Slavemakers (21 page)

“HEY, AISHA ROSE,”
Jason said. “My name is Jason Bett.”

The girl focused on Jason, and immediately she seemed calmer.

He returned her frank gaze. The last time he'd seen her, Aisha Rose had been filthy and draped in rags. Now, transformed, she was wearing a long, flowing cotton dress, a pale blue with purple flowers on it. It must have been made before the overthrow, and Jason was astonished once again by the treasures the explorers had brought with them.

Aisha Rose's hair, which had appeared dingy and hopelessly tangled, turned out to be thick, luxuriant, and an unusual coppery blond. She—or someone else—had tied it back into a ponytail, revealing her high cheekbones, long jaw, and those glimmering eyes.

Jason saw a blush rise to her cheeks, and wondered how long it had been since she'd had anyone's eyes on her.

He smiled, and said, “You look great.” And was rewarded with a smile—mostly in the eyes, though he thought her lips might have twitched upward, just a fraction—in return.

At the same time, he noticed that she'd been staring at his mouth as he spoke, and that now her own mouth was moving. As if she were testing out the words. Or tasting them.

He looked away from her face, down at her bare arms. Jason knew that the doctor must have tended carefully to her injuries, draining the worst of the abscesses and cleaning out the wounds. Fresh cloth wraps, whiter than anything Jason had seen in years, stretched from between her fingers up to the crook of her arm.

The cleanup must have been immensely painful, but the girl seemed as stoical and unaffected as ever . . . if you ignored the pallor in her face and the faint tracks that drying tears had left on her cheeks.

Keeping her gaze on him, she came around the table to his left, sat, and slid down the bench toward him. She didn't stop until their legs were touching, and he could smell the soap she'd used. And then she reached out with her right, uninjured hand and interlaced her fingers with his left.

As if she needed him, his presence, his hand in hers, for strength and support.

And the moment's awkwardness that she'd shown upon entering did seem to have disappeared, now that she was sitting beside him. She seemed entirely calm as she looked around the room, and said, “So where is she?”

Shapiro blinked. “Where is who?”

“The one who is like Mama . . . and me.”

A silence followed this statement. Finally, Shapiro said, “Aisha Rose, believe me, there is no one on board who is
the least bit
like you.”

Aisha Rose showed her irritation only in the tiny furrow that appeared between her eyes. She gave a tiny shrug, and said, “No, she will be here soon.”

Then, letting her gaze swing across the room, she said, “You are all such different colors!”

Now Jason thought that a kind of joy resided behind her flat, stiff tone.

He saw Shapiro give a small nod. As if she were speaking to a little girl, she said, “Haven't you ever seen people of different colors before?”

Aisha Rose answered at once. “In books,” she said. “When Mama and I lived in the compound, I mean. Books with pictures about life on the dreamed earth.”

“The dreamed earth,” Shapiro said.

The girl nodded. “Before the real earth awoke. Before it became real. Mama told me what it was like, and showed me, and we also had books.”

She paused, scanning their faces once again. “You are some of the same colors as the pictures we look at,” she said, “but not all.”

Jason understood the meaning behind the girl's words. Some of it, anyway, and Shapiro seemed to as well. “You've never actually seen people those colors, though,” she said. “For real, I mean.”

Aisha Rose shook her head. “Of course not. It was always just me and Mama, until now.”

At her unmodulated voice, her matter-of-fact tone,
Jason had a revelation about this strange young woman sitting at his side. He'd thought she'd slid next to him, sought physical contact, because she needed his support.

But now he realized that he'd gotten it wrong. She didn't need him; she'd brought all the strength she needed along with her. If anything, she was there to share her strength with Jason. To support him. To
give
, not to take.

Jason felt tears come to his eyes.

If Shapiro noticed any of this, she didn't seem to care. She had begun to stare at Aisha Rose with a strange, unsettling concentration.

“Aisha Rose,” she said, and her voice sounded a little breathless and strained. Not with fear, or revulsion, or surprise, Jason thought. No: with certainty.

With comprehension.

Aisha Rose, all calmness, said, “Yes?”

“Tell me something. Is your Mama always with you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But you buried her.”

For just an instant, Jason felt the hand tighten in his.

“No,” Aisha Rose said after a brief hesitation.

Shapiro nodded, but she didn't look like someone who'd been caught heading in the wrong direction. She merely said, “Why not?”

Aisha Rose said, without hesitating, “Mama didn't want to be buried.”

Now, for the first time, the doctor, Konte, spoke up. “Where was this?”

“At the rose farm.” She saw the question on his face. “On Mount Kenya.”

Jason turned his head to look at Aisha Rose beside him. She was staring down at the table, and as he watched, a tear ran down her nose and dripped off. But when she spoke again, her voice was still composed.

“Mama told me,” she said, “that on the dreamed earth, people believed that vultures would help you . . . ascend.” She raised her head. “To someplace better than the dream.”

Shapiro nodded. “That's true. Some people believed that.”

“And the vultures did come.” Aisha Rose's eyes were on Shapiro, but as she spoke, she leaned against Jason. Her bare arm was cold against his.

“But I still talk with her,” she went on. She lifted her bandaged hand and placed it gently against the side of her head. “Here,” she said.

Shapiro nodded. “I know. But before that, before she ascended, was she . . . tired a lot?”

The girl nodded.

“Ill?”

Another nod. “Worse and worse. She didn't want me to know, but I saw anyway.”

Jason noticed that, as she and Shapiro talked about Mama, Aisha Rose's speech had grown softer, more supple . . . but also more childlike.

“I knew it was the worm. What the worm did to her, before it died.”

Shapiro was sitting very still. “And this was after Mama was carrying you, but before you were born?”

“Yes.” Aisha Rose's eyes were hazy. “At the very end of the dream.”

At that moment, Jason knew what Shapiro had been driving at and what it meant. What it meant about Aisha Rose.

His heart thudded in his chest. And, though he kept his motions calm, when he turned his eyes to look at the young woman sitting next to him, holding his hand, it was with a sense of wonder.

The same expression he saw in Shapiro's eyes.

*   *   *

“HOW DID THE
worm die?” Shapiro asked. “Did someone take it out?”

Jason saw Aisha Rose's chin lift. “No. I told you. It just died.”

“And you saw that happen?”

The girl's lips thinned in exasperation. “Mama showed me,” she said.

Then she paused, and when she spoke again her voice was lower, and filled with apology and regret. “No,” she said. “Mama didn't show me. She didn't want me to see, but I looked anyway.”

Shapiro was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “And what else did you see when you looked?”

“The end of the dreamed earth,” Aisha Rose said at once. Her voice was bleak.

“You looked because you weren't there. You hadn't been born yet.”

This time the girl just gave a single nod.

Shapiro lifted her hands and put her palms over her eyes. Then, her eyes still hidden, she said, “Aisha Rose Atkinson, tell me. Please tell me. What else do you see?”

Aisha Rose tilted her head as she looked at the older woman sitting in such a strange position opposite her. Then she turned to look up at Jason.

“I see what
they
see,” she said. “When I want to.”

“The thieves,” he said.

“Yes, the
majizi
.” She gestured with her injured hand. “And I see . . . lights. The lights made by the other ones like me.”

Suddenly, her breath was short, her cold hand tightening again in Jason's. Maybe the support
did
go both ways.

“And I see . . .
him
,” she said. “The one who—”

But before she could finish her sentence, the door behind Konte opened, and a woman walked through. A tall, slender woman of perhaps thirty, wearing a baggy, blue-and-white shirt and black pants. She had high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a face betraying so little expression that she could have passed for Aisha Rose's older sister.

The doctor said, “Kait?”

But Kait gave no sign of hearing him. She was focused on one thing only: Aisha Rose.

And Aisha Rose was gazing back at her with such an expression of joy that Jason wondered if somehow this
could
be her sister.

“Oh!” Aisha Rose said, a gasp as much as a word. “I was waiting for you!”

Yet Jason, struggling to his feet, felt no joy. He knew what this woman—this
thing
—was. After twenty years, he knew what he was looking at.

He just couldn't understand why it was being allowed to walk free.

*   *   *

BESIDE HIM, AISHA
Rose let go of Jason's hand and also made to rise.

But she never had the chance. Kait's eyes had been as dull as her expression, but now they seemed to come into focus. Her gaze sharpened, and in an instant her face contorted. Baring her teeth, a guttural snarl coming from her throat, she leaped past Shapiro, sending the scientist tumbling to the floor, and threw herself across the table.

Even as Jason reached his feet, he knew exactly what was about to happen. He'd seen it so often before, and he knew that he would once again be too slow, too weak, to prevent it.

*   *   *

AS THE SLAVE'S
hands went for her throat, Aisha Rose simply said, “No.”

WHEN JASON WAS
a child, one of his closest friends died in an airplane crash. Something went wrong with the rudder system, and when the jet hit the ground nose first it was traveling at more than six hundred miles per hour. The impact left only two things intact in a field full of scraps and fragments: the black boxes, with their recordings of the conversation between the captain and the other flight officers.

During the final moments, the crew knew that they were helpless to delay the end. Yet in the last half second before the plane shattered against the earth, one of the flight officers said a single word: “No.”

No.

No, this isn't happening. I still have control of my fate. I'm not about to die.

But then he did.

*   *   *

TWICE IN THE
slave camp, Jason had heard the word used in the same way. Once when the thieves were gathering to take revenge on the wife of a man who had run away, and once when three of the ridden ones were unleashed on a young woman for some reason that Jason had never been able to figure out.

No,
the victims protested. And then they'd died anyway.

*   *   *

BUT AISHA ROSE
wasn't any of those people. Jason had no idea who she was, or even precisely
what
she was, but he knew that she was no helpless victim trying to deny the inevitable.

“No,” she said, as Kait's hands went around her throat. At the same instant that Jason, half-standing, realized that she'd let go of his hand, Aisha Rose put her palm against his chest and shoved him so hard he fell backward. His head banged against the wall, and, for a moment, his vision dimmed.

He heard the snarling cry cut off, then the thud of a body hitting a hard surface. When he refocused, he saw that it was Kait who was sprawled in graceless unconsciousness across the table, her hands still outstretched. Even as he took in the sight, she groaned and began to move.

He stepped closer to Aisha Rose, ready this time to help defend her in case of a renewed attack. Staring down at her semiconscious attacker, though, she seemed
calm, unafraid, merely interested in what had just happened.

No: more than interested. She put her hands together and said, in a tone mixing excitement and affection, “We'll have so much to talk about afterward!”

Finally, far too late, both Shapiro and the doctor were reaching for the awakening Kait. Aisha Rose said, “You don't—” but still the doctor took hold of Kait's arms and, twisting them behind her, pulled her to her feet. Behind them, Brett Callahan had his handgun at the ready though Jason had no idea whom he might be thinking of shooting.

Kait herself still seemed only half-awake. Her head hung down, hair obscuring her face. If Jason himself had possessed a gun, he would not have hesitated to use it on her. Now that he was away from the camp, he knew only one thing for sure: When you saw someone in Kait's condition, you killed them. You killed them, or they killed you.

Yet Aisha Rose clearly didn't agree. He saw that she had a long scratch on her neck, a thread of blood tracing down her collarbone and beneath her dress, which she didn't seem to notice.

As if feeling his gaze, she looked over at him. “I'm sorry that I hit you,” she said in her formal way. Jason wondered if those had been her mother's inflections as well. And maybe a trace of her accent: German, perhaps, or South African.

“You're forgiven,” he said to her. “I mean, that's twice today you've rescued me, and the day isn't over yet.”

She smiled at him, using her mouth a little as well as
her eyes. She was definitely learning. “Rescued you?” she said, turning back to peer at Kait. “No. You saw. I was the one she wanted.”

He nodded. That was true, but it was also true that last-stage hosts were rarely picky in choosing their targets.

Aisha Rose started to go on, but before she could speak, Shapiro jumped in.

“I don't understand,” she said, raising her hands. “Tell us what just happened.”

Aisha Rose looked confused. Jason, the only one who understood where the miscommunication lay, touched her arm.

“Aisha Rose, love,” he said. “They don't have any idea.”

She stared at him and made a little sound like a gasp. “What?”

“Nothing else explains it.”

“Explains what?” Shapiro said.

Aisha Rose, ignoring her, looked at Jason with wide eyes.

“You see, they have this vaccine,” Jason said.

“Yes. Dr. Konte wanted me to take it.” She rolled her eyes. “Silly.”

“But that's the point,” he told her. “It's been so long since they've seen it, they don't even recognize the signs anymore.”

Finally, Shapiro got a word in. “What the hell,” she said, “are you two talking about?”

Without replying, Aisha Rose came out from behind the table and walked up to Kait. With her injured hand, she lifted the hem of the semiconscious woman's shirt up
above her waist, revealing exactly what he knew it would: the huge, bulbous swelling overlying Kait's belly, and the black airhole that punctured it like a gunshot wound.

“This,” Aisha Rose said.

*   *   *

“IT'S ALMOST READY
to hatch,” Aisha Rose observed, letting go so the shirt could drape back down, “but it is very small and weak. Does your vaccine do that, too?”

Shapiro wasn't listening. For a long moment she just stared at Kait, first at her now-covered belly, then up at her face. Then her own face flushed, the red even reaching down her throat and upper chest above her shirt.

She took a step closer, and only then did Jason realize that Aisha Rose's attacker was fully awake now as well. He felt a sudden surge of panic, of renewed vulnerability. Yet Shapiro did not seem afraid, only furious. Enraged.

“You did this to yourself,” she said to Kait, in a voice so venomous that it prickled the hair on Jason's scalp. “You fucking did it
on purpose
.”

And Kait nodded.

“So did you get your wish?” Shapiro leaned forward so their faces were just inches apart. “Do you see what Trey did?”

And then she slapped her across the face.

But wonders never ceased. The blow did not seem to anger Kait, provoke her. Instead, she lifted her head, and, through tear-filled eyes, looked at Aisha Rose, and said, “I can see you.”

Aisha Rose smiled. “Yes. I know. And I can see you. A new light.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “A clear new light. It's been so long.”

Kait said, “Can you help me?”

“Of course.”

“How?” Shapiro, rounding on her, spat out the word. “By taking it out and watching her die?”

Aisha Rose gave a little frown. “Die?”

“You saw it,” Shapiro said. “Hell, you
showed
it to us. You must know it's been days—
days
—since we could remove it without killing the host. Without killing Kait.”

“Killing?” Aisha Rose said. “Kait? No.”

No.
That word again. The same word, but this time possessing a completely new meaning.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Don't tell me what I can and cannot do.