Tunde knew what was about to happen. Holding his camera, he could barely make the finger on the shutter-release press down. He wanted to see it happen.
The blind woman at the fire was all the women who had nearly killed him, who could have killed him. She was Enuma and she was Nina and she was the woman on the rooftop in Delhi and she was his sister Temi and she was Noor and she was Tatiana Moskalev and she was the pregnant woman in the wreckage of the Arizona mall. The possibility has been pressing in on him all of these years, pushing down on his body, and he wanted it done now, wanted to see it done.
In that moment, he longed to be the one with his wrists clasped. He longed to kneel at her feet, his face buried in the wet soil. He wanted the fight over, he wanted to know who won even at his own cost, he wanted the final scene.
She held the young man’s wrists.
She pressed her forehead to his.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Yes.’
And when she killed him, it was ecstasy.
In the morning, Tunde still does not know whether it was a dream. His manual camera is advanced by eighteen pictures. He might have pressed the button in his sleep. He will only know if the film is developed. He hopes it was a dream, but that has its own terrors. If, in some dream place, he had yearned to kneel.
He sits in the tree and thinks things through from the night before. It does look better in the morning, somehow. Or at least less terrifying. The report of his death can’t have been an accident or a coincidence. It’s too much. Moskalev or her people must have discovered that he’d gone, that his passport had gone with him. The whole thing must have been staged: the car accident, the charred body, the suitcase. This means one very important thing: he cannot go to the police. There is no more fantasy – he had not quite realized before that this fantasy still clung to the edges of his mind – that he can walk into a police station with his hands up and say, ‘Sorry, cheeky Nigerian journalist here. I’ve made some mistakes. Take me home.’ They won’t take him home. They will take him out into a quiet place in the woods and shoot him. He is alone.
He needs to find an internet connection. There will be one somewhere. A friendly man who’ll let him use the home computer for just a few minutes. He can convince them in five lines that it’s him, that he’s really alive.
He’s shaking as he climbs down from the tree. He’ll walk on from here, he’ll stay in the forest and head for a village he passed through four days ago with some friendly faces. He’ll send his messages. They’ll come for him. He shifts his bag on his back and sets his face to the south.
There’s a noise in the bushes to his right. He whirls around. But the noise is on the left, too, and behind him; there are women standing up in the bushes, and he knows then with a terror like a springing trap – they’ve been waiting for him. Waiting all night to catch him. He tries to break into a run but there’s something at his ankles, a wire, and he falls. Down, down, struggling, and someone laughs and someone jolts him on the back of the neck.
When he wakes, he is in a cage, and something is very bad.
The cage is small and made of wood. His backpack is in here with him. His knees are pulled up to his chest – there is no room to stretch them out. He can feel from the throbbing ache in his muscles that he’s been like this for hours.
He is in a woodland camp. There is a small campfire burning. He knows this place. It is the camp he saw in the dream. Not dream. It is the encampment of the blind woman, and they have caught him. His whole body starts to shake. It can’t end here. Not trapped like this. Not thrown on the fire or executed for some god-awful tree-magic religion. He rattles the sides of the cage with his legs.
‘Please!’ he shouts, though no one is listening. ‘Please, someone help me!’
There’s a low, throaty chuckle from the other side of him. He cranes his head to look.
There’s a woman standing there.
‘Got yourself in a fucking mess, haven’t you?’ she says.
He tries to make his eyes focus. He knows the voice from somewhere a long way away, a long time ago. As if the voice were famous.
He blinks and she comes into view. It is Roxanne Monke.
Roxy
She says, ‘I recognized your face as soon as I saw you. Seen you on the telly, haven’t I?’
He thinks he’s in a dream, must be, can’t not be. He starts to cry. Like a child, confused and angry.
She says, ‘Stop that now. You’ll set me off. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?’
He tries to tell her, but the story no longer makes sense even to him. He decided to walk into danger because he thought he was enough, and now he is in danger and it is clear to him that he has never been enough and it is unbearable.
‘I was looking for … the mountain cult,’ he barks out at last. His throat is dry and his head aches.
She laughs. ‘Yeah, well. You found it. So that was a bloody stupid idea, wasn’t it?’
She gestures around her. He’s at the edge of a small encampment. There are perhaps forty dirty tents and huts slumped around the central fire. A few women are at the open mouths of their huts, whetting knives, or fixing metal shock gauntlets, or staring blankly. The place stinks: a smell of burning flesh and rotten food and faeces and dogs and a sour note of vomit. To one side of the latrine there’s a pile of bones. Tunde hopes they are animal bones. There are two sad-looking dogs tied by short lengths of rope to a tree – one has an eye missing, and patches of fur.
He says, ‘You have to help me. Please. Please help me.’
She looks at him, and her face twists in an awkward half-smile. She shrugs. And he sees that she’s drunk. Fuck.
‘I don’t know what I can do, mate. I don’t have much … influence, here.’
Fuck. He is going to have to be more charming than he’s ever been in his whole life. And he’s stuck in a cage where he can’t even move his neck. He takes a deep breath. He can do it. He can.
‘What are you doing here? You vanished the night of the big Moskalev party, and that was months ago. Even when I left the city they were saying you’d been bumped off.’
Roxy laughs. ‘Were they now? Were they? Well, someone tried. And it’s taken me a while to heal is all.’
‘You look pretty … healed now.’
He looks her up and down appreciatively. He’s particularly impressed with himself for doing so without being able to move.
She laughs. ‘I was going to be President of this fucking country, you know. For about … three hours there, I was going to be the fucking President.’
‘Yeah?’ he says. ‘I was going to be the star of Amazon’s fall line-up.’ He looks right and left. ‘Think they’re coming for me now with a drone?’
And then she’s laughing, and he’s laughing, too. The women at the entrances to the tents glance over at them balefully.
‘Seriously. What are they going to do with me?’ he says.
‘Oh, these people are bloody mental. They hunt men at night,’ Roxy says. ‘Send girls off into the forest to scare ’em. Once they’re scared and running, they set a trap – tripwire, something like that.’