The Rosewater Insurrection

by Tade Thompson

  Kaaro comes out into the physical world. Feeling like a bad taste in the mouth, barking coming from Yaro’s hole.

  Too easy.

  “Security cam,” he asks the house. “All directions.”

  All the feeds are jammed.

  Definitely too easy. I need eyes.

  He sits on the floor, closes his eyes. Back in the xenosphere. He flies out, his consciousness split in many directions, looking for eyes he can borrow. He finds a child, a reanimate, and what the child sees Kaaro sees.

  Not good. There are six soldiers creeping towards the house. They are wearing skin-tight assault suits and have gas masks with oxygen tanks. No part of their skin is exposed to the air, therefore they are invisible to the xenosphere. The first two were decoys, then, feints. This is the real thing. Prepared by someone who knows his talents.

  “Kaaro!”

  Shit, they’re not even hiding any more. Simply yelling through the door.

  “Kaaro, come out. Your government needs you.”

  No point lying. “Did Japhet send you?”

  Kaaro is surprised at this show of strength. He thinks of Japhet as an invertebrate. He reaches but cannot find the soldiers in the xenosphere, not a single gap. Professionals. He turns on the juice. He finds more reanimates. They are like empty vessels, hollow men, voids begging to be filled by Kaaro. On instinct, he enters those wells and…

  And they open their eyes, flooding Kaaro with data from all directions, a panoramic 3D view of the tableau. The black-clad attackers stepping over their convulsing comrades, suppressed rifles pointed at the doors and windows. Kaaro makes the reanimates move closer so he can see better, but then he realises he can make them move, and if he can make them move, he can make them attack.

  “Oh, you guys, watch this, watch this!” says Kaaro.

  He makes himself a beacon for the reanimates, draws them to his door. The squad notice and start to shoot them, but they’re spooked because it’s unexpected. They are here to get a retired sensitive, not clean up after an Opening. They work as they are trained, shooting the centre mass of the reanimates, but this makes no difference. Thirty reanimates now. Thirty-five. Kaaro did not expect so many.

  It is now close-quarters, a hand-to-hand and small-arms fight, with bayonets and daggers, too near to use rifles. One attacker goes down among a cloud of fists and headbutts. Sporadic gunfire before the others are engulfed. Kaaro can feel each and every one of them. He feels the bullet wounds as pinches. All of the reanimates he controls appear with him in the xenosphere. They’re like drones. Those shot in the head blink out; brain destroyed, no other way to control them.

  —but what if you—

  Stick to the matter at hand. They have removed the weapons. Some perish when the chip synchronisation fails and the weapons explode. They rip off the armour piece by piece. Collectively, they rip off limbs, and the courtyard is a mess of blood. When there are no more enemies to kill, they stand still, waiting, facing the house like an altar at which they worship a god of reanimates. Yaro starts to howl. Kaaro lets him out of the cubbyhole and strokes him.

  Yet more reanimates arrive, and Kaaro does not know how to shut off the signal he started. He feels no guilt in killing the soldiers. Fuck them. It’s not that he doesn’t understand remorse. He does. He just doesn’t feel that people who come to kill him should be spared. He feels like phoning Japhet and screaming, Fuck you I killed them all, ha ha, down the phone.

  Vultures gather overhead, and after two circuits of the killing field, five descend. Kaaro knows they are COBs and orders the reanimates to capture, kill and dismember them. The others overhead keep their distance. Kaaro hates not knowing who is watching, but he can assume that at least S45 is surveying his handiwork.

  He searches the bodies for credentials, finds nothing, which is odd.

  He pings Bad Fish.

  Shortly after, his phone rings.

  “What?” Bad Fish seems to be in a perpetual bad mood. Or maybe he just doesn’t like Kaaro. Probably the latter.

  “I have some soldiers here, dead soldiers. Can’t find any ID chips.”

  “And you want…?”

  “I want you to look at them and tell me who they are.”

  “You are an asshole. Give me a second.”

  Kaaro has a fix on certain minds, and Bad Fish is one of them. He knows what the hacker does with a bank of ID chips and tinkering with satellites and drones. It is amazing that nobody has executed Bad Fish yet, but then he probably covers his tracks better than anyone in the world. He has acolytes who worship him as the tech-god of the future.

  “Beloved,” says Bad Fish. “These little piggies are mercenaries.”

  Huh.

  Still, the president could be using them as proxies to avoid culpability, but that’s not his style. He doesn’t do subtle.

  “They have chips, they’re just masked from muggle-tech like yours. Stripping back the layers, I can tell you where they’re from.”

  “And?”

  Silence. Bad Fish goes off for two minutes and Kaaro is confused. Should he wait? Then he hears breathing. “Bad Fish?”

  “Hmm? Oh, you’re still here.”

  “Motherfucker, I’m waiting for your answer.”

  “Why? Kaaro, I’m busy here. The world is larger than your problems, you know.”

  Kaaro counts to ten under his breath. “Where did my six mercenaries come from?”

  “They’ve been here and there, but from the patterns, they’ve taken flight from the mayor’s mansion. Jack Jacques sent them to kill you. Have a nice day and fuck you.”

  Kaaro pulls out of the xenosphere and calls Aminat. It bounces or doesn’t connect or something. He tries through the xenosphere, but cannot find her, which could be anything or nothing. There’s flooding. The connections between xenoforms disconnect in adverse weather conditions. Still. He has always hated Jack Jacques, but now… well, now he has reason to kill him.

  He leaves the house, ignoring Yaro’s whining. Outside, there are over a hundred reanimates, all seeming to stare at Kaaro.

  “Troops, I have nothing inspiring to say. Go. Make me proud.”

  Kaaro feels a mild headache coming on, a tightness around the eyes, but otherwise he’s fine. They run away, towards the mansion, while he takes his stripped-down jeep. One of the only hydrocarbon-driven vehicles in Rosewater, it is not vulnerable to someone in power reprogramming it while in motion, or fluctuations in the central power like those electric ones are. He fills the tank from his underground stash of fuel which Aminat always says will consume the house in a ball of flame one day.

  He barely remembers how to drive an internal combustion engine, and the lack of an onboard navigational computer confuses him. Traffic is harmonised by each on-board computer being aware of that of other cars. He is an anomaly in the system and several times he either almost hits or is almost hit. After twenty minutes, he is smoother.

  Motherfucking Danladi, his trainer when he was with S45, used to say fleeing is stupid. Enemy at your back? No plan? He’d shake his mighty head. You can step back to create the desired striking distance, but you do not run.

  Which is bullshit. Kaaro has run many times and is still alive, which is more than he can say for his fellow sensitives. All dead. Kaaro is the last of them, the last of the humans with access to the xenosphere, or at least access to the information. There were other humans with different skills conferred by the xenosphere.

  But Jacques is a capitulator, a ball of green snot, a gigantic asshole. Kaaro will run from many things, but he will never run from Jack Jacques, and if the man is stupid enough to come after him, well, this is one enemy he will not leave at his back.

  Interlude: 2067

  Eric

  It’s uncanny that I can still find my way around Ona-oko. There are paved roads for the most part, but it seems they are based on the footpaths that we established back in 2055. I’m standing on a street called Ronbi. I don’t know who it’s named after, but I can tell
you that it was the first place in Rosewater to have a cement-block wall. You probably already know there were tents and shacks. The materials for those structures came from everywhere, being dragged in by individual people for their own use. There were no shops or stores, but a kind of barter thrived, what would later turn into eru, a primitive credit system. There was a lot of stealing as well, and I’m not talking food. If you had six-inch nails holding up your structure, a thief would extract one or two during the night, not enough to collapse your shack, but enough to make it wobble. The rampant theft of nails led a guy called Solo to build the first wall. It was a miserable thing, itself made of stolen cement blocks, but Solo’s wall stands as the first permanent structure of Rosewater. Solo built a wooden shack using his wall as a stabiliser, but someone else used the other side of the wall. These two structures became the first street because people naturally aggregated where others already were.

  Today, Ronbi Street has the least modern houses, partly because those who arrived first were the most deprived. The later arrivals were middle-class folk who already had money, or at least the potential for money. Places like Ubar got taken by the government and Atewo became a suburb. But it all started here. I’m trying to locate a rendezvous point and bump into two Rastas while not watching where I’m going. I apologise, but they may not even have noticed me.

  The house I aim for is a bungalow, plastered but not painted, with a courtyard but no gate. The wind sweeps the yard, lifts dust towards the east. It’s cold and maybe moist, going to rain at some point, I know it. There is Arabic pressed into the gable. A dog sleeps across the entrance, which is open. I step over it.

  “Salaam alekum,” I say. My words echo down a dark hall.

  “Alekum asalaam,” comes the reply, a man’s voice, but I don’t know from which room.

  There’s a smell, a residue of incense, but the air is still, in contrast to the rowdiness of the wind outside. The largest single human being I have ever seen walks towards me from the other end of the hall. The lights flick on as he comes, motion sensors activated. He’s tall, with his head barely clearing the ceiling, and he’s broad. He’s Polynesian, Samoan from what I read in his head—but Nigerian through and through. The man stops right in front of me, and he says nothing. He’s waiting.

  “Your name is Timu,” I say. “And the pass phrase is Malietoa Tanumafili II.”

  “You’re amazing. Welcome to the resistance,” he says. “Follow me.”

  They have been told that I will arrive and know their pass code without them supplying it to S45. Parlour tricks. I can’t see where I’m going because Timu’s back is so broad, but I pick up his impression of me, which is benign, and the fact that he is a decent man, gentle and lonely. At the far end of the hall there are steps leading down, and at the landing there is someone waiting. He’s black and has his shirt off and is covered in linear scars of varying lengths, from a few centimetres to a foot.

  “I’m Nurudeen Lala. Call me Nuru,” says the scarred man.

  “Eric.”

  Timu slouches away, and I can’t help staring.

  “He came here in ’sixty-four with uncontrolled diabetes. An imam sent him here, and once cured, he decided to spend the rest of his life memorising the Noble Quran and teaching in the Ile Keu down the road. Don’t ask me the logic. Your packages are right this way.”

  “Packages?”

  “They arrived a few days ago, keyed to your ID, I’m told. We didn’t touch them.”

  I look inside and hide my shock. Someone must really hate Jacques.

  “When and where?” I ask.

  “Not tonight,” he says. “Tonight, we boogie.”

  I think he means going to a club and dancing, which reminds me of the last time I was in Rosewater and would have been freaky, but, no, to Nuru, “boogie” means sexual intercourse. And when I find out the rest of the details, I almost kill the one man who has everything I need.

  Nuru takes me to a building I think is a brothel, but even when I’m declining, I see… something. So I read the girls one after the other and… I blow up at Nuru. It’s a rape camp, the girls—and they are girls, not women—have been rounded up by the resistance to “comfort” the fighters.

  “If you don’t wish to partake, don’t,” says Nuru.

  “Release them,” I say.

  “You are not from here; you do not understand.”

  I draw a gun, or at least, he thinks I have a gun. It’s manipulation of his visual cortex, but I can’t keep it going for long. “Release all the women and children.”

  It happens too fast. His scars split open like mouths and tentacles emerge. There is a wetness, like lubrication, that makes their touch disgust me, but pain overcomes that. He takes my gun hand and throws me off my feet. His mind is messy while he controls the tentacles, and I could use my ability to predict where he will send them, but it will take time to get used to.

  I’m still trying to decide where to take the confrontation when it starts to rain. Flood waters make the argument a moot point. We have to take the equipment to high ground to avoid water damage. While we work, I see Nuru’s mind. He considers himself an artist, and he co-authored his current body with the alien over years of Openings. The cuts, the scaffolding for the tentacles, the healing, the failures and re-cutting, he is the uber-reconstructed. And he has made others.

  But I manage to drop a seed of doubt into Nuru’s head, and it blossoms into regret.

  The rape camp is dismantled before the waters rise about two feet. I still plan to report it to my superiors.

  After my business with Jack Jacques.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Aminat

  The flood water has not receded, but it hasn’t got worse either, for which Aminat is grateful. She and Alyssa are in a canoe; she paid half of her eru for it, the owner navigating the new currents to the new bank. The homunculus drowned in the night. At least, they assumed so as it had not been seen or heard from in hours. Some of the poor folk cling to rooftops and wood, with improvised flotation devices like inflated inner tyre tubing. There is no rain, but it is cloudy and there is a fine mist that leaves the skin and clothing wet after a few minutes. All kinds of vessels mobilised by a community that has lost everything, ferrying people back and forth, meagre belongings clinging like fungus.

  The news is dire. All over Nimbus, there is talk of the government puncturing the dome, and that fills Aminat with genuine fear.

  Incoming call, from Femi. For a split second Aminat does not wish to answer, but she resists this. She uses her palm this time, to keep Alyssa from listening in.

  “Hello?” That calm, assured voice. Bitch.

  “You took your sweet time,” says Aminat. “I take it you got my messages.”

  “Mind your tone, Aminat. Remember who you’re talking to.”

  “Don’t. You have no idea the kind of time I’ve had.”

  “Did you sleep in a cell? Because I did.”

  “I suppose we’ve both had interesting times.”

  “Report.”

  Training and habit brings it all out of Aminat, about the car chase, about Alyssa Sutcliffe, about the murder attempt on her, about the death of her friend Efe, about the roll-up and the homunculus and, finally, the flood.

  “You’ve had a busy time.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t vex my spirit, woman, I know it’s hard being cut off, but you’re an agent, not a soldier. A soldier has to function with orders, but for you, orders are like suggestions. You have to—”

  “Are you apologising?”

  “I am not. I wasn’t in touch for good reason. What’s the state of Mrs. Sutcliffe?”

  Alyssa is sunning herself in the rocking boat despite the cloudy weather, as if they are out for some fun on the river on a Saturday afternoon. Her skin is covered with xeno-arthropods.

  “Satisfactory,” says Aminat.

  “Good. Bring her to the mayor’s mansion.”

  “What? No. That’s
a bad idea. If this war heats up, federal forces will target it.”

  “Somewhere you got the impression that we are negotiating, or in conference.”

  “Ma’am, I’m just saying she will be safer in the sublevels at Ubar, plus there’s a lab there with back-ups of my data.”

  “Understand something, Aminat, this conflict has afforded us opportunities to do what we need to: rid the Earth of this insinuating alien presence. Alyssa is an important player in this. I can send a team to get you.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to get killed. My best friend is already dead.”

  “And there will be a reckoning for that, Aminat, but now, today, I need you in here with me.”

  “Are you and Jacques in league now?”

  “Bedfellows, Aminat. Strange ones. You know how it goes.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “I don’t think anybody should trust him, but that’s not your concern right now. I’ll see if I can find a helicopter, a civilian one, don’t worry. I’ll send you coordinates for the LZ.”

  “Fine.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. And Aminat, if for any reason you think you might lose Alyssa or that the enemy will take her, you need to kill her.”

  “Who is the enemy?”

  “Right now? Anybody who is not me.”

  Before Aminat can say anything else, Femi hangs up. Alyssa is now staring at her from the other end of the boat. The oars hit the water with a hypnotic rhythm and Aminat can smell the sweat from the man behind her.

  “This is not water,” says Alyssa.

  “What isn’t water?”

  “This mist in the air. It isn’t water. I tasted it. It’s a chemical.”

  Aminat sticks out her tongue and immediately feels the artificial bitterness. She hawks and spits over the side. “What the hell is this?”