The Liminal War

by Ayize Jama-everett

  “It might not be safe,” Mico warns, but I’m depleted, almost asleep. Besides, she’s already out the door.

  “It’s an unsafe world she’s grown up in. She’s fine.”

  “I thought it was just loyalty between you two,” he starts. “But it’s more. It’s love.”

  I tell him to keep watch just before I lose consciousness.

  My body sleeps, but my mind races. Long tan roads choke the only image of Robert Johnson I’ve seen with dust. He’s wearing a poorly made, ill-fitting pinstripe suit with a matching small-brimmed hat. The dust storm behind him masks hungry canine teeth, Nordeen eyes, and a version of Prentis that’s more savage than I’ve ever seen her. I want to help, let him know.

  “Taggert!” I hear Samantha behind my non-existent body and feel her bruised, beaten, and burned. But I don’t see her.

  “What happened?” I yell. She can’t hear me. I know this smell. It’s burning flesh.

  “They’ve already won here.” She doesn’t hear me. “You’ve got to stop them before they get here.”

  “I’m trying! We’re trying!”

  “If . . . if you can’t . . . don’t come back.” The dust-bowl storm comes from nowhere and blankets my every sense.

  I’m awake before I know I’ve slept. My girl lays out on her mattress comatose, belly down, drooling. The Dread crooner stares out the window catching what passes for London morning sun on his face. I don’t need to see him to tell he hasn’t slept, but it’s the loneliness that catches me by surprise. I keep expecting to see an unnaturally friendly smoke surrounding him, or an adoring clan. Last night, watching Mico jam with Marley in front of a crowds I saw a glimmer of the man in his element. It was Eel Pie Island Mico. Did he know all he’d be giving up by travelling with us?

  “All quiet?” I hear him hum a low tune. A protective spell if ever there was one. True spells aren’t spoken, they’re sung.

  “As quiet as London ever gets.” He forces a smile. “Tamara told me the details of your mantis fight when she got back. No wonder you were so tired. She brought back some food for you.”

  I grab some spiced bread and ice-cold sorro from the dilapidated fridge and head back to Mico.

  “It wasn’t just the bugs,” I confess. “The knives are . . . I guess it’s what A.C. said. They are heavier than I thought they’d be.”

  “He makes it look so easy,” Mico says, surprised I remember the wind man but not looking at me. “That sword of his, those guns. They would crush most others.”

  “How does he not . . .” I’m useless for words.

  “His god gives him strength.”

  “Fat lot of good that does me.” I almost laugh until Mico turns and eyelocks me. Not aggressive, just serious.

  “There are no atheists in foxholes. Sometimes you’ve got to be in the middle of a war to find your god.”

  “You calling this a war?”

  “The opening volleys, if nothing else” he says slowly. “The last echoes of the first creation are dying out. The birth gasps of the Big Bang are fading. Either we, as a creation, start to unite to build a rejoining chorus of life together, or whatever entropy engine Kothar is coming up with will mute the very resonance of life.”

  “Kothar. That’s the Alter specifically tasked to the Manna?”

  “To me, actually. He’s been . . . after me since long before I knew what I was supposed to do.” I hear it then. Fear in his voice. Honestly, I don’t care.

  “I just want to find Prentis.”

  “And that’s the problem.” The Manna said something similar, and it confused me then. This time I kind of understand, but I don’t have time for it. I drain the sorro.

  “My girl can’t do the time warp again.”

  “What?”

  “Look at us. We’re all diminished. I thought it was the knives at first. But even your singing voice isn’t as strong as it was in our time. And Tam never sleeps like that. She’s in a near coma. When was the last time you’ve seen a psychic rest so completely? It’s not exhaustion; it’s weakness. And we both know she did most of the heavy lifting popping the needle on the cosmic record player or whatever.”

  “We can try . . .”

  “So we can be weakened even more? Don’t be the git she thinks you are. You’ve got to find another way.”

  “The only other way—” He snaps at me, then calms himself. “It leaves me near powerless once we get to Johnson’s time.”

  “Afraid we’ll let you fall?” Tam says from her bed, not moving. I felt her consciousness ping me for details of our conversation the second she woke. “Thought we was a team.”

  “You don’t understand,” he protests. “The only way this is possible is because we’re crossing the Atlantic to visit another person of African descent. A long blood debt is owed that will allow our spirits, and by extension our bodies, to travel across space and time.”

  “Makes about as much sense as you usually do,” Tamara says, sitting up.

  “But the blood debt was from enslaved Africans, and the last thing they want us to do is go to the Americas.”

  Some songs are more powerful past the sight of land. That’s what Mico says. We ferry out as far as we can, then Tamara carries us in the air, close enough to the ocean to have high waves touch our feet. We’re flying in the middle of the damn ocean. I’m about to shout at Mico for making her do the heavy lifting again until he starts wailing.

  It’s impossibly loud. His throat can’t possibly be making that sound, and his soul . . . it can’t contain that much suffering, right? His listening body has transformed into a projecting vessel. It’s such a lurid enunciation Tam’s concentration almost slips. I grab her hand off instinct. She’s happier for it.

  Mico’s soul lamentation doesn’t stop, but he looks at me desperately. I grab his hand and feel the drain that sustaining the notes puts on him. I’m thankful for the truck full of food I devoured before we left, as I heal and replenish them at the same time: two people, at once, these two that require not only focus but sensitivity. When I close my eyes, I feel more than wind rush past us.

  It’s like the wind boy’s travel, only harsher. I feel resistance, but light changes to night and back to day in minutes. We’re travelling through time. On the strength of Mico’s wailing.

  “He’s playing the record backwards,” Tamara shouts over the resistance.

  “I’m not,” Mico mind-barks at us, not missing a note in his singing. “I’m begging the souls of the dead to let us pass. Now be quiet!”

  “Well hurry it up, yeah? I’m good for short bursts. This long-term push isn’t my forte.”

  I shush and heal her at the same time. Mico rejoins his own voice, almost singing backup for his own tune. I keep my eyes open this time. Watching the strain on both their bodies. We might not make it. I don’t even know what that would mean. Stranded somewhere between 1971 and the 1930s . . . in the middle of the Atlantic. That would be the best-case scenario. I look behind us, into the past, and see a shape descend under the waves.

  Tamara catches my tension, but I get her to stay on task. I don’t want to disturb Mico. But whatever it is, is coming. It’s following us, through space and time. And it’s fast. The shadow of a giant fish is directly under us. Tam and Mico are too focused on the movement to notice. I make the decision in a second, before Tam can read it and stop me. I put Mico’s hand in my daughters and let them both go.

  The shark jumps just as I fall from Tam’s levitation bubble. The blades are in my hand and scraping the back of the prehistoric hammerhead shark’s back just as I create gills in my neck and ankles. I hear Tam scream my name as I go underwater.

  Chapter Ten

  This fucker will not have me for lunch. The blades agree with me. I beef up my arms and legs then insulate with a thin layer of fat just below my skin while the wounded hammerhead circles, trying to intimidate me. Worse than him have tried.

  I do the reticulating lens trick just as the side-eyed fish makes his approach.
I dive quicker than it can clear the space between us, then reverse course even quicker, angling up, right at its soft underbelly. The blades scream for its blood.

  We pop up to the surface, actually catching air. In midair I flip the sixteen-foot beast and hack away, slicing, stabbing, ripping. If I had any compassion left in me, I’d be finding a way to end this thing’s life instead of making sashimi. I want to expose all of its organs to the sun. In the seven seconds it takes to hit the water, I’ve turned the shark into chum. Shit.

  “God damn it Taggert!” Tam yells at me from a hovering distance overhead. “More coming!”

  I go underwater to see eighty-five different varieties of sharks that make my first look like a guppy. All of them coming my way. I’m about to swim for them when Tamara pulls me from the water.

  “I got this!” I drop my gills and underwater body modifications.

  “Shut your gob and listen, yeah?”

  “They’re not normal sharks,” Mico says, his acoustic time-travel-projected voice totally halted. “They’re the ones that fed off the Africans.”

  “Slave trade’s been over for a while,” Tam chides.

  “These are the nightmare sharks of the Africans that survived. These sharks have developed a taste for . . .”

  “Dark meat,” I hiss. “Black blood. I got it. It’s another trap courtesy of Nordeen and Prentis. The plan is the same. Chop, kill, and keep moving.”

  Mico’s smarter in a fight than I give him credit for. He has Tam drop him underwater briefly in a bubble of air. Whatever he’s singing is enough to get some of the sharks to surface. With the girl’s help I make shark-fin soup of the thirty-yard radius around us. Tam gets the singer out of the water just as the nightmare sharks begin feeding on each other. They may like the taste of Africans, but all species learn to kill each other first.

  Only the most horrible, tenacious ones break the surface and aim for us. I’m ready, but Tam takes the bull sharks and the great white on a tour of the sky, tossing them fifty feet in the air. When she misses a black-tipped shark coming up from the rear, I find my moment to shout.

  “Look out!” She drops me from shock, and I kick off Mico’s arm to meet the beast in midair. I rake its right gill while stabbing its eye. Fucker rolls its body on me as we hit the ocean surface. And me without my body mods. I make more chum meal out of the black-tip shark while holding my breath. But a bite hold on my leg drags me down. I exhale all my bodily toxins through the wound and the leviathan gags. I dive deeper, raking and scraping anything moving my way. I’m maximizing the oxygen, in my body but I’m using it up too quickly. I should grow gills again, something to keep me alive. But all I want to do is slash and kill.

  I scream underwater for more, want them to come to me, when I feel a strong tug skyward. I hold fast to the tail of one shark already half gutted and continue to punch-stab at it when I get air. My screams are born from joy as Tam deposits me on the wooden deck of a ship, shark in hand, still punching. Why would I ever stop slicing? Tamara screams in my head to get my attention.

  “It’s dead, Tag!”

  I feel cheated. It didn’t suffer as much as I wanted. I need more flesh to stab. Not Tam. That much I hold on to. But Mico. I would like to see the color of his blood. I start toward him but the body of a girl—rail thin, Asian eyes, and milky chocolate skin—gets in the way. She moves . . . I’ve seen this movement before, like a deadly ballerina.

  “Remember yourself,” I hear Tamara shout. I leap for Mico. My jaw, throat, my biceps, and the back of my neck are all struck at the same time. All I can see is black.

  The ebb and flow of the tide pull me from sleep more than Mico’s mournful hymn. But the shock of being dry and not floating shoots me up. I’m on a boat. An old-world, three-sail Chinese junk, to be precise. It’s impossible for its well-worn planks and sun-touched sails to be weathering the mountain-sized waves. But the ship is here and so am I. So are the entropy blades, resting by my feet.

  “Get those things off my deck,” a disembodied voice says from the rudder wheel. “And do right with them or I’ll kick you back to sleep.” It’s the chocolate girl, in baggy sweat pants, a black T-shirt, an open gray vest, and a bandanna over her head, not covering a thigh-length queue. At least that’s what my normal eyes see. My liminal sight can’t find her. Mico sits above her, chanting against the waves in the crow’s nest.

  Collecting the blades, I have a second to wonder where Tamara is before she comes up from below deck and smacks me from port to stern with one telekinetically assisted blow. I knew she’d get me back.

  “Asshole!” she shouts. I don’t bother trying to get up.

  “Go easy. All that hack and slash tired me out.”

  “You trying to die?!”

  “Of course not. What else was I going to do?”

  “How about not dive into spirit-shark-infested waters? Those knives are fucking with your brain.”

  “And if it wasn’t for them you’d be dead right now,” I tell her softly as I stand, cautiously. “Look, they’re a pain in the ass, super dangerous, and not good for me in any way, shape, or form. Agreed. But they cut through giant bugs and the sharks. They can probably slice through Alters as well. We’re getting weaker the longer this journey goes. We need all the help we can get.”

  “I need you.” For a second I want to call her daughter.

  “So does Prentis. So I’ll use whatever weaponry, tools, prayers, and allies I can get my hands on. To hell with the cost. Speaking of which, where the hell are we and who’s the quick kick?”

  I guess Mico realized his channeling through time wasn’t going to work. So he changed his tune when I went underwater. He called out a name that his pet Alter gave him before we left. Chabi, her name is. This is her boat. The Mansai. The spirits of the Africans took a brief pause when she showed up, and all the remaining sharks ran. But now the Africans started up again, whipping at the entire ship in the form of a perfect storm. It was taking all of Mico’s singing and Chabi’s piloting to avoid capsizing. For the first time since we started this trek, Tam and I are just passengers.

  Time means nothing here, so I don’t know how long we’re waiting as the girl with no body I can see and the troubadour steer this strange fight for us. But when the ship does a full one-eighty under the influence of a forty-foot wave, Tamara gets nervous. The air is thick with wisps of smoke masquerading as bodies, screaming in tears, moaning, and pleading as terrified dead Africans whip around us.

  “Long as they’ve been dead, ya think these slaves would’ve calmed down a bit,” she tries to joke.

  “They’re not slaves,” I tell her, touching her back gently. “They’re mothers and fathers. Bankers and bums. They’re blacksmiths and professors. You think of slaves, you think picking cotton and driving mules. But it’s more than that. These spirits, even if they made it across, they never would’ve been slaves because they knew where they came from. But their children, and by extension us—you and me—we will always be slave children.”

  It’s not that the waves abate as much as they collect at the aft of the twenty-five-foot ship, while the winds threaten at the starboard side of the majestically faded red and black sails. Mico takes a moment in the relative calm in his song-fight to attend to us.

  “We’re in deep now, yeah?” my girl asks, fear tinging her voice for the first time.

  “We ain’t out of it yet. That’s for damn sure,” the bodiless girl speaks—in a language I don’t know but understand perfectly.

  “Chabi is doing a lot, but she’s not . . . substantial enough to take on all the spirits by herself.”

  “We can help, right?” Tam asks.

  “There are no bodies or minds for you to work on,” Mico apologizes. Then she does it. Tamara, scrapper supreme, bar-none shit-talker, the original posh turned chav, kills me with her eyes: she looks at me, either sea mist or the beginning of tears in her deep browns, and silently begs for a solution, like I’m a teacher with the right answer waiting
to see if she’ll get it. I can’t disappoint her.

  “This is just the eye of the storm,” the captain says in that non-voice. “It’s about to be a shit storm up in here. Might want to go below deck.”

  “You!” I shout over the rising winds at Mico. “You’re a body I can work on.”

  “This isn’t about strength or brains,” he says.

  “Your flesh, brain cells, it’s all putty in my hands, boy!” I shout at him. “That’s got to count for something. This is your world not mine. Think! Stop singing and think for a second. What calms spirits down?”

  “Sacrifice,” Chabi tells us as she starts walking a large circle on deck. It’s that same patient, deliberate movement that goes everywhere and nowhere at once. Where the hell have I seen this? I pull a bewildered Tam out the way as the girl who doesn’t speak with her mouth begins moving with marked purpose. The ship responds to her body, swaying the way she does, thrashing at her command, arching in time with her slightest leg movement. When the wind and waves start again for real, we are protected. Barely.

  “They need a sacrifice?” I turn toward Mico. “They can have me.”

  “Fuck they can!” my daughter shouts.

  “A sacrifice must be clean.” Mico tries to be gentle about it. “They don’t want to add to their numbers.”

  “What do they want, Mico?” I’m shouting.

  We’re knocked—I’m knocked—off my feet and have to grip the side rigging to keep from going over. A wave the size of a building wants to snap the Mansai in two. Impossibly the ship arches backward until the wave is about to break, then it turns and rides the crest as I lash myself to the perimeter. We ride the impossible wave like a surfboard, hitting it head on and watching in silent panic as uncounted African spirits scream at us from the water to turn back. Tam’s doing slightly better, but that’s only because she’s straining her telekinesis. Mico is battered but still on board. It lasts forever before the dark sky above gets farther away and we descend back to a relative normal height. Waves ahead promise more of the same. Mico sings at the helm while Chabi continues to dance, spar with nothing save stray spirits.