All stories must be told.
I’ve been telling you this one as I cross the Atlantic again. Below me, its waters ripple and roil. There is great wind here. An angry type of wind. But it’s moving in the right direction, which means that all I have to do is keep my wings open. The wind is taking me to my false home in America. To pass the time, I tell you The Book of Phoenix. My turbulent accurate memory. My oral unfinished tale. Unfinished because it will finish when I finish.
If I stray too far from the ship below, I have no doubt that they will come after me in their helicopters, with their weapons and their fearful self-entitled intent. However, they have nothing to worry about. For now, I comply.
How long have I been telling you this tale? How long have I been flying? For days. I’ve shut down my system again. No straining muscles, this time. Flying is natural, and I am stronger than I was when I left the United States. My titanium alloy bones are not light, but my body is made to fly. The Big Eye built me well. I’d have been a good weapon if I were not human, if I did not have a brain that could remember after death after death after death.
And there is more. Last night, he came to me. I was flying low, listening to the calm of the water and fantasizing about dropping into it. If my wings got wet, I wouldn’t be able to fly. The water would pull me into its great belly, as it had so many other Africans on unwanted journeys. Will the Big Eye be able to come after me? I was wondering. I almost wanted to find out. Do they have deep diving gear ready? Will they be able to reach me? I can fly, but I am not light. I will sink fast.
The smell of the ocean out here, away from everything, a mile from the ship whose lights I follow, is of fine salt and the flesh of bodies large and small, plant and animal. I felt good. I inhaled the fresh air, feeling my brain and spirit vibrate because I clearly understood that I was so much more than I was before. Tower 7 would never have held me for long. I wished Saeed could see me now. “Saeed,” I whispered. “So much has been lost, but all is never lost.”
It was too dark for me to see anything but the sliver of moon above, the lights of the ship, and the soft glow of my red gold wings. The wind was gusting, so I couldn’t hear him. The ocean’s musk was in my nose, so I could not smell him, either. But I sensed him with the tips of my longest feathers.
There he was, flying below me, slightly to my right. His enormous wings spanned past my left. He rode the air inches above the water. Something told me that he didn’t risk a watery death if his wings got wet. It was hard to believe that I had freed him from Tower 7. Already I was putting next to no effort into flying; his presence made flying even MORE effortless. He was carrying me, for the moment. I stared down at him. His skin was so dark that I only clearly saw his brown wings. I heard his voice as if there was no roar of ocean wind, and he was right beside me. He spoke to me in Twi.
“Phoenix the Okore returns to the United States of America, her birth place, the prodigal daughter.” His voice was rich, and it sounded like he was smiling.
I frowned and spoke aloud, despite the noise of the wind. “I’ve had one other ‘birthplace’ so far. And there will probably be more.”
“Yes, but Tower 7 was the place of your creation,” he said. “There is nothing to love or hate about it. It is fact.”
“Tower 7 no longer exists.”
“Phoenix of the Okore,” he said again, this time laughing, deep and throaty. “Reckless impulsive child.”
“How did you get here?” I asked. “Who are you?”
His voice grew deeper. “I am your father.”
I paused. Then I burst out laughing, glad that he was carrying me. I’d had the time, equipment, and access in Tower 7 to stream and watch thousands of movies, old and new. But how had he managed to see the fifth movie in the Star Wars series while trapped in his glass dome?
“Not all questions have answers,” he said, chuckling.
“I know.”
“I know what you are planning,” he said. “You’ve no intention of letting them take you to Tower 6. You want to go to New York. But, Phoenix, you can’t just go to The Backbone.”
I paused. How did he know? “I’ll do my best,” I finally said, pressing my lips together and frowning. I didn’t want to think about the how yet.
“Your ‘best’ will get you captured quickly,” he said. “Your blood is tainted.”
I laughed. “My blood has never been pure.”
“They can track you wherever you go.”
He was right. But they might let me at least flee as far as the city. I just had to reach The Backbone.
“I’m here to show you how I got here,” he said. “Because you can do it, too. And you might like to have some fun with it.”
“Do what?”
“You are not what I am,” he said. “I’m immortal. I cannot die. You are super-mortal. You can live and die to live and die again. You are speciMen, beacon, and reaper, life and death, hope and redemption.”
Villain, too, I thought. And I have plans. But I hoped he couldn’t read my mind. No one needed to know that. Not even him.
He chuckled, again. “That is to be decided by your actions, Phoenix. Not by your thoughts. I want you to remember the ends and the beginnings, of birth and death. Remember.”
“I can’t remember when I was first born.”
“No. But what of the other times?”
The first time I inhaled my first breath in the ruins of Tower 7, it warmed my warming body. I remember noticing the breeze first, how it smelled of flowers and then exhaust. The second time was in the pit that used to be Kofi’s home. A hot shiver from my toes to the top of my head. I’d thought of Saeed, but then Kofi. I remembered both times that I died, when there was also heat. I frowned, remembering something else.
“There was something.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, pushing the memory forward, and then I opened them. “When I died in Kofi’s house.”
“Good.” He said. “You’ve found it.”
But I hadn’t. Not yet. It was right on the tip of my mind but I couldn’t grasp it. There was something when I died. With Kofi burning up in my arms. As I burned. For a whole minute we flew, not speaking. I still couldn’t remember it.
“I live outside of life and death,” he said. “So I can slip through time and space. You live inside life and death. So you can do the same.”
I looked up at the moon. It was a tiny sliver. Like an opening, a cut into another place. That was when I remembered. A sliver. The moon. Like the slice of otherness I’d seen when I was burning up, when I was trying not to look at Kofi’s disintegrating body. My heart ached for a moment, as I remembered Kofi’s face blowing away, becoming ash, showing bone, then bone becoming ash.
With effort, I focused on the opening into nothingness I’d seen. “There was something into something else,” I whispered. It was black. A black slit. No not black, it was nothing. I’d stared at the “bones” of my hand, realizing that my bones were some kind of metal. Then I’d slipped my hand into the slit and my hand disappeared. I brought it out just before I died. My bones were still intact, made red hot by the flames.
“Will it hurt?” I asked. I’d only slipped the skeleton of my hand into it.
“No.”
“I can control what it does?”
“Oh yes.”
I felt my heart begin to pound as I realized what this meant, what I could do. I smiled in the dark, above the ocean. I looked at the oil tanker that carried the Big Eye, and the tanker’s crew, and wished that sea monster I’d seen last time would emerge and swallow them all up.
The Big Eye had no idea what was coming to their coveted country, their beloved city. I am reminded of the chant that the African market women over a hundred years ago shouted when they battled against the white colonialist foreigners. One woman would cry, “What’s that smell?!” and the other women would shout in response, “Death is that smell!”
Something scarier than that sea monster is coming.
• • •
That was yesterday. It is today. It is afternoon. Up ahead is the American coast and the Big Eye are signaling me to come and land on the ship. I’d told them I would never set foot on that damn ship, any damn ship. That should have been their first clue. I would never arrive in this country on a boat. Never.
I take one last look at the coast of Miami. Then I do as the winged man taught me last night over the ocean. I look deep within myself, as I hear the Big Eye’s helicopters approaching me. I count to five as I focus inward. I am heating up. My wings are probably glowing. Then I fly forward, and I am gone. “Slipping,” that’s what I will call it. And it isn’t hard to do because I am “slippery.” And it doesn’t hurt. I am made for this, too.
And I know exactly where and when I am going.
• • •
Tower 1 is a large building in the middle of a Chicago northern suburb called Naperville. It is surrounded by bushy unkempt palm trees, but it is easy to find. I can practically smell what they are doing in there. Once you’ve smelled captivity, greed, and abomination, you know the grey nose-stinging scent anywhere. I don’t need to go in through the entrance. They have high security to make sure only cleared personnel enter and none of their creations get out. This place is no Tower 7 where guards and security relied too much on technology. Here they have true Big Eyes. Especially after what I had done to Tower 7. Also, security is tighter here because Tower 1 is where it all began. Tower 1 is the nexus.
I read about Tower 1 in my days at Tower 7. It is where the Big Eye created their first abomination. They “adopted” a ten-year-old girl from Ethiopia. They believed that she was a traceable direct descendant of “Mitochondrial Eve” and thus carried the complete genetic blueprint of the entire human race. On top of this, the girl was afflicted with hyperthymesia, an extremely rare condition that made her able to remember every moment of her entire life. They gave her the code name, “Lucy.” The portion of the records that gave her real name was deleted.
To the Big Eye, this girl was the complete Great Book of Humanity. They did two things with her. 1. They made a perfect clone of her (when you have one Great Book, you make a back-up copy). 2. They tried to make Lucy immortal by reprogramming her DNA to not age. For eleven years, Lucy remained in the body of a ten year old. When she was twenty-one, she escaped and threw herself from the roof of Tower 1. She left no suicide letter. Nevertheless, her case was still deemed a great success. And they still had Lucy #2.
From that point on, the programs in Tower 1 were heavily funded. They built Tower 2 in Boston, where they focused primarily on creating methods of dealing with climate change and buoy technology for floating towns and cities. Soon after that, they built Tower 3 in New Orleans, where Leroy Jackson became famous for curing AIDS and several of his students began studying the New Malaria. And so on. Behind the good intentions and amazing science, however, was abomination. Weapons, the quest for immortality, how far could we go . . . The foundation of all the towers was always always always corrupt, driven by a lusty greed.
• • •
To kill a snake, cut off the head.
No one has any idea what is about to happen right here in the dead of night. It doesn’t matter who is patrolling the hallways or the streets and parking lots outside. It doesn’t matter who is perched in the trees, guns ready. None of it matters.
Somewhere a tracking device receiver is beeping. At first, it claims that the nanobot’s host is in a department store. Then it claims that it’s outside of Tower 1. Then inside. But that does not matter either. They will dismiss this information as a malfunction because no one has injected me with the tracking nanobots yet. Not to their knowledge. That won’t be done for another two days. I’ve stepped into a different space and time. Naperville, Illinois, United States, Tower 1, Floor 4 out of 9. The most extreme research is usually done on the middle floors.
The walls are white and low. The floors are grey, shiny, and cool beneath my bare feet. There is steel railing running along the walls of both sides of the hallway. We didn’t have that in Tower 7. The hallway is narrow, so I fold my wings tightly against my back. It’s painful but I have no choice. I’ve wrapped a black sheet over myself so that only my face shows. I pinned it below my head, so that it doesn’t fall off. I have used make-up to shade my dark brown face a light peach color. I grabbed all these things from the department store. If I am seen by their cameras, they cannot know it is me.
I walk down the hall, the soft slap of my feet the only sound I hear.
“Like a hospital,” I whisper. But I know it is not. This is not a place of healing. Pathologies are created here. It smells strongly of rubbing alcohol. I turn a corner and step into a hallway with walls full of glass doors. I tug my black sheet over my forehead to hide the upper part of my face and peek into the first door. I want to scream, but I hold it in. It’s not his fault. And as I look at him, my eyes understand what I am seeing. He is no different from me.
He is a man with rich brown skin and a wide puffy crown of black hair. He could be Kofi’s brother, for all I know. A jelli telli is stretched to cover the wall in front of him. He is watching an ancient Western that I recognize immediately because the theme song had scared me so deeply when I watched it over two years ago: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As if something is mocking me, the awful theme song plays, and I shudder. It still sounds like a chorus of starving coyotes.
Both of the man’s arms and the lower parts of his legs are complicated masses of red, black, and green wires meshed over jointed metal rods. His hands remind me of the metal bones of my own hands. Computer parts are strewn about his room, and he is standing at a table heavy with more parts. His thin metal fingers are highly dexterous as he weaves wires into what looks like a green circuit board. There’s a spark. He laughs to himself and nods his head. I can’t tell what he is building.
He looks up, and his eyes grow wide with surprise. I hold a hand up and wave. He waves back. He looks up to the side and all emotion drops from his face. His room is under surveillance. I quickly look at the ceiling in the hallway. As soon as my eyes notice the camera, a siren goes off.
The man’s mouth opens with surprise, and he frantically points at me.
“Hey!” he shouts.
No, not at me.
“Behind you!” he says.
I turn just in time to see the guard about to grab me. There is a gun on his hip. I inhale. Then I am instinct and I’m fast. I pull my wings even closer to my body, whirl around and shove him backwards against the wall with one arm. I grab his face with the other. He is a big man but no taller than my six feet. And I am stronger. When did I become so strong? Was it the flight across the ocean? Or maybe it is the dying and coming back to life.
The guard has blue eyes, a sparkling earring on his left ear and a bushy black beard that is scratchy beneath my pressing hand.
My body floods with the rage that has wanted to burst from me since I left Ghana. I let it wash over the guard; I let it drown him. I slam his head to the wall, and there is a soft crunch. He goes limp. He sinks to the floor. There is blood now. I’ve crushed his head. His gun is still in its holster. He had no intention of killing me. But I have killed him. I shudder and frown, my nostrils flared. My belly flutters. What am I becoming?
I stare down at the man. My mind feels cloudy. I am villain, I think.
Bang, bang, bang! The man in the room is kicking his door as hard as he can. “Forget him, o,” the man says. His thick accent sounds Ghanaian or Nigerian. “He is rubbish. And he don’ peme, anyway. Go down ‘de hall! Look for ‘de square. Smash it.”
I blink. “Square?”
“Yes! You will see it! Go! Move, now!”
I can barely hear his words over the siren. I look at the glass door holding him in. There is no knob. I push at it. The door doesn’t budge.
The man looks like he is going to go mad. “You cannot release me, o!!” There are tears in his eyes. “Biko, do something! They kill us every day. They kill you soon!” He is pressing his face to the door and looking down the hall. “Run!”
I nod. I don’t run. I am gone. I slip.
• • •
The third time is easier. It is natural to me. I was made to do this, whether the Big Eye meant to make this so or not. I am like a horse who has just discovered what it is to run.
I have slipped to the same place just an hour earlier, just further down the hall, out of the camera’s view. I have not killed the guard yet; I hang on to that fact and think nothing else of it. I run in the opposite direction, this time staying in the blind spots of the cameras. When I cannot, I slip and reappear where I need to be. What do I see behind all the glass doors? More cybernetic humans, more sophisticated than I have ever seen. That must now be Tower 1’s specialization. Most have mechanical limbs, some more than others. One woman has a mechanical lower body, but with human legs. I see three people in the same room with skin that glows a soft green. At first I think they are what I used to be, but when I look more closely, I see that their skin is embedded with millions of miniscule screens.
“How can I get you out?” I ask them.
“Get to the glass box,” one of them shouts. “Break it!”
I’m relieved to hear the same suggestion.
“Keep going down the hall!” a young man with only one cybernetic arm says. He seems to expect me to run by.
I am fully convinced that they are all able to communicate electronically when I pass the next door several feet down the hall. The old woman inside is the first Caucasian captive I see. She is entirely robotic except for her head and left arm. “Don’t let them see you!” she says.
“I won’t,” I say. My heart is pounding like crazy. Heat pours from me, and I hope that my black sheet doesn’t catch fire. For the second time in my existence, I feel that if there is a God then I am doing God’s will. I do not think of the guard I will brutally kill in an hour. All who see me understand what I am. All creatures of the world want to be free, even when they’ve never tasted freedom. So all of these caged people are glad to see me.
A minute later, I stand before the large room staring at the wooly mammoth sleeping on an equally massive bed of hay. I am wondering why the enormous creature does not free itself. Then I see the square. It’s the size and width of a sideways refrigerator and it’s made of glass. There is something foggy and vaguely red inside. There are screens and other equipment along the far wall, but I am focused on two things. The sleeping beast and the glass square.
I think of the glass dome back in Tower 7; I’d made the plants crush it. I smile. Here I am again, unsure of the consequences but sure that I needed to break the glass. But what of the beast?
My desire overcomes my fear.
I slip.
Blackness.
I step out.
I look up. Its head is nearly as big as my entire room in Tower 7. It breathes. Deep. Calm. At peace in its unnatural life. It smells like freshly broken plants with a hint of manure. This human-made beast is my kin, too. It’s resting its head on its thick folded hairy legs. Its eyes are closed, its thick brown eyelashes over an inch in length. Its sharp yellow tusks reach and curl many feet beyond me. Without thinking, I reach out and touch its huge furry forehead. The long brown-red hair is rougher than it looks. The mammoth’s breathing doesn’t change. Deep and full.
I move toward the glass case. Upon closer inspection, the thing inside looks like a ball of forming and disintegrating red dust. A soft hum vibrates from it, and I can feel it in the tips of my wings and in the back of my head. It’s a pleasant feeling, however. Calming. Is this what is making the mammoth sleep? Is this why the mammoth doesn’t free itself? Beside the case is a smaller glass cube about the size of a shoebox. It was also full of something red, but more solid.
Another louder siren sounds off over the still blaring one. There must be cameras in the large room. I make the decision and put my fist through the glass case. As the glass shatters, the thing inside sends out a vibration so strong that the rest of the case crumbles. Puff! For a moment, there is red dust everywhere. Then the dust particles pull into a solid ball of red sand on the shards of broken glass.
I am stamping on the smaller glass case with the heel of my foot when I hear a grunt from behind me. I whirl around to see the wooly mammoth rising slowly to its feet. It shakes its head and lets out a horrible trumpet-like roar. Meanwhile there is something tall and red standing behind me. I turn to it as the mammoth runs toward the glass. The red creature is tall and praying mantis-like, its body made of something like thick glass and full of red smoke. Even as I look at it, the glass-like shell of its face billowed out to form a second eye. The stuff in the smaller glass case was its exoskeleton.
“I need to free the others,” I tell it in Twi. Why not English? I have no idea. When you are terrified, you do what you do, logical or not.
The mammoth is ramming its body against the solid wall outside in the hallway now. The arm I punched the glass with is bleeding, cut by the glass. People are shouting. And shooting. When did more Big Eye get here? I focus on the thing in front of me. Did they create this? WHAT is it?
The air around me vibrates, and I stumble back. The creature looks up at the high ceiling and then, like a giant grasshopper, it leaps. It disappears into the vent. The mammoth throws its body against the wall again and there is a loud crash as the enormous thick slab of concrete falls out, revealing the night sky. There are Big Eye huddled in the blocked hallway shooting at the mammoth. But it’s clear that its skin is too thick to be harmed. They cloned the creature too well. Or maybe they cloned it and then enhanced it. Stupid.
They seem to have forgotten about me. I slip.
It is still night. I stand outside of Tower 1 in the parking lot covered by a black sheet. I have slipped fifteen minutes into the future. The mammoth has left a path of destruction behind it. There is the enormous opening in the side of Tower 1. The five crushed vehicles below it, embedded with rubble and the imprint of the mammoth body when it fell out. The torn gates. The car accidents down the road from when it ran into the street. In the distance I can hear its wild roar.
And as I stand there, men and women run past me. As they run, some swing cybernetic arms, some run on cybernetic limbs. The woman with a torso of machinery slowly struts past me. “Daalu,” she says. Then she smiles and says, “That means ‘thank you’ where I’m from.”
“You’re welcome,” I say.
As I wonder what happened to all the Big Eye, I see the young man with cybernetic arms and limbs who first told me to find the glass box. He stands in the parking lot and turns toward the building. He holds up both of his hands and splashes of orange-yellow liquid fire shoot from them. The skunky smell of propane hits my nose. When the side of the building is burning, he brings his arms down and slowly walks up the parking lot. He will move round the building and set the other side on fire. And then another side, and another. Tower 1 does not have nearly as many stories as Tower 7. However, what it lacks in height, it makes up with width. Still, I am sure this half man half machine, this speciMen, this abomination—my kin—will find a way to single-handedly bring down Tower 1. Oh yes, Tower 1 will burn just as I had intended.
Before I slip, I see a backward shooting star. The orange-red light leaps from the top of Tower 1 into the dark night sky. I doubt this “shooting star” will burn out, though. I doubt it’s a shooting star at all. I think it travels far into the night and then crosses the Kármán line and keeps right on going. Returning to wherever it came from before the people of Tower 1 captured it.
• • •
The Backbone is as tall as I remember. I look up at its spiked trunk and softly glowing leaves in the warming sky, all the way up until I can’t see any further. It has grown so much since I last saw it. I clench my jaw, pushing all this aside.
It is the early morning before I disappear from the eyes of the Big Eye over the coast of Miami. Just before sunrise. The air is warm and humid, and I can hear the rush hour traffic; I can smell the exhaust. I am crying and the tears become steam before they can even roll down my cheeks. My black sheet burns up, the white make-up on my face turns to ash. My white heat resistant dress begins to crackle. I increase my heat, keeping my gaze on The Backbone. I am villain. I will break The Backbone’s back. I will burn the entire city starting from this arboreal heart.
The tree shivers and some of its leaves fall. A groan comes from its roots; they are writhing deep below my feet. And the noise echoes across the city. I hear people exclaim from nearby, but I don’t turn to look. They’ll soon be dead, anyway. Good. These people are the same people who went about their lives, walking past Tower 7 every day, when it still stood. It made no difference to any of them what they were doing to us only a few floors above.
And even if I care to see these indifferent people, I can’t see them. The mile wide area where Tower 7 used to stand is now gnarled wild jungle in the middle of the city. They have tried to contain the plants and trees by surrounding it with a high concrete fence. I smile with disgust. These people haven’t learned from their many mistakes. You cannot contain The Backbone. But I can burn it and the rest of this remorseless city to ash. They made me here. I will be exactly what they wanted. Since no one else seeks revenge for all that the Big Eye have done, I will. Let me be the villain for the sake of justice.
“Is this what they’ve made you?”
I pull my wings in. He is naked, but I know it must be terribly hot for him. Immediately I pull in my heat. I am so glad to see him.
“Mmuo!” I whisper. I fall to my knees on the soil, suddenly very very tired. I look up at him. Now the tears fall down my cheeks, through the white ashes of make-up on my brown face. Wet. Water. They feel so cool. He reaches out a hand and helps me up. Mmuo, the Nigerian man who can walk through walls. Mmuo, who helped me escape Tower 7. Mmuo, one of the only two who survived its fall. Mmuo, who knew that I would rise from the ashes and had left me a dress to clothe my nakedness.
“He said you’d be here at 6:55 am, a minute before dawn. And here you are.” Sweat pours down his face. He blinks as a drop falls into his eye.
“Who?”
From above, comes the loud flutter of wings and a burst of air that blows the trees, cooling the air further. The winged man lands on one of The Backbone’s lowest branches. Then he flies down and lands before me. He stands tall, peering down his nose at me. His eyes are still soft, still kind.
“Will you kill everyone in this city, Phoenix?” he asks. He speaks with his mouth now. His voice is fatherly, and I feel like sitting back down and listening to him tell stories as the children did with elders on moonless nights in Wulugu.
“Isn’t that what they want?” I whisper.
Behind me, I hear Mmuo laugh.
“You’re not a villain,” the winged man says.
“I am a weapon,” I insist. “I’m a bomb. Isn’t that a villain? I’ll be doing what I was made for.”
“Who made you?” The winged man asks, his beautiful face serious and intense.
“That’s a tricky question,” Mmuo added. “Phoenix, it is not so simple.”
But I still want to do it. Not only do I want to do it, I want to burn so hot that I would not come back. Saeed is dead. Kofi is dead. My only home has been blown up. The alien seed is safe. Mmuo is my friend, and he can sink into the ground to safety. The winged man is my guardian, and he can fly away. Let them leave me. I want to do evil. I want to do great great evil. More tears fall from my eyes as the thought squeezes my heart.
“You both should leave,” I say flatly.
“Should I leave, too?”
The voice came from beside me. Slowly, I turn my head. Slowly. The sky is warming. My eyes focus on him. He is dressed in a simple white dashiki and pants. He wears leather sandals. Saeed. I press my hands to my heart, curling my wings around myself.
He slowly comes to me. A stunned smile on his face. “Phoenix,” he says. “I thought you were dead!” He opens his mouth wide and inhales a deep breath.
I cannot speak. I cannot think. I cannot process.
He takes my hands. He sighs, his mouth quivering. “You are real,” he breathes.
I can’t keep my tears from coming. My world is falling apart.
“I-I’m sorry,” he says. “Phoenix, when I saw what they were doing, I couldn’t . . .”
“You ate the apple,” I say. “You died.”
“No, that’s not what happened,” Saeed says, shaking his head. “And they only thought I was dead. They flew my body to Tower 4 on the U.S. Virgin Islands.” He pauses, a dark look crosses his face as if he were remembering something ugly. “I woke in a morgue. I don’t know exactly what they planned to do with my body. But no one was watching me. So I escaped.”
“You survived,” I say flatly. That’s what he always used to say.
He nods. “Yes. But I had no money, I had no way of contacting you. It took me weeks to get back here, but I came for you. But by then . . .” He motions to the jungle and the majestic Backbone. “There was nothing in the news but talk of poor architecture and toxic waste.” He looks at the winged man. “I was in the Library of Congress searching fruitlessly for information about Tower 7. Over the months, I managed to take a reading class but still can’t; it’s hard. I was trying to read a general history book about the city when this man appeared and nearly got us both arrested.” He points at Mmuo.
I can’t help the smile on my face as I imagine Mmuo appearing stark naked in the middle of a library; a tall glistening dark dark African man rising through the floor or stepping out of a wall.
“He found us soon after,” Saeed says motioning to the winged man. He pauses, looking at my red gold wings. I have unconsciously uncurled them as I listened to him speak.
He pulls me to him, and I rest my head on his shoulder.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” I say.
“Phoenix,” he says, kissing my ear.
“I was the one who did it,” I say. “Tower 7 went down because of . . .”
“I know,” he says.
“I have a lot to tell you.”
“I do, too.”
We stand that way for several moments. Then he holds me back, his eyes on my wings.
“May I touch them?” he asks.
I laugh, glancing at Mmuo and the winged man. “Maybe later.”
Mmuo steps up. “That was you, too, wasn’t it, Phoenix? You did that to Tower 1?”
I press my lips together. Then I stand up straight. “Yes.”
I catch the winged man’s eye and then look away. I know that he will come to me over the ocean as I am following the oil tanker tomorrow and teach me how to move through time.
“See?” Mmuo tells Saeed.
Saeed is looking at me with wide intense eyes. “We want to do that to all the towers,” he says. “We want to set every speciMen free.”
Like an egg, a plan starts to hatch in my mind. There are several we can recruit who will want to help. If we can find them. I’d watched them escape Tower 1. My mind focuses especially on the one who’d set the building on fire. He will join us. That, I am sure of. But there is one problem. The tracking nanobots inside me. Even if I burn to ash, they will survive and immediately re-infect me as soon as I begin to reform.
“The Big Eye will find me wherever I go,” I say, after explaining this to the three of them.
“You have to die,” the winged man says. “And you must burn hot. You have to destroy all the tracking nanobots in your body.” He looks into my eyes, leaving the worst of what he meant unsaid.
I didn’t just have to burn hot. I had to burn 6000 degrees Celsius. The temperature of the center of the earth. Can I do this? Might this burn away that which is me? Phoenix or not, I am still a creature of this earth. But do I want to have to run from the Big Eye forever? Or even worse, get recaptured?
“I won’t let them hurt you,” Saeed says.
I wince. Kofi had said the same thing. I take Saeed’s hand, and I look at the winged man, “I will have to find a desert or go to the moon.”
“I will contain you,” the winged man says. “Come.”
Saeed is frowning. “Phoenix, you . . .”
“Saeed,” I calmly say. “There is no other way. You know it.” I pause. “If I don’t come back, make sure you destroy them all. Every single goddamn tower. Every brick, piece of concrete, shard of glass. Make those buildings your greatest feast!”
This makes him actually smile, and I know I am making the right decision.
I look at Mmuo, who has taken my other hand.
“There are others like us out there,” I say. “I helped them escape Tower 1. Find them. What they are doing in the towers will be the end of humanity if it is not stopped. We are living in darkness and, I swear to you, one day the Author of All Things will pull a star to this planet to burn all the evil away, taking all the good with it. I don’t believe in God, but I feel this so deeply. In my bones. But if we bring down the towers, maybe this will not happen.”
Saeed hugs me. He whispers into my ear, “My special bird. Don’t fly away.”
Mmuo squeezes my hand. “Don’t forget, we have work to do.”
“Like what you did in Nigeria to your government?” I ask.
But he only frowns. Still, even now, Mmuo refuses to tell me what happened in Nigeria that ended with his imprisonment in The United States, in Tower 7.
“You will tell me someday,” I say.
“No. It’s not a story with a happy ending,” he says.
“No story ever really ends anyway,” I say. “Especially not the good ones.”
The winged man curls his wings tightly around me, and I shut my eyes. I rest my head against his bare chest. It feels so cool. I hear no heart beat. I do hear the rush of the wind over the trees, the movement of the ocean, the shift of desert sands. Who are you? I wonder. I don’t believe in angels.
I heat. With all my strength. I heat. I am so strong. I am so powerful. They made me a villain. But these people whom I love, they help me to make myself more. I have purpose. I go beyond that which I was made for. I heat. I burn. All around me are a thousand spinning suns. Oooh, I heat.
Then I hear the wind in the leaves of The Backbone, and I understand the deeper meaning of my name.