FINALLY, THEY REMEMBERED to bring some food. It was about time: Aisha Rose couldn’t recall when she’d last eaten, and from the expression on Jason’s face, he was as hungry as she was.
There was fish soup—two portions for her, four for him—and hard biscuits, which hurt her mouth, and pickled vegetables, which she stayed away from. Jason ate everything, sometimes looking at the food like he couldn’t believe he wasn’t imagining it.
But the two of them still weren’t allowed out of the mess. Shapiro said she wanted them to rest. That didn’t make much sense to Aisha Rose, so she wondered if there was actually another reason. She thought that maybe everyone was still a little afraid of them, especially of her.
In any case, she was happy to eat with Jason, with one or the other of those two, the boy and girl who looked alike, guarding the door.
Dessert was dried fruit, mango. Aisha Rose liked it more than the coconut she’d opened, though nowhere near as much as the fresh mangos that had grown outside the Naro Moru house.
Before they took the plate away, Aisha Rose put some of the dried mango in the pocket of her new dress. You never knew when—or if—you’d find something else to eat.
* * *
WHEN THEY WERE finished, Shapiro came back with a few others, including a man, not that much older than Aisha Rose herself, who seemed to think he was in charge, too. Not as in charge as Shapiro, though, of course.
Aisha Rose didn’t listen to his name. There were too many names.
“Okay if we ask you some more questions?” Shapiro said. Aisha Rose saw that this itself wasn’t really a question, so all she did was shrug. Sitting beside her, Jason shrugged, too.
Now he was looking as tired as she felt. She was also a little dizzy and hot, with aching muscles like she’d been climbing.
But that didn’t seem to matter to Shapiro and the others. For the first hour or so, they talked to Jason. Aisha Rose listened to some of it. The rest of the time she dozed or thought about what she’d say to Kait when she finally saw her again.
So even though Aisha Rose didn’t always hear the words, she loved the sound of Jason’s voice, the deep rumble so different from Mama’s. Even more she loved the feel of his strong hand, which she kept captured in her own whenever she could.
Not that she needed to pay attention. Everything he told them about the slave camp she either already knew, had guessed at, or didn’t care about.
The rest, the way the camp worked, how many people were there, how it had started, what the ovens were for (though she and, she imagined, everyone else had guessed that), all of it didn’t matter much to her. All her life she’d seen the stain and witnessed its spread, and that was all she’d needed to know.
When they asked Jason why he hadn’t been enslaved, though, she started to focus. She’d been wondering that, as well. She could see him only with her eyes, not inside, so she knew that he was untouched.
“First of all,” Jason said, “I was a slave. But if you’re asking why they didn’t pump me full of toxins? Because I was useful.”
“Useful?” someone asked.
He nodded. “The ones they drug, the ridden ones, they’re slow. Stupid. Useless for anything but menial jobs.”
“And battle,” someone said. “Like the last-stage ones.”
Jason nodded. “Yeah. And the young ones,” he went on. “The ones born . . . since? You saw them.”
Shapiro nodded.
“They’re born to it. Slavery. It’s all they know.”
“Are they educated?” she asked.
Jason’s sudden, hard-edged laugh surprised everyone, including—it seemed to Aisha Rose—Jason himself. “Educated?” he said. “You think we had schools in the camp? An apple for the teacher every day?”
No one spoke.
So Jason said, “They’re educated in tending the fields and taking care of the host animals. They’re educated in feeding themselves and following simple directions. Is that what you meant?”
Aisha Rose knew that wasn’t really a question, either.
When he was done speaking, Shapiro said, “Do they have language?”
“Sure, but it’s minimal.” He shrugged. “One more generation, and I doubt there will be any.”
“Because it won’t be necessary to talk to communicate.”
Jason looked into Shapiro’s eyes, and Aisha Rose thought they understood each other just fine though she couldn’t tell exactly what they were communicating.
* * *
“THE FORT,” SHAPIRO said a little later. “The camp. Do you think it’s the only one? The only one on earth?”
Aisha Rose heard Jason make a sound in his throat. When he spoke, his voice was like wire. He was angry, but she didn’t know why.
“Well, I really couldn’t say,” he said. “We didn’t have telephones. Or Wi-Fi. We weren’t exactly hooked into the World Wide Web.”
But then the anger seemed to drain out of him, leaving only exhaustion and, Aisha Rose thought, sadness.
“Are there other camps?” he asked. “I’d guess there are, but I don’t know for sure.”
“I do,” Aisha Rose said.
* * *
THIRTY-ONE.
There were thirty-one other slave camps. Aisha Rose counted them on her fingers. All looking in her mind the same as the one at Lamu Fort. The same kind of light. The same stain.
When she told them this, she saw them all sag, like plants when the rains were late. They hadn’t known. They hadn’t even guessed.
After that, it was such a challenge to follow what they were talking about. Especially Shapiro. She talked so fast, so much faster than Mama ever had, like she didn’t care whether anyone could understand her or not. If you couldn’t keep up, that was your fault.
But Aisha Rose knew she had to try. She had to try to understand because she knew things that they needed to know.
“Can you tell where they are, these other camps?” Shapiro said to her. “Where they’re located?”
Aisha Rose shook her head.
“Not at all?”
Aisha Rose just looked at her. She wasn’t sure what she was being asked.
But Jason understood. “You’re asking,” he said, “if there might be a slave camp near where your colony is located. What did you call it?”
“Refugia,” Shapiro said.
“Yes. Refugia.” He shook his head. “And the answer is, of course there might be. In fact, I’d say it’s likely. Wouldn’t you? They’d establish one nearby, far enough away to avoid being seen. Bide their time, build their strength, till they were strong enough to attack.”
No one in the room spoke until Aisha Rose said, “Like those big red ants do before they attack the black ones. I’ve seen that.”
“Not just ants, all slavemakers,” Jason said. “Ants. Parasites. Fungi. Why should thieves be any different? They’re still just bugs.”
Shapiro’s scary eyes flashed. “Yeah, just bugs. So how are we going to stomp on them?”
Everyone else looked at each other, and Aisha Rose kept her mouth shut.
* * *
AT THE VERY end, Shapiro asked Jason something else, something that Aisha Rose thought she’d been holding on to the whole night.
The most important question. The one Aisha Rose had been waiting for her to ask.
“Malcolm,” she said. “Our friend who was taken.”
Jason said, “Yeah?”
“Back onshore, you said he would likely be dead by now.”
Aisha Rose saw Jason open his mouth to reply. But she saved him the effort.
“Dead?” she said. “Of course he’s not dead.”
After that, things got noisy, just the way she’d expected it to.
Still, to Aisha Rose it all sounded like the honking of geese or hornbills. Even though she knew they were asking her questions, she responded the same way she would have if they really were birds. She stayed silent and waited for them, in Mama’s words, to pipe down.
She didn’t need to say anything, not yet. The fact that they were being so noisy meant that things were going as she wanted them to.
* * *
EVENTUALLY, THEY DID pipe down, and Shapiro took a long look at Aisha Rose and asked, more quietly, “How do you know this?”
Aisha Rose shrugged. How could she describe what she saw to people who couldn’t even begin to understand it?
But Shapiro surprised her. “Somehow you can see those who have been infected,” she said. “Right?”
Aisha Rose nodded.
“For example, you can’t see the people of Refugia—our colony. Or at least we hope you can’t.”
None of that had been a question, not quite. Aisha Rose stayed quiet.
“So then . . . how can you see our friend? How can you see Malcolm?”
Aisha Rose did not answer.
After a moment, Shapiro’s hand went to her mouth. “The same reason you could see Kait. Because he’s been infected. Because . . . he’s being used as a host.”
Aisha Rose gave a little nod. Shapiro’s cobra eyes were coming back, but at least right now they weren’t aimed directly at her.
“But he wouldn’t infect himself, like idiot Kait did. And I know he was protected.” Shapiro’s face had turned very pale. “Which most likely means the vaccine stopped working.”
Jason said, “No. It was working. We all saw it.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes, but all it takes is one thief that’s immune, and you know there will be more. That’s how it goes.”
Aisha Rose, drifting away from the talk again, found herself thinking about white ants. If you knocked a hole in their mound, they came flooding out at you. Every time.
Yes, that was how it went.
Beside her, Jason leaned his back against the wall. “Without your force field,” he said, “you’ll be dead in what, thirty seconds?”
He spread out his palms. “So . . . get out of here. Go home. Maybe there it will still be safe.”
Aisha Rose saw him take a deep breath. “Just take me ashore before you go.”
Shapiro’s eyes on his face were like a cobra’s. “Why?”
“Because I won’t leave Chloe behind.”
“Even if,” Shapiro said.
Aisha Rose was amazed to see him smile. “Yes,” he said. “Even if.”
Equally amazing, Shapiro smiled back at him. “Just like we won’t leave Malcolm. Even if.”
Then she swung around and looked up at the faces of the others standing there. Aisha Rose couldn’t tell what Shapiro saw—faces were too hard to read—but whatever it was, it made her smile again.
Then she turned back to look at them. “Go get some sleep,” she said, “while the rest of us talk.”
* * *
SLEEP? NO.
Aisha Rose was lying in the bed in the room they’d given her, had been for hours. It was so strange, that bed, too soft, and the room was so small it reminded her of one of the deeper caves at Hell’s Gate. She hadn’t liked those caves, and she didn’t much like this room.
She knew she was supposed to sleep, but her hand hurt and the boat moved in strange ways and by now she was so past tiredness that she wondered if she’d ever sleep again. So when she heard footsteps in the passageway outside, and then someone rapping on her door, she was completely awake.
Just as she was wondering if she was supposed to say something, the door swung open, and Shapiro came in and sat on the edge of the bed.
Aisha Rose felt nervous. She was glad that the light—from a lantern out in the passage—left Shapiro’s face, and those cobra eyes, in shadow.
“How are you?” Shapiro said, sounding . . . nervous. Not at all like a cobra.
“I’m well,” Aisha Rose said.
“Good.”
She paused, and now Aisha Rose was certain of it. This loud woman was jumpy, more antelope than lion.
“And how are you?” she said, as Mama had taught her to do.
She heard Shapiro make a little snorting sound. “I’ve been better,” she said. Then, “I’m sure you know we’ve been talking all this time, me and the rest.”
Aisha Rose nodded.
“Well, as you probably could have guessed, we decided to go back in the morning. At dawn. To try to rescue our friend—and his daughter.”
Aisha Rose hid the wave of relief running through her. This was what had to happen. This was the decision they’d had to make.
She heard Shapiro draw in a breath. “We know our chances. But without you, we won’t even make it to the top of the stairs, much less to the cells where they’re holding Malcolm and Chloe.”
Aisha Rose was quiet.
“You’ve done so much for us already,” Shapiro said. “We know we can’t ask for more.”
Again she made that snorting sound, which Aisha Rose recognized as a laugh. “But I’m going to ask anyway. So . . . will you? Will you come with us?”
Aisha Rose said, “Of course I will.”
“Good.” There was a pause, and she felt Shapiro’s hard, bony fingers give her arm a squeeze. “Thank you.”
She explained the plan—what there was of their plan. It took only a few sentences. Then she rose and walked away.
But at the door she hesitated and looked back. A dark, hunched, backlit form.
“Aisha Rose,” she said at last.
Aisha Rose waited.
“There are others out there like you, aren’t there?”
Ah. At last she’d thought of the right question. Aisha Rose had been expecting it, preparing for it, all evening. But even so, having to answer it filled her with the strangest mix of exhilaration and terror.
“Yes,” she said.
“And you can see them, just as you could see Kait? As lights?”
“Yes.”
Constellations. Galaxies.
“And you keep referring to someone else, someone stronger than you, someone you’ve learned from. ‘He.’ That’s one of them, one who is like you?”
Aisha Rose was silent. She wasn’t sure how to answer that question.
“Born like you, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Can he help us?”
That wasn’t the right question, and after a moment Shapiro seemed to realize it.
“Will he help us?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Aisha Rose said.