Kept on the chest next to her bed.
Nomvula bites her lip, blinks away the tears. This lock pulses with a funny energy that makes Nomvula’s ears tingle like when Sydney’s in the room. Nomvula closes her eyes and concentrates. Eventually an image like a puzzle forms in her head, nine square pieces almost identical. She imagines bringing two of them together, and as soon as they click into place, a bit of the energy fades. She tries another piece, but this time as they connect, a sharp zap runs through her. Nomvula seethes, but she’s determined, and she places a different piece. This time, the shock makes her cry out in pain and throws her to the back of the cage. She sucks at the tips of her blackened fingers and sighs, thinking how nice it would be to stretch her legs.
She can’t get comfortable. Her cage isn’t long enough to lie down in, and it’s not quite tall enough to sit fully upright. Being trapped like this, like an animal, it’s eating away the last bits of her humanity. The god-creature inside her grows stronger, and what frightens Nomvula most is her own craving for another taste of death.
But she has got one friend who helps her pass the time. Nomvula whistles, and Sydney’s alphie trots over to her, its screen flashing red, blue, and green.
“Would you like to play a game?” it asks her.
“Yes,” Nomvula says, making sure to put the “s” on the end like her English teachers taught her. The alphie isn’t that great at understanding her, but it always plays with her—guessing games and matching games and drawing games. It keeps her good company, keeps her mind off the sound of children playing outside in the streets, keeps her from falling asleep where her nightmares patiently await. It’s all for the best, Nomvula thinks. Cooped up in here, she doesn’t have to deal with humans anymore, to grow close to people who will only betray her, who smile as she suffers, laugh as her body is abused. The alphie is simple. It doesn’t love her and never will, even if they play together every day for a thousand years. That makes her feel safe, or at least as close to it as she’s going to get.
She holds her hand out and it nuzzles her, like a pet. She strokes it, once, twice, then holds her hand flat against its surface, speaking to it. It doesn’t have much to say, but Nomvula decides she can teach it how to play a new game. She feeds it images of the nine squares, checking so she gets the exact shapes and colors. Once it has them, she practices putting the puzzle together, until the solution becomes clear. It doesn’t take her long.
The real lock rests in her hands again, and Nomvula steadies herself in case she makes another mistake. Slowly, she visualizes aligning the sides of the squares. They click into place, and she exhales as the final block goes in and the lock releases.
Nomvula feels like a giant! She stretches her arms up, up, up, stretches her wings too while she’s at it, then goes to the window and looks out. There are big, scary buildings as far as she can see, sides bright with flickering animations and colorful lights, commercials and news blips. The city is crammed tight, all concrete and pavement, with the odd tree popping up from little squares of dirt. She recognizes none of it, but she knows she can still look up at the same old sky, and that keeps Nomvula from feeling completely lost. She misses the sky, the wind, the sun. Here it’s all shadows, not that Sydney ever lets her outside, or even near this window for that matter.
She knows she shouldn’t, but Nomvula lifts the window open and the smells drift in. Leaning her head out, she sees kids her age tossing a ball in the street. They stop their game every time a car passes. At first, she’s jealous of their freedom, but the god-creature inside her rears its head and her heart goes cold, slick, and gray in her chest like a sliver of flint—each beat a spark sawing at her ribs. Her mouth waters at the memory of Sofora, eyes so bright and so wide, lips stretched open in a perfect circle as she uttered her last scream on her last breath. Her fear had been sick, foul, and bitter, but now Nomvula’s got a hunger for it like no other.
Nomvula’s ears tingle—a sharp, piercing sound that sets her teeth on edge. She winces and slams the window shut. In her rush back to her cage, her wing clips the light fixture in the ceiling. It sways on its frayed cord. Nomvula sucks in a hard breath, then climbs carefully up onto the glass of the coffee table, not needing to be reminded of the spikes that sit in wait underneath if she slips. She holds her hands up, steadies the fixture—an old iron thing with thin arms bending up each way like something out of a nightmare. The tingling in her ears gets stronger, so she rushes back down, crawls into the cage, holds the lock in her hands, sees the squares and topples them over each other until it’s locked again.
The door creaks open. Nomvula curls into a ball and pretends to sleep. Her heart thumps like a drum in her chest.
“Nomvula, sister. I’m home!” Sydney says as she enters. Footsteps clack toward the cage. “Wake up, hon. Your dinner’s getting cold.”
Nomvula sits up, fakes a yawn, and stares into Sydney’s smiling face, then at the greasy bag she’s holding, noticing the blood beneath her fingernails.
“Did you have a good day?” Nomvula asks politely.
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
Sydney starts to talk about the ladies at her new salon, and how they hate her already, when Nomvula sees that she’d left the curtains to the window drawn wide. She concentrates, makes a small movement with her hand, and they whisper shut.
Sydney palms open the lock on the cage, and Nomvula timidly exits, waiting for Sydney to notice something, anything, but she doesn’t. Nomvula grabs the bag and sits down with it. She reaches in, pulls out a greasy paper wrapped around some bread and meat. It tastes all sorts of awful, but Nomvula takes another big bite, and another, hoping to chase away those awful cravings. Her mouth can’t get wide enough.
Sydney flops down on the couch, kicks her feet up on the coffee table, and turns on her television. She flips through channels, and stays for a few seconds on SABC and the breaking news of another murder, before she finally settles on an old black-and-white movie.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Nomvula dares to ask. “Killing those people?”
Sydney purses her lips, slits her eyes. Nomvula backs away and covers her neck. She doesn’t want to be mute again—not like the first few days she’d spent with Sydney. Sydney had rubbed Nomvula’s throat and had stolen her voice when she’d tired of Nomvula’s screaming and yelling and cursing.
“I’m sorry, sister,” Nomvula whispers, then says even softer, “I think they deserve it.”