Slavemakers (6 page)

And then, because she was lonely, because she forgot her fear, she'd created the image of a beautiful black-maned lion she'd seen a month earlier, out by the big lake. Naivasha. Standing there, every bit a picture like the ones in books. The King of the Beasts.

Sprawled on her platform to escape the heat of the day, she'd opened herself and placed the image of her lion where his had been. After all those years of hiding, it was such a simple act, a step she'd taken in what must have been a moment of madness.

His response had almost killed her. Three times. First with its own force, a massive, paralyzing blow to her
head, an explosion inside her skull. Second because it had caused her to fall from her perch. And third, because the hyenas could easily have disposed of her before she ever awoke.

That was the breadth of his power: to kill her in an instant or to leave her vulnerable to the death that was always awaiting her—awaiting everyone—on the real earth.

But she hadn't died. He hadn't killed her. In her high-walled canyon, at the base of her tree, she was still alive.

But for how much longer, now that he knew she existed?

She shivered, but as much from the chill as from residual shock and fear. Drawing in a breath, she looked around. The sun had already dipped behind the western wall. The air had noticeably cooled. It would be full dusk inside the canyon within an hour, and dusk on the earth above little more than an hour later.

She was
so
late.

Without hesitating, she headed deeper into the canyon and half ran through its caves and narrow passageways. Twisting and turning as she went, toward the surface now, her momentum sometimes taking her halfway up the walls as she ran. A path so familiar that she knew from instinct where to place her feet.

Singing as she went because she always sang as she ran.

She made it in time. The sun was still high enough though the evening's first rays were already staining the mountain's spires a deeper red. Vultures soared around the cliffs, and swifts winged overhead in a whirling flock.

“You're late,” Mama said. Mama, sitting in their spot, the place where they came every evening, so Aisha Rose could perform her recitation.

Their spot was a small, hidden plateau on the lip of the canyon that afforded a view of the giant lake below, the game-rich plains that spread outward from it and, beyond, the Great Rift Valley wall.

“I was beginning to wonder, Aisha Rose,” Mama said, “if you'd forgotten.”

Mama's real voice had become so different from the one that Aisha Rose heard inside her head. The loud, declarative tone that Mama had once possessed, but that had been stolen from her, along with her strength and endurance, and, in truth, her life. Soon enough.

That loud Mama had become part of the dream. The real Mama's voice was scratchy and weak, her sentences interrupted by the kind of breaths that whistled in her throat but barely seemed to reach her lungs. A voice to match the way she looked: gaunt, the skin so tight over her bones that you could almost see the skeleton beneath. Her hair, which had once been as thick as Aisha Rose's own, now dull and ragged.

Mama was dying. She'd been dying since before Aisha Rose was born, and for the same reason everyone else like her died. Her fate was inevitable and irreversible.

Aisha Rose had known this from the start. It might have been the first thing she'd ever known, as she began to understand what the lights in her mind meant, and as she watched Mama's light fade, day to day, year to year.

But her eyes, the same strange blue-violet as Aisha
Rose's own, were just as clear and sharp as they'd been when Aisha Rose was a little girl, fifteen and more years ago. And her manner, if not her voice, hadn't changed either.

“I'm sorry, Mama—”

“Don't waste any time.” Mama sat back in the wooden chair that Aisha Rose had made for her. “No lollygagging or daydreaming. Just begin.”

So Aisha Rose began. “My name is Aisha Rose Atkinson,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I was born nineteen years, one month, and twenty-six days ago, six months and three days after the end of the dreamed earth.”

“Concentrate.” The single word like the crack of a whip.

Aisha Rose paused, took a deep breath, shook her head. For an instant she felt a spark of irritation flare under her breastbone. So what if she got something wrong? She was tired. And hungry. Her head hurt. So did her throat. What did her recitation matter anyway?

Then she closed her eyes for an instant and brought her mind back to the sharpness Mama required. She knew exactly why it mattered.

“I was born nineteen years, one month, and twenty-six days ago, six months and
four
days after the end of the dreamed earth,” she said. “Today's date is June seventeenth—June
eighteenth
.”

“Good,” Mama said. “Please go on.”

“My father's name was Erik Atkinson. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and died at the end of the dreamed earth, so I never met him. But I know I have his build, his smile, and his love of nature.”

And his tendency toward distraction.
That was Mama's line as well.

Aisha Rose said, “My mother's name is Francesca Oliviera Atkinson. She was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and was alone on the real earth when she gave birth to me.”

“But after that I was never alone,” Mama said, as she always did at this point.

“After that,” Aisha Rose said, as
she
always did, “
neither
of us was ever alone.”

She let those words hang in the air for a moment, then went on. “We lived only in Naro Moru, Kenya, until I was nine years, three months, and sixteen days old. Since then, we've come here, to Erik's Gorge in Hell's Gate, in the Great Rift Valley, for part of each year as well.”

A wave of dizziness stopped her recitation for a moment. “We migrate,” Mama prompted.

“We migrate,” Aisha Rose went on, “like the wildebeest and the zebras and Africa's other living things.”

But for how much longer?
she wondered.

*   *   *

NEXT IT WAS
time for her sums.

“Mama . . .”

A waiting silence.

Aisha Rose sighed, and did her sums. Her times tables. Division problems. All in her head, of course, or scratched onto a rock face with a sharp stone. They'd never had paper here, and it had been years since they'd had any even in the house in Naro Moru. Like so many other things, paper had receded into the dream.

*   *   *

NEXT CAME HER
reading. But which book?

Aisha Rose thought about it. Before their books had been destroyed by the wet and the mold and the little red mites that loved eating damp paper, Mama had insisted that Aisha Rose memorize as many of them as she could.

In the end, before they were gone forever, she'd committed nine to memory. She couldn't begin to guess how often she'd recited all nine since.

They'd finished one—Gerald Durrell's
My Family and Other Animals
—just last night, and Aisha Rose always got to choose which one to read next.

She thought for a moment, then said, “
I Capture the Castle
, by Dodie Smith.”

“Begin,” Mama said.

Aisha Rose closed her eyes so she could see the words. “‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,'” she began. “‘That is, my feet are in it—'”

*   *   *

SHE RECITED THE
words until the sun had long since sunk below the surrounding cliffs and the darkening sky was crisscrossed by the little bats that roosted in the caves riddling these mountains. Somewhere far off, on their way to someplace else, the hyenas yipped and yowled.

By the end, Aisha Rose's voice was so scratchy that it didn't even sound like her own. But Mama didn't care, and there was no one else to hear.

“Very good,” Mama said. “Now . . .”

That meant: Finish up.

Aisha Rose drew in a deep breath. “My name is Aisha Rose Atkinson,” she said, “and I am human.”

“Good. Say it again.”

“My name is Aisha Rose Atkinson . . .”

“Good. Again.”

Lamu

THE LUCKIEST ONES
had died first.

The ones who had perished in the fires that roared across the cities and the ones who had been stung to death or killed by the late-stage hosts while trying to fight back at the very beginning.

Next were those, hundreds of millions of them worldwide, Jason was sure, who had died more slowly . . . but still within days or weeks. From thirst or starvation, many of them, as they hid in locked bathrooms, windowless basements. Or so terrified of what lay outside that they committed suicide, with gas or knife or gun, rather than face it.

Next most fortunate were the hosts. Yes, they had moments of lucidity that were horrible to witness, moments when they realized what had been done to them, what was growing inside them. And in the last stages, when they ferociously attacked anyone and
anything the hive mind perceived as a threat, sometimes you could see awareness of what they were being compelled to do. The desperation to die.

But that final stage lasted for only a couple of days. Then came the hatching, the emergence, and merciful death.

Yet even the hosts were luckier than Jason himself and the dwindling number of others who were aware. The ones who
knew
. Who maintained the capacity to comprehend what was being done to them and to remember how different things had been once.

Even if “once” was now so long ago that it seemed as surreal as something he'd read about once but never lived through.

But still not surreal enough. Not for Jason.

Not until he lost more of his memories, lost the sound of the three words that remained as vivid in his mind as if he'd heard them yesterday.

Just three words.

*   *   *

HE'D BEEN ATTENDING
a conference in Nairobi on emerging diseases. A conference he'd decided he couldn't miss, even as the world seemed to be hurrying toward some dimly seen precipice.

He could still remember his justifications. To anyone who was a parasitologist, or an epidemiologist, or any kind of scientist or physician working where the monsters lurked on the fringes of human society, the world
always
seemed to be hurtling to the edge of a precipice. It was their job
not
to look away, not to think about something else.

They were the experts who knew you didn't skip a conference just because the world was facing another threat, especially an emerging one. SARS, Ebola, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: You put your chin up and marched forward; because if you didn't, who would?

So Jason hadn't thought twice about going that fall. About being seven thousand miles from Boston, and leaving his wife, Gail, and their daughters, Ami and Esi, alone.

Ami and Esi, ten and eight years old. Forever ten and eight.

They'd trusted him. Even Gail had. Gail had believed him when he told her she shouldn't worry, he'd be back in ten days, that they'd barely even have a chance to miss him.

The actual future was simultaneously so imminent and so far beyond their imagining that they might as well have been farmers discussing soil conditions on the eve of the Great Flood.

So off Jason went, comfortable in business class on a flight from Logan Airport to Nairobi, sitting beside an epidemiologist, an older man whose name had long vanished from Jason's memory. One of the final flights ever—one of the final thousands, at least—but it felt no different than any other.

The meeting had been the usual as well, spread across the ballrooms and restaurants in the Nairobi Serena Hotel. Jason had participated in two panels and attended many more over the course of four days. That was, when he wasn't in the bar or the Mandhari Restaurant, or taking an afternoon trip to Nairobi National Park, the only place
on earth where you could watch wild lions and giraffes in the shadow of newly sprouted city skyscrapers.

Two of the panels he'd attended had been about the thieves. That was where he'd learned about the virus that a wasp species used to enslave a beetle, and about the recent discovery of a previously unknown virus in the bloodstream of those primates the thieves had used as hosts. Including humans.

He'd seen images of human hosts looking vague-eyed, absent, not seeming to see the huge swellings the thief larvae inflicted on them. (This blindness, and more specifically the way the wasps' toxins seemed to steal the awareness from their mammalian hosts, providing the common name—
thief
in English—that seemed to have been adopted nearly worldwide during those final months.)

Dreaming hosts, and ones that were far from asleep. The speaker had shown a brief, shaky clip—which had caused a stir in the audience—of what he'd called “the soldier phase.” A last-stage host in full attack posture, its teeth bared, face contorted, its eyes somehow both filled with madness and strangely expressionless.

All things Jason had seen up close countless times since, but at the time he hadn't paid much attention to the presentation. When all was said and done, the thieves weren't doing anything other insects, their toxins, and the microbes they carried hadn't done first.

Like trypanosomiasis, a disease caused by protozoa and administered through the bite of a tsetse fly, which also caused those afflicted to lapse into semiconsciousness—otherwise, why would it more usually be called sleeping
sickness? And, in its final stages, the rabies virus caused similar behaviors as those shown by last-stage hosts, yet no one at the conference was hosting rabies panels, were they?

And anyway, the world was full of dangers, threats. Yes, the wasps were a new one, and highly hyped, but at the time of the conference they'd caused far less destruction and death than malaria, leishmaniasis, Ebola, or countless other less glamorous diseases.

So Jason drifted in and out, jet lag and the notes he was writing for his own presentations stealing his attention from the subject at hand. If he had understood that this was the last time he'd ever sit with brilliant people, people possessing a deep desire to gain knowledge, then use that knowledge to help others live longer and healthier, well . . . he would have valued it more.

But he hadn't understood. Instead, it all remained merely a bitter memory. Bitterer still because it took the place of other memories, ones he could have had if he'd stayed home.

Memories of his wife, of his daughters.

No.
No.
Even that was a lie. He wouldn't have had any memories at all. He would have died alongside them that first night. They would have died in his arms, Ami and Esi and Gail, and he in theirs.

*   *   *

BUT IT WASN'T
just the conference. If it had been just the conference, he
would
have gotten home in time to die.

In fact, the conference ended, and most of the attendees did fly home. Jason, on the other hand, extended his trip for three days to visit Lamu, a place he'd visited
before and whose crowded marketplaces and peaceful coral reefs he'd loved. A three-day extension, and a lifetime.

He'd spent his first day there diving, the reefs seeming a little more stressed and underpopulated than he'd last seen them, three years before. In a world contorted by climate change, he'd wondered if there'd be coral reefs at all in twenty years. Would reefs be something Ami and Esi knew only from old videos?

He'd chosen to sleep at a guesthouse beside a mosque, just a stone's throw from Lamu Fort. The next morning he'd woken with the muezzin's call to prayer and walked into the center of town—the bustling waterfront already crowded at dawn with dhows and donkeys and fishermen and taxi drivers—for an early breakfast.

For something else as well. Something that forever after, when he was being honest with himself, when he was hating himself most, he had to admit he hadn't even been looking forward to: a Skype session with the wife and kids.

He'd rather have slept a little later, and anyway, he'd be seeing them in just a couple more days. He never forgot that.

Still, they'd scheduled the session, taking into account the eight-hour time difference between the two continents. His destination, the Lamu Café, had good food and excellent coffee, while also being one of the only places on the island with Wi-Fi.

And, largely due to its expat chef, Chloe Granger, who'd browbeaten the absentee owner into agreeing, the café made a practice of opening extra early to supply
coffee to people heading out on fishing, diving, or other adventures. Or even, on request, extra extra early to make sure that those needing Internet had access to the news headlines, the workings of the stock market, or the miracle that was Skype.

Jason remembered Chloe from his two previous visits to Lamu, to the café. Admittedly, she was hard to forget, with her height (equaling Jason's five feet ten inches), her lanky frame, all long tanned legs and arms, her crazy blond hair tied back behind a headband to keep it out of the food, and—above all—her loud Aussie voice and utterly fearless manner.

Anyone who spent more than fifteen minutes in the Lamu Café remembered Chloe Granger.

*   *   *

JASON HAD WALKED
along the waterfront with the sun rising over the channel and Manda Island beyond. Despite the hour, all along the way, locals in kikois and hijabs and Western clothes approached him, touting tours and money exchange and various goods legal and illegal because even though he was dark-skinned like them, it was clear that he was a tourist, and therefore likely wealthy.

On the walk, he'd come across the only thief he'd noticed—seen or smelled—during his whole trip. Just one lurking half-inside its burrow in a sandy patch beside the road. It was facing away from him, huddled low, and Jason wondered if it was ill or injured.

He'd had a stray thought: Maybe the thieves, after their explosive spread, had encountered a pathogen—a virus, perhaps, or a parasite of their own—that might
help control their population naturally. Such things happened sometimes, nature doing a better job of controlling pests than humans ever could.

That was the last time that Jason thought about the thieves this way: as a solvable problem. As “pests.”

*   *   *

CHLOE BROUGHT HIM
coffee as he booted up his laptop. Then, as Skype was loading, he glanced at the news headlines.

It was Election Day back home—and eight hours in the past—and it looked like the challenger had defeated the incumbent. A rare enough occurrence to be of interest, unless you were Jason, who'd forgotten to vote by absentee ballot and had no faith in either party to understand the threats to the world, much less address them.

He plugged in his earbuds as Skype's familiar electronic ringtone sounded in his ears. He accepted the video call, and there they were. A little blurry, a little pixilated, but there, alive, in real time. Seven thousand miles apart and yet together.

Gail stood in the background, smiling. The two girls were wearing pajamas—Ami's pink, Esi's navy blue (anything but pink for Esi)—because it was after eleven o'clock at night their time, way past their usual bedtime on a school night. Sleepiness made smudges under their eyes and slackened the muscles in their cheeks even as adrenaline brightened their faces and made them chatty.

Jason told them about a moray eel he'd seen on the reef, five feet long and green, with a big toothy grin. That made them wide-eyed for a moment, even quiet.
But they were anything but quiet during the rest of the conversation, vying as usual for his attention as they interrupted each other with stories about school and friends and Esi's lacrosse team and the play,
Annie
, that Ami was going to try out for the next day.

At a certain point, Jason noticed that Gail was gone from the screen. He didn't pay any attention, though, because he knew that soon enough she would shoo the girls off to bed, then he and she would get to talk.

But when she came back into view, looking down at her phone and then tapping the screen, his attention sharpened. When she looked up again, he could see that she seemed concerned about something.

“Let me talk to Dad,” she said to the girls, and her tone of voice made Esi stop in the middle of a word, and the two of them make some room for her to sit between them, nearer to the screen.

“What is it?” Jason asked.

“I don't know.” Gail frowned and glanced down at the phone again. Up close, she looked tired as well as worried. “My mother just called, which is weird enough at this time of night. But before I could answer, it went dead—and now the circuits are all busy.”

Even then,
even then
, Jason had suspected nothing. Gail's mother lived in New York City, in Queens, and though problems with their cell-phone provider were rare, every so often they all got reminded that the technology did, after all, rely on satellites to allow communication from city to city—or even room to room.

Right then, unafraid, unsuspicious, Jason merely
thought,
Technology!
And opened his mouth to say something reassuring.

But at that moment, the Skype window went blank. Black. For an instant, he thought that the connection had been lost—a common enough occurrence—but then he heard Gail say, “What the hell?”

Then, even over the earbuds in his laptop, Jason heard another sound. One he would soon come to know better than any other and live with in his nightmares. But that first time he didn't even recognize it: a harsh, almost mechanical chittering. And, underneath it, the loud humming of wings.

Gail said, “Jason—”

But whatever she was going to say next, he never knew, because one of his daughters gasped, and the other, at the same time, in a voice so distorted by distance that he never knew which it was, cried out—

Cried out, “Daddy . . . help us.”

No words after that. Only the sounds of mandibles, and wings, and wordless screams.

For a few seconds, until finally, blessedly, the connection was lost.