“Job’s over. Or nearly,” she says. “Remember how we used to talk about sneaking back here, and you know . . .”
“What, eating our weight in samp and beans?” I tease.
“No!” She pinches me in the side. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Stealing all the hairnets on mala mogodu day so we’d have to go off campus to eat? Spiking an entire tub of that drab beef stew with chili powder?” I make the mistake of looking into the serving tray nearest me. The carcass of a dead rat is curled up in one corner. I cringe, and when I look back at Nkosazana, her shirt is off, and I feel like I’m not the only one that’s capable of turning clothing to vapor. She holds her weight like a woman now, fuller, rounder. Softer in the places that need to be soft, and firmer in those where life in the camps demands it.
“We’ve still got a couple hours before we need to worry about daybreak.” Her hand touches my chest. She presses until I’m backed up against the iceboxes. She eases her body up against mine, and all of a sudden, I’m Auben all over. Naked, fragile, and half-starved of love as well.
Hands that have pulled the tethers of the moon tremble at the magnificent curve of her breasts. Skin that has withstood the fires of suns burns hot where her flesh touches mine, and the vacuum of space could only wish to be as cold as when her lips pull away from me, again, again, and again, in a rhythm that throbs to the beat of the universe. Expanding ever farther into the nothing. Faster. And faster. And . . .
Time stops. Days, weeks, a millennium passes in that moment, our bodies entwined, a million thoughts pass through my mind, and every single one of them obsesses over how much I love Nkosazana. How could I not? The only person in the world who could make me feel—
This.
Damned.
Good.
And not just here, about to cross the precipice. I mean, all the time. Forever.
“I love you!” I scream, grit my teeth, clinch my eyes, as gravity returns, and all the laws of nature with it. The ride down is a swift one. I tingle all over. Splayed over the tile floor like a puddle of jelly, I take a moment to savor the feeling, then open my eyes. Nkosazana’s already up, tucking her shirt into her pants.
“That was nice,” she says with a wink.
“Nice?” I ask. There must be a fair amount of disappointment in my voice, because she smiles warmly at me.
“Very nice,” she says.
Yeah, okay. I’ll roll with it. “It was pretty good.” I peel myself up, resting back on my elbows. I take a deep breath, and roll my skin into the drab gray swatches of fabric that Chiso had worn. “Just like old times.”
“Definitely.” She nods to herself, eyeing me suspiciously. I tense, puff my chest, trying not to look like a kicked pup, but I’m failing so hard. “Wait . . . you’re not . . . into me, are you?”
“No, I mean. I just thought. I dunno. Maybe?” Hope springs.
“Auben Mtuze,” she says my name, my old name, like it’s a cuss. She smiles, and no longer in a rush, comes over to me, looks me square in the eyes. “Don’t tell me becoming a god has softened your heart.”
“I’ve come to some realizations. About what’s important.”
“Like?” She arches a brow.
“Like family. Friendship. Love.”
“Friendship, I’ll take. I like you, Auben. I really do. I always have.” She pecks me on the cheek. “I’ve gotta piss,” she says, and like that, she’s off.
A thousand glass shards pierce my heart, searing pain for a long moment, but it goes completely numb. Breathe. Breathe, damn it. I force the breath out of me, my eyes burning red-hot in their sockets. I tremble all over. I try to restrain my temper, but soon the earth starts humming along with me.
BREATHE.
In and out, in and out. I think about what Chimwe had said, fearing what would happen to a god whose love goes unrequited. But eir fear was unfounded. I can control this. Light fixtures above sway like pendulums. Doors to empty cabinets swing on their hinges. Layers of dust and dirt stir up into the air.
Fucking breathe, Auben, I grate through my mind like a saw, until finally the tremors subside. See. Nothing to fear. It’s still hurts to get rejected, but at least the seas are not boiling off, and the sky’s not burning.
Nkosazana’s bag has fallen off the counter from all the commotion, zipper busted, contents strewn wide. I grit my teeth, hoping that my infatuation hasn’t ruined all that delicate equipment. I check the devices over, they’re dented, busted, rusted. Not something a little fall would have caused. It’s all scrap, not the precision-crafted tools I’d expected.
“Auben, what was—” Nkosazana says as she runs back into the cafeteria. She sees what I’m holding. Stops where she stands.
“What is this?” I demand of her. “It’s just a bag of junk.”
“It’s nothing you need to worry over,” she says, then bends down and starts shoving the busted tools back into her bag. Finally, when it’s all packed, she takes another swig of water before offering me her canteen.
“No, thanks. My bladder is about to burst as it is.”
“Better take care of that then. It’s a long ride back.”
“Yeah. Maybe I’d better,” I somehow manage to say this without belying the burning suspicion braiding through my mind.
We chat the entire trip back, wind whipping at our faces as the skitter-scat engine rumbles away from the ass-end of Grace Mountain. I laugh when Nkosazana laughs, sigh when she sighs, blink when she blinks. We connect on a deeply platonic level. It’s like we’re best friends. Like we’re siblings. Like we’re the same person. I absorb the cadence of her stories, feel the tension of her voice right before she delivers the punch line to a joke, calculate the angles of her hand gestures.
“Auben, I’m really glad we had this time together,” she says as the familiar shape of Akinyemi rises above the horizon. The oryxless carriage slows.
“Auben, I’m really glad we had this time together,” I mimic. She looks at me, smolders.
“Why are you mocking me?” she says.
“Why are you mocking me?” I repeat, putting my hand on my hip to match hers.
“Funny. Here I was thinking you were beyond these childish games.”
I grin at her. Finally, finally . . . I get the rules of the game she’s playing, and I’m about to rewrite them. I get out of the carriage, and round the back where Nkosazana had stuffed her bag. There’s a big gold lock. I put my fist to it and extend a claw, slice it to pieces. The trunk pops open, revealing a nice, velvet-lined compartment, just big enough to fit a body in.
“What are you doing?” Nkosazana screams at me. She jumps out of the carriage, takes one look at me, and faints.
Nkosazana struts into the subsecular warehouse, bag slung over her shoulder like she’s bearing the spoils of war. The whole place swarms with goggle-eyed machinists bent over their work, torches sparking, saws buzzing, the steady churn of steam fogging up the room. She sees Enna Zeogwu inspecting the welding seams on a giant machination, a spiderlike thing come to life from hunks of metal. A large furnace burns where a mouth should be, twin red-hot eyes and steam petering out from the smokestacks.
“We still need more power,” Enna Zeogwu says, looking into the furnace, the lenses of her goggles reflecting the fire inside. “If we can barely scrape together enough fuel for this prototype, what hope do we have for a fleet? A four-person team with a pickax and an oryx-drawn cart could harvest more wood and ore than this contraption!”
Standing fully upright, the machination does a slow dance on its mighty haunches while the undercarriage pivots, revealing a thick protrusion that neatly houses industrial-sized drills, saws, and hammers.
“We’re working on it, Enna Zeogwu!” says one of the other machinists.
Nkosazana approaches the leader of the sect, ready to share her bounty and claim her congratulations on the collection of junk she’d reclaimed from the Cape, but a hand comes down on her shoulder and spins her around.
>
“What are you doing?” Ruda whispers. Her is hair thinly plaited and pulled up into a knot atop her head, and she’s wearing the same blue-gray worksuit the other machinists are sporting, streaked over by three different hues of grease stains. Nkosazana loses her balance, but Ruda pulls her back up. “Whoa, there. Do you need to sit down? You look a little dizzy.”
“Ruda? What are you doing here?”
“Saving your ass from ruining four years’ worth of work, that’s what! Were you just about to hand everything over to Enna Zeogwu?” Ruda doesn’t wait for an answer and whisks Nkosazana away to a dark corner. “Did you get it all?”
Nkosazana nods.
“All five of them?” Ruda arcs an awestruck brow.
Nkosazana nods again, sets the bag atop a worktop covered in metal shavings, and then zips open the bag, revealing the rusted instruments.
Ruda sucks her teeth. “Not those.” She grabs the bag, dumps the contents onto the floor, then rifles through an internal pocket. She pulls out a metallic envelope and looks inside. “Saliva, blood, tears.” She pauses. “Urine. Semen . . . I’m not even going to ask how you got those.” She stares into Nkosazana’s eyes—stares hard, too hard, as if she’s penetrating the privacy of her very thoughts. “You know you didn’t have to. Blood and saliva work just fine.”
“What can I say?” Nkosazana boldly lifts a brow. “Dedicated to the cause.”
“Lwazi!” Ruda says in a harsh whisper. Seconds later, Nkosazana and Ruda’s father is there, armed with a leaded apron full of scientific instruments.
“You got them?” he asks, taking the metallic envelope and reaching in with a pair of tongs. He pulls out five handkerchiefs, each drenched in body fluids that glow blue-white. Ruda and Lwazi don their goggles and stare as Lwazi takes readings with a metered device.
“I think we’ve done it. Definitely potent enough now,” he says, then he looks Nkosazana up and down. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a demon.”
Ruda snorts. “Lwazi! She’s been through enough.”
“It wasn’t my idea for her to go around sleeping with the devil!” he whispers, and suddenly there’s a pained look in his eyes before he grabs the envelope and rushes away.
“Ugh,” Ruda says, rolling her eyes. “He played the role of our father so long, now he’s really acting like one. I’m just glad we’re done with all of that, pretending to be those awful sisters. And when Enna Zeogwu sees what we’ve done, how we’ve solved all of our power problems forever, she won’t be able to overlook us anymore.”
“Singletons . . .” Nkosazana breathes.
“Changing the world for the better! But you know, if I did have a sister, I’d like for her to be just like you. Confident. Charming. More dedicated to the cause than anyone has a right to ask.”
Nkosazana wraps her arms around Ruda, pulls her body in tight. Natural, at first, but then it stretches on too long. Much longer than a hug should last between sisters. Between artists of deception. Between anybody, really.
“Come on,” Ruda says as she struggles to free herself. “Let’s go give Lwazi a hand with the distillation before he wrecks everything.” She tries to laugh off the awkwardness, but makes the mistake of looking into Nkosazana’s eyes. “What, why are you staring at me like that?” Her lips open into a perfect circle, about to scream a name, but Nkosazana’s mouth is upon them so fast, Ruda doesn’t get the chance to utter a syllable. The kiss is wild, deep. The flavor is nutty and sweet, sucked over the tongue, and smooth going down, like a good malt. Exactly as expected, only it ends entirely too soon.
There is nothing left to taste but ice.
Someone screams. Nkosazana startles, bumps Ruda who falls back, a sculpture of pure perfection right up until the instant she collides with the floor. Millions of ice shards explode on the concrete.
In the span of seconds, the room’s temperature drops to below freezing. Nervous puffs of smoke rise from the sect workers’ mouths, all eyes trained on me. On all the facets of my godhood. They shiver. Teeth chatter. Probably from the cold.
“Mother!” I cry out. The entire building shakes, metal clatters, gear stacks topple, people are brought to their knees.
She comes to me, her white lab coat flapping behind her like a full-length cape, pristine, despite the piles of coke coals and black dust littering the entire floor. She doesn’t bat an eyelash at the beast standing before her.
“Why, Mother?” is all I can manage. All I can say without turning into a stream of tears.
She looks down at the splinters of crystal ice that used to be Ruda. “I warned her not to get too close,” she says solemnly.
“Just like you refused to get too close?” I say. “Like you refused to be our mother, and for what? Because you need a little bit of my blood to power your big, powerful resource-fetching machination?”
Something like compassion flashes in her eyes, something I can barely remember from our early childhood, but it passes as she covers them up again with her bulky goggles. “We don’t need your blood,” she says. “We just need you to stay out of our way. We’ve fought against the religious sects so long, they’ve stifled our work. Plotted against our advancements. Imagine where we’d be as a people if we’d been allowed to delve into science without restrictions! We’d be walking on the moon instead of staring at it through telescopes.”
“But I encourage science! Akinyemi is built upon science.”
“True, but your celestial manipulations wreak havoc on our data. You, son, were chaos as soon as you erupted from my womb.”
I shake my head. “Aunt Cisse said I was perfection.” I hold my late aunt’s words in front of me like a shield.
Mother’s mouth twitches at the mention of Cisse’s name. I’ve struck a nerve. “Chaos. From that first moment I held you in my arms, I knew what you were. I should have told the sect then, but I was stubborn. I thought I could change you, or at least stop you from becoming what you were meant to be.”
“You could have killed us, Mother. When we were weak and vulnerable. But you couldn’t because you needed us. You loved us.”
“I was doing my job. And you can’t kill a god. Only break their vessel, if you’ve got someone foolish enough, someone strong-headed enough to try. But the souls of gods would only find another vessel.” Mother’s hand hovers over the womb Kasim and I had once shared. “Then things started happening. Bathwater started turning ice-cold, sitters complained about bite marks and blackouts. I put you and Kasim through Discernment early, and had the practitioner do everything he could to prevent you from accessing your powers. Then I spent the next twelve years hoping it’d worked.”
“What about the bedtime stories? What about when you tucked us in at night and made us our favorite meals for our birthday dinners? Was that just a part of the job?”
She stares, says nothing.
“You loved us!” I yell at her. “You love me, and you need me.” I plead with everything I have in me. I hold out one arm and use a claw to slice from the inside of my elbow to my wrist. A blinding flash of white light spills from the wound, causing all the machinists to shield their eyes, even those with protective goggles. Mother doesn’t look away.
“Take my blood,” I tell her. “Take all of it. Power every machination in this whole wretched city. Just tell me you need me.” Before I know it, I’m standing in a pool of molten blood.
Mother steps back, maybe from the searing heat, maybe because she’s repulsed by the thought of being near me. “I think you should leave now,” she says.
I go, feet pounding the earth, dirt and stone splitting with each step. There’s so much blood, so much it doesn’t even seem possible that this body has contained it all, but it keeps flowing down behind me.
Above hangs the moon—the impossibly distant moon Mother would rather coddle than spend an instant thinking about the son who’s been right here just out of arm’s reach his whole life. I stare hard at the moon, connect with it, the gossamers in my mind a te
rrible, tangled mess. My temper bucks and a violent charge whips through me, a soundless explosion so intense, I bite down on my fist to keep my teeth from shattering.
When I look up, the sky is changed. Most of the moon is now a haze of insignificant dust that used to make up something magnificent, something seemingly impervious and unexpectedly fragile.
My temper has not been mollified and nothing is safe from my touch. I breathe in, breathe out—tethers humming at my fingertips like angry wasps, waiting impatiently for my next command. Those commands are foreign, and wrong, and much, much too easy to give. It is truly unfair that the only person capable of healing my fury is the one who has given me my deepest, coldest scars. Still, I must find him, and if I can keep calm enough not to rip him to shreds, then maybe he can help.
I stand at the tip of Grace Mountain, at the doors of the Sanctuary—or what used to be the doors of the Sanctuary. They’ve come unhinged, centuries-old tarred wood burnt down to a collection of blackened splinters. Inside is worse. Scattered light shines through broken stained glass. Enormous defting sticks lie strewn across the pulpit, like an entire forest toppled by a storm.
But I don’t see Kasim. Don’t feel him anywhere. I keep looking, beneath overturned pews, behind broken doors. I yell out Kasim’s name over and over, my words echoing back at me, so angry and bitter. Maybe he’s not here, but I do have one way I can reach him. I’m weak, dizzy from losing so much blood, but I still find the strength to maneuver the defting sticks. They’re charred and burnt like the rest of this place, but most of the gold-inset inscriptions are legible.
“Kasim, if you can hear me, tell me where you are.” I look dubiously at the sticks. I’d had enough trouble with the defting trainers, but I have to try at least. I tent two sticks together, and they come easily to a point. They stand solidly, to my surprise, but the second pair I set opposite the first nearly collapse on top of me. I try again. And again. I get the feeling that someone is watching, and I’m creeped out by the gaggle of broken, battered zekwenusi statues staring back at me with their menacing marbled eyes. I swallow back my unease and try the sticks again with no luck.
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