Slavemakers (26 page)

She also knew, now, that Mama was truly gone. That
her soul had ascended when the vultures took her body up on the mountain. And that, regardless of Aisha Rose's daily recitation, neither of them—neither Mama nor Aisha Rose herself—was human. The thief inside Mama had changed her into something else and had made something new of Aisha Rose as well.

She, and the boy, and all the other lights, had been wrought out of new clay.

But none of that was important, not anymore. The only important thing was that Aisha Rose's plan had worked. The boy had unleashed the tsunami, and no one, not the slaves, not Aisha Rose, not the hive mind, not even the boy himself, could stop it now.

Already it was spreading across the earth, and all who belonged to the mind would be swept away. The stars, the galaxies that had accompanied Aisha Rose on her journey, and of course, Aisha Rose herself. New clay and old.

And Kait. Kait, too. The newest, and the only one that mattered now to Aisha Rose.

But then, as the wave towered over them, she saw that it wasn't what she'd expected. And she understood: He was choosing to save her. He was choosing to keep her alive.

So only the two of them would remain. The two of them standing on a cleansed earth.

That was his dream.

Her heart broke then.
I'm sorry,
she told him, though she never knew if he heard her.
I'm so sorry.

The wave broke. And Aisha Rose Atkinson, human being, something else, something more, stood in front of Kait, so she could be swept away in her stead.

*   *   *

“NO,” KAIT SAID,
her arms around Aisha Rose.

She thought of all the people in her life who had fought for her, protected her. Her birth mother and father, who had never seen the Next World. Her grandmother Mary, who'd brought her to Refugia. Trey. So many dead, and she hadn't been able to save a single one of them.

No.

Not this one. Not this time.

*   *   *

IT WAS OVER.

The boy stepped forward into the darkness and let the wind carry his fragile body away.

*   *   *

THE SCREAM OF
wings had built to an impossible crescendo. Followed by . . . silence. Complete, utter silence.

Malcolm awoke. He had no idea he'd been asleep, unconscious. At first, he didn't even know where he was. He didn't understand a thing.

And then he did.

His belly hurt. He noticed that. And, when he pulled his ragged, stained shirt up and looked down at his flesh, he saw for the first time what had been done to him.

The tiny swelling. The pinprick of an airhole.

And, half-emerged from the pinprick, the minuscule larva. Newly hatched from its egg yet already dead, hanging limp in the midst of its hopeless attempt to escape.

Revolted, Malcolm pulled it from the hole.

Then he looked back at the window, at the patch of blue sky. There was not a movement there, not a single black dot, no shimmer of bloodred wings. Nothing but silence.

A silence broken by the sound of voices. Familiar voices.

Shapiro's voice.

He stood, head spinning, but somehow maintaining his balance. Four steps across the slick stone, and he stood beneath the window.

“I'm here,” he called out. But it was only a whisper. No one would hear him.

He took in a deep breath, and when he tried again he shouted more loudly than he ever had before, or ever would again.
I'm here.

He heard answering shouts from outside, then another voice coming from much closer. A familiar voice, one he recognized right away even though he hadn't heard it for so long.

Calling his name.

*   *   *

THE GROUND WAS
carpeted in thieves. Normally, this would have been the most dangerous time, dying wasps desperate to sting or lay their eggs in anything warm-blooded.

Only . . . not this time. Not now. These thieves were still, unmoving, not even a twitch or quiver, much less that rhythmic pulsing of their abdomens, the jagged, mindless punch of the stinger.

Unmoving. Shriveled. Again, and for the last time, just bugs. Harmless, finally and forever.

A scene repeated across the world, Kait thought. All was silence inside her head as well. The hive mind was gone.

Taking most of the slaves with it. The last-stage hosts and the ridden ones, all the ones that had ever been infected, had been struck down. Kait could tell this, too.

All except Kait herself, and she knew why. She knew what Aisha Rose had done for her, and for all those other lights she saw in her mind. The other ones like her, scattered across the earth.

What Aisha Rose had done to protect them all from the wave, and what Kait herself—far too weak and new to save them all, but strong enough to protect just one—had done in return.

Kait looked down at the girl cradled in her arms. As she did, Aisha Rose opened her eyes and looked back up at her.

“Mama?” she said, her voice a breath. Then, a little more strongly, “Kait.”

“I'm here, Aisha Rose.”

“They're still there,” she said. “I can still see them.”

“See what?”

Though she knew. Constellations. Galaxies.

Aisha Rose, smiling, burrowed more deeply into her embrace.

Kait

Nova Refugia

Year 5

IT TOOK THE
dinosaurs ten thousand years.
At least
ten thousand.

I remember learning that from Carl, a friend of Jack Parker's at the American Museum of Natural History back before the Fall. I was . . . God, I was ten, and I'd never been to the museum before, and Carl took me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the dinosaur department. It was so cool, that huge old building with shiny floors and hidden rooms filled with shelves and drawers and old wooden crates containing fossil bones and teeth and who knew what else. I remember they had one fossil that had come from a uranium bed, and it was still radioactive.

And Carl was easy to talk to, kind of like Jack. So I asked him how quickly the dinosaurs had gone extinct after the earth had been hit by an asteroid. (I'd read that in a book.) And he shook his head and told me they'd
never gone extinct—that modern-day birds were dinosaurs, too.

“That pigeon you saw sitting on Theodore Roosevelt's head on your way in . . . that's a dinosaur,” he'd said. “Dinosaurs are everywhere, even now.”

I saw him smile at the expression on my face. “Oh,” he said, “you mean the
nonavian
dinosaurs? Well, paleontologists have been arguing about that for a long time, and we still don't know. Some believe it took as long as a million years, but others think as little as ten thousand.”

I remember he snapped his fingers, and said, “Ten thousand? A million? Both of those are nothing. Gone like that!”

But I'd thought they'd both sounded like a long time. An incomprehensibly long time.

And I still do, and always will.

You want “Gone like that”? Forget dinosaurs, even “nonavian” ones, and look to humans instead.

Because it's possible that the human race won't last anywhere close to a hundred years, much less ten thousand.

Only . . . not if we have anything to do with it.

And not if we're willing to tweak the definition of “human” a bit.

*   *   *

IT TOOK US
eleven months, but we finally made it back to Refugia on the
Trey Gilliard
. Forty-one of us, in the end: twenty-one from the original crew and twenty more who hadn't taken the outward journey.

Twenty strangers, even though it's hard to remember now, five years on, that they were ever strangers. They're woven into Refugia's fabric now. Part of Nova Refugia.

A strange section of the weave, admittedly, but a section nonetheless.

Twenty of them then, many more now, five years in, and we hope for still more in the future.

There are no guarantees, of course, but someday we might even get past the point where we'd have to worry about minimum viable population for species survival, one of those subjects that can keep people like Shapiro arguing all night. You see, back in the Last World, some scientists believed the minimum number was
this
, and others believed
that
, and . . .

Never mind. We'll just see what happens.

What a relief to be able to say that.

*   *   *

WHO WERE THE
twenty newcomers on the voyage home? Well, Chloe, of course—and how weird was it to see Malcolm as a dad, with a nearly fifty-year-old daughter who looked almost like his clone? Their arguments were—still are—fierce because they're nearly as alike as the twins. Just noisier.

We also picked up two actual children, a three- and a five-year-old, left behind in the carnage at Lamu Fort. Feral children. Not feral anymore, and loved here, though I don't think they'll ever really get over those first unimaginable years of their lives.

We brought no other adults back from Lamu, though. The ridden ones died when their masters did, and the
natives and human slaves all disappeared into the ruins of the town as soon as the tide of battle shifted our way. We never saw any of them again.

I suppose I understand that. They must have thought they'd be killed on sight if they returned. After all, they knew we were human, too, and wasn't that what humans do? Take an eye for an eye?

I can't swear that we wouldn't have, either, if they'd dared to show their faces.

*   *   *

SO . . . THREE FROM
Lamu. And then, not long afterward, two more.

Early on our return journey, in what had once been Tanzania, we saw an enormous flock of vultures circling near the shoreline. We moored offshore, went to check it out, and found—as we expected to—the remains of another slave camp.

Piles of bodies everywhere, so many even the vultures were sated, the remains in a condition where it was impossible to tell whether they'd once been human, ridden, or born into slavery. Not that it mattered by then.

But just as we returned to the boat, these three came running toward us. Two adults and a baby boy who couldn't have been more than a year old. All three shaking with such fear that they were hard to look at.

There was some debate, but in the end we took them with us as well. The father died of a fever after just two weeks—the kind of fever that explorers have been “gifting” to native peoples since time immemorial—but the other two survived to land in Refugia with the rest of us.

*   *   *

BUT, REALLY, THOSE
weren't the important ones. The important ones were those that Aisha Rose brought to us. The Newcomers.

Her lights. Individual stars in the galaxies she saw.

It didn't start right away because we almost lost Aisha Rose early on. The infection in her hand and arm didn't require amputation, but Fatou had to perform one surgery after another and use up most of our supply of antibiotics. (No one would have had it any other way.)

Still, she was close to death for days, and in great pain for weeks, but she bore it all with her usual calm, bright-eyed stoicism. Of course she did.

Her left hand and arm have never been much use since then—too much nerve damage—but she's never complained about that, either.

Anyway, it was soon after she finally got well that she, quietly, and to me alone at first, suggested that she could bring others like her to us. That she could call to them, and some might make the journey to meet the ship if we'd be willing to stop for them and pick them up.

Call to them how? I asked.

She just shook her head and said she didn't have the words for it. Not speech, she said, or mind reading. A deeper connection.

“They'll be so scared,” she told me. “Many of them have been alone for a long time. But I think they'll come, some of them, anyway. It's hard to be alone.”

Well, when I broached it, THAT idea caused quite the discussion on board. Some people were against it,
afraid and wanting to press on home. But Malcolm, who knew what it was like to be separated from someone you loved, and Shapiro, who was fascinated by the science of it all, and Chloe and Jason, of course, argued strongly in favor, and their arguments carried the day.

So Aisha Rose, our beacon, reached out, in that way that none of the rest of us could begin to understand, and some of them—the others like her—did respond.

And in that way, over the months, we added to our crew, one or two at a time.

The Newcomers. Human?

I'm not sure. Something different, I think.

Members of an evolving species. Same clay, new mold, as Aisha Rose put it.

Ross and Trey would both have loved to meet them. I wish they'd had the chance.

*   *   *

WE MADE IT
back to Refugia to find a colony grievously altered. Nearly a quarter of the residents had been killed during the invasion and its aftermath, and more died of injury and disease, shock and heartbreak, in the weeks and months that followed. If not for Sheila's medical expertise—and tirelessness—and Mariama's leadership, many more would not have made it through.

Still, everyone lost someone they loved. I won't list them here. Death, regardless of where it comes from or when it happens, isn't usually worth recording anyway. It isn't very distinctive or terrifying. It just is.

We all know that too well.

But we also know how to go on.

*   *   *

AS SOON AS
we got home, Malcolm gave the order to start building new ships, two at once, following the same design as the
Trey Gilliard
. It felt like we barely had a chance to take a breath and mourn our dead before we were back at work. All of us, even the kids, even the new ones.

It made sense, as Malcolm well knew. He gave us all something to do, to focus on, and by doing so helped bring the community together in its new shape.

Now, after five years, we have three ships, and we're ready for further forays. (It's amazing how fast you can build a sailing ship when your whole colony pitches in.)

We're planning the first attempt at a transatlantic voyage, and another ship will head (at last!) for the island of New Guinea, to make contact with the colony—the truly human colony—that Sheila, at least, insists still thrives there.

Someday, one of our ships won't return from a voyage. We know that. It's inevitable.

And we'll mourn, and hope for another miracle, and go on.

*   *   *

AISHA ROSE WON'T
be on board any of these voyages. Her damaged arm, for one thing, would be a hindrance . . . but she's also had enough of hejiras.

That's good, because it's crucial that she stay here, in Nova Refugia, to greet the new arrivals and help with their transition. Which is almost always very difficult, as she'd known it would be, since most of them had been
on their own for years, and that's not something you just get over.

But it turns out that Aisha Rose—I think because Mama was with her for so long, telling her about the Last World, making her perform her recitation—
is
the most human of all her new species. Much more than the other Newcomers we've brought in, though, as time passes, the distance between us all narrows.

I think it's the colony's young people, the natives, who deserve the most credit for the meeting of cultures, of minds. People like Jack Gilliard, my brother, who, not really belonging to any world except this one, serve as a conduit between us. They're invaluable.

Plus, Jack really likes Aisha Rose. And even though she treats him with a kind of amused tolerance, as if he's just a child—I imagine I'm hearing Mama's voice when she chides him for something—in truth he's only about three years younger than she is, and in most ways much more worldly.

It turns out they're both human in some important ways. Go figure.

*   *   *

AS I'D GUESSED,
whatever happened that day at Lamu Fort was the end of the thieves. The true end: the asteroid impact that carried them into extinction.

The tsunami, the gigantic wave, swept them away.

To be honest, our assumption—that they're extinct—is based purely on empirical evidence. For example, we saw so many on our journey home, dried husks flying in the breeze, piling up amid the ruins, and floating in
uncountable abundance in the sea, that it seemed impossible that every last one hadn't perished.

And no one has ever seen a living thief since, while the primate population has rebounded everywhere we've looked.

Even so, these observations don't come close to proof. Nor, in truth, do Aisha Rose's assurances that the
majizi
are gone forever. It's hard to have complete faith in someone who claims to hear voices in her head, no matter how much you love her.

But I have another reason, though I know it's just as much a leap of faith: I'm certain that the thieves are extinct because I'm still the same. Still healthy.

Whatever dragged Trey, Aisha Rose's mother, and others like them—the hosts who survived infection—into irrevocable decline, and killed them when they were young, has left me unaffected. I think I understand why. It was the mind that was slowly destroying them, and now that the mind is gone, the fact that I once had a thief larva growing inside of me, pouring its chemicals into me, changing my own chemistry . . . it's inconsequential.

Who knows? But I'm still here, and the thieves and their hive mind are gone. Of course, this means I will never see everything Trey saw. My lifelong dream, the dream I was willing to die for, has been denied.

That's fine with me. I've seen enough. I'm ready to stop seeing.

*   *   *

AND THE OTHER
one? The one who unleashed the tsunami that swept the thieves and their slaves away? He died
that day, too, Aisha Rose says. She's certain about this, and I have no reason to doubt her.

She can't know how he died, or where he lived—except that it was a park in a big city—or anything about him other than the face he'd showed her, the fact that he was damaged in some way, and that no one else on earth had the power he did.

And—she told me late one night, in our cabin, when no one else could hear—that she thought he died for her. Out of love for her.

This broke her heart, she said, but at the same time left her filled with relief. His power had really frightened her.

But where had it come from, this power? Shapiro speculated that something had happened to him, some injury, that had unlocked his brain, making it (in her words) even noisier than your typical Newcomer's.

“Even with all our toys in the Last World,” she said, “there was a whole lot we didn't understand about brain function. People would awaken from head injuries, from comas, with strange new abilities. When you add the brain remodeling of the kind that's gone on in all of them . . .”

Then she laughed and turned her palms up in an elaborate shrug. “Oh, who cares how it all happened? It just did.”

She's come a long way, has Shapiro.

*   *   *

THE LAST TIME
I wrote in this journal was right before we headed off on the
Trey Gilliard
. The first voyage of the Next World.