariama explaining all this around the fire one night. Mariama, the one among them who knew the most about fighting, about killing. Even more than Malcolm did, and Malcolm knew just about everything.

  Kait, who knew nothing about killing, and didn’t want to learn, hadn’t listened when the topic had turned in that direction. But she did remember that part. You attacked at dawn.

  Even when you knew you had no chance anyway.

  * * *

  EIGHTEEN OF THEM, using both dinghies. Sixteen crew members, plus the two newcomers, Aisha Rose and Jason. The two who knew better than anyone how hopeless it was yet had decided to fight beside them anyway.

  Eighteen here meant that a crew of ten had remained on the Trey Gilliard. Most likely that would not be enough to sail the ship back to Refugia if the others never returned, but at least it might be possible.

  A little hope. The best any of them could do.

  * * *

  THIS TIME THEY got all the way up to the plaza before the slaves attacked. Three dozen of them? Four? So many that it was all a blur to Kait, a blur of bodies battling hand-to-hand, accompanied by the whipcrack sound of guns and the screams of the wounded and, above all, the whirling hum of the thieves in their masses, their clouds, above.

  A blur with moments of great clarity. Shapiro with her back against a stone pillar, discharging her shotgun once, twice—flesh and bone and blood flying in the misty gray air—and again.

  Dylan Connell, who’d insisted on accompanying them this time, but not for very long, as he fell under the onslaught. Kait glimpsing his shocked expression, his wide eyes, lifeless already as the attackers tore apart his body.

  Jason seeming almost to fly through the crowd of attackers, his mache
te swinging so rapidly that its blood-smeared blade left a crimson afterimage in the air, like the smear left behind by thieves’ wings.

  Kait herself, infected, safe, invisible to the attackers. Not to the human ones, Jason had warned her, but only to the slaves and their thief masters. But no one, slave or thief or human, seemed to be paying her any attention, because—invisible or not—she seemed like no immediate threat. Weaponless, half-hidden from the melee by a pile of coral stone where a section of wall had fallen, she stood so still that she might have been a wraith, a vision.

  Standing beside her was Aisha Rose, face bone white, skin translucent. Far too weak to repeat what she had done on these stairs the day before.

  Aisha Rose’s eyes were closed, and she swayed on her feet. But it seemed to Kait that she was seeking something. Questing.

  * * *

  PERHAPS TEN FEET away from them stood the twins. Today they were armed with handguns, and though Brett had his out, Darby had already lost hers. A group of slaves surrounded them, shouldering closer as they stood side by side, awaiting death together.

  Kait looked at the two of them, knowing there was nothing she could do to save them. She had never been any sort of a fighter, and she would not leave Aisha Rose’s side.

  And then, in that instant, she felt a shift in her brain. Like a key turning, and something new opening.

  And, at last, she saw. Saw from within what Trey had witnessed all those years and kept secret from her. Her own place in the mind whose shape shifted with every instant, whose horrifying, overwhelming consciousness was built from countless eyes, countless senses. Including her own.

  She understood how weak, how unimportant, the human mind was by comparison, with just one slow, incomplete, individual response at a time. How could it match up against a million visions all channeled effortlessly into the whole? A million visions creating a million responses, reactions, commands, followed by another million, and another?

  And now she had become part of that whole.