“This is what made you.”
“Ella, please, stop.” I have my head in my hands. My head is pounding. My arm is on fire. “Ella, please. Make it stop.”
“It will never stop.” Her voice sounds so distant, faraway, even though she’s standing right in front of me. I feel like if I were to look up, I wouldn’t recognize her face. What did this to her? “This. It will happen again. And again. And again. It already has.”
“What do you want me to do?” I scream.
In the silence that follows, I’m huffing. Sweating. Shaking. I can’t stop shaking. Whatever cracked is getting more broken, and I need to put it back together. I know I need to put it back together. I’m struggling to put it back together, but it’s like I’ve got my shoulder pressed against a screen door in the middle of a flood. My body strains. I know what she wants. I know what she wants, but I can’t give it to her. I won’t.
“Ella,” I tell her through gritted teeth, “I can’t afford to be angry anymore. I can’t. I don’t have it in me to keep being this angry.”
Ella kneels down so we’re eye to eye. “Did you ever stop being angry?” she asks me, softly but with Mama’s sternness.
“But my life,” I say to her, and she knows without me saying that I mean my job and my house. She knows I mean not having my back on fire from tension, walking up and down the walkways of Rikers waiting to defend against harm. She knows I mean the fact that I haven’t seen a white person since I got here. “I can’t see ’em to hate ’em. Please don’t take me back out there.”
“Kev, it was never just ‘out there.’ It’s here, too.”
And that’s when she shows me the metal Miguel and Royce and Marlon and Mero and I have been working on, have been bending, building. Shows me that it doesn’t just go to damaged workers in the factory but that it’s being put on cops outside to increase their reflexes, to upgrade them. That those misshapen pieces of metal we’re forming make shields on their bones, beneath their skin, so that no bullet can kill them. We’re building the turrets mounted on our street corners. We’re working to make the police invincible.
“You were never free.”
My thumb is on fire. Ella looks at me with this pained, sorrowful gaze, watches me hold my hand and try to bear the hurt. And I close my eyes and grit my teeth against the hot needles piercing every inch of skin on my thumb where that fucking chip is, and it gets bigger and bigger, the pain, until I’m blind with it, the whole world white, then it stops.
There’s an arc of blood splashed in a single line down one wall. My thumb is cut open. And there on the rug in front of me, past Ella’s ghost, is the chip. Glowing blue in the near-darkness.
“You took it out,” I say between heavy breaths.
“No. You did.” She’s smiling when she says it.
Instinct tells me I should be afraid. That this is the same as cutting off my ankle monitor. They can’t watch my bloodstream anymore, can’t see if I’m sleeping right, can’t inject compliance into my veins when I get angry, can’t tell me when curfew is, can’t pay me my wages, can’t get me into my home, can’t see me—
She touches me and there’s weight in my arms, a warmth. It smells of milk. A baby.
Ella shows me. Shows me the doctors who looked down on Mama, this woman they were supposed to care for, with such disdain. With such disgust. Feeding her the wrong medicine. They didn’t care whether she lived or died. Whether her child lived or died. Our sister.
Ella’s looking at her. “This child could have seen the world. But they killed our sister before she even had a chance to breathe.”
The weight vanishes. I can’t move. “I don’t want—I just want to go home.”
“There is no home.” Ella is gentle. “Mama prayed we would happen,” she tells me. “God is a loving God, but he’s also the architect of our revenge. He delivers us from Egypt. But he also brings the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.”
All this time, I’d wanted it. Somewhere in the back of my mind. As a kid in those interrogation rooms, as an older kid in Rikers. Then it gets beaten out of me, and I’m convinced we’re too small for it, Ella’s too small for it, for burning it all down.
Is this what Ella’s been doing while away?
“I can see the future, Kev,” she says quietly.
I breathe deeply. Against every instinct, I say, “Show me.”
She puts a hand to my head, skin against skin.
Fire and blood and screaming and singing. Shattered chunks of marble littering park grounds. Monuments to the Confederates pulverized into dust. Police stations turned into husks, watch posts unmanned and creaking with rust. Cities, whole cities, rising into the sky. So much death, but there’s joy in it.
Apocalypse sweeps the South. Vengeance visits the North.
When she lets go, I’m trembling.
“Now, you can see it too,” she tells me. She sticks her hand out, and I shake myself back into the present. “Tell me what you see,” Ella whispers into my ear.
I see the After.
Grassland, hills that undulate, green everywhere, except when there’s fire coming out of the ground and when craters appear and the new government men knock on doors to order newly poor whites to leave, condemn houses or purchase title. The first orange and white and red fire, that time the local trash dump bursts open, is, for them, the beginning of the end. Streaks, fingers almost blue as the anthracite underground creeps closer to the surface and the asphalt is hot to the touch. The air rancid, everybody coughing, always coughing. One day, a house gets emptied, first of its things, then of its people, and a big red slash gets painted on the front door, marking it for condemnation. From the hilltop, the town is nothing but a mouth with just a few broken teeth left. They’ll feel us in every corner of this country.
Then and only then will we clear those forty acres of poison, pull the radiation out of the air. Use our Thing, jettison it into space, make the land ready for our people.
“What do you see?” she says.
There’s so much. It’s a jumble in my head, but Ella and I are in the scorched middle of it.
“Freedom,” I tell her. “I see freedom.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, like its title character, saw a fiery birth. Formerly a swirl of disembodied phrases and feelings and half-characters, the story of Ella and Kev began to coalesce while, in Paris, I learned of the non-indictments of the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. After the revelation of the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, I began to hear, with greater force, the stirrings of Ella’s voice and Kev’s. Each new horrifically regular death, whether upon initial police contact or later during police or carceral custody, made clearer what I wanted to say. Because while I mourned, I thought of the families left behind and how the orbit of hurt at the center of which sits each of these tragedies is spread almost beyond imagining. In a fiction genre that traffics in the impossible, I wondered how such people, such families, might find themselves situated.
What might the opposite of injustice look like?
My fearless, peerless editor at Tor.com Publishing, Ruoxi Chen, helped turn my questions and convictions into this book. Its fiercest advocate, she challenged me like I’d never been challenged before to write my way into a story that at times seemed beyond my abilities to tell. From the beginning, she saw this book, saw more of it than I could. To say that working with her has been a dream would be to indulge in criminal understatement. Our Gchats shall remain some of the most cherished and expansive conversations I’ve ever had the privilege and pleasure of having.