I WOKE IN SAINT Auspice’s hospital, a dressing on my face and my ribs strapped. There were three other people in the ward. The only one awake was an elderly black woman who eyed me over the top of a hefty, religious-looking book.
“Sister Beth!” she called, watching me as if I might make a run for it. “She’s awake. The new girl.”
A young Mahweni nurse looked in, then came to my bedside and took my pulse, checking it against a clockwork device she wore upside down on her apron front.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
I shrugged noncommittally, feeling the tightness of the bandages with even that small motion, but said, “Better, thank you.”
“Good,” she said. “You’ll be wanting something to eat.”
I started to say that I didn’t but found that wasn’t true.
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
“Just since yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” I said. “What time is it?”
“Almost lunchtime.”
“I’ve been asleep almost twenty-four hours?” I said, aghast. Anything could have happened in that time. I threw the bedclothes back, but the nurse replaced them.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” she said. “Have something to drink.”
She poured a glass of water from a jug and put it in my hands. I looked at it and waited, counting the seconds, feeling the woman across the ward watching me from her bed.
I needed to get out of here.
The doctor arrived minutes later, with Andrews in wary tow. He watched me too. I felt like a bomb everyone thought might go off at any moment.
“You did well,” said Dr. Mendelson. “Probably saved a lot of lives. And your own injuries, in the circumstances, are minor.”
“I have to go,” I said.
My voice sounded cracked and strained. I took a sip of the water and moistened my lips.
“I’d give it a day or two,” said the doctor.
“I don’t have a day or two,” I said. “I’ve already been here too long.”
“You were exhausted. That kind of exposure, up close to the device … You have to rest.”
“So I rested. Now I leave.”
“Not yet,” said the doctor. “I want to run some tests.”
“Listen, Ang,” said Andrews, “I’m sorry to have to say this—”
The inspector looked haggard, but I was in no mood to soothe his feelings.
“You didn’t need to shoot it,” I said.
“What?” he said, momentarily confused.
“The xipuku,” I shot back. “You didn’t need to kill it. It wouldn’t have hurt me. It was used to people, and it was sick and … Wait. What were you going to say?”
Andrews looked down, his brow furrowing, and in that moment, the ward door burst open and Sureyna came in.
“Is she awake?” she said.
The doctor nodded, and Andrews opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it and took a step backwards, allowing her access to me. I shifted painfully so that I could see her properly and every thought went out of my head as I took in the expression on her face. Her eyes were red and wet. She was ashen with shock and grief, and the hands in which she clutched a ravaged copy of the Bar-Selehm Standard trembled visibly.
“What?” I said, dreading her answer, my mind racing.
They accelerated Willinghouse’s trial or passed a new set of laws …
“He’s…” She tried, but could not find the words.
I stared at her, watching as all other emotions gave way to a sudden and overpowering sadness while Andrews and the doctor seemed to recede, their faces lowered ominously. Something terrible had happened.
“What is it?” I said again. “Tell me!”
Sureyna sank onto a chair and rocked forward, burying her face in her hands and clamping her hands over her mouth as if to hold back the wail that boiled out of her. Tears ran down her face, and she crumpled as if stabbed in the gut.
“Sureyna…” I began, but then I saw the newspaper headline.
Her tears had already spilled onto the paper so that it tore as I pried it from her hands, staring in horror.
A police spokesman confirmed this morning that, apparently despairing of his failed political ambitions, noted black activist Aaron Muhapi hanged himself in his cell overnight.…
As my own tears started to fall, I heard myself saying, “No. He wouldn’t. It’s a lie.”
* * *
BUT IT WASN’T. OR not entirely. In under an hour, the news that Aaron Muhapi was dead was everywhere. The Citizen confirmed it through black orderlies who had seen the body after he had been taken to the hospital, but their report also confirmed the lie I had recognized instinctively. He had not hanged himself. He had been beaten. Everywhere. It had begun with the soles of his feet, the small bones broken with truncheons, but it had progressed to more visible areas. The blow that killed him had partially crushed his skull.
The cover-up had been halfhearted at best. Richter’s government stood by the official suicide story, using it to imply not just the innocence of the policemen who had beaten Muhapi to death, but also the inherent moral weakness of the dead man and the failure of his political movement. But privately, according to Sureyna’s journalist friends, they didn’t seem to mind that the truth had leaked out, as if they assumed it would scare Muhapi’s supporters into silence and passivity.
I didn’t think it would. In my mind’s eye, I saw the fury in Peter’s face; the disciplined righteous devastation of Muhapi’s grieving widow, whose awful premonitions had all come true; the sorrow and anger of all who had stood peacefully behind the man at The Citizen, at his rallies; those who had danced at his house and delighted in his little boy …
Blood would run in the streets like rivers before they took this news silently, passively. But then perhaps that was what Richter and his cohorts wanted too, an excuse to bring the race war they so longed for to Bar-Selehm once and for all.
Richter was prime minister. Willinghouse was in prison. The Brevard party was in retreat, and the one man likely to unify the blacks, Lani, and moderate whites—a good, intelligent and charismatic man with a wife and a young son—had been beaten to death by a regime that felt so secure they did not even care that everyone knew. The city—my city—was collapsing. I held my tear-streaked face and drew my knees up to my chest, breathless with weeping, hugging myself and rocking back and forth like I did the day my father died.
I had failed, and all was lost.