Temper: A Novel

by Nicky Drayden

  It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

  “So what do you say we get down to business?” Nkosazana says.

  “Yes,” I breathe, the whisper of a god. The earth hums softly, not just beneath us, but from shore to shore of this whole wretched land. The entire continent has gone aimlessly adrift. For a moment, I let my mind unfold, spinning my gossamers until we’re safely tethered again.

  “—once we’ve established relations, of course. And I want to let you know up front,” Nkosazana is saying, her eyes full of seriousness, “if this is going to work, it’s going to have to be mutually beneficial.”

  “I’ll do everything in my power to please you,” I say. At this point, I’d agree to anything to be able to call her mine again.

  “Good. But remember, this isn’t charity. Payments would be arranged.”

  Wait, what? I’ve missed something. “Payments?”

  “Right now we can offer fish, yams, corn, and an assortment of handmade crafts. As time passes, we will be able to trade intellectual properties, too, but those are still under development.”

  “Who’s we?” I ask.

  “Auben, have you even bothered to listen to a word I’ve said? I swear, some things never change.” Her nostrils flare. “We want to establish trade relations between Akinyemi and the camps. We’re in desperate need of raw materials.”

  So not those kind of relations. Economic relations. The flowers above us wilt. Green vines dry up and go brittle as my disappointment and embarrassment grip me the way I wish Nkosazana would.

  “Oh!” she says, sitting back, gathering herself. “I haven’t upset you, have I?”

  “No,” I say. This can’t be it, the only reason she’s come to see me. There must be some deeper meaning, some invisible string that still connects us. A string that I could pluck, and Nkosazana would ease right back into my arms, like she’d never left. Unless . . . Unless all this is a game she’s playing, and she’s using this trade agreement as a convenient excuse to be around me. Yes, well two can play at this. “I’ll set up a formal meeting then, and we can discuss the matter with our board,” I say coolly.

  “That would be fantastic,” she says, holding my clawed hands loosely in hers. “It really is good to see you again.” She pulls me in close, and her scent plays tricks with my mind. She feels so soft and tiny and wrong in my arms, like a field mouse caught in the embrace of a lion-shaped nebula. I pull her in tighter, wishing for the sensation to subside, and hoping she doesn’t feel it, too.

  Nkosazana ducks out from my grip, then stands and dusts herself off. I take her cue and open an arched doorway among the brittle vines behind her. The plaza has cleared of people, and she stands alone against the jewel-speckled backdrop of the city. She smiles before she turns to walk away.

  That bit of humanity I had left, I think she’s taken it with her. The vines go to dust around me, and my bones go to dust as well, my true form revealing the myriad of grotesque incompatibilities that prove my infatuation ridiculous. We are too different, and yet still I pray for her to look back at me one last time, to see me. To accept my blemishes.

  She doesn’t look back, and if we are indeed playing a game, she is definitely winning.

  “They need infrastructure,” Chimwe whispers to me as Nkosazana leads us through the meandering roads of the camp. It’s been years since I’d last stepped foot here. It was the predecessor to our charmed city—built of scraps and sweat and blood, haphazard shanties and shebeens selling much-needed goods. They have made progress. Only around 10,000 residents remain in what had once housed all 300,000 of us. There is purpose now, cobbled streets, community gardens, schools.

  “Of course they need infrastructure,” I hiss under my breath so only Chimwe can hear. “And we have it. I don’t understand why they can’t move into the city. There are plenty of empty flats to accommodate them all.”

  “It’s not what you have. It’s what you don’t have,” Nkosazana says. Apparently, I hadn’t spoken softly enough. She presses her hand on the tin siding of a shanty. Graffiti adorns its surface, big-headed stick figures that must have been painted by a four-year-old, though they extend much higher than a kid could possibly reach.

  “We have everything you could want!” I plead. “There are jobs to be had, all the luxuries of life.”

  “I think she’s talking about community,” Chimwe offers. “They’ve been uprooted once already. We have room, but spread over a half dozen different districts.”

  Nkosazana nods. “It’s exactly that. We’re making progress of our own, but if we open trade relations, we can—”

  I shake my head. “We are one city. I will make sure you have what you need. Trade is not necessary.” Despite my best efforts to be humble, my words echo with pretension off the tin walls of this shantytown. I soften my shoulders, narrow my chest, try to make Nkosazana feel like I’m taking her seriously, but it pains me to see our city separated like this. I’ve lived my whole life in a segregated city. I can’t stand for it to continue, not if I have the ability to stop it.

  Nkosazana glowers at me. “Chimwe gets it. Why don’t you?” She steps close to me, so close, we’re nearly touching. Her scent overwhelms me, her anger and frustration adding a smoky edge to her essence, accompanied by a ginger so spicy, it makes my lips pucker. The tension between us is so acute, my coarse scales erupt through my cloak. Nkosazana doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away from my gaze.

  “You’re the ones who don’t get it,” I say. “We can’t stay divided like this. You saw how we were split up and separated before. By vice and virtue, by gender, by class. We were cut up and pitted against each other in so many ways. Now here in Akinyemi, we have a chance to do it right.”

  I’m so gutted, I’m trembling. Everything I’ve tried to love has been torn away from me—a hole in my heart where a father should have been, a mother who disowned me, and my brother, the only person I could depend on, who cast me away like garbage. I need this city to work.

  “Trust me, I know all about divisions,” Nkosazana says, glowering at me. I know that look. It’s something I said. “There are a few purists who think it unwise to put ourselves in your debt. However, most of us aren’t so shortsighted and see trade with Akinyemi as a necessary evil.” Her words are sharper than my claws, and she’s not apologetic in the slightest. But something else lurks beneath her complete openness . . . a message hiding in plain sight. There are a few who do not want to be in my debt. A few who want nothing to do with me. I get a sudden, sinking feeling I know who these “few” people are.

  My nostrils flare, ears perk. I tune out Nkosazana’s overwhelming scent, and focus on the subtle aromas that lie beneath. I unfold them, and my world of muted sensations becomes a rich, vibrant web of colors, sounds, and smells. I catch a fragrant whiff of citrus blossoms, polished and powerful, with the faintest trace of cleaning chemicals that never worked their way from flesh, even after all this time. I breathe her in, my mother, somewhere close.

  “Where are you going?” Nkosazana says, running after me. “You can’t go that way . . . that’s—”

  “Sometimes I think you forget who—and what—I am,” I say. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

  I follow the scent, until I reach an outcropping among the shanties. In its center, a two-story building with blacked-out windows. Two guards stand at the double doors leading inside. They immediately lock eyes with me, and their postures become erect. The beating of their hearts turns staccato in the course of a second. From inside the building I hear metal crashing, drills screeching, saws buzzing.

  “My mother,” I growl. “She is inside.”

  Nkosazana scrambles around me, putting her hand to my chest as if she could stop me. “I wanted to tell you, Auben,” she says. “I really did. But you can’t go in there.”

  “I can go anywhere I damn please,” I say.

  Nkosazana gawks at me, her eyes haunted. I’ve shed Auben’s skin completely. This is the body she was begging me to sh
ow her. She stares for a long moment, at all my impressive wretchedness, probably trying to figure out what part repulses her the most.

  “Here’s what you wanted. ‘Complete honesty and complete openness,’” I say, completely and utterly unashamed of each and every damned blemish upon my body. No longer will I hide who I am. No longer will I pretend to be something I’m not. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Nkosazana is trapped by her own words. She leans against the door, and slowly she presses the latch down on the handle. I suck in a shameful breath as it clicks and the door cracks open. It tastes like the future inside—sweet, brassy smoke, and sparks from metal kissing metal.

  My hooves clack against the concrete as I walk deeper and deeper into the building. Subsecular inventions crowd the space like a clockwork forest. Daylight filters in through a dusty green skylight, doing its best to hold the creepy red glow of dozens of boilers at bay. Gears are stacked high and thick like tree trunks, iron chains and brass piping form a maze across the ceiling, like vines and branches of a canopy, and hanging diagrams and blueprints flutter about whenever one of the workers walks past. One by one, they notice me, and the buzz of ingenuity slowly grinds to a halt. The smoke dissipates, and I see her, my mother in her immaculate white lab cloak, nearly half her face obscured by big brassy goggles with mirrored lenses. She’s yelling at some poor ingrate.

  “There’s no excuse for this kind of error!” Mother says to a woman cowering behind a large sheet of paper like it’s an impervious shield. Detailed drawings adorn it, in blue and brown ink, numbers and symbols and signs, and I’m immediately reminded of the pamphlet that had fallen out of Mother’s posh magazine on our way to narrow season dinner.

  “It’s these Mzansi-made instruments,” the woman complains. “Only one out of fifty of them will hold precision. I waste half my day checking and rechecking my measurements. All I need is a solid Rashtrakutan panel gauge that won’t slip up on me.”

  Something odd happens at the mention of Rashtrakutan fare—a craving swells on my tongue, and for the first time in a long time, that craving is not for blood. It’s for curried chicken and mango chutney. I cling to it, coddle it, try to stoke that little smolder of my humanity into a flame, but it slips past me, and my fangs once again itch only for the lifeblood of my subjects.

  “You will use the tools we have,” my mother snaps. “And you will find a way for them to work. If your measurements are off by even one—” Mother’s body tightens. She wraps herself up in her coat to ward herself from the sudden chill and then turns to me.

  “Hello, Mother,” I say.

  Of the hundreds of awkward situations I’ve brought upon myself, none compare to standing here before my mother, the mirrored lenses of her goggles aiming at me like small cannons. Slowly, she removes them, letting them hang around her neck, and things become much, much worse. That stare could make a god lose hold of his bladder, just a little. And the workers, they’re all as terrified of me as I am of Mother. She’s not scared, though. Rather, her eyes are hooked into mine, holding a burning fury that I cannot break away from.

  “Can someone tell me why my damned devil of a son is standing before me?” She spits these words, but I cannot help but feel a smoldering of pride that she still claims me as her own.

  Nkosazana skitters up between us, breaking the line of sight and the power Mother exudes over me. “Enna Zeogwu, I can explain . . .” she stammers. “We need more material. If other cities won’t trade with us, then we have to accept alternate means.”

  “What place do you have telling me what we need? How dare you go against my word?” Mother smolders. She is a woman who held gods in her womb, and every bone in her body embraces this truth, no matter how much she’d like to deny it. Anyone else would crumble before her, but not Nkosazana.

  “No matter how keen your vision is, the reality is that we can’t harbor invention here, sharing faulty tools and bickering over each other’s scraps.” Nkosazana steps forward to my mother. They’re like twin stars entangled by each other’s pull. “Your words can move our minds toward invention, but they can’t make resources out of thin air. We need him.”

  “We’ll manage getting our own resources soon enough. You have no patience!” Mother yells.

  Their quarreling makes me go faint. As I steady myself, my eyes drift, taking in the scene around me. Tinkerings pile up like snowdrifts against walls, machinations of all sorts. Broken gears litter the floor. A large brass telescope points to the filthy skylight. And in the far corner sits a giant rotund machination painted yellow with polished gold trim, and six legs cinched close to its sides like some desiccated spider. Its eyes are twin furnaces, unlit and achingly cold, and I can’t help but notice the resemblance to those mechanical bugs Mother had stashed in the secret compartment of her desk. I’m staring. Everyone notices that I’m staring. The tension in the room suddenly doubles, and before I can utter a word, Nkosazana’s hand is on my arm, and she’s pulling me away.

  “Please come,” she whispers. “I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  My hooves stand firm, but the entire building wobbles. I worry that I’ve snagged a tether, and have sent the earth spinning off-kilter, but no one else seems affected. It’s all in my head. Still, somehow I manage to fall in step with Nkosazana, out into the dusty air of the camps. Chimwe is immediately at my side, catches me in his arms and helps me down to the ground.

  “I saw her,” I heave, watching the fog of my cousin’s breath thicken with each moment that passes. He holds me tightly, despite the frost growing around us.

  Chimwe nods. “And how is my dear aunt Daia?”

  “About as charming as a riled beehive,” I say.

  “Sounds about right.” Chimwe squeezes my hand. “So is everything okay with you?” His eyes flick skyward, toward the half moon hanging in the midmorning sky. Closer, it seems. Too close.

  I realize I’ve been clinging to it like a crutch, and I release my grip on the tether, ignoring the thick jagged trench now running along the moon’s surface. “Everything’s fine,” I say to Chimwe. “Everything’s just fine.” I try to ignore all the connections I have to the cosmos, and focus on the ones I’m trying to make here.

  “I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this,” Nkosazana mumbles, oblivious to my celestial manipulations. “With the trade embargoes, we’ve got limited supplies and opportunities, and all of the sect’s instruments were left behind with the split. Your mother thinks we can manage, but our innovations will never get recognition within the greater science community unless we can shake off this stigma that we’re just bumbling hobbyists. We need the right tools. If only there were a way . . .”

  My mind must still be spinning, because I’ve got a new scheme percolating in the back of my brain. A crazy scheme, sure, but really, am I capable of any other kind? I can get my mother the equipment she needs, and make sure Nkosazana gets all the credit.

  “If I get you those tools,” I say to Nkosazana, “will you promise to help convince the sect to join Akinyemi? We’ll make room for your entire community, provide you with state-of-the-art—”

  “Your mother won’t allow it. She’s furious even about the idea of trading with you. If she knew you were involved in getting our instruments back, she’d have nothing to do with them.”

  “Well, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” I say, raising a brow. “Me and you. We go back into the old city, grab your tools, and slip out before anyone notices.”

  “Do you think we’ve never considered that? They shunned us once, kicked us from our homes, pried us from our families. What do you think they’d do if they caught us in their precious city? Besides, it’s not like everything we need is locked up together in some secret subsecular warehouse. We’re talking dozens of hidden locations, all over the place. It’s impossible.”

  “Impossible for humans, maybe.” I arch a scaled brow.

  “Impossible for humans. Inadvisable for gods,” Chimwe says, stepping in. “If you�
�re caught, what will happen to Akinyemi? What if Grace’s wrath befalls us?”

  “We’ll have to be stealthy, then, won’t we?” I boast. “Stick to the shadows. Blend in. We can use the comfy burrows to travel from one location to the next. They have to all be abandoned now.” I touch Nkosazana’s shoulder. “Just imagine what Enna Zeogwu will think when you come back to her with those tools. She’ll never doubt you again.” The words singe my throat—not quite the truth, almost spoken in anger, and envious as all hell. But Mother would be so proud of Nkosazana, and if I can align myself just right, maybe some of that pride would rub off on me by association.

  “Well . . . I guess we could—” Nkosazana starts.

  “Wait.” Chimwe’s eyes light up. “You can’t actually be entertaining these delusions. What are you going to do? Just hike back across no-man’s-land, over Grace Mountain, and back into the city that rejected us?”

  “Well, something like that. Except we’re flying,” I say, unfurling my wings and flapping them, “not hiking.” Nkosazana’s hair flips up in my wings’ wake. I extend my clawtips gently toward her. “Care to join me?” Her fingers press into my palm with more certainty than I’d anticipated. I pull her close. She straddles my thigh, and wraps her arms around my neck, prepared for the adventure of a lifetime. I can’t deny, I’m hoping this little adventure of ours will bring us closer together—

  “Where do I get on?” Chimwe says, butting his way into the thick of my fantasy.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I’m going, too. If the both of you think this is in any way a good idea, then you’re going to need someone sane to accompany you.”

  “Fine.” I nod to my back, and try not to wince at his heft upon me. I flap my wings, once or twice, preparing for liftoff. But then Nkosazana squeezes me tighter, her cheek pressed squarely against mine, and my heart stutters and goes weak, and my mind . . . oh, my mind skips back to all those nights I’d spent in her bed, how many times we’d nearly been given away by too loud of a moan or too shrill of a squeal, while her father tinkered away in his study, just the next room over. The thrill of being so young, so reckless, so mortal, it sort of infects me. We’re a couple inches off the ground when my powers give out, and my wings revert to wimpy chicken winglets.