I unlock the door to outer space, step through the opening.
* * *
The psychopathic sun fires its rays onto the landing pad, strikes at my irises. It turns the sea to a cruel, blue light that houses no life on its skin.
I knock on the door of the storeroom. Knock harder. No answer. I unlock the padlocks, let myself in. Frances is on her back, her arms flung wide. The burn wounds on her shins leak a yellow fluid. She rasps for breath like she is draining the dregs of an oxygen bottle, her face a feverish red. I put her tray on the upturned crate, lay my hand on her cheek. She has a raging temperature. Her eyes prise open. She smiles, delirious.
‘Daddy?’
Don’t be silly. I am as black as the basalt sands of Bhajo.
‘Sit up. Sit up,’ I try to say, but all that comes out are dumb-sounding vowels. I dare not use my phone in case she exposes me. I try and lift her against the pillows, but even forty kilos takes some leverage. Frances slides to the side, her forehead banging against the wall. I need to get to her mouth. The marrow will fix her. I drag her straight, grab hold of her chin. I chase a string of marrow, tip it between the girl’s blistered lips. She swallows like she has to move a cabinet to let it through.
‘Good girl,’ I slur in my tongueless language. Still, the sound has love in it. I try again. This time the food hits the cabinet and shoots back up her throat. Frances coughs it out. Fluid trickles from her nostrils. I stretch the neckline of her tattered shirt, wipe her face with it. Why do they not bathe and dress this poor kid? She is dirty and dying.
I haul her up higher. ‘Come. Let’s try,’ I try to say. This time I scoop a tiny sip of gravy. This time it goes in. But Frances’s burning head falls back as soon as I release it.
Damn it!
I grab her glass of water, sprinkle some on her forehead. I splash a few drops on her neck, watch it gather in the hollow of her shallow, sucking throat.
She is dying, you bastards.
Romano’s shadow stretches through the door. I swing towards him.
‘She’s dying,’ I try to sound.
‘I haven’t slept. I’ve been watching her. Cooling her like so.’ He picks up the weightlifting magazine and flaps it over her face. ‘I’ve just seen Meirong. They’re taking her tonight.’ He strokes the girl’s temples where her hair has saved her white skin. ‘Not long, girlie . . .’
I bend over Frances, try to trickle more gravy between her lips. She swallows convulsively.
‘Here,’ Romano says. ‘Let me.’ He takes the spoon and dips it into the stew. Feeds her tiny morsels like he is saving a baby bird.
I drop the storeroom keys on the solo sailor’s crumpled sheet, walk out of the room with lead in my sneakers. She doesn’t have long, I know this in my marrow.
‘Drink, girlie,’ Romano sings in a high, woman’s voice. He hasn’t slept since yesterday, but I know he is the best nurse Frances could ever get. I leave the girl to his ministrations, walk into the pounding sun.
Bastards. Profit-driven pigs. I should have known from Susan Bellavista’s boots that Raizier would stamp on our faces. Let a young girl bleed pus.
* * *
I am halfway down the first maze of stairs when I feel Meirong’s key card knocking against my chest. I was supposed to hang it on the lifeboat. Romano was supposed to be asleep.
I stop. Consider it.
I will give it to her later. The Meirong bitch can wait.
* * *
I stride into the cultivation hall incensed by the cruelty I have just seen. It makes me prickly with the prisoners. I walk straight past Vicki with her ripe-fig lips. They should harvest those, give them to some old lady in Hollywood.
But the angry thought only hurts my already labouring heart.
If they so much as touch the mermaid, I will kill them.
Janeé’s oxtail stew has given me the fierceness of a Maasai warrior, but with no spear and no tongue to take on Raizier. I lock the brace to cage number twenty-one, start on the man’s fingers. If the solo sailor dies, Romano and I will be on the war path.
I snort through my nostrils like the ox whose marrow I have just eaten. A mute refugee and a sleepless veteran? I doubt it. The only thing I am sure of is that I could get a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest nail-clipper ever seen on earth. I half shut my eyes, cut even quicker. The prisoners find it necessary to hold their breaths and keep very, very still as I chop off their new moons.
* * *
The social worker is not impressed with my clippers chattering like demented teeth.
‘Malachi? Why are you speeding?’
I glance at the glass. Tamba is bowed over his lap, his elbow lifted. I don’t believe it, he is clipping his own fingers.
I slip the phone beneath my leather glove, type to Andride. ‘What are you, a traffic cop?’
The social worker smiles at my stupid quip. I slip my phone back into my white trousers.
Everything, everything is standing on its head. And I have no idea how to save the dead and dying.
Andride tries to interrupt my metal-flashing frenzy, ‘What if Eulalie’s right?’
I hesitate for a second.
He shrugs. ‘What if dying’s just like . . .’ Andride thinks hard, ‘climbing on the roof to watch Foe fetara?’
I know what he means. He means the blinding beauty of gunpowder on New Year’s Eve.
A sound clatters down from above. A metal pulley cranks the giant’s empty cage towards us. Tamba has abandoned his manicure and is biting on his bottom lip, steering carefully. The
