When Kaaro wakes, Aminat is seated across the foot of the bed in full combat gear, watching him.
“Hi,” he says.
Aminat smiles, tight-lipped, but she does not move. “I have orders.”
There is a scratching sound from outside the door: Yaro hearing his master’s voice, trying to get in. That dog is excitable.
“I know. It’s in the xenosphere. I can read everyone here except Femi, because she takes precautions, and that Lora woman, who doesn’t use antifungals but somehow I can’t get through to her mind. Whatever. Yes. Orders. You and me. Into the dome. It’s like a Stephen King book.”
“Stop making jokes.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. I will protect you,” says Aminat. “I’m good at this. I promise you, I will look after you. I don’t give a fuck about the mission, but you and I will make it out of there alive.”
“How about Alyssa Sutcliffe?”
“She’s safe in Ubar in a secure facility.”
He dresses. It is not just the mission that frightens him. Every day fire falls from the sky, or assassination attempts miss by inches or electric elementals breach the ganglia and kill people. There is death everywhere, and being in the bunker doesn’t guarantee safety. He wants to be where Aminat is if he must die.
“What if we just find our way through the lines and leave? We could go to Lagos, to your family,” he says.
“My brother, Kaaro. Remember that I took this job to keep him safe from S45.”
“But Femi isn’t S45 any more, remember? She is, like us, a rebel.”
“Do not think you know what game she is playing. She could be a spy for the federal government. She could be working for herself towards ends that we do not know. Matryoshka dolls have nothing on that woman, my love. Do not underestimate her. If I thought there was any other way, I would take it, believe me. Let’s just get this over with.”
“I’m taking the dog.”
“What? No.”
“Yaro’s coming.”
“Kaaro, why the fuck do you have to spoil everything? Mo ro pe ori e o pe. Epe nja e. Aja? O fe gbe aja dani lo s’ogun? Iwo ati tani? Oya, gbono fu ara e, tori emi oni tele e, o. Sho gbo mi?” I think you’re daft, or you’re burdened by a curse. A dog? You want to take a dog to war? You and who? All right, go by yourself, because I’m not going with you, you hear?
“Fara bale.” Calm down.
“Gbenu soun.” Shut up.
“What do you suggest I do with him? Leave him here with these godless fucks?”
“He is going to die, Kaaro.”
“He might die here, too. We all might.”
“If it gives away our position or jeopardises the mission in any way—”
“Yes, you’ll kill him and mount his hide. I get it.”
Nobody is happy that Kaaro possessed a reanimate and made it bring Yaro to the bunker, a mouth to feed, dog poop to keep clean, yapping to keep muffled. The reanimate control has improved and for Kaaro it is like having senses everywhere in the city, a whole new xenosphere.
“Should we take some reanimates along?”
“Jesus, Kaaro, this is not a block party, you know?”
“We might need some cannon fodder.”
“First of all, from whom? The alien is sick. Second, the reanimates are people too. You can’t just decide to use them as human shields.”
“They aren’t human any more.”
“I think you’re trying to pick a fight. This is really not the time to stir up matters that we both know we disagree on. Unless you’re doing it on purpose.”
They soft-sulk to the staging area and all the way to the dome in the back of the jeep there is studied silence and deep breathing. Yaro is quiet in the carrier, which Kaaro holds. They are taken up a high-rise and at the top there is a zip-line. It does lead to one of the larger gaps in the dome, but there are cherubs eating at the edges of the hole, and the spikes on the dome… if they make a mistake, they might be impaled, not a future Kaaro wants for himself.
“We’ll be fine,” says Aminat, reading his mind.
“You don’t know that. You’ve never done this.”
“I’ll go first.”
“No, wait!”
Too late. She hooks her belt and jumps. Her figure recedes until it is at the opening, where the cherubs, thankfully, show no interest in her. She peers into the darkness, then gives Kaaro the thumbs-up. Behind him, the soldier who set everything up stares at Kaaro, as if to say, What kind of wimp are you where you let your girlfriend go first?
Kaaro is aware that some people zip-line for fun. He cannot understand this. He jumps. The shaking view gives him nausea, so he squeezes his eyes shut until he feels himself make impact, held from falling by strong arms.
“You can open your eyes now,” says Aminat.
This is the closest Kaaro has ever been to the cherubs. It’s like someone knitted them out of tree bark, vines and foliage. They don’t all have eyes or nostrils. Some just have mouths with sharp, wooden teeth. Some of the ones with large, green eyes don’t seem to use them for sight as they move randomly. Their wings beat slowly, peacefully, while they chew and swallow, chew and swallow. Yaro growls at them.
The dome feels bouncy underfoot, but what Kaaro isn’t prepared for is the stench from the hole. Like a blocked sewer line. This is the smell of stagnation and rot, a smell that bodes evil.
“How do we get inside?” Kaaro notices that one of the cherubs is keeping a green and black eye on them while it eats.
“Parachutes. We jump.”
The darkness prevails, as does the smell. Where are the electrical elementals? Where’s the glow from the inside of the dome? Aminat snaps some flares and drops them through the hole. They put on helmets with oxygen masks just in case there are toxins. Aminat goes first. They use base-jump chutes for the short drop, pre-opened because they assume no breeze inside the biodome. After Aminat touches down, Kaaro follows, feet first.
Kaaro cannot believe what he sees to start with, but it soon becomes evident that there is no malfunction of the eyes.
All the dome-dwellers are dead. They lie about in clumps as if stacked for burning. In the bright, fizzling light they seem to be moving, but it’s the flares causing the shadows to grow and shrink. Kaaro knows some of these people, or knows of them. They came to live here when he chickened out. This is going to hit him hard at some point, but for now, he has a job to do. Once the flares burn out there is pervasive darkness. Aminat activates light from her helmet and Kaaro follows suit. He examines the bodies.
“No trauma here. There’s no blood or wounding,” he says.
Aminat comes through on the radio. “There’s some post-mortem biting here.”
If not for the helmets, Kaaro would have smelled them. When the attack comes, he is unprepared, but it doesn’t matter. Four floaters, attacking from different directions, silent, hungry, though not as hungry as Kaaro has seen before. Aminat has a rifle out and shoots three in quick succession. They die but they don’t fall. The fourth soars away. Aminat puts further bullets in the dead ones, to be sure. Their gas bags rupture and hiss. Kaaro can hear Aminat’s heavy breathing through the radio. He signals for her to open the channel.
“They don’t like dead flesh,” she says.
“Apparently not.”
“Where do we go now?”
“I need to take my helmet off,” says Kaaro.
“Negative. You have no idea what killed these people. There could be contagion, toxins, anything.”
“And yet Yaro seems fine. Look at him. You’re okay, boy, aren’t you?” Yaro barks from a few yards away. “See? He’s alive and well. If we don’t do this, then we could spend the entire year searching. Underground, this creature is larger than the city, and that estimate is from over a decade ago. It may be even bigger now. I need to get an idea of what’s happening, but I can’t do that if I’m cut off from the xenosphere.”
Kaaro can tell Aminat is thinking of it. The moss on the ground is sickly. How did it get so bad in here? He releases Yaro from the carrier and the dog sniffs about.
“For the record, it’s a bad idea, but I can’t think of anything else. You realise if you take off your helmet, I need to do the same, otherwise we won’t be able to communicate. Which means we could both die.”
“How about just watch me and keep guard? When I’m back from the xenosphere I’ll signal, or put my helmet back on.”
She pulls him close and they touch visors. He takes off his helmet and she mouths, I love you. Don’t do anything stupid in there.
On this side of the dome there are folds in the membrane, and they form alcoves at ground level. Kaaro scoots over, sits, and rests the helmet in his lap. Aminat strokes his cheek, then holds her rifle across her chest, backing him. He resolves to write this woman a love letter if they survive, using a pen and sheet of paper and everything. Yaro comes over and sits nearby. The ground is cold, wet and soft against his buttocks, but the stench isn’t so bad. He wishes he had a cigarette for his ritual, but he’ll have to do without. Instead, he breathes deeply and imagines “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” playing in his head.
Getting into the wider xenosphere involves flowing outside his own mental defences. Kaaro has constructed a maze, along with certain attributes like wind, heat, smells, that must be negotiated in a particular sequence. He repeats seemingly random phrases, and after the maze, he is in a field. Yaro, he is surprised to find, follows him even here. It’s the real dog, not a memory like before.
“Good dog,” says Kaaro. He cannot understand why people think animals don’t have awareness.
Normally, Kaaro would transform into a gryphon, but on this mission he wants to be recognised, which makes him more vulnerable. Bolo is there, patrolling the shallows of consciousness.
“Bolo, follow me.”
What is meant to be the ground vibrates with the weight of the giant. What Kaaro perceives as the Drop Off is the edge of his mind and the entrance into the local shared consciousness. Usually, there would be representations of human minds scattered all over the place. This time, there is desolation. It is not exactly desert, but scrubland. The sky is devoid of clouds, but is the dark blue of gangrene. No birds, no insects, no wind.
“Well, fuck,” says Kaaro.
This means everybody within the dome is either dead or immune to the xenosphere. Anthony was always immune, and Kaaro has never read his mind.
“It’s going to be a long walk, boys.”
He feels an unexpected surge of well-being and he thinks Aminat may have kissed him where he sits.
In this place, time can be meaningless, but it seems they have been walking for an hour when Yaro starts to growl. The sky darkens and Kaaro looks up. A sheet of black moves towards them from the west. There’s a dot of white in the centre of the curved leading edge which turns out to be a single large eye that comes to a stop over the trio. With a closer look the sheet is thin legs attached to the eye, packed tightly together and scattering off into infinity at the edges of the “fabric.” Kaaro soothes Yaro, and Bolo follows his lead.
“Molara,” says Kaaro.
The shape comes to Earth, shrinks and changes into the more familiar shape: a naked black woman with blue butterfly wings. Last year she had been a succubus engaging Kaaro in hidden liaisons. He found out too late that she is an embodiment of the xenosphere, an anthropomorphised planet-mind, both alien and working for the aliens to gather and transmit information about Earth.
“Kaaro. It’s been a while.” She does not smile.
Molara had once said she would like Kaaro as a pet when the last human had been converted to alien cells, which makes Yaro’s presence meaningful in some way, but there is no time to unpack it.
“What do you want, Molara? I’m busy.”
“You’re looking for Anthony, aren’t you? I knew you’d come sooner or later. I know where he is. Follow me.”
Bolo stamps on her, but she dissipates into small blue butterflies, then reforms a hundred yards away.
“Sorry,” says Kaaro. “He no doubt sensed that I hate you.”
“Is there more posturing to come, or shall we proceed?”
“I think that’s it for now. Lay on, Macduff.”
She gestures, and they do not move, but the landscape runs under their feet and over their heads, as if the world rotates on its own axis faster, as if the destination comes to them. The flatness yields to a desert which waxes and wanes with dunes. The world stops at the edge of a large depression which looks like one of the craters formed after an underground nuclear weapon test. In the sand, someone has written “S.O.S.” in large wobbly letters.
There are monkeys all around the banks of the crater, about a hundred of them, hanging on, silent, all types. Howlers, marmosets, spiders, gibbons, macaques, and many whose names Kaaro does not know. Others he has never even seen, primates, but who knows what they are. How do you get monkeys to sit so still? They stare back, but do not react. They make way for Kaaro.
At the centre, Anthony. At closer look, he is curled into the foetal position around a small red plant. In his right hand, a teak statuette of an exaggerated woman, and in the left an exaggerated man.
“What is he—” Kaaro asks.
“He’s dead, Kaaro. That was his last mental image.”
Kaaro had saved Anthony’s life once, and the alien had saved Kaaro’s life in turn. Twice. But when Kaaro found that the friendliness from the alien was a patronising “kindness,” similar to Molara’s, similar to what humans show to animals, he had separated himself. Both Molara and Anthony are manifestations of the same thing: aliens who want our Earth. Kaaro makes his way down the incline and touches the body. Still and cold, no smell. He is about to touch the plant when a gust of wind stops him.
“Don’t,” says Molara.
“What is it?”
“That’s all that remains of the footholder’s life force. That’s Wormwood.”
Kaaro feels uneasy for the first time. He’s here to communicate with Wormwood, after all. Anthony was a stepping stone to that. “Is it dying?”
“Yes. It cannot truly live without an avatar. We need a new one, and we need to suppress the weed, Kaaro. This has gone on long enough.”
She looks at him with meaning.
“Forget it. I do not want to be a Wormwood avatar.”
“It isn’t so bad, Kaaro.”
“What is it with you and things like this? You were better when all you wanted was to fuck me.”
“I recall that you wanted it too.”
“I’m not being an avatar.”
“Well, we need a human to be a… Wait, I sense something. You know where the host is.”
Kaaro knows, intuits that she means Alyssa, and because of the nature of the xenosphere she knows that he knows.
“Give us the host, Kaaro.”
“I don’t have her.”
“It’s a female, then.”
Shit.
“Kaaro, as the only living Homian on Earth, she is the only one with the authority to be the avatar to Wormwood, more so than Anthony.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s Homian technology. All of this—me, the xenosphere, even Wormwood itself—the Homians made possible, and she has overriding importance and authority.”
“You’re asking me to help the extinction of my race.”
“You humans are doing a good enough job of extinctioning each other already. Rosewater is being bombed right now, and that’s only one of thirty-three conflicts currently happening around the world. Shall I talk about hydrocarbon waste products? Shall I talk about surface water contamination? Nuclear waste? Stop me when we get to a world-ending scenario that impresses you enough.”
“What happens if there is no avatar?”
“It delays things, but we have other footholders in different continents in hibernation. One has to die before the next activates, but rest assured, we will take this planet. Either we get an avatar and Wormwood lives or we don’t and Wormwood dies, but our mission will continue.”
“I don’t speak for humanity. I can’t make this decision by myself.”
Molara invades his space such that he can smell her musk. “Can you make the decision to fight the plant by yourself?”
“We’ve already tried to kill that thing.”
“I didn’t say we were going to kill it. The footholders have a tendency to take over entire planets, so you have to balance them out with one of these weeds. This got out of control and we need to slow it down, not exterminate it.”
“And you know how?”
“Oh, no, I’ve never done this before. It’s never been needed, but I’ve studied this one from a distance. It works along similar designs to Wormwood, meaning it has a human at its heart. I’m sure if we kill its avatar that will slow it.”
Kaaro reasons. Without the alien, Rosewater will collapse and be exterminated by federal troops. That indestructible plant has to go either way. The Alyssa issue is separate. How is she disposed towards humans? Aminat didn’t say much about it, just that the woman had a husband and daughter somewhere.
“All right, I’ll help with the plant, but you have to guarantee that at least the people of Rosewater and their families will be safe when the time comes.”
Those monkeys. Staring.
“We have an agreement.”
At that moment Kaaro feels a sting which increases to red heat and he is dragged out of the xenosphere without warning. Aminat is crouched, facing him, staring in his face, her own helmet off, knife in her hand.
His hand is bleeding at the heel where she poked him to make him aware. “What the fuck, Aminat.”
“Shhh. Look.” She points.
Two, three hundred yards away, emerging from a tunnel, armed and cautious, Nigerian troops, four and counting.
Huh.