There is a long, swollen oval protruding from the girl’s abdomen. I hit the switch on my device.
‘Yes?’
I touch my own stomach, spread my fingers to indicate a swelling.
Tamba assumes the worst. ‘What? Burst appendix?’
I shake my head.
He shrinks with relief. ‘Ah. Spleens. They’re growing two in number seventeen because the cells graft so easily.’ He chuckles unexpectedly. ‘You know how they say, I nearly split my spleen?’
I wait in the presence of a crack killer with two spleens inside her belly.
‘Never mind,’ Tamba says mournfully. He clicks his microphone off, once again disappointed in me.
Lolie gives me her fingers, stares unblinkingly down the barrel at me.
How many hearts have those kohl eyes found through her rifle sights? How many spleens has she split with exploding copper sheaths? The girl is a brutal killer.
I cut Lolie’s nails with steady, strong fingers. With each slotting of the blade in the interstice between skin and nail, with each slim half-moon that falls to the floor, I prove to Lolie that, crack shot or not, she is not the only one who can be accurate.
* * *
The skinny Indian is screeching now but I ignore the ruckus, move on to Shikorina.
Unlike the sniper, the child killer greets me with her arms open wide. ‘My brother. Did you come on an aeroplane?’
Her smile is as warm and cherishing as a deep silky bath on a dusty afternoon. Her nails are soft and clear, they give way easily.
‘Hear me, Kenneth,’ she implores me. ‘I said to my children, Don’t love me. Don’t.’
‘GAS!’ someone shouts.
‘They loved me too much. Don’t you see?’
‘Paraffin!’
The big beauty Charmayne is stabbing her finger at the roof above the Indian’s cage. I smell a petroleum stink. I run back to the tooth-puller, now squeezed into the corner of his cage, his feet tucked under him. Liquid pours from a short pipe high above him, pools on the floor beneath my sneakers. I shove on my intercom, bounce like a boxer, join the others in their frantic mimicry.
‘Leaking pipe! Paraffin!’ the prisoners shout for me.
‘SHIT.’ Tamba springs to his feet. He yells into a microphone on his desktop, ‘Meirong! Kerosene leak! It’s pouring all over number thirteen . . . Yes! . . . Yes!’ Tamba turns in wild circles. He mutters to himself, ‘Shut. Shut. Shut. Recovery.’ His arm swings and falls. ‘Ahh.’
The fluid fades to a trickle. The whole hall stares up, watches it drip.
Meirong’s voice sounds faintly through the speaker.
Tamba says, ‘Okay, I’ll rinse him.’ He slams a button on his DJ desk. A shower pours down on the tooth puller from his irrigation pipe. He screams and arches, the rungs of his chest a chicken carcass picked clean.
Tamba snaps, ‘It’s only water, for God’s sake. Tell him to relax.’ Tamba remembers my disability. He switches his sound off for a second, hammers his forehead with the heel of his hand. He clicks his microphone on again, says more delicately, ‘Fuck, Malachi. I think it’s time for lunch.’
Shikorina is quiet now, bewildered by the emergency.
The giant speaks to me over the heads of five prisoners. ‘Perhaps this is their modus operandi.’
‘Malachi?’ Tamba urges over my radio, ‘Drop what you are doing and come.’
Barry, the fat Australian, asks, ‘Do you mean, this is how they will finish us?’
The giant nods. ‘It looks like it.’
Someone exclaims, ‘Whoaaah.’
Barry points upwards, breathing heavily. ‘Each cage has got one. Look.’
The prisoners peer at the transparent tubing running along the roof. Between each shower nozzle is a tiny pipe aiming towards the cages.
Tamba barks, ‘Malachi. Get out.’ He is pressed hard against his surveillance glass, his nose as bulbous as a gnome’s. Is this place about to blow, as they say in those old movies with Leonardo DiCaprio?
‘Ohh!’ Charmayne gasps. ‘Liquid gas for . . .’
‘Fire.’ Josiah says the word for her.
The word flares, catches alight on the metal wires.
‘Fire!’
‘Fire!’
Through the glass, Tamba is on his feet, a tall featureless figure, his earpiece pressed to his temple. He is a vulture suddenly, one of the monstrous ones that savaged newborn lions in Krokosoe.
‘Malachi!’
I pick up my bucket, my radio still crackling. As I pass Samuel in cage number one, he thrusts his eyebrows high.
‘Do you see what I mean?’
I keep my guilty scowl wired to my brow, but my sneakers peel off the floor with soft, sucking clicks, the sound of sycophantic cowardice.
* * *
Janeé dumps our plates piled high with something white. Next to each pale heap is a row of bright orange sticks. She squeezes through the door, disappears.
Tamba turns to me.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Malachi. That pipe is too high to see a split from the ground.’ He evades the question in my eyes, tries to quip, ‘Thank God no one smokes in there. One flick and . . .’ He flings his hands to the roof like the poor tooth puller who mimed fire for nearly two hours.
Olivia’s eyes are huge with fright. ‘Why do they need that gas?’
Tamba looks down, shuffles his fish sticks. ‘Meirong should tell you. It’s not my job.’
‘Come on, Tamba.’ Olivia won’t let go. ‘It sounds scary.’
Tamba squirms in his seat. ‘Meirong says it’s to burn evidence. In, say, a crisis.’
‘What evidence?’
‘The cages, the cultivation systems . . .’ Tamba gestures vaguely.
Olivia chews as if flames are licking the walls of the corridor. ‘Meirong said the little lifeboat is for us. What about the prisoners?’
Tamba stabs a fish stick into his white mound, stodgy enough to stifle a small fire. He shrugs uneasily. ‘Maybe the big boat Romano sleeps in.’ He bites off what might be the head of his fish stick, flips it and does the same with the tail. ‘Ask Meirong.’
Olivia succumbs to the potato that now seems designed to induce stupidity. But Samuel’s angry eyes still burn into me.
Do you see what I mean?
A figure in a white moon-suit walks past the canteen. It has a padded chest and padded legs, a metal canister on its back. There
