Her father stands back up, and some sort of sanity seems to wash over him. Relative sanity. He turns back to his daughter and smiles. “I’ll be back with lunch in a bit, dear. We’ll just have to hope your mother gets here in time, or she’ll have to reheat hers! But don’t worry. She won’t miss your special surprise tonight for anything.”
Her father leaves, deadbolts locking from the other side of the door. Riya Natrajan waits a few minutes before trying to struggle out of her restraints. After spending the past five years slaving under the eagle eye of her choreographer, Riya’s got the flexibility and muscle control to wriggle, writhe, and worm herself until she gets a hand loose. Then the other. And then with a final shimmy, the rope drops and she’s free. She rushes to the window, draws back the curtains, and cusses the gods as plywood stares back at her with more nails than she can count.
Riya Natrajan scrambles down next to the bot carcass and tries to bring up the phone function. The screen flickers alive, and she types in the first three digits of Adam’s number before it goes dead again. She sighs and lets the bot unit fall back to the floor. This house bot had probably cost her father half a million rand, not your usual alpha unit, but a delta capable of carrying out complex tasks, though self-defense apparently was not one of them. Guilt creeps up into her throat, an old friend. She can’t help but think she’d caused her father’s meltdown. He’d lost everything and could barely deal after all these years. And then she comes back into his life, as casually as if none of it had ever happened, looking to be forgiven for the unforgivable. Her father couldn’t forgive, but he could forget the last twenty years had ever happened, going back to that time in his mind when his daughter was still sweet, not chasing after boys and singing silly songs. When she was still his, and he was a god in her eyes.
Riya Natrajan creeps up to the mirror over her dresser, afraid of what she’ll see. A face stares back at her, no makeup, brown skin not quite as tight as it had once been, black tresses a mess, clothes like some abomination of nature on her body. For the first time in a long time, she feels ugly and awkward and trapped. There’s no escape for her body, but there is one for her mind. She finds her sweatpants balled up in a corner and fetches the vial of godsend from the pocket. She sniffs, more than enough to cut through the haze of whatever her father had drugged her with. Her skin prickles, feathers sprout, and her tail drags behind her like a beautiful gown. She’s still too hoarse to sing, but she can hum, and she does, loudly, her body light and ready to dance. She steps out the moves to her new song, imagining she’s onstage, the only place where she truly feels comfortable with herself. Despair lifts. Her fans cheer. She’s free!
“What is the meaning of this nonsense?” her father snarls as he storms into the room. His face is stern as if chiseled from stone, but it doesn’t scare Riya Natrajan. Not anymore. She’s not that child, pining for her mother’s affection, her father’s approval. She’s grown wings and has ambitions—ambitions her father hadn’t been able to quell by taking away that wind chime, and he won’t do it now, not through intimidation, not through starvation, not even in death will he be able to take away her song.
“I’m dancing, Father! Dancing to the wind chimes. Isn’t their sound beautiful? Just from outside that window.”
Her father draws back the curtain. “You can’t hear anything. The window’s boarded up!”
“Silly father, the window’s wide open! Feel the breeze. Listen to the notes.” Riya Natrajan hums, so light on her feet she’s not even sure she’s touching the floor. “Breezy, breezy! Listen to my heart at play!”
“Stop it! Stop singing!” Her father slaps her, but the pain doesn’t stick. Instead she feels her vocal cords relax.
She tries singing the lyrics, again. The scratch in her voice smooths itself out enough to push into a flirty vibrato. “Feel me, ooh boy! Simple as seduction!”
Her father’s open hand becomes a fist. His eyes flicker with something raw and primal. The weight of his punch shifts her jaw, and the pop echoes through her skull. She sucks in a sharp breath.
But again the pain doesn’t last.
“Reaching, reaching! Living for another day!”
He punches. Rabid. Savage. Nothing like the man she’d once known. Her ribs, she’s sure at least two of them are broken. The agony is intense, but sweet. She feels her bones knitting back together even as her father straddles over her, ready to take another swing. Her vocal cords tighten like a drawn bow, and her lyrics rip forth like arrows. She laps up the pain until she’s brimming with a note so sharp, she can no longer contain it.
She lets it loose, belting out the words with a force that nearly causes her to recoil. “Feel me, ooh boy! Live forever, sweet seduction!” Song is her weapon, and her father lurches back, notes resonating so intensely he clasps his hands over his ears. Riya stands as he cowers, a smile on her face as she cuts into the second verse. By the refrain, her father is a shivering lump.
She stops, bends down next to him, peels back his eyelids to see burst blood vessels and dilated pupils.
“I’m Riya Natrajan,” she whispers into his ear. “And if you ever call me anything else, if you ever touch me again, if you so much as look in my general direction, I’ll be sure to give you an encore performance that you won’t forget. Do you understand me?”
Her father manages a nod, then closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry for hurting you, Father. I’m sorry for not being there,” Riya Natrajan says, then she leaves her father alone to deal with his demons.
She’s already got enough of her own.
Chapter 21
Nomvula
Sydney smiles a lot, and it makes Nomvula nervous. Maybe it’s supposed to be a friendly smile, but it seems more like a hungry one, like the way a hyena smiles when it has cornered its prey. Sydney’s nice enough, though. She doesn’t yell much, not since Nomvula learned to stay quiet and not make too much fuss.
Nomvula hates being locked up in this cage. It’s only when Sydney’s not home to watch her. For her own good, Sydney says. But Sydney’s gone a lot, during the day to work, and another job at night, and some nights she’s out even later, and she’ll come home stinking of fear, humming to herself as she picks dried blood from beneath her fingernails.
Now, alone, Nomvula slips her hands between the bars of her cage and holds the lock in her hands. It’s not a normal lock, not like the one Mama Zafu keeps on the chest next to her bed.