Authors: Tananarive Due
Please, Michel. Not like this. Only punish me
.
Johnny heard his own voice yell in a roar as he stood in the aisle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to my Hell!”
The screams washed over him like a waterfall. The pleasure horrified Johnny, stroking his mind. Was
this
how suffering felt to Michel?
“I’m John Jamal Wright!” his voice said. “Turn on your phones and call everybody you know. Tell them it was me. When the plane goes down, we’ll all be in pieces.”
Real death—not just for him and Mahmoud, but for two hundred people he didn’t know.
Is this how you treat your own followers, Michel?
Johnny’s arm jutted straight out. He hadn’t had a chance to turn his head before the gun fired again, and more screams pierced him somewhere new. From the corner of his eye, he could see only the white hair of the old woman he’d shot, and his spirit sobbed.
Michel, please just take me
.
“Anybody else ready to die?” Johnny heard himself say.
Caitlin’s shocked voice whispered in his ear, “Oh my God. It’s okay, baby. I’m here.”
Johnny wept with joy, in the place Michel couldn’t touch. He tried to slow his heartbeat so that he could hear every nuance in Caitlin’s voice from the radio in his ear.
“You came so close,” Caitlin said, as if that was consolation. “He was hit.”
Where was Fana? Had she been hit, too? Couldn’t she tell that Michel was killing him?
“Fight him, Johnny,” Caitlin said. “You’ve done it before. You can fight him.”
Johnny couldn’t find muscles to fight with. There was nowhere to flex or pull; he was only riding. Johnny turned, lurching toward the pilot’s cabin.
He watched his arm rise again as he fired his gun at the lock, and the mangled lock fell open. Was this what life was like for Michel? Everything parted for him?
The gunshot made Caitlin squeal in horror, but she didn’t leave him. “Fight, baby.
Fight
,” Caitlin said. “I know you’re in there. I know you hear me, Johnny. Put the gun down.”
He shot the pilot seated to the right of the door without looking over his shoulder, so he never saw his face. He listened to the copilot reason for a while, and then beg, and Johnny was forced to luxuriate in the repulsive allure of his fear. Johnny was relieved for both of them when the copilot was dead, too. Caitlin strangled her cries with every shot.
The world moved beneath his feet as the plane veered. The screams were sweet torture.
“Johnny? If you’re still there, pick your moment,
one
moment, and give it everything,” Caitlin said, impossibly calm. “Mahmoud’s heard the shots by now. You’re not alone.”
Mahmoud was behind Johnny in the cockpit as soon as Caitlin said his name. Johnny knew before he turned around, because
he
knew. Johnny’s body spun, fast. Mahmoud had a shiny black knife ready, fashioned from material he’d slipped past the airport’s metal detectors.
“Bad luck for you, isn’t it, Mahmoud?” Johnny heard himself say, the words humming in his throat. “To die in a plane crash?”
Other passengers had gathered behind Mahmoud, men and women ready to storm the cockpit. “He can’t shoot all of us!” a hoarse man shouted. A rallying cry traveled through the cabins, replacing terror with wild hope.
“Drop the gun, Hannibal,” Mahmoud told Johnny gently. “Try to move your fingers, one by one. Leave the rest to me.”
“Help him, Johnny,” Caitlin whispered. Caitlin’s voice slowed his heartbeat.
How had he done it? How had he ever shot Michel’s men in Mexico?
“
Fight
, Johnny,” Caitlin said. She’d stopped hiding the tears in her voice.
Johnny’s index finger wouldn’t obey, tightening on the trigger. Mahmoud was ducking, but he wouldn’t be quick enough.
Bless me, Lord, the way you bless Fana in the dragon’s den
.
Time slowed a fraction. If Johnny hadn’t been waiting for the moment, he might have missed it. The bullet tore into Mahmoud’s left bicep, missing his heart by a mile.
Mahmoud didn’t show pain at his injury. He gave Johnny an impressed grin.
WELL FOUGHT, MY SON
, Mahmoud said as he threw his knife.
I love you, Fana—
When the blade pierced him, Johnny was the only one on the flight who heard his cry.
T
he world ended and began with a gunshot. One world gone, another world born.
Phoenix had ducked gunfire more than once, so she knew how to dive away from death. Teferi had caught a bullet meant for her, fired from Romero’s gun. She had seen Romero glare at her with a lunatic’s loathing before he’d taken aim at her, petrified by the power in her music.
But the gunshots weren’t as bad as the smell.
Phoenix hadn’t noticed the stench until Berhanu threw himself off the tower, a sight that would have been harrowing enough. Phoenix had smelled a bare hint of the odor on Michel when she met him, maybe on the soles of his feet—but now the stench was stewing like thick crude oil floating to the surface of things. Chaos nourishing itself.
A gunshot had ripped the seams open, freeing blind fury.
“Fana, it’s not as bad as it seems,” Dawit said, although things were far worse than they seemed. Phoenix jumped at the
chug-chug-chug
of an automatic weapon spewing random death.
“His heart is still beating.”
The guns in the tower had turned to dust. That was the first thing Phoenix had to write about. Phoenix tried to remember everything, because someone would have to tell the story. Someone would have to sing the songs.
Phoenix wasn’t surprised when Dawit went flying backward away from Michel, as if he’d been blown in a gale, falling against a column. Michel still lay unconscious, but some part of him was
awake. Hadn’t Dawit just said that Michel’s heart was beating? Dawit better step off.
Clouds were covering the sun, faster than clouds should move.
Phoenix kept her eyes open, trying to see it all.
Someone had to remember.
Someone had to bear witness.
Michel, where are you?
The colorful, glittering radiance was gone, replaced by remarkable pain. The call to fuse with Michel had startled her—the severing of Michel, so suddenly, so cruelly—added new dimensions to pain. Fana was blind as she looked for him, limping, unable to fly even in her thoughts. Shadows choked her, leaving Fana to wade through a dripping, formless muck. Fana was up to her knees in Shadows.
She
felt
him. She knew his breathing. Heard his heart’s weak beating.
But the bullet had torn down the lights between them. As long as Michel was unconscious, his thoughtstreams were roaming mindlessly, disordered. The Shadows were cradling Michel while he slept, harnessing his rage. Michel was nothing but Shadows now.
Michel, wake up! It’s still our wedding day
.
A flicker brightened a passageway in the distance, but he was out of her reach when she tried to follow, just around the next bend, diving deeper into the dark. And oh, the smell! There was a symphony of suffering steeping in that smell, a stewpot cooking. Fana couldn’t wade too deeply into the smell, or she would forget she hadn’t come to feast.
Fana had experienced the first pull of the Shadows with Berhanu, watching his nose bleed like the Life Brother she had killed when she was three. No fumbling or struggling to find his heart; the Shadows were better at killing. Brushing against the Shadows was sticky, so it had been hard to pull free. Berhanu had been bleeding from both nostrils—
she
had made it happen—even as Fana tried to let him go.
Berhanu, a guardian she loved, would die like an offering to the Cleansing Pool?
If not for her games with Michel before the wedding, she would have been overpowered then. But she braced, pushed back, wriggled, washed away the smell.
And she’d torn herself away from the Shadows’ surge in time to send Berhanu leaping out of the tower, an escape from the Shadows’ exsanguination. At least Berhanu would wake after his fall, if Michel’s followers didn’t butcher his corpse to mincemeat.
But Berhanu had betrayed her.
IT WILL BE A TEST, FANA, BUT KEEP CONTROL
.
She wished it were Michel’s voice, but Teka’s voice followed her instead. At least she had a guide! Fana was glad her teacher had always known what he was preparing her for.
The Shadows whispered secrets to her in colliding voices. A flash of too-bright light, and Fana saw the charred bones of two people lying side by side with a sniper rifle between them. They had combusted in an instant, tracked by Michel’s angry Shadows. Somewhere far from her, the Shadows gaining speed, riding a horse. A rider in a cowboy hat was racing at a gallop, leaping from a cliff, an endless, petrifying fall. The conspirators were dying.
Who else?
A sudden cry of pain filled Fana’s core, one she knew. Johnny! The Shadows had found Johnny high above the world. She had murdered Johnny by giving him her heart long before she’d damned him by giving him her Blood.
Fana hadn’t thought she could absorb new pain, but Johnny’s last cry ripped at her.
Michel, stop it!
No one but Michel could stop the power the Shadows drew from him for their blindly rampaging rage. The Shadows believed they were doing his bidding.
Light flickered, gone before she could track it. Had he heard her? Where was Michel now that the bullet had set him adrift?
Heal, Michel. Call the Shadows back
.
How long would it take? Other Life Brothers might need six or eight hours to wake, maybe longer for a head injury, but Bloodborn healed faster. Could Michel wake in two hours? One? Could
she protect his body that long? Could she fight his Shadows that long?
If she couldn’t, she would have to kill him today.
Fana’s grief unearthed her anger, and the Shadows tried to carry her away again. Every part of her ached from her shorn bridges with Michel, body and mind. Her solitude felt foreign now. Fana was raw to her core. If she killed Michel, would she always feel this battered and incomplete? Wouldn’t she rather kill them both?
THE SHADOWS WILL TELL YOU LIES IN YOUR OWN VOICE
, Teka reminded her.
When Fana was still, new knowledge came to her: sixty-seven men, women, and children lay dead below the tower because they had come to see her wedding day. Sixty-eight. Sixty-nine. Concerns from the physical world squalled, calling to Fana. The Shadows were exciting Michel’s guards to grief-stricken murder. The Shadows were sweeping the courtyard, siphoning fear in their mindless protection of their host. A storm.
But Fana had lived through a storm before.
USE THEM WHEN YOU MUST
, Teka said.
A SWIMMER MUST SWIM WITH THE RIPTIDE’S CURRENTS, NOT AGAINST THEM, OR SHE DROWNS
.
Teka had never spoken of her drowning before. But she hadn’t learned the Shadows yet. Michel had just begun to teach her. When he’d tried, she had run. She had lost a lesson.
Her mind’s darkness gave way to the gray morning light and the dreary colors of the physical plane, hardly better than the muck of her mutilated thoughtstreams. Michel’s absence stabbed her, but Fana fought her grief because grief would only make her angry. The Shadows smelled sweet when she was angry. They smelled sweet already.
When Fana felt her feet on the ground, her ears awash in screams and gunfire, her mother’s shattered eyes were waiting for her. Fana forgot the gunfire.
“I’m so sorry, Fana,” Mom said in a ghost’s voice.
Fana hoped her mother would beg her to soothe her mind’s raucous pain, because she would refuse her. Fana remembered what
she couldn’t help knowing, what Mom had hidden so feebly: Mom had encouraged Johnny to kill Michel. She had sent Johnny to Mahmoud. And Mahmoud had told Johnny about their wedding. Mom could have snuffed this day before it was born.
“You only had to trust me,” Fana said to her mother’s pain-crazed eyes.
Fana clamped her mother’s thoughts away, turned away from Jessica’s wretched face. Fana was so angry, so undone, that she was afraid she might see her mother’s nose bleed.
Her mother had betrayed them.
The Shadows would hunt for Jessica, too.
The back of Dawit’s head rang from impact against the solid stone. Red spots danced.
His vision doubled and snapped back to focus as he watched Teru kneel at Michel’s side, cradling her son’s bleeding head. Caesar appeared in the tower, barking wildly as he circled Michel and Teru. Caesar’s teeth gnashed like a row of swords.
DON’T TOUCH HIM AGAIN
, Fana told Dawit. Soaked with sorrow, and worse. Her mental stream had flung him away.
We must get him inside, Fana. All of us. There’s a sniper
, he said.
NOT ANYMORE
, Fana said.
Fana sounded altered enough to remind Dawit that his daughter wasn’t the same girl who had left Lalibela—she was a product of her fusing with Michel. Worse, a fusing gone awry. Dawit did not know the new Fana entirely, but he hoped he knew her enough.
Was the dead sniper Mahmoud? Dawit’s heart shook. Was his dearest Brother gone?
Jessica went to Fana, trying to hold her hands. “I’m so sorry, Fana,” Jessica said. “But people are dying—listen! You have to make it stop.”
Jessica seemed oblivious to the stranger in Fana’s eyes. Dawit went to Jessica’s side and gently took her arm, prying her away. Would Fana hurt her mother?
Your mother didn’t cause this
, Dawit told Fana.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE’S CAUSED
, Fana said.
Michel triggered this attack, Fana. None of us asked for war
. “Call down his men, Fana!” Dawit roared aloud, hoping his voice could reach her faster, jarring her from her stupor.
The volleys of gunfire across the mountainside suddenly fell silent, an afterthought. Perhaps all the guns had disintegrated to dust.
But the look Fana gave him dried Dawit’s throat. Was she Fana or Michel? Had Michel taken her while he was unconscious? He should have destroyed Michel himself!