The hull pulled apart. Water gushed up through the seams. The barge listed to port, then crumpled, then sank. But not before Wally salvaged two fuel canisters.
When he lugged them back to his motorboat, he found Ghost standing on the riverbank. Openly staring at him with a strange expression on her face. She didn’t back away as he approached, and she didn’t threaten him with the knife handle. Wally paused. They stared at each other.
“My name’s Wally,” he said.
Ghost hesitated before she receded into the jungle.
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“We could take you all the way there,” Gaetan said. “But it will take much more time. And the closer we get to Kisangani the more dangerous the river is.”
“You were paid a ridiculous amount of money for our passage,” Michelle said.
It was raining and she, Kengo, and Gaetan were hunkered down in the cabin. Joey was huddled under the poncho on the back bench of the boat.
“It would take many more days to reach Kisangani on the river,” Gaetan replied. “I have a friend who is a pilot. He flies out of a small airstrip not far from here. He owes me a favor and I am certain he will give you a good price to take you there.”
Faster was better. Her dreams were now filled only with the urgent need to get to Adesina. And the feeling didn’t fade when she woke up. It itched and burned in her mind. It was almost as bad as the fire in her veins after her coma. The farther upriver north they went, the worse the sensation. They were going in the right direction.
“Fine,” she said. “But we better get a decent deal.”
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The landscape was steep and furrowed; Jerusha often felt they were making more progress vertically than horizontally. It rained at least once a day, but the rain never seemed to reach them. The canopy of the jungle merely dripped continuously, and the air below was ferociously hot, humid, and still. They forded a few more creeks and small rivers rushing through the valleys, though thankfully none of them were as wide or deep as the one they’d crossed before. The rest breaks became more frequent-the exhaustion of scrambling up the verdant slopes and helping the children who couldn’t help themselves took much from all of them. The children were increasingly hungry and the fruit and vegetable seeds in her pouch were nearly exhausted.
She worried that the pursuit of them might mean that Rusty… no. She wouldn’t think that. She wouldn’t.
Waikili seemed nervous. His blind, blank face seemed to survey the jungle around them. “Those two children?” Jerusha whispered to him, so that none of the others would hear.
Waikili nodded. “They’re out there,” he whispered back. “And the one moves so fast… Leucrotta is his name.”
“How can you know that?”
“I know. He wants to eat us.”
Jerusha kept them moving all through the day, and pushed them even through the twilight. The sun was already down, the trees little more than darker lines in a grey murk. The kids were strung out in a long column as they clambered along a ridge. Jerusha was already looking for a spot to halt for the night, some small shelter.
A wailing cry came from the rear of the line, a shrill of terror too abruptly cut off and followed by shrieks and shouts from the other children. “Cesar!” Jerusha shouted and the boy unshouldered his weapon as they ran back toward the sound, Jerusha unsnapping the covers of her seed-belt pouches.
Naadir, the child with glowing skin, was there as well, the shadows of the other children streaming away from her, near the stretcher that carried Eason. But it wasn’t Eason that was the problem. He gaped like the others from the stretcher, pointing with a trembling finger. “Bibbi Jerusha,” he said. “It was awful…”
She pushed through the children. In the greenish illumination of Naadir’s skin, she could see one of the older boys, Hafiz, lying on the ground in spatters of blood blacker than the twilight. Jerusha’s breath hissed in. Something had torn away the boy’s face, ripped it from his skull so that all that was left were black-red furrows through which bone gleamed sickeningly. Another quadruple line of furrows had been carved over his chest; more across his abdomen, so deep that his intestines had spilled out.
“Go up to the others,” she shouted to the children. “Go on. Did someone see this?”
“I did,” Eason said in halting French. “I heard a growl, then something… I think it was that creature at the river… it came from the bushes, and leaped on Hafiz. It was only a moment, and then it was gone into the bushes over there, and Hafiz…”
“Leucrotta,” Waikili whispered. Eason was staring at the body from his stretcher, his tail thrashing wetly.
Jerusha glanced at the undergrowth around them. She could see nothing, not in the gloom. The noises and calls of the night denizens mocked her. “All right,” she said. “All of you, go to the others. Two of you get Eason’s stretcher. Tell them to make a fire-now. Cesar, go with them.”
“What about you, Bibbi Jerusha?”
“I’ll be along in a moment. Go- quickly. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.” She hoped it was a promise she could keep.
They obeyed, hurrying away in Naadir’s glow as Jerusha crouched down next to the body of Hafiz. She shivered. “You can’t do this,” she said in French to the darkness. “I won’t let you do this. I’ll stop you.”
She heard laughter answer her from the gathering darkness: a boy’s laughter, a child’s. Jerusha shivered again.
Standing, she scattered seeds around the body, and covered Hafiz in a blanket of cool green before hurrying to join her charges.
Sofiensaal Concert Hall
Vienna, Austria
A section of the pitched roof of the Sofiensaal collapsed with a rumble as Tom showed himself on the rounded top of the old concert hall’s facade. He felt the heat of flames at his back. They silhouetted him nicely against the night sky. But the whole thing was liable to cave at any minute. Better make this quick, he thought.
“Listen up,” he shouted down to the media crowding the surprisingly narrow street, east of Vienna’s center. He knew they had shotgun mikes trained on him.
The Vienna cops in riot armor who competed with the journalists for space were pointing things at him, too. Most of those weren’t microphones, though. The street pulsated with red and blue lights. “I’m the Radical. I’m here to bring an international assassin and war criminal to justice.” Somebody started bellowing German at him through a bullhorn. He ignored it. “I want Noel Matthews. This was the last place he performed. From here on I’m going to lay waste to any place that limey bastard does his fake magic. And that’s just the beginning.”
He gave that no time to sink in: thanks to decadent capitalist-consumerist technology the whole world could watch the speech to its black heart’s content. Instead he raised a hand to torch the most obvious SWAT-type van, just for punctuation.
Nothing happened.
What seemed like a hundred cops opened up from below. The muzzle flares were like photoflashes at a Superbowl halftime. Tom went to light speed, emerged in orbit.
On one side, infinite night chilled him. On the other he felt the searing heat of the sun, which had already brought dawn to Western Europe.
He flashed back down, emerging a couple thousand feet above the blazing hall, intending to hover while he worked out what happened.
But he didn’t hover. He dropped like a brick.
“Tough luck, schmuck,” a voice said in his head in a distinct New York accent. “You won’t use me to do your dirty work anymore, you genocidal commie creep. I’m outta here.”
As the heat rose and roared at him Tom spotted a patch of darkness to the east, just this side of the
