City of Saints & Thieves

by Natalie C. Anderson

  It’s all lies.

  My whole life is built on lies.

  I swallow hard. “You killed my mother.”

  “Your mother told Greyhill I was stealing from him.”

  “But why did you have to kill her?” I gasp.

  He looks at me like I am slow. “Christina, in this business, your reputation is everything. What would I be if I let a woman spoil things and walk away?” He waits, making sure I get it. “She was tricky, your mother. You have to give her that, going and telling Greyhill my secrets in exchange for protection from me. It took some time, but I found a way to teach them both the lesson they had to learn.”

  I try desperately to get my breath. “You tortured my mother. You raped her. I’m only here because of what you did.” I feel myself coming unhinged, separating from my body. “Wasn’t that enough?”

  Omoko’s voice switches to a growl. “She got as much as she deserved. She told Greyhill about things that didn’t concern her. My things. My business. I earned every cent of that gold and he knew it! I was loyal. I did his bidding. I dealt with these savages so he wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty.”

  And then it hits me. The hidden file behind her photo. She brought Omoko’s secret accounting sheets to Mr. Greyhill. She must have seen him stealing gold and looked for something that would prove it.

  Omoko continues, “She poisoned my relationship with him. He used his connections to freeze my bank accounts. I had to start again from nothing. You think that’s easy? It’s not. It takes time. And money. And blood. Lots of money and lots of blood. Scratching my way back up.” He looks at the tent ceiling. “Goondas,” he sneers. “Before I came along they were a bunch of morons, bashing their heads together like cavemen.”

  I am trying as hard as I can to hear everything Omoko is saying and process it, but my mind is beginning to cloud with red rage. Soon there won’t be room for anything else.

  “Now.” Mr. Omoko slaps his knees and stands. “I am on a deadline. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to call up Roland Greyhill and tell him we’ve got his son. I have it on good authority he’s in the neighborhood, and we’ve got a satellite hookup, so he can actually get his son back as fast as he can transfer money to my accounts.” He starts to leave. “We couldn’t have orchestrated the whole thing better if we’d tried.”

  I raise my head. “We?”

  He stops at the tent door. “Excuse me?”

  “You keep saying we. Are you expecting my help?”

  He blinks. “I suppose your part is over, if you like.”

  I stare. “Do you think I’m just going to go along with this like I’m still one of your Goondas?” I choke. I feel my mind clearing, my anger collecting like an explosion condensing the air before it bursts. “I am going to kill you.”

  With the adrenaline that’s pumping through me I will dislocate my thumb and rip out of the wires holding my wrists. I won’t be able to strangle him, but I will stand on his neck until it breaks. Right here. I press my thumb into the side of the chair and start to push.

  “No,” Omoko says, with something like disappointment. “I don’t think you will.” He comes back to me, pulling a phone from his pocket.

  I pause, confused. What is he doing?

  He looks down at the screen. “Damn thing, I’m getting too old to read it.” He smiles and takes a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and puts them on. “That’s better. You know, I didn’t want it to come to this, Christina, but I suppose I know you better than you think.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He taps the screen and then turns the phone so I can see. I squint. The photo is a little blurry, but it only takes a second to work it out.

  When I do, the fight drains from me. Completely and all at once.

  “Check the date. Today’s. Old kidnapper trick. I saw it in a movie once.” He chuckles as he looks at the photo with me, and points at the newspaper held up in a tattooed hand next to her face. I recognize those tattoos. They belong to Bug Eye.

  “It’s a little hard to see. But trust me.” Mr. Omoko puts the phone back in his pocket. “We have a lot in common, you and I. We are practical. You, I won’t kill because you’re blood. But her, I don’t care about. She’s not mine. She’s his bastard. If he actually cared about her, she’d have made a good hostage too, but it doesn’t seem that he wants much to do with her, does it? I can’t count on her being the bargaining chip I need. The boy is better. However, she’s still useful to keep you in check. You pull too many stunts, kijana. Don’t imagine for a second you can derail any of this. She’s there in Sangui, just a phone call away.” He studies me. “You’re sensible, but sometimes you need discipline. Boundaries. Like your mother.”

  I can’t move. All I can see is the photo seared in my mind. One tattooed hand holding a newspaper, the other holding a gun to her temple. Her terrified eyes.

  My sister Kiki’s eyes.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  There are no rules for this. I am out of rules.

  • • •

  “Come on, Tiny Girl, you gotta snap out of it. You’re okay, we’re gonna be okay, but we’ve got to think . . . Tiny?”

  I wish Boyboy would stop talking to me.

  I rest my forehead on my knees. I can smell my sweat and the metallic tang of dried blood on my wrists. I would like to collapse into myself, lay my cheek on the cool dead leaves, and never move again.

  I have no idea what to do now.

  “Tina,” Boyboy says, turning his head to look at me with the eye that isn’t swollen shut. “They’re probably going to separate us soon. And they’ll most likely kill me—I’m no use to Omoko anymore; he said so. We don’t have much time. You have to talk to me. Help me figure out what to do.”

  We’re chained to a tree like animals. After he showed me Kiki’s photo, Mr. Omoko handed me over to Ketchup, who gleefully paraded me through the militia camp and tied me to the tree next to Boyboy. Boyboy was silent while he was around, but now his voice is urgent, if slurred, around a split lip. The whole left side of his face looks like it’s been run over.

  I’ve counted five Goondas—Mr. Omoko’s bodyguards. His elite squad, Yaya, Toofoh or Toto—something like that—and two others whose names I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure are the guys who chased us yesterday. Plus Ketchup. Plus thirty or so guys in ratty fatigues. From the looks of the camp, they’ve been here awhile. The Goondas and the militia dudes don’t mix. Most of the militia are swaddled in cheap blankets, still half asleep. A handful are cleaning their guns or sharpening the pangas they use to hack through the jungle. The forest floor is littered with their trash, mostly small plastic baggies that once held a swallow of kill-me-quick oil-drum spirits.

  I close my eyes again and wonder if this was how Mama felt, a captive of the militia, hopeless, waiting to die. The same sort of hopelessness, thick and sticky as tar, tugs my limbs toward the ground. My blood is sluggish traitor blood. Murderer blood. Omoko’s blood. How much of who I am and what I do is because I am his daughter?

  “They’ve got Michael,” Boyboy tries again.

  “I know.”

  “Well, don’t you want to do something about it?” Boyboy pleads furiously.

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Tina, I swear to God, I am going to—”

  “Omoko killed my mom.”

  Boyboy goes still. My head drops back down to my knees.

  “What?” he finally asks.

  I feel like I’ve never been so tired in my entire life, but I manage to relay, in fragments, how Omoko was Mr. Greyhill’s Number Two, and what Catherine told me he did to my mother, and how Mr. Omoko is now holding Kiki captive, so I won’t try to do anything stupid. Like rescue Michael.

  When I’m done, Boyboy just stares at the ground. “I can’t . . . All this time. It was him. He�
�s your dad? Your dad killed your mom?”

  “And now he’s going to trade Michael to Mr. G for a payday, and then kill them too,” I say flatly.

  I turn my face so one eye looks out on the camp. I see it like I am far away, like I’m one of those incessantly twittering birds watching from the trees. Like I can watch until I don’t want to see any more and then I can just jump into the sky and be gone.

  “Tina. Listen to me. We have to do something. We can get out of this. We just have to think.”

  I don’t answer. What can I do? I can’t rescue Michael—Mr. Omoko will hurt Kiki. It’s that simple. I go through my rules in my head, searching for one that will make sense of all of this. One that will give me some direction, some purpose.

  Nothing.

  They all seem silly now, paper swords.

  I am so stupid. All this time it was Omoko. It was always him. He always had the power. He tortured my mother and controlled me like a puppet, and I let him. I am his fool.

  “Come on, Tina. Work with me here.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Maybe if—”

  “I said there’s nothing we can do!” I snarl. Some part of me registers the surprise and hurt in his eyes, but the rest of me curls inward. I have my own wounds to lick.

  “So you’re done. You’re just giving up.”

  I say nothing.

  “You’re going to let him win. You’re not going to do anything to get us out of here.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to do! I don’t know who you think I am!”

  “I think you’re the same girl you’ve always been! You’re Tiny Girl! You’re a thief and a survivor! Somebody who doesn’t just roll over and die! Somebody who makes her own damn plans! Someone who makes her own damn rules!”

  I can feel hot tears spilling down my cheeks. But I don’t look up. “I can’t. I can’t do it, Boyboy. You don’t understand. He’ll kill her. She’s all I’ve got.”

  For a while, there is nothing but the labored sound of Boyboy breathing. Then, to my surprise, he snorts a laugh. “You think you’re the only one who ever had to worry about someone they love getting hurt? You’re still out here all on your own, in your own little head, aren’t you? Don’t you even see me?”

  I roll my face toward him.

  “Remember how you told me you got that scar?” he asks.

  “My scar?”

  Boyboy jabs his chin at my arm. “You got it for a reason. Because as smart as you are about most things, you can be so dumb about people. That scar is there to remind you.”

  I look at my arm, the smooth line of tissue crossing through my tattoos. “Remind me of what?”

  Mama and I had only been in Sangui a few months when I got it. At the time I was still getting used to the Greyhills’ palatial estate. It had unspoken rules about where I could and couldn’t go, which I was learning one smack to my backside at a time.

  I was standing at the edge of the staff quarters, watching the boy of the house and his friend play football in the yard. Mama had warned me not to talk to the boy; I was not welcome up there. I was to stay out of sight. But the possibility of other kids to play with had been too much for me. I’d been alone, except for Mama, for weeks since we’d left Congo, and she barely spoke anymore. I made sure no one was watching, and then sprinted up the yard. It would be like with any other kids playing: I’d just join in, no questions asked.

  Instead, the friend, a big pug-nosed boy, tripped me as I ran for the ball. I sprawled into a table a maid had set with glasses of juice and biscuits. A glass tipped and shattered.

  The big kid laughed, like me flopping around on the ground was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. When I stood up, I found a chunk of glass had sliced me in the crook of my elbow, and bright blood was dribbling into the grass.

  “You can’t play with us! Your mother’s a maid and a whore.” The boy cackled. “His mom told my mom. You got no dad. And your mom does it. All. The. Time.” He pumped his little hips to punctuate in a way that I didn’t understand, but somehow knew was dirty.

  “Who-ore, who-ore,” the pudgy boy chanted, while the boy of the house stood wide-eyed and silent.

  Twenty meters away, a guard who had come to investigate the noise hovered. A gardener lifted his head from his work, uneasy, but made no move to help. From the house I could hear footsteps coming, heels moving with swift surety toward the sound of broken glass.

  And as the blood dripped from my arm it became very clear what Mama had been trying to keep me from. I understood what not welcome meant, at my core. The boy of the house and his friend were different creatures entirely. From the tips of their scrubbed fingernails to the snowy laces on their shoes, they were soft, unscarred. They were significant.

  I saw what was coming. I was out of my place, and I would be put back into it. When my mother found out she would yell. Or worse, and more likely, she wouldn’t say a word, just take me back down to the cottage, then turn and walk away from me.

  And as I was standing there waiting for the inevitable, a sudden blur of fists and knees came rocketing past me, and the boy of the house launched into his friend like a tiger. The bigger boy was taken by surprise, and it took him a moment to wake up. When he did, though, he slung the boy to the ground and started pounding him back. Smack went his fist, and blood squirted out of the little Greyhill’s nose.

  At this point the gardener had stepped in, gently pulling the two snarling boys apart. The friend was crying and ran away to a puffy-faced woman who had come out onto the veranda. Mrs. Greyhill followed. It was the first time I had seen her up close, and her beauty was a powerful, living thing, as sharp and terrible as the shards of glass scattered on the soft grass. She was impossible to look away from. Her wide eyes lingered on me, and then she looked at the mess, her face a question.

  I waited for her son to point a finger at me. But instead he just wiped his bloody nose on his shirt. “He started it,” the boy said. Then he went inside.

  Later, after the friend had been taken home, the Greyhill kid came back out of the house and walked down to where I was sitting in front of the servants’ cottages. His face was clean, but his nose and eye were purpling.

  I looked up at him warily.

  “I’ve never been in a fight,” he said, sounding slightly in awe of himself.

  “Why didn’t you tell on me?”

  Instead of answering, the kid showed me his arm. “Look, I got cut too.”

  I stood up to see. He lifted the bandage someone had carefully placed over it, maybe even my own mother. Mine was bare, no longer bleeding, but raw. His was a sickle, like a crescent moon. Mine was a straight line. Our cuts were different shapes, but in almost the exact same places on our arms.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “Nah. Yours?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You want to play?”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “Why?”

  I thought about it. I didn’t really know.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Christina.”

  “I’m Michael. Come on.”

  And he had turned and raced up the yard. I looked down at the red line of separated flesh, pressed it with my finger until it hurt, to remind myself of what I was risking. My mother could still find out I’d disobeyed her. Maybe this rich boy would turn on me eventually, like his friend. Maybe I should just stay by the cottage, keep out of trouble like Mama had told me to.

  But this boy had stood up for me, even though it had cost him, even though he didn’t know me.

  He saw me, when everyone else wanted to pretend like I didn’t exist.

  I looked back at my cottage, then up at the yard, where he stood waiting.

  And then I ran to join him.

  Boyboy says, “I
don’t have a scar from when you saved me from those kids. They knew I couldn’t swim. You don’t have a scar from that day either, but I can cut you now, if it’ll help you think straight.”

  He sits back. He seems to be waiting for me to get something on my own, like a little kid sounding out a word for the very first time. And suddenly I understand what Boyboy’s saying. It is so obvious and he’s right. I really am an idiot. What I realize is this:

  Boyboy is my friend.

  Michael is my friend.

  Whether I like it or not. Whether I admit it or not.

  I have all my rules, act like I know everything, pretend like I’m in control. But they know the truth. I’m broken and messed up.

  And you know what? They don’t care.

  They stick with me. They stick up for me. It’s because of me that they’re out here now, and because of me they didn’t leave days ago. Michael may have come to clear his father’s name, but he stayed because he’s still the same kid who got punched in the nose for me all those years ago. And Boyboy has always been my partner in crime. That’s why he came back here with me.

  What I realize is not really a rule—it’s just true:

  They exist to me.

  And I exist to them.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  You’re my friend,” I say softly.

  Boyboy rolls his eyes, but the sag in his shoulders says he’s relieved. “Yes, Tina.”

  “You love me.”

  “Now, don’t get carried away.”

  “You’re going to help me. That’s what you’re telling me. We have to rescue Michael. Together. We can figure this out.”

  “There’s my Tiny Girl.”

  I wipe my face on my arm and try to hold on tight to what I’m feeling. “Where are they keeping him?”

  Boyboy nods at a tent on the other side of the camp. “I saw them take him in there.”

  A couple of militia guys sit out front, keeping watch. Unfortunately for us, they don’t look nearly as drunk as the others.