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.