off behind them, and they were flying over flat savannah plain. Finch pointed out herds of wildebeest, and buzzed low above elephants and giraffes. Wally was entranced, staring out the windows of the cabin and pointing.
In the late afternoon, Finch set the plane down near a small village. “Delivery,” he said, jerking a thumb back toward the crates. “We’ll be spending the night here…”
The village-a Masai boma, according to Finch-was a collection of mud-brick adobe huts. The children hung behind the adults at first, staring at Wally mostly. By the time they’d off-loaded the plane, the kids had overcome their shyness: they darted out to tap Wally’s metallic skin and dart away again, coming back to hit him harder and laugh at the sound. They plucked at Jerusha’s clothes too, but it was Wally who intrigued them, and Wally seemed to enjoy their attention. He’d make false lunges toward them, roaring when they ran away shrieking and enduring their pestering. He showed them Lucien’s picture, telling them (in English that they couldn’t understand) how he was going to visit Lucien, who was his friend. One of them kicked a soccer ball in Wally’s direction, and he booted it high and long, the children exclaiming and shouting as they ran after it.
Jerusha watched, laughing with them. She reached into her seed pack and found an orange seed; she let it drop, drawing on the life within so that in a few minutes an orange tree had bloomed, with ripe fruit hanging on the branches.
The village smelled of orange rinds that night.
Special Camp Mulele
Guit District, South Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
“Hey!” Tom shouted. “Hey! Knock that shit off!”
The two ignored him. One was the stocky kid Leucrotta, the other the Lagos guttersnipe with the Brit accent, Charles Abidemi, the one called the Wrecker, or sometimes ASBO, after some incomprehensible Limey bullshit.
Tom already knew who started it. Poor skinny Charlie wouldn’t start shit with anybody, although he might make your Austin Mini explode a one-kilogram chunk matter at a time once he got clear of you. But Leucrotta was your typical adolescent male: a dick with legs. Which, given that he was an ace, was a very dangerous dick indeed.
Tom hauled Leucrotta off by the collar of his outsized Simba Brigade camo blouse just as it quit being outsized anymore. As a giant hyena-form chest exploded all the buttons off the front and blew out the sleeves, Tom tossed the rampaging were-beast up just far enough to transfer his grip from a collar that had just turned into a ribbon to bristly scruff.
“What the hell is wrong with you little shits? Don’t you know there’s a revolution on?” Tom spoke French. After spending six or seven years in the Congo, he could speak it just about as well as he chose to. He found that slangy with a deliberately nasty americain accent usually had the best effect. It wasn’t like anybody was going to mouth off to him about his bad pronunciation. Not twice.
Of course, then he had to repeat it in his native tongue. Son of an Igbo soldier who immediately abandoned his Yoruba mum in a Lagos slum, Charlie had spent most of his short, miserable life in a housing estate in a not-so- trendy part of the London suburb of Brixton, getting his narrow ass kicked by Pakistani Muslim gangs, poor white gangs, Yardie gangs, and gangs of England-born blacks who despised immigrant Africans. He understood nothing but English. When the Limeys deported them Charlie’s single mother hauled him back to Lagos, which got promptly overrun by the Simba Brigades. She’d jumped at the chance to sell her troublesome son to Alicia Nshombo’s recruiters for a couple hundred bucks. But he wasn’t the fucking problem.
As if to prove the point Leucrotta snapped at Tom. Only his ace reflexes let Tom shove him out to arm’s length as drooling black jaws clacked shut. They’d have taken his face off as cleanly as any sad-sack Egyptian tanker’s, Uber -ace or no. “You little fuck,” he shouted. “Try that shit on me? You need to cool off, man.” And he flicked the four hundred pounds of spotted furious monster a casual two hundred yards through the air with a flip of his wrist. Trailing a howl of despair, Leucrotta landed in the middle of a swamp channel with a colossal brown splash.
About half the couple dozen kids hanging around by the tents broke out clapping. Tom gave them a sour smile and stomped off to confront the supposed authority figures who had made themselves oh-so-scarce during the dustup.
The special-unit camp, set well apart from the rest of the PPA army in the Bahr al-Ghazal and surrounded with coils of razor tape that glittered evilly in the white-hot sun, was as depressing a patch of perpetually soggy alkali clay, barbed-wire scrub, sorry-ass grass, and hyperactive mosquitoes as Tom had encountered in all his years spent knocking around the very least desirable real estate in the whole Third World. What the hell possessed me to take my day off in fucking Brazil, anyway? he asked himself furiously. Next time I’m going to goddamn Greenland.
The adult supervisors on duty stood aside in a clump: four surly overfed Congolese nurses from the National Health Service and a pair of Leopard Men commandos in their spotted cammies. All wore web belts with Tasers and Mace prominently displayed. The commandos wore holsters with 9mm SIG P226 handguns, too.
“What the fuck?” Tom said, spreading his hands palm up. “That asshole Leucrotta is throwing his weight around. You can’t be dumb enough not to know how that’s gonna fly: either he’s gonna waste somebody or somebody’s gonna waste him. Either way the People’s Paradise loses a valuable asset. You need to keep these kids in line. They’re freaked out and pissed off. They’re gonna tear each other apart without Siraj having to lift his little finger!”
“They are like animals anyway,” one of the nurses said. “Let them settle their pecking order themselves.”
“At least exercise some adult moral guidance,” he said in exasperation. “Try persuasion. Lead by example.”
“If the great leader will show us the way,” the shorter of the Leopard Men, Achille, said.
Tom walked two steps back into the sun. Then he swung back around and jabbed a finger at the handlers. “All right. I’ll do that. I’ll do that little thing. Hey, kids. Listen up.”
Back came Leucrotta from his bath, human, slouching, and squelching. Tom favored him with a hot blue glare.
“Got control of yourself now, Fido?”
The boy glared. “Uh-huh.”
“If you ever pull shit like that again with me I’ll take you up for a nice little visit to orbit. For about five minutes. Do you understand? Say yes.”
“Oui,” said Leucrotta sullenly.
Tom nodded. “Smart answer. Let’s hope that means you’re getting smart.” He turned to the others. They stared at him wide-eyed. He saw awe on some faces and dread on others, but no hint of hostility. That was a relief; some of them could threaten even him. I’m Hell’s scoutmaster, here, he thought. Fuck me. He drew a deep breath. “All right. Just what are we doing here in the middle of the nastiest swamp God never made? Can anybody tell me that?”
“We’re helping liberate the oppressed people of the South Sudan,” a boy said.
“Yeah,” Tom said, nodding. “That’s the official line, isn’t it? And hey, that’s true. That is what you’re doing. Don’t forget it. And what else?”
“We’re trying to keep from dying.” The speaker was a stick-thin girl in ridiculously baggy Simba BDUs. She was about thirteen, extremely dark-skinned and threatening to become pretty one day. Her hair was cut short to her head. Despite strict embargoes on “unnecessary” personal possessions she sported a pair of huge red plastic hoop earrings and matching glasses with big round lenses.
“You show some respect to your betters, little freak,” bellowed the stoutest of the Health Service matrons, a slab-faced woman with wire glasses named Monique.
Tom opened his mouth to invite Monique to butt the hell out. Before he could speak, inky Darkness began to dance around the skinny girl like black flames, then leaped suddenly toward the matron. Screeching, she turned and fled as her fellow matrons stampeded out of the way.
“Now, that wasn’t nice, was it, Candace?” Tom asked.
The Darkness shot her nonexistent hips and stuck out her underlip in a cute prepubescent pout. “We’re not here to be nice, non? And anyway, she oppresses us. Or are we not meant to share in the Liberation?”