She takes a ragged breath so she can scream for help, but chokes on liquid. Not water. Slick, and nearly as thin as air, but she feels it slide in and out as she breathes. Nomvula struggles, tumbles, kicks, and punches. She bites at the vines holding her, but they only pull tighter, until in her thrashing, one of the vines catches under her chin, choking her. She tries to flip again—again and again—until she’s so tangled she can barely breathe.
Then with a noise that could only be described as a sigh, the leaves part. Nomvula knows that plants don’t sigh, but she heard what she heard. The vines uncoil and she pushes through the moistness, her face cool as the breeze passes over it. She coughs for a whole minute to get all that slime out of her lungs. She wipes it from her skin, her eyes. Blows it from her nostrils. The air is sweet, now, like soft, fruity candies.
A canopy thick with leaves and full of mangos and pears and other fruits she doesn’t know the names for sits above her, and below, peering over the lip of the pod she’d been tucked inside, she sees endless trunks of a forest swallowed up by a mist far below. Nomvula never imagined trees could grow so high, and still can’t imagine the types of people who would dare to partake in such fruits. No, that she can imagine. The kind of people like her. The kind with wings.
Nomvula flexes hers, muscles hard and rigid beneath her skin, making her wings splay fully. Plant sap sticks between them like spiderwebs, but nothing a good flapping won’t get rid of. She stands, walks to the very tip of her pod so that her toes dangle over the edge. Nomvula then raises both arms, hands pressed together in prayer above her head, and dives into the forest, the ground so far away that she’s not even sure it’s down there at all.
She falls straight down. Her arms are pressed tightly to her sides, and her wings lie flat down her back. She falls for what feels like forever. At last, she pierces the mist and the ground comes into view.
The sound of laughter carries through the forest, and she follows it. She’s never heard Muzi laugh, but Nomvula knows it’s him—his joy as bountiful and true as his pain had been.
She glides around a maze of tree trunks, avoiding low-growing branches, ignoring the sweet smell of fruit tempting her. This place is too beautiful, if there is such a thing.
Finally she sees them, Muzi and Elkin, leaning against the same bulky baobab tree, bodies limp as licorice left out in the sun. One of Muzi’s legs is draped comfortably between Elkin’s. Their bellies are plump, their mouths smeared with the bright flesh of a dozen different fruits.
Muzi’s eyes brighten when he sees her, and he gives her a lazy smile, as wide as it is juicy. “Nomvula! Welcome to paradise. Mango?” he says, extending an empty hand. A perfectly ripe mango falls from above and smacks the meat of Muzi’s palm. He tears back the skin with his teeth, then hands it to Nomvula. Her wings beat, keeping her feet from touching the rich earth beneath her, calling to her like it’s home.
“Thanks, no,” Nomvula says with a sigh. She tugs at Muzi’s elbow. “Let’s just get moving.”
Muzi ignores her and reaches up to the leaves again, face beaming with delight. “Then perhaps I could interest you in a godfruit.” A dark blue fruit drops into his hand with a squishy thwack.
“Come on, Muzi. We’re wasting time,” she says. Muzi looks too comfortable, too content. He can’t do this to her now. Nomvula peels her lip back and flaps hard, then with the strike of a cobra, she snatches the overripe fruit from Muzi’s hand, and pulp oozes out from its skin. “Say your good-byes. We need to go. Remember Sydney?”
Muzi nods. “But can’t we enjoy ourselves a little first? Elkin says that time passes differently here. Days stretch here where only moments pass there.”
“You don’t know the destruction Sydney can do in moments!” Nomvula screams.
“I do know,” Muzi says. “I know everything. I’ve seen it all.”
Elkin takes Muzi’s hand in his, then looks up at Nomvula. “It’s true. We’ve both seen what Sydney can do. She’s too powerful. She’ll kill you, Nomvula. Dying isn’t fun, trust me.”
“She can be defeated,” Nomvula says. “It has to be possible. Mr. Tau wouldn’t have sent us here if it wasn’t.”
“We’ve seen the future.” Muzi nods at the godfruit. “We saw you go up against Sydney. A hundred variations I watched, and she sliced you down, again and again. And what happened after was even more horrific. All of that power . . .” Muzi groans, holding his head like he’s got too much stuff in that brain of his. “Try it. You’ll see for yourself.”
Nomvula knows the look on Muzi’s face. More than drunk—not like Letu’s eyes after sampling too much beer. Not like that, but like Mr. Nwaigu, who had let drugs rule his life. He’d scared Nomvula—his eyes soulless, arms always outstretched for a handout. In his last days, he’d been like a skeleton. Nomvula took pity on him one evening and brought him a bowl of mielie pap. He’d looked so feeble. So weak. She’d gotten too close though, and his hand had gripped around her ankle, making her spill hot pap on herself. He smelled of piss and death, his breath sour like spoiled milk as he tugged her close. He called her a pretty thing and begged her to get him drugs. Begged and begged and begged until she couldn’t stand his rotting breath upon her any longer and she agreed. Nomvula never returned to him, though. Never even dared to think of him again until now, seeing a bit of him in Muzi’s eyes.
Nomvula brings the godfruit to her lips. She knows she shouldn’t. She’s worried she’ll like it too much, worried she’ll start wanting to stay here forever. She’ll just take a small taste, Nomvula decides. Enough so she can use what she learns against Sydney. She’s going back to fight her, with or without Muzi. She presses the blue-black flesh to her tongue. It envelops every single one of her taste buds, cracks them clean open, and cracks her mind open, too. A storm of infinite knowledge rains down upon her, unleashing the true breadth of the god hidden inside her.
She concentrates, grabbing at a strand of reality, and it comes into focus. She sees Sydney and herself, entangled in battle, spinning around each other like two suns caught in each other’s grip until Sydney unleashes a storm of fury that grinds Nomvula down to dust. Nomvula pulls again, a slightly different version of reality with the same gruesome end. Again. Again. Sometimes she comes close, but no matter what she does, no matter what she tries . . .
Nomvula grips herself, pulls back to the here and now, and shakes the omniscience off like cobwebs.
“Did you see?” Muzi asks, but Nomvula’s too numb to answer. “You can’t go back there, Nomvula. Stay here with us. The forest will give us everything we need. We can be happy here.”
Nomvula wonders if Muzi’s right. What if it’s pointless to fight Sydney? She’d seen how powerful Sydney had gotten upon each of Nomvula’s deaths. But then it dawns on her what she hadn’t seen. “You weren’t there,” Nomvula says sharply, pointing her finger at Muzi’s chest. “You weren’t there to help me. That’s why I died!”