At some point she fell, trying to catch her breath. Someone shoved Alhaja out of the way and they were on her. The blows seemed to rain from the sky and still Sankofa fought to hold it in. She would not harm RoboTown. This was the only home she had. Hot painful water splashing onto her body. She curled herself tightly into a ball. No, she thought. I won’t. I can’t. Not again. They only thought of their town’s reputation. Maybe it had been too long since they’d seen violence. Or felt a need to respond with it. Had RoboTown been too content? Sankofa didn’t know. What she knew was that when the green deadly light burst from her, it felt like cool water. It put out the flames. Everything went quiet.
She stayed that way for over a minute. “No, no, no, why,” she whispered, her face pressed to the road. When she looked to the side, first she saw red fur. Movenpick stood up now, but didn’t move from her side. She sat up, seeing beyond the fox. She gasped. She was surrounded by nine or ten dead bodies. She had controlled it. This she knew. She had only allowed a fraction of the light to come. But it was enough to cause several around her to drop dead. There would be bodies left to bury. Those who still stood, alive, stepped back, mouths open, words lost, eyes twitching with terror. Sankofa’s eye fell on the fallen body of Alhaja and she shrieked. Then she ran. People got out of her way.
Sankofa fled up the road, her chest burning and her nose bleeding. One of her eyes was swelling shut. She paused after about a half mile and looked back. No one was following her and from here, she could hear people beginning to wail as they surrounded the dead.
Then she saw it high in the sky. She was wrong. One person had followed her. The Steel Brother, the robocop. “I also send reports to LifeGen,” it said. Projecting its voice so precisely, even from a distance she could hear its every word clearly.
“LifeGen?” she said. The shock of this made her stumble over her feet. “You’ve been spying on me for… for them?” Is LifeGen responsible for the seed coming back into my life? she wondered. The world around her swam. What did all this mean? Why?
“You are confusion,” it said. “LifeGen studies you. Then it will find use for you.” It was so fast that she only managed seven steps before the burst of lightning from the drone’s wireless Taser travelled from her head all the way down to her toes. Her last thought was I thought drones could only do that in the movies.
Then Sankofa remembered nothing.
CHAPTER 9
DEATH
Whimpering. Someone was whimpering. And tapping her shoulder.
Soil. Rich fragrant soil. She pursed her lips and pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, smearing it with a coat of the soil. She worked her jaw and flexed her legs and the muscles of her thighs locked with cramps. The pain of it shot through her body. And someone was still tapping at her shoulder, moving up to her neck. A warm wet roughness rubbed at her cheek.
She cracked open her eyes to a shadow hovering over her. The shadow whimpered, moving back as she sat up. “Mo… pick?” she muttered, her mouth too gummy to fully pronounce the name. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust to the sunlight and immediately, she noticed another black shape close to her on her right. Something bigger than Movenpick. It bounced before her, making a papery sound as it did. It smelled of decay. The shape slowly bounced back, but did not go away. “Awk!” it said. Sankofa’s eyes focused and she found herself looking at an enormous vulture, its wings casually spread. It stared back at her as if to say, “What are you going to do now?” To her right, now feet away, Movenpick yipped and paced back and forth, keeping his distance from both Sankofa and the vulture.
“I am The Adopted Daughter of Death,” Sankofa told the vulture. “You are just a bird of death. Fly away. Or walk if you prefer. Just leave me.” She got up and more dirt tumbled from her skin and her dress. Her satchel of things was gone. She brushed off the dirt from her arms, rubbed it from her face, spat it from her mouth. She coughed loudly, hacked mud from her throat and spat. She blew it from both her nostrils. She dug it from the sides of her eyes. When she looked up, the vulture was gone. For all its noise when it had moved away from her, it had taken to the air silent as an owl.
Sankofa stopped and stared at the area around her. She was in the bush, though she could hear vehicles on a road nearby. And she was standing in a shallow hole the length and width of her body. A shallow grave. Had they thought she was dead when they put her here? Or maybe they’d thought they were burying her alive. Or maybe the people of RoboTown weren’t even the ones to bury her and some stranger had seen her lying in the road and put her here. But who would bury a child, especially one who was not dead? LifeGen might. If only to see what would happen next. She glanced around cautiously.
Deciding she was as alone as she could get, she took a silent inventory of her entire body, flexing muscles and lifting her dirty dress off her legs to see if there were scratches or bruises… or stab wounds. She touched her ears and was glad to find she still wore her mother’s earrings. She felt no pains or more than minor stings, but pain was a tricky beast, as she knew. Sometimes it took its time to officially arrive. But aside from a headache and a dull soreness in her forehead, which was most likely where the drone’s Taser had hit her, she was ok. She was alive.
She closed her eyes and tried bringing it forth. Would she still be able to? She could. Her world glowed green and the effortlessness of it was surprising. She tried shining even brighter. Then brighter. Then brighter. She lit up the road. And pulled it in. “I can do it so easily now,” she whispered, looking at her hands. She glowed again, controlling the light so well that she could make it shine a foot from her and then pull it right back in. “What am I?” she said. But she didn’t really care about that question. No. She was what she was and now after nearly dying, waking up in her own grave, and emerging from the soil, she was better.
She hugged herself and looked at Movenpick, wishing she could hug him, too. Movenpick yipped and trotted into the bush. Sankofa coughed again, hacked and spit out more mud and looked around her at the tall and robust forest. There were no plants around the spot where she’d lain. Barren, almost. No plants grew in the spot they’d chosen to bury her. Or maybe it had all died?
“I wonder…” she whispered, remembering. She simultaneously hoped in two directions as she reached into her right pocket. She wasn’t surprised to find her wad of paper money. She held her breath as she reached into her left. “Dammit,” she said when she touched the wood of the box. She spat out more dirty spit, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Dammit.”
She heard a soft snort and turned around. Movenpick stood there, still waiting. “Thank you,” she said. Movenpick fidgeted his paws and licked his chops. “Yes. Let’s go.”
Sankofa ran for the cover of dense trees, Movenpick trotting behind her. She wanted to get away from “her resting place.” For an hour, she walked through forest. Still, as she walked, she kept an eye on the sky that she glimpsed between the leaves and branches, watching for Steel Brother’s drones.
When she found the beautiful stream beside the large tree with several low growing branches thick enough to easily carry her weight, she knew she’d found a place to rest her tired lonely head. Even better, the area was bright with sunlight due to a large tree felled by a lightning strike. It was such a huge tree that its descent had taken down three other trees with it.