Sydney laughs. As if scrap metal could get in the way of world domination! She sends them both flying through the air, way across the arena floor where they land with a double clang. Sydney dusts her hands off, but before she can take another step, ten alphies form a wall around Nomvula’s scrunched-up body. Sydney steps back, takes a good look at her surroundings. There’s a whole army of them headed this way, alphies of all sizes and shapes. The one in the pink coat leads them again, dinged up but no worse for wear.
Sydney draws hard and deep, then sends a hundred of them careening into a wall with such a force, they’re battered to unrecognizable bits. And yet they still grow in number. She shuffles backward, trying to buy herself time, conjuring a magnificent force, enough to crush a thousand of them with the flinch of her mind. An impressive feat . . . and yet they keep coming, filing in from the doors flanking the side of the stage, all those alphies that had been checked before the concert. Thousands and thousands of them, they form a cocoon around Nomvula’s body.
But no, this isn’t the end. Not by a long shot.
Sydney flexes her wings, using the last bit of ire within her to soar straight up into the rafters, and with talons sharp as diamond-tipped blades, she claws a hole through the arena’s domed ceiling.
She escapes into the blackness of the Port Elizabeth night, and damn it, wouldn’t you know it, she’s chipped her nail polish.
Now she’s really mad.
Part V
Chapter 38
Muzi
It’s like the fiery depths of hell have been compacted into a neat, golf-ball-sized tumor, then shoved into the back of Muzi’s brain. It’s so heavy, so all-encompassing that Muzi barely remembers where he is, who he is. Terror is so crisp, so precise that he forgets to breathe until his lungs yell bloody murder. He can’t close his eyes or he’ll see their faces, the thousands of lives extinguished by that woman’s hand. No, not a woman. A monster. He stares ahead at nothing, unseeing, until his eyes burn with the dryness of an endless desert.
Then he blinks.
And in that instant, they all stare back at him, pleading for their lives—bruises blooming like death-ridden flower patches, flesh split clean open with the precision of a sushi chef. Smelling of piss and sick and shit. They die a hundred agonizing deaths, their screams threatening to shatter his teeth, his bones. Muzi lifts his lids. They’re gone now, but he knows they’re waiting.
“Muzi?” Nomvula says.
He jumps at her touch. Muzi tries to focus on her, but it’s hard.
“Are you okay?” she asks. Her small, brown hand rests on his chest. There are alpha bots surrounding her, lots of them. Maybe hundreds. “Blink if you can hear me,” she says this time. A cruel joke if he’s ever heard one.
Muzi wiggles feeling back into his fingers, then slowly brings his hands to his face. With his thumbs and forefingers, he keeps his lids pried open, but that makes it worse. Nomvula plants her clammy hand on his forehead. It sears his skin, then flashes ice cold. The nightmares fade into the shadows of his mind, allowing him to entertain a few thoughts of his own.
“How did you do that?” he asks.
“Shhh. We need to leave now. Before Sydney comes back.”
“What is she?”
“Too many questions. Clever4–1 knows a safe place for us. We can talk there.” Nomvula gestures at the alphie next to her, the one wearing a bright pink coat.
“Clever?” Muzi looks at it closer. It’s dinged up pretty good, but Muzi recognizes the cluster of brood band decals: The Adamants, Whisky Sour, Frankie and the Fingers. “Is that my bot?”
Nomvula exchanges a glance with the robot whose mono-eye flushes a pale green Muzi’s never seen before. She laughs. “Your bot? You belong to it as much as it belongs to you. It says that it trusts you. I will try to trust you, too.”
The bot nuzzles Muzi’s armpit and helps him to his feet, its dome head a convenient place to rest his weary, pain-racked body while he gathers his strength. It chirps at him all the while, encouragingly.
“It thinks you are very brave for fighting Sydney, for saving my life. I can see why it loves you so much. You’ve always treated it as a friend rather than a machine.”
Muzi shakes his head, trying to make sense of Nomvula’s words. Her accent is thick, syllables long and rounded. Maybe she’s choosing the wrong words. “It is a machine.”
“Yes, and so much more. I can tell you more. But first we must leave this place. Are you okay to walk?”
Muzi tests his legs out, then nods. A pestilent fog still rims his thoughts, so they make their way slowly, but with an anxiousness in their step. Nomvula tells Muzi of his alphie’s secret life, an odd tale too fantastic not to believe. In a weird way, he can relate—the secrecy, the lies, the double life that makes it nearly impossible to show your true self to anyone.
Nomvula keeps glancing back over her shoulder at the hole Sydney left in the ceiling. Muzi is still not sure this hasn’t been one giant hallucination from snorting too much godsend. He wishes Elkin would have never given him the stuff. He wishes things could go back to normal.
Bladdy hell. Elkin.
Muzi screams his name. The crowd is thinning now, just panicked people searching for loved ones. Muzi pulls away from Nomvula and her bot posse. “Elkin! Where are you?” he calls out. He wades through toppled seating and steps over trampled bodies like he’s doing foot drills. He panics, mind fluttering a thousand different ways as he tries to remember the last place he’d seen Elkin.
“Muzi, please. We must hurry,” comes Nomvula’s voice, concerned and impatient. She’s not going to wait around forever, no matter how highly his alphie speaks of him. But there’s no way Muzi can go without Elkin. Has to find him alive and well, and tomorrow they’ll bunk class, order a meganacho from that Tex-Mex place near the beach, then blaze up down by the seawall, watching the waves crash, laughing about how wicked sick the concert was, and how bladdy ridiculous their hallucinations had been—flying demons in sequined dresses and secret robot armies!
A piece of cement crashes against the floor and explodes like a brick of powder right next to Muzi. He coughs, cringes, and as the haze parts, he looks up to see the ceiling giving way around the gaping hole.
“Elkin!” he screams, but it’s immediately lost in a thorny tangle of names of others looking for their loved ones. He’s all but given up when he spots Elkin’s coat on the ground. He’s close enough to see Elkin’s face, skin a ghastly blue, jaw dislocated, hanging so wide and so wrong. Muzi’s chest fills with a piercing numbness, and he stumbles backward. But he pushes through fear, through sickness, to be at Elkin’s side. He can’t be left alone like this, with no one to mourn him. Muzi cries. God, he cries so hard, he thinks he’s about to shake himself into a thousand pitiful pieces.
Nomvula bends down next to them and presses her hand against Elkin’s chest. She concentrates hard, like she did with Muzi’s mind, but this time she’s wincing in pain. She buckles forward, catches herself.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers to Elkin. The bots form a circle around them, their mono-eyes black at the top and fading into a somber deep orange.
Muzi leans closer to Elkin’s body, but the bots get closer, too. A couple of them nudge Muzi out of the way. Muzi beats them off with his fist.
“You stay away from him, you hear me?”