by Sheena Kamal
8
Bonnie dreams of the voice, the voice that has haunted her for days now. She can’t open her eyes, so she knows she must be dreaming, but it’s terrifying still. That cold voice, so brusque, is now tenderly whispering to her. The dream is so real that she can feel the breath on her forehead, a hand tucking a tendril of hair behind her ear, a long fingernail simultaneously scratching a line down the side of her neck where her jaw begins. She cannot put a face to the voice, but she would know it anywhere. So she screams and screams and screams until there’s the sound of pounding feet on the ground, rushing to her side. It is her dream, so why shouldn’t she be rescued?
She hears the voice protesting, saying that Bonnie must be delirious. The voice is accusing somebody at the hospital of hurting her. She’s dreaming of being in a hospital? Bonnie knows, though she can’t say how or why, but the voice is lying. That woman always lies.
“Ma’am, please give us the room,” says someone else, a man whose voice Bonnie doesn’t recognize. Though this person speaks with authority, there is an underlying concern here.
“Please step outside. We’ll call you when she’s settled.”
“Of course,” says the woman who haunts Bonnie’s dreams. “Take good care of her or you’ll be hearing from my attorney. I’ll be back.”
Bonnie’s breath quickens. She is safe for now, but that awful woman will come back for her. She said it herself, and this time she isn’t lying.
9
A frigid gust of wind jolts me awake.
Something hard presses into my stomach. The ground is near my head and I don’t know where my legs are because I can’t feel them. For a brief, terrifying moment I think that I’m in the nightmare again, but there is a fleeting memory of Kai Zhang’s face smeared with blood. Gradually my senses return to me. I am outdoors, hanging upside down, slung over a muscular shoulder. By the uneven, sinking steps that I feel the man holding me take, I sense that he is walking on sand. Then his pace evens out and we are on solid ground again. A wooden dock. There is a sliver of moonlight out tonight and the rain seems to have given us some respite. I twist my head around and see a woman’s form trailing the man who carries me.
“She’s awake,” the woman says.
I recognize that voice. I last heard it in a dimly lit lounge overlooking a spectacular winter vista. A second later, my world turns right side up as I’m dropped. My vision blurs for a moment, a residual effect of whatever drug her husband had given me, and then clears. I’m now in a boat, sprawled on the deck. I watch as Dao helps Jia inside and goes about preparing the boat for launch. He tosses in a box of garbage bags and some weights.
“I told you that it was her up at the chalet,” she tells him.
He frowns. “I thought she was dead. Saw her car go over a railing.”
Jia sits gracefully on the bench and regards me from her perch. “You killed my husband,” she says, as conversationally as if she’s talking about the weather.
“Did you a favor,” I say, my voice thick. “So that you and lover boy over there could finally be together. You’re welcome.”
Dao turns from where he is untying the ropes anchoring the boat to the dock. There is a pause, then Jia shrugs. “So what if she knows,” she says to him. “She’s going to die soon anyway. She can’t hurt us and now we have that girl, too.”
I can’t hide my shock.
She laughs. “Oh yes, she was brought in with severe dehydration by some guy on a research trip. Documenting erosion or some bloody thing that these environmentalists bother decent businesspeople about. Took us a lot longer than it should have to find out where she is,” she says, with an annoyed glance at Dao. “Whoever was monitoring the hospitals has displeased me.”
“I’ll deal with them later.”
“You better. When we pick her up tomorrow, make sure it’s quiet and make sure you get rid of her for good. We’re far too exposed on this already. It was a mistake for me to go to the hospital today.”
Dao gets behind the steering wheel. “I thought it would have been easier for a woman to convince them to release her to us.”
“Well, it wasn’t, was it?”
“No,” he agrees, like the excellent employee that he is. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
He launches the boat while I try to get my bearings. It’s the way he said “take care of it” that I can’t get out of my head. If they’re willing to kill her, it can only mean one thing. “So she isn’t a match for the little spawn.”
With a surprising burst of fury, Jia backhands me and, oh, there it is. Another tooth comes loose. I spit that one out, too. “The cord blood worked but you used it all up for the first transplant. You needed more. And then her bone marrow was rejected, wasn’t it?” It’s the only reason that they’d get rid of her. If Jia’s sickly child was a match for Bonnie, they would keep her alive just for that. For parts. “What is it, leukemia?”
A pained expression softens her face. “Such a nasty word to give to a baby. He’s just a child. My little angel. I would do anything . . .” Her voice falters, but she can’t seem to stop herself from continuing. “You’re right, of course. We found the initial cord blood match from a transplant registry. But my son . . . when he relapsed . . .” Tears stream down her face. “There were no other matches. Neither of us, Kai or me, was a potential donor. Dao had always suspected that Kai had another child out there, read about some woman in the paper who turned out to be you. When we tracked down the girl, we thought she would be the answer. But it was for nothing, all this trouble. She’s only a half sibling, you see.”
She falls silent, turning inward and away from me. And I see the desperation in her now. It is the same desperation I had sensed in Everett when he first called me. For the life of her child. “So he’s going to die.”
All the softness in her face disappears and a flush of color stains her high cheekbones. “Shut up.”
“You’re out of options now that Bonnie’s blood won’t work. He doesn’t have that much time left.”
“Shut up!”
“A baby with cancer.” I shake my head. “With your kind of money, you’d think you could find another match on the red market, but you can’t, can you?”
She stares at me. “I wonder . . . Kai was an idiot—no one, not even his father would deny that—but what did he ever see in you? I wouldn’t touch you if you paid me.”
For some godawful reason, this strikes me as hilarious. I smile, but it hurts. “Word on the street is that there isn’t a hell of a lot you wouldn’t do for money.” I never heard that, on the street or anywhere else. I just assumed.
She slaps me again, this time harder. My brain rattles around in my skull for a brief, stinging moment then steadies itself. No teeth come loose this time. “That’s why you keep the old man shut away, isn’t it? He wanted to divest but you’re a greedy bitch and when he had that stroke and couldn’t keep control of the company, you were glad, weren’t you?”
With a swift movement, she grabs my face as Dao launches the boat. “How dare you? Family is the most important thing in the world to me. He hadn’t been in his right mind even before the stroke. He wanted to halt production on our projects, even managed to get the island mine shut down before I found out.”
“Jia . . .” Dao says, his voice barely audible over the sound of the engine. I’d almost forgotten about him.
“Oh, she dies tonight anyway, Dao. What does it matter? Just focus on getting us as far away from our property as you can. Do your job.”
I feel my guts twist into a knot. Dao turns back to the wheel, chastised, but I feel no pity for him. Once the help, always the help. He should know that.
“He got old and thinks he’s in love with the damn forest,” Jia says.
Something in my head rings a bell, so loud it almost splits my temples. Whatever Kai had given me is pretty damn effective. “The mine. Mineral extraction.”
Her eyes narrow. “You’re not as stupid as you look. We’v
e been in rare earth mining for decades in sub-Saharan Africa and he didn’t give a flying fuck. He comes here after the Congo deal and, after we try to get the mine up and running a couple of times, he decides it’s not the right direction for the company.”
“But you already bought the rights.”
“Just before he had the stroke, he pulled the plug on our application. He wanted to make it into some kind of godforsaken sanctuary. But we mine. That’s what we do. We don’t create sanctuaries.”
“This land is unceded anyway,” I tell her, just in case she didn’t already know.
“Oh, fuck those tree huggers,” she says, in response to that. “We could push it through if we wanted. This isn’t my first rodeo, you know. I have people on the boards.”
I frown and struggle to hold on to a thought. It’s hard, but I manage. “It makes you look weak.”
“You’re damn right!” A gust of wind loosens her hair and the dark strands whip about her face. She looks like a madwoman and the change in her temperament throws me. The woman I spoke to in the lounge days ago . . . or was it weeks? I can’t remember. I’d never imagined her raising her voice or cursing. I’d never imagined her tears. But then again, last week, she wasn’t in a boat headed toward my demise, either. “We have mining interests everywhere . . . do you understand? We turn soft on one project, we turn soft on them all. Canada is one of the greatest mining nations in the world, and so is China. Zhang-Wei Industries is positioned to bridge the gap, so to speak. And my son will live to see it happen. I will find a way to save his life.”
Her mouth moves, but I barely hear the words. She has become banal to me. There is nothing more boring than greed. It is where east meets west and north meets south. At the center of everything is money. How very ordinary. Whatever I might have felt for her because of her cancer-stricken child evaporates. I close my eyes for a brief moment and when I open them she has a gun in her hand. Out of all the ways I see myself going, shot on a boat isn’t one of them. Perversely, I feel myself begin to smile. If that’s what’s about to happen, so be it. I’m feeling reckless again.
I meet her eyes, open my mouth, and let my voice soar.
After singing for the IT crew at WIN, this has been something that I’ve been itching to do. For too long I’ve denied myself this pleasure. If it’s going to be my last song, let it be the one that I’ve always wanted to be my mantra, though I’ve never had the courage to sing this one, until now. I’ve hummed it all my life, ever since I heard it for the first time in Pastor Franklin’s choir. If it’s going to be Nina Simone, it has to be the one that I never dared. It has to be “I’m Feeling Good.” And I am. Any minute now I’m going to be free of these people forever. An image nags at the back of my mind, a picture of someone with dark eyes like mine, but what more can I do for the girl?
My voice is strong now and I let the rawness in my throat bathe every note with a rasp that would make Louis Armstrong proud. The wind threatens to snatch the notes from my lips but it can’t, not tonight. Tonight belongs to me. I sing my song and it does, it truly does. Feel good.
Jia stares. I think she shoots me more out of surprise than anything else.
I feel the bullet tear into my left shoulder and the blast sends me sprawling back on the deck. Dao cuts the engine at the sound of the shot. I feel something sharp pierce my thigh, but that is a momentary distraction from the surge of pain in my shoulder, crashing over me like a tidal wave. I pull myself up onto the seat nearest to me and resume singing. I don’t want to look up at her for another second.
Jia raises her gun again, but something catches her attention behind me. I see a movement out of the corner of my eye and turn to it. A dark current rises up from the depths of the ocean and bursts from the water.
For a moment it’s as if time itself ceases to exist.
I have never seen anything more beautiful in my life. The clouds part, the moon shines overhead, casting its glow on the water. The dark current (because what else could it be?) sent me a savior. A great, forked tail slams the surface of the water in front of us. A tremor rocks through the boat and Jia loses her grip on the gun. Dao stumbles. He, too, has seen it. If I am Jonah and this is my whale, then it is an opportunity that I won’t squander.
I pull out the fishhook protruding from my thigh with a gasp and stumble toward my rapist’s wife. She screams for Dao, but I’m already upon her and pound the fishhook, slippery with my own blood, into her neck. Her arms grasp at my throat, my shoulder that her bullet ripped through. Just like her husband did when he twisted my ankle, she presses into the wound that she has created. The pain sends me reeling, but I see the gun she dropped just two paces away and I grab for it. The gun slips from my grip just as Dao comes for me, his own gun in hand. At the steering wheel, he was far enough away to have concern for Jia, but now, right in front of me, his shot cannot miss. The boat lurches again and he slips in my blood. I’m already on the ground so it is easier for me to find purchase. I grab the gun again and this time I don’t falter. The shot hits his abdomen and he goes flying backward. The force of the recoil slams into my upper body and my arm goes numb. The gun slips again and goes clattering to the deck.
I hear a step behind me and turn to see Jia, fishhook still lodged in her neck, hair spilling out behind her, almost upon me. Both arms useless now, I can’t even maintain a grip on the weapon so I stand on my twisted ankle, angle my wounded shoulder away from her and when her hands are upon me, I twist to the side, pushing her toward the low railing. She loses her balance, the force of deflection sending her careening over. What is a surprise is that she’s managed to grab on to the front of my jacket and, in a final show of strength, she takes me with her.
The freezing water slams into me, the shock of it sending me reeling, flailing my arms, looking for something solid. There’s nothing but Jia, still holding on. It’s so dark down here that the moonlight is lost. I can feel us sinking, feel her grip slacken. I have one good leg left so I press it into her stomach and kick out . . . and I am free.
My head breaks the water and I gasp in lungfuls of fresh air. The water is so cold and sharp that I’m once again able to focus. I know this will not last long. I’m losing too much blood. The waves will pull me under or I will get hypothermia and seize up. So I force myself to swim until my arms and legs give way and then I let the darkness consume me. Before I lose consciousness, I think I see a sliver of light on the horizon, but my mind is too exhausted to be trusted. I go to sleep.
Is it my imagination, or is that a warm current taking hold of me?
10
The man and the dog have been searching all day long.
The light is fading now and the trail that they’ve been following, winding along the coastline, has not been easy for him. His bad leg aches something fierce. He knows that they should have turned back by now, but feels a strange premonition urging him forward. They’re running out of time. He watches the dog stop to feel the salty air on her muzzle, then trots ahead and out of sight. He can do nothing to stop her. His limp has gotten worse from trekking through the rough terrain these past hours and it is all he can do to stay on his feet.
When Simone had called, Brazuca felt that the inevitable had snuck up on him. It hadn’t struck him with a blunt metal object, but it might as well have. He had betrayed a fragile trust and now owes a debt.
“I’m too late, Jon,” Simone had said. He had never known her to sound frantic before. “It took me a while to find this property—I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was looking in mainland Vancouver, not the island. I should have found it earlier. Something’s happened to her. I can feel it. I’ll stay put in case she reaches out from this end, but I need you to go over there.”
“Simone—”
“Just find her. Please.”
It was the please that did it for him.
Neither Crow nor Krushnik could tell him whether Nora had gone over to the island. They, too, were worried. They wanted to go with him, but he refused. He
’d been halfway down the hall when he heard the soft steps behind him, the click of nails on bare floors.
“You better take her with you, then,” said Crow, watching him and the dog from the doorway of their shabby offices.
“Hang on,” said Krushnik. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
But the mangy mutt refused to leave Brazuca’s side. She stayed with him during the ferry over and the long drive down to the address Simone gave him. When they arrived that morning to find the house still, a looming, silent presence, he felt a cold fear take hold of him. Then he saw the blood inside . . . God help him, all that blood, and Nora nowhere in sight.
He rounds a corner to find Whisper standing over a steep ravine, looking down at the rocks below. He’s about to move on ahead of her, but her ears are up, as though she’s caught a faint trace of a scent lingering there in the air. She takes off down the steep slope, picking her way down the easiest path. When she reaches about halfway, the rocks slide out from under her and she goes tumbling the rest of the way. Her nails grate against the ground, looking for purchase, but she finds none. One of her rear legs buckles beneath her. She hits the bottom.
“Hey!” Brazuca shouts as she limps over the rocks. “Come back here, you ugly mutt!”
She ignores him.
“Dammit,” he says, before he follows her, using the same path that she had. It takes him a lot longer. Now that he is on the ground, level with the rocks, he sees what she had sensed. There, near the ocean, hidden by a large boulder, is a huddled form of some sort. The dog approaches it cautiously, sniffs it. Then she grasps an arm in her mouth and pulls until the figure turns over.
“Jesus,” says Brazuca.
Suddenly, the dog lifts her head, her hackles up.
A sleek movement at the edge of the forest just above draws his eye and a cat, larger than Brazuca has ever seen, steps from the trees and looks down on them, baring its teeth.
