“I’ve wept for them all, just like you weep for yours.”
“But I didn’t kill Elkin!” Muzi shouts, so full of anger, of rage—wishing more than anything those words were true. He had killed Elkin. Muzi should have refused that first taste of godsend, should have talked Elkin down, too. He should have stood up for himself in front of Papa Fuzz and ventured into manhood on his own terms. He should have fled the concert arena with Elkin, instead of being so hell-bent on acting like a hero and rescuing a little girl who he’d thought was vulnerable . . . not this monster sitting before him. “You killed him!”
Muzi flexes his muscle again, this time wrapping his will around her neck. He hears her choking, then his head is slammed against the wall, a pain jacking through his bones like they’re being sheared apart. She’s fighting back.
“I’m not your enemy!” she gurgles through the darkness.
But Muzi doesn’t believe her. Either that, or he doesn’t care. Someone needs to pay for what happened to Elkin. Muzi screams through the pain, grits his teeth, tightens the noose. Then his skin smolders as if it’s about to catch fire, burning all over. “You won’t win,” he says, his words dry and sore over his scorched tongue.
“Enough!” comes a voice, splitting through the gloom like an axe.
Darkness parts to reveal hints of facial features: a long chiseled nose, pitted brown skin, yellow eyes like Nomvula’s. Muzi recognizes him from her vision. The man stoned to a pulp.
The pain’s suddenly gone, and so is his grip on Nomvula.
“Baba?” she whispers.
“My child,” he says, his words curt, but heavy with the weight of a million lifetimes. Muzi draws himself back to give the man room. “There’s enough fighting to be done without the two of you at each other’s throats.” He extends his arm, and Nomvula scrambles into his lap. “War is on the eve, a war of gods, and I fear it will destroy everything on this earth.”
“Sydney,” Nomvula says.
That demon woman, Muzi thinks.
“Not a demon,” the man says. “She’s my child, too. As are you . . .” He extends his hand out to Muzi who reluctantly takes it. “And the two of you working together have the power to stop her.”
Muzi is getting a full-on pervy vibe from the guy, but calling “stranger danger” on a wrinkled old bastard who can pass through locked steel doors probably isn’t going to help the situation. Calloused fingers stroke Muzi’s right cheek, his neck, his shoulder—leaving behind a trail of warmth that seeds itself into his skin, his flesh, his bone. A numbingly white light floods the closet, and suddenly Muzi’s drowning in the acuteness of his own senses, the most disturbing of which is the world slipping out from under him.
Clouds hang heavily in Nomvula’s mind, but she can just make out a figure standing before her. She blinks away the haze and her vision sharpens. She’s staring at a woman—a sculpture of a woman to be more exact—larger than life size, smooth and etched from the trunk of a tree. Mr. Tau’s work, for certain. There’s the swell of her pregnant belly, cradled by one hand, while the other points down a gentle hill. Her breasts full and alert. Those things Nomvula can’t remember, but the face haunts her, and she swallows back her tears. The slope in her nose, the nap of her hair, the sorrow in her eyes. It was her mother, pregnant with Nomvula inside. Nomvula takes a step forward, reaches out to place her hand against the sculpture’s belly, but she’s pulled back. The whole left side of her is paralyzed.
And white.
Nomvula lets out a startled scream.
“Nomvula?”
It’s Muzi’s voice, but he’s nowhere to be seen. She tries turning her head, but there’s a strange tug that makes it difficult. She blinks a couple more times and notices the forest beyond the sculpture of her mother—a forest of baobab trees with their trunks as wide and round as her old solar well, and their bristly branches and leaves swallowed up by a fog all the colors of a pretty sunset.
“Muzi?” she says. “Where are you?”
“Here,” he says, waving his pale arm in front of her.
She gasps, then brings her hand to her face, pressing over her familiar features, then past her left cheek, where another face starts all over again. Muzi’s face. It reminds her of that goat of Mr. Ojuma’s, born with two heads. It hadn’t lived long, just a couple weeks, but it was the talk of the entire township for months after. She’d seen it once or twice, before it’d gotten too weak to walk, always trying to move in opposite directions. She’d laughed then. Now it doesn’t seem so funny.
“I think Mr. Tau means for us to work together,” she says.
“So he puts us in the same body?”
“He’s very wise.”
“If by wise you mean a sadistic asshole, then yeah. I agree.” Muzi twists suddenly, angling Nomvula toward another sculpture. It’s Muzi and his friend Elkin, wrestling with their bodies pressed together, muscles rippling through the wood. One of Elkin’s arms is wrapped tightly around Muzi’s shoulder, and the other points off into the forest, the opposite direction that Nomvula’s mother is pointing.
“Oh, my,” Nomvula says, remembering how Mr. Ojuma’s boy goats would sometimes play like that.
“Don’t stare!” Muzi shouts, the heat of his cheek warm against Nomvula’s. “I think we’re supposed to go this way.”
“Well, I think we’re supposed to go that way,” Nomvula tugs the other direction, but stumbles under his force. She drags her heel, and still she can’t stop him. She clenches her stomach muscles, trying to draw upon her powers, but they slip like sand through her fingers.
“You’re being selfish!” she screams at him instead. She never should have trusted him. Can’t he see how much she’s hurting? Can’t he feel how close to the surface the creature inside her lurks? She can tame it, she knows it. That must be why Mr. Tau sent them here. “Please, Muzi. We have to learn how to stop Sydney. People are in danger!”
“They can sort out their own damn problems. Elkin’s got to be here, and I’m going to find him. Even if it takes me an eternity.” Muzi’s words tickle across her lips, closer than they were before. She presses her hand to her face again and feels. The edge of her mouth blends right into Muzi’s, and now they share an eye. She panics. She reaches for something to grab onto so her body isn’t swallowed into his.
But the harder she fights, the harder his thoughts press up against hers. She feels his obsession. His anger, hatred, rage. He cusses her, his words slurred with the side of his tongue weighed down by hers. She yells right back at him, and when she runs out of words in English, she shouts some more in Zulu. Through the sting of her anger, she feels their hearts merge, a pain like her chest is being cracked open with each beat.
We’re going to die, she thinks, just like that goat of Mr. Ojuma’s. Not because it was too sick to live, but because the two halves had wills of their own, too stubborn to work together.