My Soul to Take

by Tananarive Due

  Her instincts about her first interrogator had been right: the woman had been dressed like a scientist, but she’d been strictly an operative looking for information. The medical aspect of their abduction was pure bullshit. Her captors seemed like military types, perhaps from several different agencies. The soldiers in the hall seemed young. The three people who’d questioned her that day had been vastly different—an officious black woman, a nerd in Clark Kent eyeglasses, and a hairy biker type who looked like he worked undercover.

  The last one, appearing with his walrus mustache, mane of shaggy hair, and collection of old scars on his face, had scared the hell out of Phoenix before he opened his mouth. Despite his easygoing smile, Phoenix had expected him to hit her.

  Tell me everything you know about Glow. Let’s start at the beginning.

  She hadn’t been denied bathroom breaks, and she’d been offered food and water on a regular basis. She’d been subjected to hours of monotonous questioning about Glow and John Jamal Wright—his fingerprints had turned up at her house, of course—but no one had laid a hand on her or Marcus. Phoenix closed her eyes. Thank you, God.

  Their blood tests would come back fine, and they would let her go. But if that was true, why hadn’t it happened yet? And if the fear of infection was only a ruse, what difference would their blood tests make?

  Marcus began dozing off, his empty burger wrapper in his lap. Phoenix had lost track of the time long ago, but she thought it was late. It might be nearly eleven.

  “Come on, baby,” she said, nudging him awake. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “I want the top bunk, Mommy.”

  “Why?” Phoenix had planned to share the bottom bunk with him.

  “I’ve never slept in a bunk bed. I want to be up there.”

  “I don’t like sleeping in high places,” Phoenix said. She didn’t say so, but if they needed to try some kind of getaway, it would be a lot harder so many feet off the ground.

  “You stay on the bottom, Mommy. You’ll be under me, guarding me. That way, I can go to sleep and I won’t be scared.”

  Phoenix couldn’t argue with his point. The blankets were thin, so she draped hers over Marcus, covering him from head to toe. The mattresses were uncomfortable.

  But we won’t be here long, she told herself. Maybe just tonight.

  Her eyelids tugged together like magnets. She listened to Marcus’s steady breathing as long as she could, and then she was asleep.

  Hours passed. Phoenix never knew how many.

  As soon as she opened her eyes, she knew from the silence of the walls. She knew from the lethargy in her limbs, and a persistent drowsiness rocking her head that had nothing to do with normal sleep.

  They had drugged her after all. Had it been an odorless gas pumped into the room?

  “Please … please … please … no …” Phoenix whispered.

  She pulled herself up by the cold bed frame to see the bunk above hers. She was so tired from whatever they had given her, peering over the mattress was like scaling a mountain.

  Marcus’s bed was empty. Even his blankets were gone. Only the coloring book was left behind. She stared at the empty bed with all her might, trying to change the sight of it.

  Then Phoenix screamed.

  Fourteen

  Morning. Light. Still here.

  Jessica woke as she usually did, breathless and wide-eyed; a swimmer clawing for shore after sleep tried to drown her. She was eager to escape to her bedroom’s weak sunlight.

  6 a.m., the lime-green face of her digital alarm clock assured her. Still here.

  Jessica sat up beneath the queenly white canopy of David’s antique opium bed. The bed was built low to the ground, smaller than a queen, with regal carvings of dragons in rich teak. The bed and the smell of David’s spicy incense evoked an ancient time and place, but the illusion was broken by the shiny metallic CD player on her dresser and her leopard-print bra dangling from the top drawer.

  Jessica slipped her bare feet into her waiting white Nikes under the bed, the insoles slick from wear. She wrapped herself in the newsprint bathrobe her mother had bought her during her first internship at the Miami Sun-News, when she was eighteen. The hem’s loose threads tickled her thighs. Thank you, Lord. Still here.

  She stole out of bed, leaving David sleeping in a mound beneath the covers. Jessica glanced at her husband’s exposed brown shoulder, exquisitely contoured, then forced her eyes away. Contemplating David’s skin too long could lure her back into bed, where she might fall asleep staring at his face. David’s face could still do that.

  No. This was her time.

  The 1920’s-era oak floorboards groaned and creaked in the usual places as Jessica crept to Kira’s closed door, beside her bedroom. Jessica smiled at crayon drawings of her orange cat, Teacake, and the black Great Dane, Princess. Jessica pressed her ear to the door and heard the music of her daughter’s breathing.

  Still here.

  Jessica took the knob with a practiced, silent touch and cracked the door open to see Kira’s sleeping face. Coiled black curls rested on Kira’s forehead beneath a lone pink barrette. Last night’s shampoo smelled like honey. Kira’s tiny nose, which mimicked her father’s, was slightly crusted from the cold she had finally fought off after a week.

  But Kira’s breathing was clear and strong. No asthma today.

  Sweet relief came, a fresh taste in Jessica’s mouth. Still here.

  Her relief dizzied her. Her daughter Kira, her daily miracle, was safely asleep in a cocoon of silent toys and dreams. She watched Kira’s nose twitch above the rumpled pink face of Ariel from The Little Mermaid on the sheets rising and falling with her clear, even breaths. Sometimes Jessica stood in Kira’s doorway and watched her sleep for hours at a time.

  “She’s beautiful,” a woman’s voice said behind her.

  The voice cleaved Jessica in half; a voice she both knew and didn’t know.

  Already, Kira’s nose was swimming, blurry. The entire room would wash away.

  “No,” Jessica said to the woman behind her. “Not now.”

  “When?”

  “Not now, dammit.” She almost said damn you.

  Jessica waited without turning around, to be sure the voice was gone. She inhaled deeply, bathing her lungs. It’s 1997. I’m still here.

  But it was too late. Jessica had blinked, and now Kira’s bedroom door was closed. Quickly, she tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn, much less yield. She was locked out. Jessica pressed her ear to the door, listening for Kira’s breathing. Silence.

  And the door wasn’t a door. It was a stone wall as smooth as marble.

  Jessica was in her bed again, but it was a different bed. A different place. She was hugging the wall as if she could melt through it. Her cheek, pressed against the cool surface, was slick with tears. A tide of hatred welled inside her, with nowhere to go.

  Jessica wiped her face dry with her shirt. She hoped never to cry in front of Fana again.

  “What do you want?” Jessica said.

  She turned, expecting to see her adult daughter. Instead, there was a horrific, stunted figure draped in bees standing only as tall as her waist in the center of her room. The bees scuttled over one another in a wriggling mass, impenetrable.

  Jessica’s heart knocked against her rib cage, but only for a breath. She blinked, and the horrific image was gone. Her memories were confused, remaking Fana as a toddler on their worst day together. Some part of her might always see Fana draped in bees.

  The disorientation sometimes lasted for hours. Hallucinations. Voices.

  Was Fana really in the room with her? Maybe not.

  “I wanted to let you know we’re back,” Fana said.

  Yes. Fana was standing over the bedside table, stubbing out the Dreamstick in the clay platter that served as Jessica’s ashtray, scarred with tar and soot. Fana politely kept her eyes down, although her face seemed tight with disapproval. Or was that Jessica’s imagination, too? Maybe she wanted to s
ee a teenage daughter’s pout, something she might recognize. Once the thin wisps of smoke were smothered, Fana pocketed the Dreamstick in her jeans like a magician.

  Jessica almost told Fana to keep her hands off her property, but she had four more sticks in her desk. Those would last two or three days, and she could get more. In some wings of the colony, her status as Fana’s mother gave her access to anything she wanted. Beautiful men who looked young enough to be her sons were eager to bring her food and gifts, enchanted by the novelty of her. Some of them hadn’t laid eyes on a woman in decades, or longer.

  But Jessica steered clear of most of the colony. She steered clear, period.

  She was thirsty, as she always was when she woke, so she poured herself a glass of water from her crystalline decanter. No matter how long she’d been back in the Lalibela Colony, she never tired of how fine the water tasted. It was as thick as apple cider, rolling across her tongue with a vague whisper of sweetness. So crisp! Each gulp was like tasting water for the first time. One of the Life Brothers upworld was bottling the stuff and selling it, she’d heard.

  “How was the concert?” Jessica said, remembering. Proud of her recollection.

  “Fine.”

  “Phoenix came?”

  “Yes.”

  Jessica tried to say Good for you, Fana, but she was beyond empty praises or the glories of her daughter’s gifts. Fana had healed people at the concert, no doubt, using her mind as a conduit for the Blood’s healing.

  Khaldun would be proud. Fana, his pet project, was everything he’d prophesied.

  Jessica stood up, shaking feeling back into her legs. How long had she slept? Her limbs were awkward and unwieldy. In her dream world, there were clocks in every corner: her nightstand, her wristwatch, the microwave, her car. Here, she was always wondering about the time. So like a mortal, Fana’s guard Berhanu said when she asked him.

  Their sole clock was in the bedroom, a cheap plastic wall clock she’d bought at the last minute from an Addis market when she remembered that the Life Colony had none. But Jessica practically lived in the smaller room adjacent to the bedroom, separated by a door Dawit had built for her. She’d christened the room her study. She’d planned to start writing a book, her vow for years, but she spent most of her time on the spongy pallet beside her table, half sitting, half reclined, fleeing the terror and monotony of her new life.

  Dawit must be back, too. He’d decided not to disturb her, sleeping alone.

  So she was busted. Fine. It was silly to lie to him. Why bother?

  She and Dawit hadn’t lived apart since their first reunion in Lalibela when Fana was three, but maybe it was time. She’d felt that way for at least five years, not so much out of anger or boredom, but because she was wrung out. She was dry to the bone. She’d shared this new quarters with Dawit in Lalibela only because she’d been too intimidated to set up her own space in the vast, foreign colony where she was a stranger.

  Jessica didn’t have a good history with the Lalibela Colony. During her first visit to see Dawit, she and three-year-old Fana had been attacked by two Life Brothers. But no one dared to stand up to Fana directly now: if you were supposed to kill the dragon while it was small, that day had passed. She and Dawit had reunited to raise Fana, and Lord knew Fana had been raised.

  Jessica still sometimes enjoyed Dawit’s touch, but she preferred making love to him in the dream, where she still called him David and didn’t know anything about his Blood, his violent history, or his alien people. Physical sensation under Dreamsticks could seem more vivid than life. When she wanted David, he was always waiting in her memories. Why did she need Dawit when she could go back to the man he’d manufactured to fool her into marriage?

  It was his fault. He was the one who’d split himself in two. Split her in two.

  Jessica walked to the red marble washbasin on its contoured marble stand and splashed her face with the constantly replenishing water. The colors in her room jumped from dull gray to a sharp rainbow: red-tinged walls, Fana’s mustard-yellow T-shirt, a shiny orange at her bedside. Dawit must have brought the fruit for her. At least some of him was still David, thoughtful and doting—most of him, if she was honest with herself.

  She wished his best gestures felt like anything more than penance.

  Jessica’s stomach stabbed her with hunger pangs. She ate vivid meals in the dream, but her stomach never got the message. She might have been dreaming for nearly twenty-four hours. She didn’t need food as often as she had before the Blood, but breathing in misty nutrients like the Life Brothers who meditated for months didn’t do the job for her. Jessica shoved orange wedges into her mouth while juice dripped down her chin.

  “You should look at yourself in a mirror, Mom.” A ring of judgment from Fana.

  Jessica only grunted as she chewed. When the wall beside her glimmered with light, Jessica ignored it as a hallucination. Sometimes the whole room rippled like a waving flag.

  “Please look,” Fana said.

  A square patch of her wall was a mirror now, like a clear liquid pool upright. Jessica glanced at herself. Her hair hadn’t been combed in as long as she could remember, so it was in disarray across her forehead. Her T-shirt was stained with old meals eaten equally as hastily. And her face seemed gray instead of brown, even in the natural light from her open ceiling that stretched up at least a hundred feet. If not for the Blood, she might have thought she’d aged five years.

  Fana stood behind her in the reflection, tall and unknowable.

  One glance was all Jessica could take. “I get it,” she said. “I need a bath.”

  The liquid mirror froze and solidified, shifting until it was only the wall again.

  “You need more than a bath,” Fana said quietly. Gently. Fana seemed to float above Jessica, gazing at her with a blank pity that Jessica couldn’t stomach.

  “I’ve told you about that zoo in Miami called Metro Zoo, right? It’s mostly designed so it doesn’t have cages. Just these wide ditches. The animal are supposed to think they’re free. I’m taking Kira there today. Feel free to drop in, if you’d like to meet your sister.”

  “I’ve made a decision,” Fana said, ignoring her invitation. “I wanted to tell you first.”

  Jessica wasn’t clairvoyant—Teka had judged from her aura that she was still fifteen years away from even rudimentary telepathic gifts, if she kept up her meditation, which she hadn’t in at least three months—but she knew what Fana was going to say.

  Maybe she’d known since the shock of seeing blood on her daughter’s clothes and face in Mexico. He wouldn’t let her go.

  “You’re going back to him,” she said.

  “To ask him to stop the plague.”

  Of course. Jessica had avoided most conversations with Dawit and Alex about the new illness, but she should have known it was Michel. What else could Fana do, except follow her mother’s path straight to the man who could destroy her?

  Jessica shrugged. “He’s got you, baby.”

  “It’s not like that, Mom.”

  “Oh no, he’s got you good and tight, like a fly in a honey jar,” Jessica said. She sounded more like her own mother, probably because she spent so much time with Bea now. “The sticks mess with my memory, but I remember even if you don’t: you came to this room a year ago and said, ‘Mom, if I try to go back there before the ten years are up, you know I’m not in control. It’s him.’”

  Fana’s placid expression wavered as Jessica grazed one of Fana’s doubts. Stick around, baby girl, I’ve got a million of ’em, Jessica thought. The first days after their return to Lalibela had been better, when Fana had needed a mother again. Finding friendship with Fana hadn’t blunted the pain of losing her mother, friends, and world in one horrible night, but it had been a shiny trinket in the rubble.

  Now that was over. Fana had her world of meditation and instruction with Teka, and Dawit was happy to surf the havoc with Fana when she needed him. Havoc was his specialty.

  Jessica was fi
ne with her quiet world in the dream. Years ago, Dawit had warned her that she would lose everyone she loved, but people always lost themselves or everyone they knew; the Blood didn’t change that.

  “Seems funny,” Jessica said. “Here you are stressing about me and a little smoke in the air, and look at you headed straight to Hell. You need to think about your own choices, Fana.”

  “It’s not a happy choice, Mom.”

  “What Michel does or doesn’t do isn’t your responsibility. But you know that. And you didn’t come for my advice, so I won’t waste it.” Was she so short with Fana because that was who she had become, or because she was searching for a way to reach her?

  “You don’t think I should go?” Fana said. “Even to prevent suffering?”

  “Stop it,” Jessica said. “If all he had to do was spread a little misery to get you back, why did you bother to leave him?”

  “Five hundred dead already,” Fana said. “Phoenix’s mother-in-law. Issa’s sister.”

  Fana’s voice was at the end of a tunnel. There was enough residue from the Dreamsticks in the room’s sweetly scented air to make the colors fade when Jessica tried hard enough. Bees crawled erratically across Fana’s face, wings flitting; gone when Jessica blinked.

  “You’ve done worse by accident,” Jessica said. “People die, Fana. Now they’re home.”

  The hurricane once had been a taboo subject, a primal wound between them. Maybe Fana had grown beyond her trauma, but Jessica couldn’t forget witnessing her toddler daughter’s transformation into a terrible, foreign entity with power over the sky, riding the Shadows.

  Michel swam in their stink, and Fana would go back to the Shadows, too, one day. Jessica had known that since Fana was three. It was too much power to ignore.

  “What happened to the woman who raised me, Mom?” Fana said. “Who taught me that it was worth risking everything to help people?”

  Jessica tried to feel hurt, or pain, but all that came was a weary laugh. For all Fana’s gifts, the girl was still so blind sometimes. “I wouldn’t sacrifice you for five million people, Fana. Or five billion.”