Aliyah hugged her mother. “Egypt . . . why would I go to Egypt?”
“The Djinn was killing the Living Gods. You went with John Fortune to save them.”
“The PA?” Aliyah had a flash of memory. It was as if a dam broke, belief and realization crashing through, coming out as tears and great gasping sobs. “Oh, Mama . . . Mama . . .”
Ellen stayed silent. It was best at these moments.
“Hush, Aliyah. Hush, my dear one. Mama is here.” Isis rocked her in her arms, stroking Aliyah’s hair, Ellen’s hair, one and the same. “Mama is here. It is all right.”
“I didn’t tell you how much I loved you . . .”
“Nor I, Daughter,” Isis said, tears at last beginning to fall, “nor I.”
They held each other for a long while, rocking in time with the boat, Isis crooning some wordless Egyptian lullaby.
Volunteers of America
Victor Milán
TWO TALL MEN IN Nigerian Army uniforms stretched the young boy’s arms out to the sides. A third stepped forward, raising a machete.
Screaming, the boy’s mother bolted from the flock of Ijaw villagers kneeling under the patrol’s guns. Sergeant McAskill, mercenary “advisor,” bellowed a command. Beneath his boonie hat his face was redder than usual, clashing with his ginger mustache. A buttstroke took the mother down, blood and teeth flying. Her husband sobbed in his mush-mouthed wog English that they were innocent.
Watching from well back among the cluster of shacks that rose on stilts from pale green swamp weeds and white sand, patrol leader Captain Chauncey grinned in his beard. Sod that for a game of soldiers, he thought. LAND, the Liberation Army of the Niger Delta, had blown an oil pipeline two kilometers away last night. The lump of black smoke still hung in the sky to the northeast.
These people knew the game. Prices must be paid. And as for innocence—“It’s bloody Africa,” he said aloud, shaking his head. He inhaled deeply from his cigar.
The blade fell once, twice. It chopped the boy’s arms off just below the shoulder. If the boy made any noise it was lost amid the villagers’ screams. His blood spurted bright red in the morning sun.
From the corner of his eye Chauncey saw something in the sky. He looked around right quick. A man was flying low over the village. It was the blond-haired pretty-boy ace from down south in the People’s Paradise.
Quickly Captain Chauncey stepped back out of view under the overhang of a roof meticulously hammered out of scavenged soup cans. Once when the sergeant didn’t think his CO was listening, McAskill had dared to call him a “podgy, pasty-faced git.”
The captain smiled again. Now he’d learn what happened to those who said shite like that about Butcher Dagon.
The flying man stretched out his hand. A line of bright fire leapt from his palm. It hit McAskill in the back.
With a scream that was mostly superheated air expelled from already-dead lungs McAskill flung his arms out straight as flame enveloped him. His FN-LAR rifle went flying.
Gunfire began to flash and thunder from the surrounding weeds, raking the Nigerians. The Butcher flicked his butt to the ground.
“Sod you, McAskill,” he said, and took himself off.
Crouched among weeds the twenty-one-year-old woman felt fear spread like sickness from her belly. Though it was probably no hotter nor more humid here near the Bight of Bonny than in her home city on the Congo River, now part of the People’s Paradise capital of Kongoville, the sweat streamed down her face and from her armpits inside the camouflage blouse she wore.
Her desire to rush forward and save the child from the blade had burned like fire. But the hard men around her in their Ray-Ban sunglasses and distinctive spotted camouflage, elite Leopard Men commandos, would shoot her if she gave away the trap about to be sprung. As surely as their comrades, fanning out to surround the village on three sides, were about to cut down the Nigerians and their SAS advisors.
Her breath caught in her throat as the golden-haired hero of the PPA, of whom her people said his skin was white but his soul a black man’s, touched lightly down by the man he had incinerated and swatted away the soldiers who had mutilated the boy. As the Leopard Men opened fire she unfolded long slim legs and stumbled forward.
Her escort let her go. They were intent on shooting at the now-fleeing remnants of the Nigerian patrol. Stealth was no longer a concern.
As if drawn by an invisible tether she approached the boy flopping and bleeding his young life away into the white sand. The risk of accidental shooting meant nothing. Her whole being had narrowed to needle focus on her duty: to succor the hurt. As only she could.
She walked as though she sank to her knees in the soft sand at every step. Because she walked also into her own private world of pain.
“This is gold!” Sun Hei-lian’s cameraman exclaimed. “Holy shit, this is great.”
Annoyance stabbed Hei-lian as behind her a new crew member turned to lose his lunch in the weeds among the palm trees a hundred meters from the village. She had spent much of the last two decades working third world crises, seen a hundred people’s share of horrors. Yet her own pulse ran almost stumbling fast and her skin prickled with adrenaline from what she’d just witnessed.
It was so horrible she had actually felt an urge to intervene. But their Leopard Society guards had made abundantly clear that while her CCTV news team represented the People’s Republic of China, whose fraternal assistance to the PPA they greatly appreciated, if they got out of line, they’d be killed without hesitation.
If I can take it, she thought, the newbie can, too.
Her longtime sidekick and cameraman, Chen, a chunky crew-cut gargoyle kneeling at her side, seemed focused as tightly as his camera. Hei-lian had to agree that what they’d just captured, the boy’s mutilation followed by the ace formerly known as the Radical leading a surprise assault on his tormentors, was electric. A victory for her team as complete as the one the commandos were even now mopping up.
A young native woman, willowy-tall and fresh-faced as a child, emerged from tall grass to Hei-lian’s left. Hei-lian’s instincts started barking like excited guard dogs. “Chen,” she said urgently. “Track left.”
A brief scowl creased his big round face behind his viewfinder. She actually thought that in their years of working together as a team he’d learned to overlook the fact that she was a mere woman—as well as the indignity of having to take orders from her. He swung the camera left.
“What’s with this chick?” he asked. They spoke English in the field, for practice. “She’s moving like a zombie from Dawn of the Dead.”
“Get that sat dish set up now,” Hei-lian shouted. The use of Mandarin instead of English made the young tech wiping puke from his mouth with the back of his hand jump like a jolt from a cattle prod. He and his assistant didn’t fumble as they unfolded the small metal flower of the portable uplink. They didn’t dare. “Get us a signal.”
“Why bother?” Chen said. “The healer ace. Oh, boy. What? She’s going to conjure bandages out of thin air? Bo-ring.”
“Just keep shooting,” Hei-lian said.
“All right, I know. Human interest. Yada-yada-yada.”
But Hei-lian knew something more was happening. She wasn’t really a telejournalist. Or rather, she was that among other things. And she was getting the intuition in stereo.
The African girl’s smooth face showed keen suffering now, as if she felt not just sympathy but the brutalized child’s actual pain. An empath-ace? wondered that specialized part of Hei-lian’s mind. The Ministry of State Security, the Guojia Anquan Bu, Guoanbu for short, had no information on the girclass="underline" she was new. Their would-be allies, the PPA, were holding out on them. Again.