‘Y-, you don’t look that old.’
Njinga chuckled, genuine mirth sparkling in her hazel eyes.
‘Still gets me every time I hear that,’ she said, shaking her head, the corners of her lips creeping up into the curve of a smile. ‘Even after three centuries.’
‘Three … centuries?! You can’t be s-, serious. Three h-, h-, hundred years?!’
‘Three hundred and fifty-four years, to be exact. I was brought to America as a slave three hundred and twenty-seven years ago … and here, in the New World, as those assholes called it, I became … beyond mortal.’
‘Holy sh-, sh-, shit! Are you for real?’
Njinga leaned back against the wall of the furniture truck and released a protracted sigh, staring up at the steel ceiling. Her focus was not the rust and dents there, though; instead she was gazing through a madly spinning cine reel of memories; colours, scents, sounds, images and sensations, all blended together in a chaotic, ever-tumbling chamber of a million living, breathing photographs.
‘We gon’ be in here a while,’ she murmured, her voice barely clearing a whisper. ‘And this whole thing, this mess, this war that y’all have become entangled in between The Hunstmen an’ … well, everything that’s alive on this planet, it’s a long an’ complicated story. I guess I’d better start at the beginning. What better place to start, huh? Just a warning though … y’all might wanna buckle up for what you’re about to hear.’
21
CHLOE
‘Holy shit,’ Chloe murmured, after Njinga finished her long and complex story. ‘Holy fuckin’ shit.’
For a few drawn-out moments nobody spoke, and the inside of the truck was silent but for the slow, rhythmic breathing of the unconscious animals and Jun, and Lightning Bird’s occasional snores as he slept.
‘There ain’t no way I’d believe anything you just said,’ Paola said softly, ‘if I hadn’t seen what I seen with my own eyes. Even so, it’s … it’s hard to like, wrap my head around it and stuff. I mean … it’s seriously like, the craziest story I ever heard … but it’s real. I don’t understand how, but it’s real, I seen it.’
‘There’s only one thing you didn’t explain,’ Chloe said. ‘Well, a few things I guess, but there’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. You explained about the word “satyaduta” and what it means, and the old Councils and stuff, but what about the word “beastwalker”? I heard you guys use that word too, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, “beastwalker”, it sounds like, I dunno, some cheesy old eighties or nineties retro stuff, like Dino-Riders or something.’
‘It’s a literal translation of an ancient Egyptian term,’ Njinga answered, ‘which was translated into a bunch a’ other languages, and then, after thousands of years, into modern English. We have the Huntsmen to thank for that; those assholes use the term as an insult. But we owned that shit, and now we call each other beastwalkers just to piss our enemies off. The original ancient Egyptian term, though, meant something like “someone who walks in both the skin of a man and the skin of a beast”, so you can see why it was appropriate. It’s just that over countless centuries and hundreds of retranslations, it eventually became the word “beastwalker” in English. Get it?”
Chloe nodded. Daekwon, meanwhile, leaned back and released a long, slow sigh, and then spoke.
‘Man, I wish I’d never gone t-, to that stupid Environmental Club m-, meeting. All I wanted to do was h-, h-, help save the planet … an’ now my whole life is over. I’m f-, fightin’ in a war I didn’t even know existed. An’ the most p-, powerful people in the world want me, want all a’ us d-, dead. Shit. Shit!’
‘If you ever were sincere about wanting to save the world, kid,’ Njinga commented dryly, ‘you would have understood exactly what you were getting into. Make no mistake, regardless of whether you knew about the war or not, steppin’ up to fight against the people who stand for profit an’ power, who hate Nature an’ the living world … that shit was always gonna be a fight to the death. It was always gonna mean uprootin’ your entire life, upendin’ everything you ever believed about the world an’ the way it works, an’ unpluggin’ your damn self from the Matrix, like that movie said … an’ yeah, layin’ your life on the line. Being willin’ to take a bullet for a cause far greater than your mind can even begin to wrap itself around. I don’t know if you believe in fate, kid … but if you do, an’ you sincerely, genuinely do want to save the world, well then, maybe fate took you exactly where you were supposed to go. What is it that all those self-help guru assholes say all the time – ah yeah, that’s it: don’t look at a disaster as a tragedy, look at it as an opportunity. Yeah, a huge part of your life is over, but now you’re on the front lines, kid, the front lines. You have a chance to really make a difference, in ways your lil’ high school club never could have.’
‘How?’ Chloe demanded, her eyes puffy and red with the aftermath of tears, and her face sporting a bedraggled look from all the smudged makeup and running eyeliner. ‘By fighting, by literally killing people? That makes us just as bad as the Huntsmen! I can’t, I won’t, I refuse, I fucking refuse to touch a gun, to pick up a weapon, to, to have literally anything to do with fucking violence!’
‘Listen, kid,’ Njinga began, but Chloe was on a roll now, and she refused to be silenced.
‘No!’ she snapped, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks – tears of passionate fury. ‘You
