Rosewater is having a sticky moment.
A spree killer has held up the financial district for two hours. Forty-two people are dead. Tactical teams are unable to end it because they have been split due to unrest in other parts of the city. Protests and riots erupted after the reanimate trials, with people demanding the bodies of their loved ones back.
Aminat and Dahun arrive at the district, and settle behind the barricade. The shooter is ensconced in the lobby of Integrity Bank, a place Aminat remembers both Kaaro and her cousin Bola once worked. The building is pocked with bullet holes from returned fire. The road is littered with corpses, scorch marks and the twisted metal of downed drones and assault bots.
“The shooter has two turrets and some strange assault rifle. No demands. Three officers down, and we haven’t been able to get close to him.”
“You know it’s a male?” asks Aminat.
“No.”
“Snipers?”
“Distortion field.”
Dahun reaches into his jacket and hurls some small baubles to the ground. They roll towards the blackened building, then crack like eggs before disgorging several arthrodrones. He activates his subdermal phone and a series of graphs appear.
“I shouldn’t be here,” says Aminat. “I should be coordinating, calling the plays from headquarters.”
“You can work from here as well as there,” says Dahun. “Permission to go and kill this sonofabitch?”
“Have at it,” says Aminat.
Dahun takes off his jacket and places it on the asphalt. His armour is up, leaving only eye slits. The light around him shimmers from his bespoke personal repulsion shield. As soon as he is within fifty yards, the turrets start shooting at him. The shield holds, but Aminat can see he does not wish to test it consistently. Tactical releases volleys of suppressing fire.
The bank is a good choice for a siege, as it’s already fortified against robbers, so once you’re in, it’ll take the kind of thing Dahun is doing to get you out. Idly, Aminat hopes Layi and Kaaro have the sense to stay home. But since when do those two ever have sense?
All the plate glass erupts outwards and Aminat falls flat. Dahun walks out dragging a man by the scruff of the neck, ignoring the pain he must be causing. His force field has fizzled out and strips of his armour are gone. When he gets to Aminat, he flings the man to the ground. Tactical start to draw near in ones and twos.
The man is burned, smoking and laughing.
“He’s a fucking synner,” says Dahun.
Yes, the green tinge to the eyes. Dahun may be new, but he’s learning fast. This is not going to help matters in Rosewater. If Homians are committing mass murder to up their numbers, the reanimate protests might just explode into revolution.
“I used up the power cell on my shield just at the last minute. Lucky to still be alive.”
Aminat prods the alien with her boot. “Do you have a name?”
“Laark.” It comes as a raspy whisper, along with the rest of his breathing. Maybe the fire burned his airways.
“What is your fucking problem?” asks Dahun.
“Hmm. Fornication. I have never understood the human tendency to enjoy sexual intercourse yet use it as a label for… something you don’t like. Fornication and profanity. Fornication as profanity.”
“Why do you kill us, Laark?”
“I’m not killing you, silly. You are not real. Can’t kill what’s not really there. You are aberrations of nature. I’m making way for… me and people like me to inherit the Earth.”
A tactical officer puts her hand on Aminat.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Move to the left, please.”
Before she can read the situation, a burly officer points a handgun at Laark’s head and fires. Several others follow suit and the alien’s head is disintegrated into a pink smear. Aminat is aware that they are staring at her as the most senior person. She shrugs, pulls out her sidearm and shoots Laark in the root of the neck twice. Because fuck him and fuck him. As she holsters her weapon, she wonders when Koriko will arrive. Must be busy with everything going on.
“Get to identifying the dead and talking to next of kin before that ghoul arrives to take the bodies. Go!” To Dahun she says, “Go get changed. Our work isn’t done.”
Parts of Rosewater are on fire. There is unrest in every ward except the toxic area. There are multiple shootings and explosions. At first Aminat thinks it’s a spontaneous outpouring of rage at the revelations in court, but from her vantage point of hearing every single report, deploying her forces, she begins to discern something, a pattern.
The shootings aren’t random. From her own… nocturnal activities she can tell that the people shot are Taiwo’s men. The businesses hit belong to the gangster. Checking the reports for victim profiles, many have been criminals. The natural assumption would be the Rastas, but theirs is one of the quietest wards, with no civil unrest, just random gunshot reports. So this is not retaliation.
“New player in town,” she says aloud.
“What?” asks Dahun.
“The last time when Taiwo’s men were executed, I thought it was a one-off. It’s not. This is a full-scale takeover.”
“What about the bombs?”
“What about them?”
“These bombs didn’t just get made today. This takes planning. The targets are not criminal, but civilian. Shopping malls, churches, mosques. That’s not a criminal pattern. That’s mad bomber or terrorist. Which means, to me, someone is trying hard to make it look like you have a terrorism problem, but they’ve overdone it.”
“You think it’s S45?”
“I do. They’re playing from the CIA destabilisation manual.”
“This is… out of control.”
“In more ways than one. Look.”
The self-drive comes to an abrupt stop. Koriko stands in the middle of the road.
“Get out of the car,” says Koriko. “I wish to speak to you.”
“Open the door,” says Aminat.
Yes. Park or idle?
“Idle.”
“Don’t do it. She’ll kill you,” says Dahun.
“Why would she do that?” asks Aminat as she climbs out. “Besides, I might kill her.”
Koriko stands in what Aminat supposes is the exact centre of the road. The regular thin layer of moss on the unweeded surface is thicker under her feet. There’s a serpentine following her around. What the fuck? Aminat tags the hardware address for later. The robot is weathered, corroded in places, dark green, and gathering information about Aminat, she is sure.
“Hi, Alyssa,” says Aminat. She walks right up to the alien, an inch separating their noses.
“That isn’t me,” says Koriko. “Alyssa is with her family.”
“Yeah, I saw that. You put a dead-eyed doppelgänger in your marital bed. Shame. Shame on you, Gatherer of human flesh,” says Aminat. “I liked you better when you weren’t green.”
“And I liked you better when you kept order in this city and my people didn’t have to die in the episodes of unrest.”
“You’re funny.”
“I am not given to levity.”
“We are in agreement.”
“Aminat, your people can’t kill Homians.”
“That’s bullshit. If synners can kill humans, humans can do whatever the fuck they want. And why do you bring them back anyway? They’ve had a life. Why make them immortal?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“Likewise.” Aminat sticks a finger in Koriko’s face. “Stay out of my way. And get off the road. You’re obstructing traffic.”
“Three fronts, sir.” Aminat reports to the mayor. “The gang war between Taiwo and his brother Kehinde, though it’s more of a rout than war; explosions and vandalism from anti-Rosewater groups; and spontaneous rage events, protests, people wanting their loved ones back.”
“And there has been some anti-Homian violence,” says Jack, on the other end of the line.
“You’ve been listening to Koriko.”
“Is the Honeycomb safe?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to come here? It’s impregnable.”
Aminat laughs, a bitter bark. She is looking at seventeen dead soldiers who worked for Taiwo. She is looking at the precision of the bullet holes. There are long-range, high-velocity shots and multiple wounds clustered together. This seems as much a war as the insurrection. Dahun trained them all too well.
“I still have work to do out here,” she says.
“Don’t die,” says Jack. He signs off.
One of the corpses is showing early reanimation signs, but it is twitching in the wrong place and hitting the back of its head on the pavement, bashing its own brains out. Aminat tells one of the officers to get some tarp to soften the blows. She feels the hair on her forearms rise and someone yells something. She makes herself flat just as the charged air turns into a lightning streak. Nobody gets caught in it. Ever since the dome disappeared and the ganglia multiplied, there is sometimes a flash of electricity between them. You can tell by the ionisation of the air. The inner surface of her left cheek bleeds where it made impact.
She tells the car to take her home. She needs to change and see Kaaro and maybe quit her job. This isn’t her. She cannot remember the last time she had fun. She doesn’t know how all of this strife will turn out, but she knows she can’t stand to make these decisions much longer. There is death everywhere, and that is no way to live. Unlike a lot of the people of Rosewater, Aminat is not a loyalist. She can live anywhere. If not for Kaaro, she would have left Rosewater. If not for Layi, she would have left S45.
Casual protesters pelt her marked car with rocks, yelling indistinct slogans, frustrated when the windows resist damage and her face does not show fear. Their expressions are angry, but beneath the rage Aminat senses uncertainty. Healing is good, uninterrupted power supply is good, living in the city of the future is good, but should one sacrifice the bodies of loved ones? Were she not part of the government, would she be part of the solution? As they drive past a naked ganglion it flashes, dazzling Aminat. There isn’t enough money or need to install Ocampo inverters on all of them. She blinks her vision back. The windows have polarised.
She passes shopfronts, one in two broken, inventory on the street or gone, listless protesters wandering through.
“Stop,” she says, and the car halts. “Idle. Amber alert level.”
Acknowledged.
She walks to the broken windows of a jeweller’s. She thinks it strange that the place hasn’t been looted until she realises that it’s costume jewellery. Kids pick over what was displayed. Discount stickers garishly haunt the cases. The profane signs of credit card vendors line each surface. Financing plans. Promises of seven-day delivery time on the real versions of corresponding baubles. Couples with good skin, white teeth and expensive clothes glow with commercial romantic bliss.
Fuck.
Aminat realises she wants to be married, and that she wants to marry Kaaro. She wants that whole expensive, unnecessary ceremony. She wants an over-the-top wedding dress, drunk guests, a whole weekend of being smushed together with extended family, putting out the fires of petty quarrels and decades-long feuds between aunties. Yes.
She approaches who she believes to be the owner of the shop, a tall, gaunt old man picking up debris with a sad look on his face.
“Sir, I’d like to buy a ring.”
“You’ll have to come back another day. There’s nothing here worth—”
Aminat picks up a ring off the floor. “This one. I want this one. How much?”
“That a cheap piece of—”
Aminat takes his right hand and pays what is most likely twenty times the actual value of the ring. She rises onto her toes and kisses the man on the cheek, then runs out to the car.
“Take me home,” she says. “Double time.”
Yes, Aminat.
She raises the ring to the light. It is truly shitty, and she has no idea if it will fit Kaaro’s finger, but she is unbothered. There are tools at home; she can hammer it into shape.