Kaaro spoons the bespoke dog food from the saucepan into Yaro’s bowl. The dog starts eating even before the first lumps stop moving.
“Slow down! Savour the taste, you ingrate. I spent hours on that.”
Yaro continues to scoff down the food, eyes occasionally flicking up to his master, but generally looking at the food. Kaaro places the saucepan in the sink and runs some water into it, after which he squirts some washing-up liquid and stirs. He opens the fridge, selects a beer and closes the door.
“Penultimate bottle,” says the fridge.
“Fuck you,” says Kaaro. “I know. I can count to two.”
When Yaro finishes the meal he laps from his water bowl, then pads over to Kaaro’s feet and sits down, crossed paws, like he’s waiting for instructions.
“Don’t fart. I swear to God, I’ll turn you into a rug.”
His phone rings. Japhet Eurohen, his old new boss. This is his third call, so it must be important. Good. Ignoring it is so much more satisfying.
He scratches Yaro’s back. The dog twists his neck and licks Kaaro’s fingers. Sleep will follow and Kaaro will have to creep out of the kitchen.
Kaaro’s forearm beeps and a voice screeches through.
“Kaaro, ah-ah, ore wa! Why don’t you want to speak to me, now?” Eurohen. How the hell?
“How are you—”
“Overrides, Kaaro. You’d be surprised what we can do these days. Stop trying to hang up, it won’t work.”
“I wasn’t trying to hang up.” Kaaro tries to hang up. “What do you want?”
“I’m calling on behalf of the president.”
“Get to the point, Japhet, what do you want?”
“The president wants to know if you will do your duty in the coming troubles between Nigeria and Rosewater.”
“There is no duty. I don’t work for S45 any more, Japhet. You know that.”
“Your duty as a Nigerian, Kaaro.”
“Hmmm. I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, was I really a Nigerian to start with? Just because I happened to be born within the arbitrary boundaries that the British set up, I’m supposed to take on a citizenship? That’s just an accident of biology. Being here, in Rosewater, now, that’s an accident as well.”
“So you won’t answer when your country calls?”
“Have you not been listening? I’m saying Rosewater’s my country now.”
There is the sound of swallowing on the other side. Kaaro tries every combination of buttons to shut the call down.
“We will remember, Kaaro.”
“Yes, yes, whatever. Can you hang up or tell me how to hang up? It’s my nap time and my dog needs his beauty sleep.”
Eventually, after huffing and puffing, Eurohen disconnects. Kaaro sends a text to Bad Fish asking for a fortification to stop this kind of intrusion. He gets no response. Yaro is asleep on the kitchen floor. Kaaro steps off the stool and makes his way to the bathroom. When he comes out, Oyin Da is in the hallway. He hasn’t seen the Bicycle Girl—fugitive, supposed terrorist, dome-dweller—in over a year and she looks harried, except for her eyes, which are calculating as usual.
“Kaaro, there are people coming for you. Run.”
With that she disappears.
He whistles for Yaro, and opens a hidey-hole he had dug into the foundations of the property. Yaro squirrels away inside, and Kaaro closes the latch.
“Windows, one-inch gap,” he tells the room. He waits for ten seconds, as the xenoforms infiltrate the filtered air of his flat, then he enters the xenosphere.
There are two of them, armed, a few yards away from the front door, wearing suits. Kaaro doesn’t know who they are, but doesn’t care. He locks every neural pathway in both of their brains in the on position. They drop to the ground and start convulsing. One of them yelps with each muscle contraction and the other wets his pants.
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.