Authors: Tananarive Due
“From the House of Science,” Dawit said.
Alex and Lucas had been invited to the repository of technology and scholarship in the House of Science’s underground wings in Lalibela, but they had been given very limited access to the treasures. Unrestricted areas only, always under escort. Alex had been waiting for permission to see the colony’s HIV research. Lucas blamed their cultural prohibition against sharing with mortals, but to Alex it had always looked like hiding.
“Developed at least eighty years ago,” Dawit explained. “Not an identical strain, but very close. There have always been factions …”
“Ready to wipe us out,” Alex finished. Hot dust seemed to coat her throat.
Dawit nodded. “Only small factions. Our recurring debate.” He sounded unapologetic.
Anger lifted Alex to her feet and seemed to raise her height. “Was AIDS yours too?”
“No,” Dawit said, his eyes unblinking and impassive. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked, and the answer was always the same. She was a fool for having believed him.
Alex wanted to leap on Dawit, to slap at him or pound him with a fist, although she never had before—not even after Dawit killed her niece, accident or not. Now Alex understood what Jessica meant about the past feeling fresh enough to smell and touch: she could
see
Dawit’s hands around poor Kira’s throat. The coroner’s
report said he’d strangled her in his badly failed quest to give her immortality.
“Explain this, Dawit!” Alex said. Lucas hooked his arm around her waist to hold her.
“Try right goddamn now,” Lucas said.
Dawit blinked with his own anger. “You’re making it too simple,” he said, struggling to sound measured.
“Simple?”
Alex said. The urge to strike at him reared again.
“Yes, Alex,
simple
,” Dawit said. “Because if it were my Brothers, we could contain it. But I believe this virus is in the hands of someone outside of Lalibela, which is a significant complication. So we don’t have the luxury of raw memories.”
Fear curled Alex’s stomach into an icy fist. “You think it’s Michel?” she said.
As Dawit nodded, Alex’s anger at him melted.
“Fana thinks so,” Dawit said. “Michel might have access to our research, with or without help. If he’s following Sanctus Cruor doctrine, expect bigger outbreaks soon.”
Michel.
One man had overwhelmed all of Dawit’s people in Washington from thousands of miles away. Lucas had told her he’d been as helpless as a child when he lost his eyesight for a harrowing moment, struck blind by a Life Brother acting under Michel’s mental influence.
Alex was as close to crying as she could allow herself. What should she cry about first?
“What was the rationale, Dawit?” Alex said. “When ya’ll were back in the lab trying to dream up ways to kill us in large numbers—random men, women, and children. How did you explain it to yourselves? What made it all right?”
Dawit looked wounded. “I can’t speak for them, Alex. I pray you know that.”
“But you’ve got an idea,” she said, pinching his soft cheek. “Come on, sweetie. We’re all family here.”
Dawit shrugged. He paused. “The air tastes different now. To us. So much has changed. There are too many of you.” His voice was so
quiet, Alex barely heard him. Dawit had made the pronouncement without a blink.
“Fana is here,” Dawit said. “She’s resting from the concert, but she’ll go to the village.”
Alex felt pained for her niece, who was so young. But her weary heart celebrated for the first time since her stomach had begun its mourning ache.
6:30 a.m.
F
ana realized that this trip was the closest thing she could remember to a family outing. Only her mother was missing; Mom wasn’t strong enough for this journey.
The three-vehicle caravan of Land Rovers bounced along the unpaved road in a cloud of dust, undercarriages whimpering. To Fana, their journey was like the replaying of a dream, or a future memory. She had felt this day before. She had seen this dry, rocky land of dying saplings, without a single mature tree in sight across the dusty, arid plain.
The smell of death was everywhere. The air stank of rotting flesh. Fana heard phantom screams, the last echoes of fear and pain to the pitiless sky. Tears burned Fana’s eyes. She would no more mourn simple death than she would mourn watching a boatman cross a river—that was all death was—but unexpected passages left so much pain in their wake. Her mother would not have been so shredded by her grandmother’s death if not for Michel’s hand in it.
Had an entire village suffered because of her childishness?
“We’re close now,” Jared said quietly, but she had known that from the smell. And the sudden sound of shouting that grew louder as they drove. Jared held her hand, and she held his.
Fana had loved her cousin since before his parents’ marriage made them family; before she had met him in the physical world. Their spirits had played together when leukemia ravaged his body, nearly transporting him across planes. His father’s search for a cure
was what had brought him to Aunt Alex, along with the mercenaries who had almost killed them both.
And Moses was in Kano! She had seen him only briefly when they picked up her family at their hotel, but as he’d leaned into her window, Moses was the same lanky giant she’d known when she was three, and later, when her family flew him to the Washington colony to be her playmate. She had made it rain for him once, and she had hurt him without meaning to. Neither of them had spoken of it, but they both remembered.
Jared’s touch and the memory of Moses’s smile would carry her through this day.
Hundreds of people waited ahead, crowding in a surge. Army trucks appeared in the road beyond a rise, blocking the growing crowd along a perimeter already fenced with rapidly unrolled spools of barbed wire. Her father and her personal guard in the front seat, Berhanu, coiled with readiness. A year ago, she’d hated living under guard, but she knew better now. The three vehicles’ formation tightened as the drivers slowed. In Mexico, the last time Fana’s father stumbled into a knot of soldiers, he’d ended up Michel’s prisoner. All of them had.
Fana didn’t like being nervous, so she tried to reassure herself with logic: Michel had no need to trap them. He could have brought them back at any time.
Her father’s gun snapped to his hand, ready.
“How far is the village from this perimeter?” Dawit said.
“Quarter mile,” Uncle Lucas said.
Aunt Alex nodded toward the gun. “Dawit, we’re supposed to look like scientists.”
“Scientists, not fools,” he muttered. But he hid the weapon beneath his shirt again.
“How was Phoenix?” Aunt Alex asked Fana suddenly, surprising her. “At the concert?”
Music flared in Fana’s mind. She smiled. “Brilliant. Sorry you missed it.”
Her aunt smiled. “Me too.”
Aunt Alex and her mother had first played Phoenix’s music for
her, an addictive dance song called “Party Patrol,” the first song Fana ever danced to when her physical body was still a novelty. Their shared smile was a balm, but those days were long gone now.
Fana’s smile vanished quickly as Aunt Alex pulled a handful of plastic name tags from her pocket and handed them out one by one. “Make sure these are visible,” Aunt Alex told them. “As of the last election, Clarion’s name is no good here. We’re with the CDC today.”
Fana glanced at her plastic badge. A recent, unsmiling photo of her sat above a bland name: M
ARY
F
IDLER
. E
PIDEMIOLOGIST
,
CENTERS FOR
D
ISEASE
C
ONTROL
F
IELD
R
ESPONSE
T
EAM
.
“The head of the healthy ministry’s sharp,” Uncle Lucas said. “Dr. Ogunyele. He’s mastered the medicine
and
the politics. He alerted Alex, and he’s taking good care of us.”
Aunt Alex went on. “Chris Ogunyele stepped in quickly enough to stop the spread when the official government line was ‘poisoning.’ Thank the Lord he isolated the village.”
Michel had stopped the infection’s spread, Fana suspected. Just as he had in Puerto Rico. To him, it had been like blowing out a match after watching it burn for a time. There was nothing the mortal health minister could have done to make it better or worse.
Rows of green jatropha shrubs began dancing outside Fana’s window. She thought they were swaying with memories, until she heard the beating winds of approaching helicopters. She peered up at the sky. One helicopter was flying low enough for her to see inside: soldiers’ legs and boots. Guns dangling from the open bay door.
“A riot is coming,” Dawit said.
“We’ll be in and out before that happens,” Uncle Lucas said.
“We better be,” Aunt Alex said.
“No—not you, Aunt Alex,” Fana said quickly. “You and Jared stay behind.”
Her aunt looked at her, defiant eyebrows raised high. “What? We’ve been there already to lay the groundwork, and we’re fine!”
Jared let go of her hand. “
This
again.” He hated lines between mortal and immortal.
Sorry, cuz
. “It’s not just a disease,” she said. “Let’s not pretend it is.”
That was the one lesson her mother always drummed into her head: don’t ignore the obvious. Don’t be afraid to look at the truth.
“My wife couldn’t bear it if something happened to her nephew and only sister,” Dad said. His voice was heavy with the idea of it.
Alex’s face softened, although disappointment burned in her eyes. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me in twenty-five years, Dawit.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, Alexis.”
Alex and Dawit laughed, but without joy. Fana smiled at her father’s rare joke. She had sensed an earlier argument between her father and her aunt, and she was glad they were moving beyond it. She told herself she wasn’t creating the peace, but it was hard to be sure.
Fana scanned the sea of rainbow-colored scarves from the women crowding the barricade, washed in their wails and shouts. Fana remembered that she was wearing her own favorite white gauzy
netela
head scarf, and wrapped the soft fabric across her mouth and chin as she watched the crowd draw closer. Fana had never outgrown the reflex to cover her face when she was away from home. Unwelcome thoughts were louder when others looked at her—or came close to her—and it was hard to filter out the noise. A scarf offered nothing to stare at; it was a relief from being tumbled inside the hurricane.
Like a little kid with a security blanket
, Johnny said.
“Aunt Alex?” Fana said. “We’ll bring less attention if you cover your head.”
Uncle Lucas muttered, “Told you.”
Aunt Alex sighed, but she accepted the mustard-colored veil he pulled out of his briefcase. He had asked her to wear it before. Aunt Alex didn’t argue this time, taking the veil without a word and draping it loosely across her graying Afro.
Fana had muted her aunt’s thoughts from herself, but she saw the irritation in her eyes. Fana accidentally had left her aunt in a coma a year before, repeating a similar accident she’d had with Moses when she was three. Since the latest incident, Fana
tried to speak to her aunt in gentle tones, and Aunt Alex chose her battles.
“There he is!” Aunt Alex pointed at someone through the windshield. “It’s Chris!”
The Land Rover ahead slowed as Berhanu, their driver, alerted Fasilidas to stop. The two drivers were powerful telepaths who could communicate mentally beyond fifty yards. Ahead, Fasilidas pulled over toward a waiting army truck. Two dozen young Nigerian soldiers in black berets waited while their fates were decided by others, hands on their rifles.
Uncle Lucas held up his finger. “Remember: we’re with the CDC.”
STAY INSIDE
, Dawit told Fana.
Aunt Alex climbed out of the Land Rover, waving to the civilian.
A man in a dusty office suit walked toward them, flanked by three men in the bright blue shirts of Nigeria Police. Walking at a brisk pace, the man in the suit stumbled in the uneven soil. The man looked forty, with a solid build. His stylish black eyeglasses were almost too small for his square-jawed face. He had not shaved in days. His dress shirt was soaked with perspiration, clinging to his skin.
“Alex, I’d given up on finding you,” he said. “We must hurry!”
A man’s impassioned voice from a loud radio caught Fana’s ear: “… is preceded always, always,
always
, by a time of cleansing. Noah’s flood cleansed the earth. We cannot walk in fear. Why should we fear death? We must walk with our eyes toward the Kingdom of Heaven and be
cleansed
of fear …”
Fana sharpened her focus, clicking a dial in her mind, and knew who the speaker was: Amadi Owodunni, an excommunicated cardinal who had been exposed as a thief. Owodunni’s repetition of the word
cleansing
made Fana’s heart race. The phantom signal grew faint, lost in the crowd’s furor.
“We’re here to do whatever we can, Chris,” Aunt Alex said, and introduced them all to the health minister’s police escort using their phony new names.
Her veil’s anonymity worked in Fana’s favor. She had been on good terms with the previous president, invited to dinner at his palace
once, but Glow distribution in Nigeria had slowed dramatically since the election; the new president was being swayed against Glow by pressure from the United States. Fana had avoided controlling the new president outright. That was what Michel would do. Michel might already have him.
“You’re sure no bodies have been transported?” Aunt Alex was asking Dr. Ogunyele. “The virus might live for days in a corpse. It happened in North Korea….”
“Not a single one,” Dr. Ogunleye said. “They’re still in tents at the outbreak site.”
“… This world is your
prison
… God calls you home with
love
, so
do not fear
…” The radio sermon went on, quickly drowned out by a helicopter landing in the clearing. The crowd backed away from the thick dust cloud, clasping their clothes flying in the gale.