SHE COULDN’T BE sure, but Aisha Rose thought she might be dying.
Mama had told her that on the dreamed earth, people used that word all the time. “People would say it,” she said, “even if they didn’t mean it. Didn’t come close to meaning it. ‘I’m dying here,’ they’d say, and no one would give it even a second thought.”
Aisha Rose, days out of Nairobi, heading east across the savanna, realized that was another difference between the dreamed earth and the one she lived on and would die on. Back then, before the dream ended, you could say almost anything and mean something else, and everyone would understand anyway.
You could say you were starving, or chilled to the bone, or terrified, or dying, and mean that you hadn’t eaten in a few hours, or you needed to put on a sweater, or that you were nervous about something, or that you were merely very bored. And no one would take you seriously. They’d know you were exaggerating, and that you likely had never been any of those things, not really. Nor had they.
But back then, it was to your advantage to say things you didn’t really mean. On a huge and crowded earth, filled with floods of people like the ones in the pictures she and Mama looked at, you’d be invisible if you weren’t noisy. No one would listen. You’d be drowned out.
But life was different now. If words themselves mattered at all—and Aisha Rose had begun to wonder if they did, even as she continued her nightly recitations—then they only mattered if they meant something. They only mattered if they were true.
* * *
THE TRUTH: AISHA Rose was chilled to the bone.
Huddled beneath a thorn tree that she was too weak to climb, she watched the sun descend toward the western horizon. Even the last trailing outskirts of Nairobi had dwindled and finally disappeared. Now all that was left was endless bush stretching in both directions. She was already starting to shiver.
These were the patterns of her days on the savanna. Midday here in the bush was so hot that the sweat slid off her body in sheets—except when she couldn’t find enough to drink. Then her sweat would dry up, her tongue would swell in her mouth, the sun would twist her thoughts into disorganized fragments, and she would find herself losing minutes, even hours, as she staggered forward, one step at a time. Or, finally, retreated to the shade to rest and wait.
At first, when the heat began to ebb, when the sun began to lose its blistering strength, relief would almost overwhelm her. But it wouldn’t last long, because she knew what the night would bring. In just a few hours, as soon as the chill began to seep—and then flood—into her, she would crawl under a blanket of leaves, a leafy fallen branch, or some vines.
It didn’t help much, but it was better than nothing. Sometimes she had nothing.
Inevitably, the shivers would begin. Her teeth would click together, her skin erupt in a mass of goose bumps, and she’d shake so hard she thought that her translucent skin might split to reveal the bones planted so shallowly beneath.
Her whole body possessed by the cold, except for her left hand, the one she’d cut, which throbbed with heat. The palm was swollen and an angry red, and her forearm was beginning to get puffy, too. Within a few more days, she wouldn’t be able to use the hand for anything.
Finally, dawn would arrive, the day would begin to warm, and she’d get back to her feet. Start her hejira east once again, every goal stripped away but that one.
But she was beginning to hear voices—not Mama’s voice; Mama was silent—telling her she wouldn’t make it. She would die days, miles, before she reached her destination.
Telling her that she could die here, or she could die there. Why fight to keep going?
But she didn’t listen. She fought, and kept going, each day, as the sun rose and blasted her, and fell and tortured her.
* * *
AND AISHA ROSE was starving.
When had she last eaten? Yesterday? No, the day before. A green fruit plucked from a bush she did not recognize, fruit that had sat in her stomach like a stone. Some fat white grubs she’d found under a rock. And then some pink baby mice she’d dug out from their den and eaten raw, as their mother screamed at her from some nearby bushes. (The mother was too fast to catch, or Aisha Rose would have eaten her, too.)
Two days before that—or was it three?—she’d come upon the remains of a kill. She’d spotted it from miles away, of course, because of the vultures she’d seen circling above it and, as she drew closer, perched in the branches of nearby thorn trees.
And then, as she came even closer, moving as silently as she could through the dense bush that dotted this stretch of savanna, keeping upwind, the east wind always in her face, she could smell the kill as well. The rank odor of rotting meat.
The kill itself was shielded by the low bush, so Aisha Rose couldn’t see what it was, or what predators might still be around, until she was so close that her heart was pounding from fear. The blood rushing through her veins made her more alert but also caused her feverish head to spin, her vision to cloud.
Finally, she reached the edge of a small clearing and could identify the kill: a zebra. It had undoubtedly been taken by lions, but by now the big cats had eaten their fill and abandoned it, leaving behind the pungent odor of their urine and the scattered remains of their prey.
The zebra’s skeleton had been pulled into pieces. The bones were stained brown with old blood and yellow with gristle and scraps of meat that the lions had left behind. Here and there, strips of skin showed the black-and-white pattern.
Around the clearing, vultures tore at the remaining flesh and squabbled among themselves, hopping in their froglike way, twisting their long, bare necks like snakes, and hissing at each other. As they took notice of Aisha Rose’s presence, they turned and stared at her, unafraid.
At the far edge of the clearing, a family of jackals stood in a patch of tall grass, also watching her. Eight in all, but four were unlike any Aisha Rose had seen before. Instead of typical long, fine silver-and-tan coats, theirs were shorter, coarser, and speckled with brown.
Sick with hunger, Aisha Rose leaned against a tree and thought. She couldn’t be certain that the lions weren’t still in the area, or that a pack of hyenas might not show up at any moment to feast on what remained.
Including Aisha Rose. This time.
And even if the big predators were far off, Aisha Rose wasn’t even sure she could fend off the vultures and jackals. The only smart thing to do was turn and walk away. There were so many risks, and every one of them gave her this same message. Leave.
But she was so hungry. If she walked away from this kill, she might not reach the next one. If there was a next one within walking distance.
Still hesitating at the edge of the clearing, she looked down at her own body. Her hips jutted out under her tunic and her legs didn’t look that much different than a gazelle’s.
She knew she had longer than a day, but how much longer?
So she took her knife out of the leather sheath on her right hip, drew in a deep breath to calm her pounding heart and steady her whirling head, and walked forward toward the kill.
* * *
A FEW OF the vultures took off from the ground, their heavy wings creating a breeze that blew the fetid air into her face. But the rest stayed where they were, opening their bloodstained beaks wide and hissing at her as she headed past them, to the zebra’s vertebrae and ribs.
And she ate, pulling some of the soft flesh away from the ribs, breaking a smaller bone to suck out its marrow. Eating so quickly she thought she might choke but not caring.
She was so absorbed in her meal that she didn’t see four of the jackals coming out of the tall grass toward her. At first quiet and then yipping and growling, showing their teeth, they were led by one of the strange doglike ones.
Aisha Rose stood as tall as she could. She shouted, though her voice emerged as a thin squawk. She waved her knife. She strode toward the jackals as if she didn’t fear them even though she did. In all ways, she tried to make herself as large and threatening as possible.
It didn’t work. None of it worked.
The jackals scattered at first, but soon enough—almost immediately—they started circling around her, keeping apart, waiting for the moment for one to come in and give her the bite that would start the bleeding. The first bite that might as well have been the last.
It wasn’t really until that moment that Aisha Rose realized where she stood on the food chain.
On the totem pole, as Mama put it. Aisha Rose didn’t know what a totem pole was, and had never asked, but she’d understood what Mama meant.
Lower than lions and hyenas, and jackals. Equal to vultures. Maybe.
She fled before the jackals had the chance to prove their superiority. When you were that low on the totem pole, you accepted the fact if you wanted to stay alive.
At least for another day or two.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, back near the thorn tree, she found two treasures.
The first was a patch of sumeito vines, growing amid a jumble of boulders in a sunny spot beside a patch of woodland. As Mama had told her to do, Aisha Rose made a paste of torn-up leaves and sap she bled from the stems. Then, tearing off a strip of the filthy shift she wore—the only cloth she had—she strapped the paste to the angry wound in her palm.
Almost immediately she started to feel better. Maybe that was all in her mind, but that didn’t matter. As far as she was concerned, everything was in her mind.
The second treasure was a nest of ostrich eggs, its enormous guardian—the male who guarded the nest—out of sight somewhere. Six giant eggs, newly laid, lying there on the bare ground.
She knew that the adult would return soon, and that when he did, he would defend the nest. She also knew that his large size and powerful legs meant he could easily kick her to death and well might.
So Aisha Rose Atkinson, furtive mammal, lurker, egg-thief, human, took one of the huge eggs and carried it off to safer ground. Where she cracked it open with a rock, just as she’d seen the white vultures do, and ate and ate until she was covered in dripping yolk and her stomach bulged against the shrunken skin of her belly.
Then, stronger, unafraid, she stood and set out once again.