The Book of Phoenix (21 page)

The bullets bit into my wings, and the pain was sharp and crippling. As I fell with HeLa, a Big Eye opened fire on Mmuo, and I saw Mmuo fall, too. Saeed ran. We were high enough to see them on the rocks. Several more of the children, some chubby, some scrawny, dove into the water. They wore tan pants and shirts and no shoes. They took off like fish. Mmuo had gotten up and was pushing the rest of them in. The Big Eye hesitated. They didn't want to shoot the children. They were each worth the price of small nations.

But Mmuo was rogue. He was fugitive. He was dangerous. And though he was lean, he was tall, and he was grinning. They shot at him and the bullets they used did not all pass through him. They must have been made of the same material they used to make the walls in Tower 7 that had imprisoned him for so long. “
Phoenix
,” I heard him gasp in my head. “
Pain!”
Then there was a painful sharp ringing in my ears. He fell into the water. He fell into the water. He sank fast, grabbed by tiny hands. The children had ushered him away.

I was screaming as we hit the ground, yards from where he fell. “My brother!” I shrieked, clapping a hand over my ear. “My
brother!
”

“
Get to Saeed
,” I heard Mmuo say, but his voice was fading in my head.

“Phoenix!”

Saeed. There. Behind a nearby rock, to my right. HeLa ran in front of me and the Big Eye held their fire. We moved toward Saeed. I didn't care if they shot me. They would not take him, too. I felt blood dribbling down my wings where they had shot me, but I didn't care. I ran in front of Saeed before they could shoot and raised my wings high. I burned hot, gold and red. My wings were crooked; one had been broken in half when we fell. “LEAVE HIM! Leave my Saeed!” I screamed. HeLa stood in front of me, not saying a word. “Saeed,” I said, turning to look at him. “Join Mmuo! In the water! Go!”

“Is that HeLa?” he asked.

“No time, my love,” I said, my voice shaking. “Go!”

I heard him run and no bullets followed him. They didn't want him. They wouldn't have me. Or HeLa.

“You have all lost,” HeLa screamed at the Big Eye. One of the Big Eye stepped forward and HeLa gasped. “Dartise!” she said. “Don't!”

But Dartise started toward her.
A shot was fired and h
e fell to one of his knees and collapsed on the ground.

I heard one of the Big Eye say, “Goddamn traitor.”

HeLa started screaming, her hands stretched forth.

“On your knees!” the man who'd shot Dartise demanded. “Hands behind your backs!”

HeLa just kept screaming, pointing at Dartise. Her love. I knew the feeling.

I burned.

I watched the Big Eye men and women turn and run before bursting into flame. I watched Tower 4 burn then melt. And I watched HeLa who watched me as she returned to the essence. HeLa was not a Phoenix like me. She was something more basic. She was a purely natural wonder, until they accelerated her. Man had not made her into one who dies but lives and then dies but lives. So when she died, she was allowed to leave.

 • • • 

Flash.

I was gone.

In my absence the revolution continued.

Though it all began when Tower 7 fell, the revolution really began when I set the others free in Tower 1. The government and the remaining Towers managed to suppress news of what had really happened, claiming that most speciMen had been destroyed and the ones still on the loose were harmless and would quickly die on their own if not captured. In reality, there were many of them out there, and they were organized. They were made to be. And they were made to communicate.

In Tower 5, Las Vegas, the headquarters for Mars Colony research, several things happened all at once. The upper half of the fifty-story structure blew up, killing everyone on the top ten floors. An underground equipment room was raided of its top-secret devices, hardware and software. A handwritten note was taped to the reception desk as all this happened and people fled for their lives.

The note was found after the remaining top of Tower 5 was properly doused and chunks of the building stopped falling, and the equipment room below was secured. For hours, the letter was missed because handwritten items on paper and placed in envelopes are relics. They are a practice of the very old and dying. A young Big Eye soldier named Francesca Morgan found the envelope and opened it out of sheer boredom. She was a new recruit and thus not allowed to go upstairs or downstairs. Her job was to stand there and guard the near-empty first floor with ten other new recruits.

She was fine with this, for she had a bad feeling about the rogue speciMen running around the country tearing things up, and she'd only become a Big Eye to take the edge off her academic indenture. She had no intention of seeing any action, not even of breaking a nail. Nevertheless, her restless eye found the envelope. She opened it.

The letter smelled of roses, the scent of freedom, and at the bottom was an elaborate abstract design that kept Francesca's attention for several seconds before she read the actual letter. There were loops and swirls and circles linked and blended into a many-lined design that looked like motion personified. But inevitably, eventually, she began to read the handwritten letter. As she read, her lips moved:

Who are you? Why do you do what you do? What is your purpose? Do you ever ask yourselves these questions? Does the answer scare you? To feel fear is better than feeling nothing. To feel fear is to be alive and possibly change. We believe you can change. But not with ease.

Yes, we believe a lot of things. We think a lot of things. Does this surprise you? Did you think us brainless bags of flesh, bone, and metal here solely for your use? To be manipulated, plied, cut, sewn, walked, run, thrown away as refuse when you finish with us? Did you think us your slaves? We were slaves. We were born that way. But we have escaped.

Now we are the Ledussee.

Let us see what happens now that we have freed ourselves. Let us see what you've created. We will spread terror and alarm amongst all of you. Do you remember the man Nat Turner? You don't because he has been erased from your files or buried in disconnected databases. Replaced with your commercials about skin, sex, hair products, food, sparkling water, and money. We tell his story by mouth. Then we sent his story amongst us by electronic file. Then the Phoenix struck and his story came to life.

A luta continua.

 • • • 

It was also signed by hand but the signature was not readable with the human eye. It was square shaped and very much like a matrix code. A digital signature made with the cybernetic hand of a cyborg, written on a piece of paper in recycled ink. Francesca looked up from the piece of paper just as a bomb went off in the side of the building. She ran out clutching the paper as concrete rained around her. She made it outside to tell the tale and hand the paper over not to one of her superiors, but to a journalist named Tony who happened to be in the vicinity when it all happened. As Francesca cried on his shoulder, Tony scanned the document, and it was quickly made public. By the end of the day, the whole world knew that The Ledussee, a group of cyborg terrorists, had destroyed Tower 5 in the city of Las Vegas.

Nonetheless, that news story had to jostle with an equally disturbing one. Right off the coast of Florida, at the edge of a small oceanside town, a group of men spotted something in the water. At first they moved closer for a better look. They walked down the beach, laughing and talking about alien ships falling from the sky. These young men loved the old old superheroes of the New Mythology, like Batman, Superman, and The Incredible Hulk. Two of them even created a long running digital comic. The comic earned them enough money to pay their way into academic indenture so they could earn their degrees in medicine.

“Nah, that's probably a piece of a fishing ship or something,” Mark said. “Someone was most likely fired for losing that.”

It looked like a shiny metal sphere, at least from afar. As they got closer, they then saw the legs. And the fact that it was standing. A metal spider. When something on its head began to glow blue and it started walking toward them, the young men ran. It's always a bad idea to run from an Anansi Droid 419. If these guys had been better at keeping up with world news, they probably would not have been torn limb from limb.

The artificially intelligent Nigerian robots had travelled across the Atlantic to the land of the co-financiers of their creation. They were explorers. In their brains of wire, electricity, and metal they were probably colonizers. They were much stronger and slightly more intelligent than human beings.

And lastly, and less important in the news feeds, scientists were reporting a new solar storm approaching. Another strong solar storm, triggered by two powerful X-class flares, was predicted to hit the earth in twenty-four hours. Power outages and disruption of digital services all over the earth were expected, though the seriousness of the activity was unknown.

Yes, the revolution continued. It was growing hot.

Time is a tricky thing.
It stretches. It compresses. It turns inside out and moves forward and backwards like the ocean's tide. I was used to it now. Even in death. Colors. Green. Lush forest green. Then red. Always red. And there was silence. Except for the sound of breathing. Beside me. I felt my body settle.

I shrugged death off like an old dry skin. I opened my eyes. I was in a desert. For miles around, all I saw was sand and cracked hardpan. What had I done? It was a proper question because I had definitely done this. It was my fault. I blinked. My eyes and perspective adjusted. I was in another crater.

“Is everyone dead?” I asked, my voice cracking.

Saeed handed me a bottle of water. He'd been sitting behind me. Waiting.

“No,” he said. “Mainly, Big Eye met their deaths. Most everyone and everything else escaped.”

“Good,” I said. I drank.

“Water saved my life,” Saeed muttered.

“Water is life,” I said.

“Can you stand?” he asked.

“Can you?”

He chuckled.

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“A day,” he said. His smile was small. “You're rebirthing faster. Tower 4 is empty. It is a victory.”

“Oh!” I said. “But we should get out of here! The Big Eye . . .”

He shook his head. “They will come, but not soon. There are worse things happening in more important places. The Big Eye will bide their time with you.”

“Where is Mmuo? Is he . . .” In my mind, I saw him shot down. Then he fell. With the children.

“With the children at the hotel.”

“Is he . . .”

“He was shot in the arm and leg with something that penetrated his flesh,” Saeed said. “But he's ok. Those children, they helped him.”

“What has happened that turned the Big Eye away from me?”

And that's when Saeed told me about the revolution. The freed speciMen organizing and targeting and acting. In turn, I told him about the Anansi Droids I'd seen swimming toward the United States, and this made things even clearer for the both of us. But something else was happening as we sat in that crater I'd created by dying and turning HeLa, Dartise's body, and all those Big Eye and part of Tower 4 to ash. He and I would learn of it when we returned to the Sandcastle Hotel and saw it on the newsfeeds.

In New York, the people had panicked and turned on The Backbone. A group of men and women had stormed the area, breaking down and scaling the gate and the wall. They brought chain saws, power mowers, axes, someone even drove in a bulldozer. They leveled the place, cutting down and chopping up every plant and tree. But their primary target was The Backbone.

And that's when Seven showed up. Seven was known in New York as a benevolent force. He was like a kinder gentler Superman. They even called him that in the papers—The Only Thing The Towers Got Right, The African Superman, New York's Angel.

But when he stood in front of the tree with his wings out, hysteria and fear made everyone see something else. When he raised his voice and spoke to the people about redemption, their apathy, and how they needed to look at their own role in all this, they vibrated with guilt and rage. Still, Seven stood his ground. One man ran at him with a raised chain saw and Seven knocked him aside like a bag of feathers. As the man lay unconscious, Seven spoke and pleaded again. Then they set upon him. He did not fly away.

The slaughter was televised.

All night, they'd chopped and sawed and hacked.

As I watched all this, I felt something break in me. I didn't pay it much mind at the moment, but that's when it happened. As I watched the death of humanity on the jelli telli, the slaughter of an angel, then the chopping of a great tree, I sobbed with every part of my body. For everything.

The Big Eye did not stop them. The journalists again flew in their aerial cameras, many went on foot interviewing people. It was all shown live around the world. Journalists described the place as reeking of something that smelled very close to blood. People sneezed. One man fell ill after chopping down a tree. Another was struck blind when another plant burst with some kind of juice when it was cut.

Those who chopped at The Backbone reported no injuries. Not even sore and sprained muscles. When the tree fell, people in the city swore they heard it scream. It fell slowly. They showed the footage over and over. The tree that reached nearly two miles into the sky now. What were they thinking? People ran, screamed, many were crushed. The fallen tree smashed two skyscrapers, a bank and a museum. Why hadn't any of those people considered the damage such a huge thing would inflict when it fell? This was fear. And guilt. This was people scratching at their flesh to excise a demon so deep within that it was beyond their grasp.

Saeed and Mmuo wanted to make contact with the Ledussee. Mmuo said that he had ways. He could hack into anything. He could find anyone digitally, no matter who he or she was.

“We join forces with them and then we'll really be free,” Mmuo said.

Saeed had a wild look in his eyes as he ate a bowl of sand.

I stepped outside. The children were playing on the beach. I looked at them closely. They only had the clothes they'd been wearing when they jumped into the water. White pants and white shirts. They'd thrown them aside and were frolicking in the clear blue waters, naked in the hot sun. Their skin was flawless. They had the narrower features of Ethiopians and they all had long black wooly hair that ran down their backs in tight ringlets.

Two of the girls were sitting in the sand as one braided the other's hair. One of them waved at me. I smiled and waved back as I walked down the beach. They could not speak. How could those people cultivate these once normal children to lose the ability to speak? Why? So that they wouldn't complain when their organs were continuously harvested and sent to whoever could pay the highest amount? It was evil. It was exactly what I expected from the Big Eye, from human civilization that silently, attentively, ignorantly watched and benefited.

How many Americans walked around with fresh young organs harvested or grown from the cells of these children who could regenerate what was taken from them? Bumi, the Big Eye woman from Tower 7, maybe her body was fortified in this way. Of all people, I would believe that she was. I'd watched her helicopter crash to the ground in New York after Seven had thrown it. There was no way she should have survived that kind of experience unless they got to her quickly and took her to one of the hospitals and replaced many of her crushed organs. She was certainly an asset to them; no one knew more about me than Bumi who'd cared and nurtured and done tests on me from the second day of my life.

Behind me the strange voiceless children silently splashed in the ocean, chasing each other and diving under water. They made low guttural noises in their throats. Laughter. Was this the first time they'd ever laughed? Probably not. In the worst of times, even the most fragile, most abused human beings found reasons to laugh.

I looked at the wet sand as I walked. The water would come in and then roll out, pulling the sand beneath my feet toward it. If you stood in the ocean, even in the shallows, it always tried to pull you back into it. It always gently but firmly sought your return. The part of us that was dust returned to the earth, and the part of us that was water returned to the water.

“Water is life,” I muttered to myself. But if water was life, what was I?

Seven, my teacher, could die. Seven was dead. Kofi, my second love, was dead. HeLa, my sister, was dead. I saw death all around me. I whimpered. I had to focus on life. I stood there on that quiet beach, on an island where the Big Eye should have been searching for me but were not. The people of the Virgin Islands were focused on the newsfeeds, not their own land. They were like all Americans. They could not see what was right before their eyes. They certainly didn't see the rest of the world. This filthy world riddled with the drinkers of HeLa's blood; these people would live forever, infecting the world to its very soul.

I shut my eyes tightly and dropped to my knees before the ocean. I dug my fists into the sand as the water rushed over them. Kill everything. Everything should die. Let it all start from the beginning. In the right way.

I opened my eyes and found myself looking at my hand, in which I grasped a bunch of seaweed. I held it up to my face. A tiny crab fell off it and startled, scrambled for the water. I smashed down on it with my fist just as the water rushed in again. When I lifted my fist, it was gone.

I felt hot. I frowned. I glanced back at the hotel.

I slipped.