Slavemakers (2 page)

Refugia

“DON'T GO,” TREY
said.

Looking into his eyes, Kait didn't reply. He'd made the same request, the same plea, many times, and she'd never replied.

Don't go. When Malcolm finishes building that ship, and it finally sails away from here, don't be on it.

No. It wasn't true. Sometimes she had answered the request. With a question.

“Why not?”

And then it had been his turn to be silent.

It was maddening.

This time, as usual, she planned not to answer, not even with a question. Nor did she intend to allow any expression to cross her face.

Yet even though she was the best she knew at remaining expressionless—she'd been good at that forever—she
could tell from the glint in his eyes that he was seeing her frustration, her annoyance, anyway.

And that, on some level, her reaction amused him.

The longtime pattern between Trey Gilliard and Kaitlin Finneran Gilliard.

Father and daughter. Kind of. By temperament and paperwork and love, if not by blood.

So, without intending to, because he was her father, because he was ill, she found herself saying, “All right. I won't.”

For a moment, his eyes went wide. He tilted his head and looked at her more closely, his large dark eyes prominent in his gaunt face.

Then, without saying anything, he turned away and looked out over the savanna again. After a moment, she did the same, and they sat side by side, but in silence.

*   *   *

KAIT AND TREY
came often to this spot, the watchtower that stood where Refugia's northern wall met its eastern one. The sturdy walls, made of kapok and other local hardwoods, and the towers at each corner were designed to withstand an unnamed, unidentified danger. An onslaught that, once the terrible early months after the Fall had passed, seemed less and less likely ever to occur.

In the nearly twenty years since the colony had been established, there'd never been a warning given from any of the towers. No, that wasn't true: Twice the colonists—Malcolm had dubbed them “Fugians” early on, and the name had stuck—had been alerted to a
monsoon rolling inland from the Atlantic Ocean three miles away.

But the kind of threats they'd guessed might be coming? The kind of invasion they couldn't even put into words, but feared anyway? No. Of course not.

Still, even now, someone was stationed in each of the watchtowers twenty-four hours a day. Because you never knew. Because people still had nightmares.

In those early weeks and months, some had feared a human invasion: desperate, starving people fleeing Dakar or Banjul or one of the other fallen cities to the north.

Clare Shapiro, Refugia's resident skeptic, had scoffed at the idea. “You all have read too many pulp novels and seen too many movies,” she'd said. “Invading hordes? I think not.”

And she'd been right. No one had come. Not once. Not ever.

Shapiro hadn't been done, though. “You know as well as I do,” she'd said. “The attackers that will bring our walls tumbling down won't be anything we'll see coming. And a wall sure won't stop them.”

Yes, they had known. But the logic of it didn't much matter. Kait had long since learned that humans did all sorts of things for no reason other than reassurance. Growing up in this vulnerable colony, seemingly the last human population on earth, she'd come to understand the value of being reassured.

So as soon as she'd been deemed old enough—fourteen—she'd taken her turn in the watch. It had been no burden, an eight-hour shift every ten days or so. She'd always been a solitary soul, so she enjoyed the chance to
be alone, looking out over the savannas to the north or the rain forests that flanked Refugia's other three walls.

The forests, regenerating year by year, always a shocking, intense green, and the grasslands, ever-changing depending on the season and the time of day. Sometimes gray, sometimes a reddish brown, and sometimes the palest jade, as fragile as an eggshell.

Brown now as she and Trey looked out at them. Yet even so, in the midst of the dry season, the savanna was still beautiful, in its own subtle way. The green of the thorn trees, flat and jagged against the horizon. The warm gold of the grazing antelope, the bushbucks and kob. The enormous billowing clouds, white and slate gray, that built up on the horizon every afternoon, harbingers of the approaching rainy season.

Kait knew that Trey loved the diverse landscapes around Refugia. The rain forests, the mossy streams, the coastline with its endless miles of empty white-sand beaches.

He'd spent most of his life before the Fall escaping civilization and lighting out for the most remote and unpopulated territories he could find on a shrinking planet. Seeking out swamps and thorn forests and icy mountain páramos—all the places that people in their right mind avoided. With those as far from his reach as the moon, Kait thought he'd been most at peace when they sat together and looked out over the savanna.

At the water hole that lay across what had once been the red-dirt Massou-Djibo Road but was now just a grassy stripe a little lighter than the savanna beyond, six elephants
were bathing. The elephants had returned just months before, yet another sign—and there were many—of an earth recovering from the contagion that had been the human species.

Anyone who had been part of the Last World, and had been paying even the slightest bit of attention, had known that elephants had been on their way out during those final, unstable years. The worldwide demand for ivory had become so insatiable that extinction was certain. When poachers were machine-gunning elephants from helicopters and poisoning water holes with cyanide, what possible other future did the species face?

There was just a single hope: that
Homo sapiens
would exit before the last elephants did the same. And, amazingly, that was what had happened.

Watching them, Trey smiled. But when he spoke, it wasn't about the elephants or anything else out on the savanna. It was the same old topic, the one that always made Kait feel like a child, as she'd been when they first met.

“I used to play poker with this guy,” he said.

Poker was one of the games that had been carried over to the Next World, poker for money, even though the money itself was meaningless. They even had real playing cards, packs hoarded by the hundred, some before the Fall and others retrieved by Malcolm on his forays away from Refugia in the first months after.

Kait played sometimes, though she'd never seen Trey at a game.

“Guy named Greg,” he went on. “You'd bluff him, and he'd always know.
Always.
If you had a real hand,
he'd fold. But if you were bluffing, he'd stay in and beat you. Every damn time.”

Kait stayed quiet and let him get to the point.

Trey shook his head at the memory. “He said it was easy to spot a bluff. He could always tell. ‘Take you, for example,' he said to me. ‘If you're planning to bluff, you always take a deep breath before you bet.'

“‘I do?' I said. And he nodded. ‘But don't feel bad. Everybody has something, or three things. Their pupils dilate. They get a little sweaty on the temples. They drum their fingers a certain way. Always something.'”

Trey turned his head to look at her, and Kait thought she might be blushing. “So it's that obvious?” she said. “That I'll be on board the ship?”

“Sure.” He smiled at her expression. “I've never understood most people that well. But
you
? You I know.”

Kait knew this was true. That didn't make it any less exasperating.

“But I don't understand—” The words were out before she even knew she was saying them.

He looked interested. “Don't understand what?”

She felt her chin lift. “Back before, you would have been the first one on that boat.”

Kait saw him draw in a breath, like they were playing poker. But this time it was no bluff, and all at once his illness, that relentless, unstoppable thing, showed starkly in his pale skin, taut over his cheekbones.

When he spoke, his voice was quieter. “It's true,” he said. “But the world was a different place back then.”

“
More
dangerous, not less,” she said.

Trey was silent.

She stared at him. “Dad, it
was
more dangerous, wasn't it?”

Still Trey did not speak.

*   *   *

HOW COULD IT
not have been?

In the chaotic weeks and months that preceded the end of the Last World, the parasitic wasps they called thieves had both explosively extended their range and expanded the variety of species they used as hosts for their young. Though monkeys had been their preferred targets in the remote forests where they'd evolved, they'd soon found humans fertile territory as well.

The thieves were far from the first insects to parasitize
Homo sapiens
. Some species of botfly, for example, depended entirely on human flesh to raise their larvae. These flies still sometimes afflicted the Fugians, even the hardiest of whom didn't relish extracting a wiggling white worm from their scalps or the palms of their hands.

But the thieves were far more sophisticated than the primitive botflies. Both wasp adults and larvae poured drugs, toxins, into the hosts, to control their behavior—at first to make them forget they'd been infected and later to make them fiercely protective of the alien life growing inside them.

And, lastly, to guarantee that the host died if the larva was removed before hatching, and in any event died upon the emergence of the adult wasp.

Before the end, this all had been widely known. But Trey had understood far better than most what it meant because he'd been one of the earliest thief victims. He'd
been infected, parasitized, had a thief larva growing inside him and pumping its poisons into his blood.

He'd barely survived the surgery to remove the larva from his belly, but although he had lived, he'd been condemned by the thieves. Destined for a long, slow, irreversible slide into weakness, decrepitude, early death.

Condemned in another way as well because of something else the thieves had done to him. The larva growing inside him had connected him to the wasps' hive mind. And not just Trey: others who'd been host to a thief larva but had somehow survived.

But what did that mean? Her whole life, Kait had been desperate to learn what it was like.

And now, sitting beside him on the edge of Refugia, the home she was ready to leave as soon as she could, she understood that something about Trey's condition—his curse—was the cause of his warning to her. His plea, because it
was
a plea, to stay behind when the ship left. To stay home. To stay safe.

“Dad,” she said.

His eyes had been closed, but when he opened them to look at her, they were clear.

“Tell me
why
I shouldn't go,” she said, “and maybe I'll understand.”

Trey was silent.

Kait didn't relent. “When you close your eyes,” she asked him, “what do you see?”

But still he would not say.

AND NOW SHE
would never find out. Not from Trey, at least.

Because that conversation had been years ago, of course. The two of them had been sitting side by side, watching the elephants bathe and spar.

Year Six, it had been, or Seven. Back when Kait was young, a child still, and filled with a child's questions.

And Trey was still alive.

But he was long dead by now. And Kait was nearly thirty, not that much younger than he'd been when they first met. These days, she sometimes found it hard to remember what his face looked like, or the tone and timbre of his voice.

But not his words. Those she would never forget even as she prepared to ignore them.

Don't go.

*   *   *

KAIT STOOD AT
the edge of the beach that lay three miles west of Refugia. The gleaming white-sand beach, largely free twenty years after the Fall even from plastic garbage spat up by the surf, that bordered the Atlantic Ocean.

Just offshore, the
Trey Gilliard
, the ship Trey had warned her against—and had been named for him, in honor and irony—was preparing for departure. The next day, it was going to set off on the first great scientific exploration of the Next World, and Kait, as both she and Trey had always known, was going to be on board.

The first great scientific exploration. At least, that was the reason everyone gave, and it was true that Refugia's chief biologist, Ross McKay, would be part of the crew of twenty-eight. Ross, who'd been a primatologist in the Last World, Clare Shapiro, and other scientists would be keeping journals, collecting specimens, and doing everything that the great scientific explorers of the nineteenth century, the last before aviation, had done.

But that was not the only reason, or even the main one.

The main reason was to discover if, in fact, Refugia was it: the last human colony on earth.

Another human trait that had carried over from the Last World to this one. The desire, need, obsession, to find out if you are alone.

*   *   *

DOWN THE BEACH,
a caravan of rowboats was bringing the last shipments to the
Trey Gilliard
. Food: salted meat,
fruits and vegetables, both fresh and pickled. Freshwater for the tanks belowdecks.

And medicines, including precious supplies of antibiotics. Kait thought that Shapiro was going on the expedition partly to keep a close eye on the pharmacy, which she'd done so much to develop and stock.

Including the vaccine, derived from the fruit and seeds of the n'te vine, which—when taken weekly—kept the people of Refugia safe from the thieves.

Kait recognized everyone hauling supplies. There was Fatou Konte, born not thirty miles from here, who would be ship physician. Brett and Darby Callahan, the odd twins, just a little older than Kait, who'd worked nearly as tirelessly as Malcolm had to make the
Trey Gilliard
seaworthy. Shapiro, supervising. Malcolm himself.

Of course she recognized all of them: When you lived in an isolated community of just 281 souls, you came to know every face—and every quirk, every fear, every strain of kindness and cruelty—as if they were your own.

You knew too much.

Kait had thought about that often, what it had been like to live in a world where you could know thousands—or millions—of others without much effort. Though she understood now that this had been an aberration, a sign of the sickness possessing the world in the century or so before the Fall.

Such a vast human population, so mobile and interconnected, was a blip that could never have endured. It had gone against Nature. Humans could build airplanes, satellites, computers, bombs, but they were still primates, and
throughout million of years of evolution, no primates had ever lived in hordes of thousands, much less millions.

In fact, Refugia's structure and size, an isolated society with no interaction with any other, but a society nonetheless, was a lot more in line with the way primate societies had always existed than the cities of the Last World had ever been.

The problem, Kait thought, was that the colony's older residents sometimes missed the old ways too much. Life would be easier in a generation or two, when no one could remember the way things had once been.

She turned away from the beach. She'd go down to join them soon, but not quite yet. There was something she had to do first.

*   *   *

SHE'D TAKEN ONLY
a few steps along the trail that led among the palm trees and scrubby beachside undergrowth when she stopped and tilted her head, waiting.

There it was: the familiar migrainous shimmering movement at the corner of her vision.

She'd known she'd find it somewhere around here. There was always a little thief colony near the beach. The sandy soil suited the wasps, and so did the distance from Refugia. Close enough to keep an eye on the humans there, far enough away to stay alive.

Maybe stay alive. Whenever Fugians came upon one of the colonies, they destroyed it. But no one worried much about the thieves' presence. For now, at least, the wasps posed no threat.

A thief rose on bloodred wings from the black hole
of its burrow and hovered in front of her face. Its triangular head tilted this way and that as it stared at her with its bulbous, multifaceted green eyes.

That's what thieves did. They looked you in the eyes.

Kait stood unmoving. The big wasp, three inches long at least, flew closer, its wings beating so rapidly they were invisible save for the characteristic bloody smear they left in the air. Kait saw its thin, black body arch. Its abdomen pulsed and extruded the stinger, a needle as white as ivory. A drop of black liquid—its deadly venom—danced on the needle's end.

Her heart thudded. Maybe this was the time. The time when her immunity would fail her. The moment when the thieves would first demonstrate that they'd evolved the ability to overcome the vaccine, as Shapiro had long predicted they eventually would.

If this was the case, Kait knew what would happen. The thief would rise, then stoop like a hawk toward her, too fast for even the sharpest eyes to follow. Its stinger would plunge like a hypodermic into the flesh of her neck. The injected venom would flood through her, and the thief would pull back and hover once again at a safe distance, watching as she fell to the ground in agony.

And then it, and any others in the vicinity—and there were always others—would attack her eyes. That was what the thieves always did: destroyed their victims' eyes.

Or at least, that's what they
used
to do.

The thief shifted position in midair. But in that moment's hesitation—a pause that she knew as well as her own breath—Kait thrust her right hand out and snatched the wasp from the air.

This was something she'd been doing for nearly two decades though everyone told her not to. In a place like Refugia, most people didn't believe in taking any unnecessary risks. Not when you were one of 281.

Kait understood that, but even so, she could never stop herself. She was always compelled to look closer, to see once again what had brought the Last World to ruin and killed so many people she'd loved.

She held the wasp between her thumb and forefinger, in that spot on its thorax that rendered it helpless. Where she was out of range of both its mandibles and its lethal stinger.

Not that it didn't try to reach her, twisting its head around, curving its abdomen up over its back like a scorpion, the black poison dripping from the stinger's end. The thieves' characteristic bitter smell rose more strongly from it, making her nose prickle.

She always wondered after she caught one: If she let it go, would this be the time it overcame the vaccine's prohibition and stung her?

All she knew was that it hadn't happened yet.

She looked at the wasp more closely. It was a female, and gravid. Pregnant. Kait could tell by the tumorous swelling of its abdomen.

But this was no surprise. Adult female thieves were always gravid. They were one of the creatures—there were many—that carried their eggs around with them for as long as they needed to, until they found a host. They could delay the implantation almost indefinitely.

Kait straightened. She wanted to do nothing more than to twist her fingers and pop the thief's head off.

But she knew that would be the most dangerous thing to do. A beheaded thief could live for days or even weeks in that condition, until it starved to death. And all that time, it would use specialized heat receptors on its abdomen to seek out warm-blooded prey. Prey that included humans, vaccinated or not.

Clare Shapiro's theory was that by beheading an individual thief, or severely wounding it, you severed it from the hive mind. Without the guidance of the mind, the warning to stay away from vaccinated humans, its only goal was to kill you or to lay its egg in your flesh. In the colony's early years, two vaccinated Fugians—both children—had been killed and one adult, Emily Russo, had been infected by wounded thieves.

The vaccine hadn't kept the dying thief from laying its egg, but it had stunted the growth of the larva and delayed its attempted emergence for days, maybe even weeks. And, at the very end, the emerging wasp had been so small and weak that it had died while hatching out.

Too weak to emerge successfully, yet strong enough to kill Emily during the process.

Of course, converting a thief to pulp with the bottom of your sandal took care of all potential risks. But instead, Kait reached into her pocket with her left hand and withdrew the small brown bottle she'd brought for this purpose. She popped the top off and, in one fluid move, dropped the wasp into the bottle.

She got the cap back on just as it leaped to escape. For a few seconds it battered itself against the glass, but then—as captive thieves always did—it seemed to give up, settling back to the bottom of the small space.

As Kait replaced the bottle in her pocket, three more thieves rose from somewhere nearby and flew off, heading south. In just a few moments, they were tiny dots against the sky; and then they were gone.

*   *   *

KAIT LIFTED HER
right hand to her face and breathed in the thief odor that clung to her fingers. Then she raised her head, drew in a deeper breath of fresh salt air, and turned back toward the beach to go help load the ship.

Remembering, as she did, the last words Trey had spoken to her on that far-off day when they'd sat atop the wall and watched the elephants. The closest he'd ever come to describing what he saw inside his head, the curse the hive mind had bestowed on him.

Don't go.

Why not?

“Because if you stay here,” he had finally said, “you'll stay—”

He'd paused, searching for the right word. She hadn't hurried him.

“Ignorant,” he'd said. Then, always precise in his language, he'd grimaced and shaken his head. “No.
Innocent.
”

She'd stayed quiet and, just for a moment, his haunted gaze had met hers.

“Alive,”
he'd said.