Sāfil and its newborn twin slid through the low entrance of the slaves' room. Faraji crawled in behind them, clutching an old friend's tunic.
Merek's pointed boot tapped an inch from the Mchangan's eyes. The Orosian was leaning in the corner, waiting for his escort. Fortus had ignored him.
By the balcony at the other end of the room, Atiena was playing dolls with some of the other little girls. Some couldn't talk yet, others were enduring periods.
Their black-skinned bead dolls were relics.
Women made them generations earlier, from the colored fabrics and bracelets still on their bodies when they arrived.
Those first women had made them for their daughters.
They were all gone, now.
Faraji handed the tunic to his foreign guest. "Here. It'll be painful and scratchy until the burn leaves, but you won't get another."
Merek threw down the hat he'd been fanning his face with. "This is covered in blood!"
"Then don't wear it," Faraji sighed, dropping it on his toes.
The slave took up his shovels.
That little slit-door room housed just twenty of the top floor's two thousand people, ten bunks on each side. Across the other fourteen rooms of 29F, there were eighty-five candles. Faraji's room alone used twenty-seven.
The other groups went right to bed, maybe waited quietly for dinner. The room with the little slit-door blazed bright as Kazkazani deserts, and louder than the parties of Sa Ibabaw.
The girls and their pretty dolls staged stories of political assassination, beast-slaying, and infidelity. The boys envied. The men gambled and tried to ferment millet pancakes into alcohol. The women told stories. The faithful practiced rituals.
You had to half shout to hear someone next to you.
Hamisi's bunk was empty. Just in time for the new shipment.
Samir was cross-legged on the floor, laughing into Nandi's bunk. "On what planet are Mchangans and Orosians the same people?!"
His lady lay on her back, her head dangling over the edge.
"Well, look at yourself! If you lined up next to people from Paradiso…"
Nandi's elaborate braids were finally loosed from their bun, clean as they were in the morning. They hung long and brushed the stony ground with every passionate movement.
The woman was strong and clean, though the Encampment had touched her. She had big eyes, a loud laugh, and dark skin from deep in the central jungles.
The pair had met working on their rest days.
"Samir," Faraji interrupted. "Sorry, Nandi." He smiled at the woman. He stood the shovels on their ends and waited with his eyes cast down.
Just when the northern Sahari had cracked his mouth to reply, his brother burst out, "Samir! Your nose is already blacker than mine! Why would you take off your turban? You worked ground-level, Kaka! Sun! All day!
"Ehh, yaani…" Faraji shook his head like the man was his young son.
Bright red Samir laughed and stood up. "You're not the only smuggler, Akhi." He winked and pulled a makeshift black purse— his former turban— off his arm and unraveled it. Muddy red clay, by the handfuls. He shrugged and dared Faraji to criticize.
The Easterner shook his head and almost smiled, but swallowed it alive when he felt the old shovel nick his palm.
"Samir," he returned. He handed him the newborn tool from the day's work. "I started another one. Should bite."
The Northman looked at pretty Nandi and then back at Faraji. He wanted her to run off, stumble down the stairs, leap the wall, and swim to Kāpura. He ground his teeth when he remembered he wanted her beside him through every night he'd ever sleep.
"A…Sāfil?" he sighed. He ran a hand up and down Nandi's back. Faraji raised that rotten old blade for his answer.
Samir nodded and looked at Atiena, running in circles from a mob of young girls and protecting her rogue nation-toppling doll. She tripped, and the girls piled onto her with giggles and fake punches.
The Sahari let out staggered breaths. "Th…Thank you, Faraji."
He took the new shovel and helped slide Nandi out of her bunk. He spoke incredibly softly as he came to her ear.
Nandi sucked in a sharp breath and pushed him away, as if to ask his eyes if his mouth were a liar. It wasn't. She shot a look at Faraji, then back to her partner.
Samir tried to grab her hand, but she ran out of the room and into the maze.
The men locked eyes.
"Play me!"
Fortus shoved an old wood-scratched gameboard in Atiena's face. He held it by his pinkies, the rest of his hands filled with game pieces made from pebbles and bits of metal.
"Nuh-uh!" she sang.
Atiena stuck out her tongue and put a finger to her forehead. Fortus was sure the girl who taught her that was fooling her.
Fortus nudged her with his foot, and she yelped. "Why not?"
"You are a cheater!"
"What? I'm a cheetah? What does that—"
Atiena kicked him back. "A cheetah!"
"What?"
"Fortus! A—"
The boy dropped the game pieces and flicked her on the nose, erupting into chittering laughter. "I can't even understand you! Your accent is so bad, Atiena! Just speak Mchangan," he said, switching to their native tongue.
"Baba! Baba! Baba, Fortus said I have a accent!" Old Bhekizitha crushed his pillow over his ears and growled.
"Hush," Samir interrupted. "You both have accents. Atiena, look—" The man bent down and laid bare his sandy red gold. "Clay," he said, filling his eyes with meteors and peaks.
Atiena started screeching wildly and flapping her hands. She didn't even know what it was.
"I met a Ng'ombeni woman today when I was packing the rocks. We worked the whole day; she prays to Oshun.
"I told her that we had a little girl, and she recommended this clay for a style from her people. Talaya said it would keep your hair clean, safe, and out of the way." He placed it in front of her carefully and pinched her cheek. "You like it, qalbi?"
Atiena smiled until her tongue was pinched between her teeth and her chin touched her collar. She jumped up and hugged his legs hard as she could, then yanked down his calloused hand and kissed it.
The little girl smoothed out the corners of her treasure's display mat and lined it up with the gameboard. She started filling in the pieces and called Fortus to sit.
When Nandi slid back in, everyone whipped their faces towards her. Scindreux had a certain ring.
The young woman held a chunk of shovel-handle, trembling in her fist. A bright shard of Scindreux gemstone was shoved into its center. One green edge was sharp as it was when she found it, sharp as it was when it formed a billion and a half years ago. The other was the shattered side, and had its sharpness on a hundred and one faces.
Once, a slave had managed to rend a Scindreux weapon from a Superior's hand, cut him down, and when faced with another, hold that blade proudly in front of him. When the Scindreux weapons clashed, the swords shattered, and the shrapnel killed them both.
That day, Nandi was charged with cleaning corpses.
They'd forgotten a chunk lodged in his armpit.
Samir's eyes wouldn't leave it. "Nandi—"
"They're not taking me again." Her proud voice was breaking, and she shook her head over and over. She looked at Atiena. "Anyone."
It was not for the man to say anything more.
Everyone stared, and most of all, Merek.
It wasn't his intention to stay in the Encampment for long.
Faraji's heart drummed upon his ribs; a sickly marimba.
"Ndugu zangu!" he called to the room, and everyone listened with lowered heads.
"Nandi is one of us. We will take care of her and protect her actions." Sweat carved across the wrinkles of his forehead.
His eyes kept darting to Merek.
"Aye," Bhekizitha added, leaning out of his bunk to catch every single neighbor in his one good eye. None looked back.
Everyone yanked back the breath they'd just released when barked orders and crashing crates echoed from outside.
"Dinner," Faraji said, clapping his hands and forcing the soul back into the room. "Let's go."
The twenty hurried down in a frantic train of their own.
Faraji made Fortus run back up to get Atiena's clay.
On floor thirty-one, they entered a dark room. Cobwebs and gossamer slept in the bunks.
Their assigned room.
The slaves placed down a couple of candles and began their act— pretending to have been in a raucous conversation for hours.
"Quiet!" boomed into the room. This particular Superior looked like he might've been a god himself, the irony— closer to seven than six feet, and three slaves wide. Everyone scurried towards the back wall and looked away.
"You may be misinformed: We buy you to slam rock on wood and sometimes wood on rock. You may discuss your great philosophies some other time. Mkubwa requires that you eat. Go." He threw up a lazy hand to direct the train of young cargo slaves like one might ask a dog to fetch.
Bhekizitha teetered to his feet as everyone else studied the floor, took up his plate, and marched up to the Superior. Like bamboo, the soldier grew by the second with every step, until Bhek's hunch hid the green demon in all but his shoes. The elder raised his hands over his head and poked his plate into the bull's chest.
"I like when you shred the goat, not slice it. What have you made for me?"
The man looked down his body at the balding head of the wild old man. He ran his eyes across his exposed vertebrae. His bewildered smile broke with a chuckle.
"My name is Bala Magaji, Mzee."
Magaji took off his kufi and bumped the old man on the shoulder. "Give this one double." He placed his hat back on and ducked out of the room.
The room watched.
A series of teenage slaves rushed in like an assembly line, one after another. They placed and pried open crates of horned kiwano melon and shredded goat. Like ants, they traded off perfectly: Another few set down and unlocked a barrel of drinking water, and then another of a thicker spout for the samp and beans.
Bhek got a plateful, and when he saw his goat just the way he liked it, he called out the door, "Thank you, Bala!" and the man mumbled something back with a laugh.
Merek grabbed a second horned melon after he saw the foreign samp, and was met with the back of a server's club smashing into his forehead.
When Faraji walked up with his plate, last of the room, his eyes were nailed to a teenage boy whose bones he could count.
"Habari, chef!" he called. The boy didn't lift his eyes. His ears and mouth were long dead and dried. "Do you speak Kāpuran?"
The boy nodded.
"That's good. Do you eat in the mornings? If you wake up early enough, they bring biltong."
"..."
"Come now, that man isn't here anymore. Speak to me, Dogo."
"...I cannot eat goat, Bwana."
Faraji laughed, and the boy looked over his shoulder. "The goat is dry, dogo, but you can eat it."
The boy cracked a little bit of a smile at the very corners of his mouth. "No, Bwana—" he pinched his throat. "I can't. I can't breathe."
Faraji's mouth opened a little, and his charming eyes fell as he thought. He finally nodded. "At all?"
"Just the millet and the samp."
Faraji shook his head. "You haven't been here long?"
"Why do you say that?"
"You would've died. Meat is essential."
Neither said a word.
"Here," Faraji pushed his bowl of samp and beans into the boy's hands.
He panicked and spoke from over his shoulder, eyes never leaving Magaji. "No, Bwana—"
"You will die, dogo wangu."
"I will anyway. They weigh the boxes, we cannot take extra."
Faraji shoved his bowl hard into the boy's sternum. "It is not extra. I'm not asking for anything more, eat what is on my plate. I can eat goat."
"Bwana—"
"You will eat it or I will tell that beast that you stole a kiwano." He gestured to the peel by his feet and threatened with his eyes.
The boy hesitated, then raised the bowl to his lips. Faraji nudged it higher, "Hurry, hurry!"
When he finished, Faraji brought the boy's head to his and whispered, "I know how it sounds, dogo wangu…But insects. Insects, or— or ravens. Even…It will keep you alive."
The boy nodded and took his hand. "Nashukuru sana."
"Hey!" Faraji screamed, and the whole room looked. "What are you doing?!" The boy's heart plopped onto the cold floor. The man switched his and his son's bowls. "Give me more! I'm forty-one years old, give me more!"
Magaji rushed back in, "Stop with your barking! What is it?!"
"This kibaka is trying to short me on portions!" Bala leaned over and looked at the full bowl, then back at the server, then at Faraji.
He ripped a back-handed slap across the aging man's face. "Greed. Good work, boy. Be off, slave."
Faraji winked at the server as he pretended to lick his wounds.
He finally sat to join his family for dinner.
"Baba—" Fortus sighed, in that winding tone that promises trouble.
"Fortus," he hissed, holding up his hand.
"You always do this, Baba."
"God forbid," Faraji sighed, wanting to enjoy the third of his portion left.
"Do you really think they would do it for you?"
"Fortus."
"If you were hungry? Or me? Or Amu? Babu, have they?"
Bhek shook his head and grunted to shoo the boy away.
Faraji finally answered, "What if that were us, mwana?"
"It isn't."
"It will be."
"Not yet! You're getting older, Baba! How many old men do you see around the Barracks? You can't do this, Baba, you'll starve— and if not, you'll die."
Faraji's eyes had never grown so hard.
He shoved his fingers into his son's bowl of samp and beans and gobbled up a scoop. Then he yanked up the bowl, and swallowed two more. He tossed it onto his son's lap.
"There, I'm fed."
Old Bhekizitha flew into howling laughter, slamming his son on the back again and again.
Fortus grew red and hot. Atiena tried to mock him, and he flicked her on the ear.
Merek was awkward. Not socially inept, but cumbersome and obtuse. He sat too close to everyone to act so distant. It was just as well to the slaves; they spent their whole dinner speaking of him, instead of to him.
Finally, when he was nibbling at his samp, Atiena reached over and grabbed one of his chunks of shredded goat.
"Look, Bwana, if you dip the goat in—"
Merek slapped her hand away and his meat scattered onto the floor. "Get your hands out of my food, you pest! You're like an insect."
Bhek crawled over, fast like an alligator. He stuck his whole palm in the Orosian's beans. He stared right in his blue eyes as he did it, and chewed with his mouth open.
"Don't offend me again," he warned, corn on his gums.
Merek set his porridge aside and said nothing.
The Orosian started slamming his kiwano into the rocky ground, bending its orange spikes and bruising the hard fruit.
Faraji leapt over to him, "Merek, wait! You'll spill it, look—"
He offered a hand, and the magistrate gave him his kiwano.
Faraji hooked his tooth over the hard tip at one of the poles and dug in, making a slit to peel from.
"Disss-Gusting!" Merek wailed, ripping the kiwano back.
Before Faraji could manage a desperate plea, the Orosian slammed his melon hard into the ground, and its bottom burst, spilling its green pulpy guts across the floor.
"See?" Merek beamed.
Faraji sighed out his nose. "Yes, Merek, great work.
"You know, you're very pale. You could use the kiwano meat to—"
"Right, and what's so wrong with that?!" he huffed.
Faraji blinked at him and breathed in. "It's just— You're extremely red, if you don't do something—"
"Only because your dull-witted plan—"
"Merek!" he barked, trying to cage it behind his teeth. The whole room snapped their heads up to eavesdrop, most of all his own family. "What is your problem?! I've done nothing but help you, Merek! These people— You think anybody here would do so much to help you? An Orosian, a Trinitarian?!
"Your people don't last a month here! I am the only thing keeping you alive! I'm trying to tell you that if you don't rub some of the kiwano pulp on your burns, you'll blister so much it'll kill you! You need to soothe it— mjinga!"
Merek's face twisted around his nose and he chewed his cheeks. "I should be grateful?" he whispered. Biting, sour.
"Grateful you people didn't kill me when I walked up? Grateful to work, to burn?
"Grateful there's one— one of you that would even speak to me?" His breath was unsteady, and the fire of his eyes had a pitiful sheen. He shook his head and chucked his kiwano at the wall.
"I won't get on my knees for these portions like a dog. I have fat enough on my bones.
"…
"...
"...It'll drive you mad, this place."
In that short moment, before everything, every Mchangan in the room could understand his accented Kāpuran.
They looked him in the eyes, and saw him.
Faraji put a hand on the man's shoulder, and he didn't push it off. He offered the other half of his own kiwano.
"Here. For the ointment, I mean. It'll keep you alive."
Merek exploded and punched that melon out of his hands. "What?!" The pulp spilled. "To work tomorrow?! And the day after?! What do you know of Orosians, you naïve mudstain—"
Faraji punched through Merek's nose with so much strength he could taste it in his throat. Every Mchangan in the room jumped to their feet, and the Orosian's body clapped as it plopped onto the ground.
Every selfish thought stopped swimming through Merek's padded skull. When his vision finally floated up from that static black sea, he smacked his lips and grimaced at the bitter taste in his mouth.
"Oy! You—"
Faraji yanked him up by the vest and raised another fist. Merek's eyes ran to beg the others, and Faraji followed. Every single person held their breath and watched him.
They were glued to his fist, most of all Fortus.
The man's hand shook as he primed it. He could feel his nails cut his palm and his knuckles strain their skin. Bhekizitha was nigh salivating under his wild eye.
Faraji dropped the man to the ground, and the room could breathe again.
"Please," he begged, "lather it on."
Merek didn't say a word, but his face softened.
Though pride had its foot on his throat, his eyes promised some strange kernel of reconciliation to Faraji.
He grabbed his scattered slices and bundled them up. The magistrate scooped up what he could to give Faraji back his own kiwano. Wordlessly, he went back upstairs with his melon.
"Fat white cloud," Bhekizitha mumbled, as he chomped onto the skin of his kiwano. He was convinced by an old myth that it would make his teeth grow back.
"Fara," he called. "Sit down and eat, stop moving so much!" he raised his hand like he might strike him.
"You know," Bhek switched,
"today, when me and Atiena were walking back up, someone fell. Stairs, again." Another bite at a spot he hadn't yet sucked dry.
"Who? Is he alright?" Faraji threw down his handful of goat right as he was about to bite it.
"Weeeh, he hurt his legs. But I worked with the boy before, I think, some months ago. Strong boy. Western, if you can believe it."
Faraji nodded and took his first bite. "They'll take anyone," he said, gesturing towards the door Merek had left from, "doesn't matter how far. Even their own, right out of their pretty beach villas."
Bhek cursed and spat on the ground. "A dog that bites both rabbit and bear fears nothing but lack of prey," he quoted.
"'Dogs' is right," Faraji answered. Bhek laughed.
Fortus slurped up the rest of his kiwano. "When are they going to learn how to build something that doesn't fall apart every twelve hours?"
Faraji sighed, "Who is 'they,' mwana. 'They' is us, we have no servants.
"Three of us die every time they order a new room! At least!"
He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. "Weeeh, never wish for more work, mwana."
Fortus shook his head, but he knew better than to talk.
"You cannot speak that way, mtukutu!" Old Bhekizitha added, testing the teen's humility. "Risky, it is, boy. Amarupachaq listens. She'll write it down in your soul." Between the phlegm and the peel, Fortus only caught every other word.
The boy chained his eyes so they wouldn't roll. "With respect, Babu, Amaru is the one who put us here—"
"Amarupachaq," Faraji corrected.
" —She could've made us be born in some big tower in the capital, like everyone else! I think she forgot to write our fates."
Bhekizitha shook his head. "No. No. You misunderstand the foreign gods, boy. She is not ours. She cradles the Raphians much better. Their whole land is fruit and water."
"So, where's Mbombo, then? I don't see any kind of creation in a giant pit that kills Mchangans by— by the hundreds—- or…" A nervous stammer had crept up and swiped his legs out from under him. It was a thin line between lying and getting knocked across the face.
Faraji glared at his son. "The West is Mbombo's too, Fortus. All of us are his children. Even more— all of Ihlok: Orosians, Kāpurans…It is complex. So many wants." By the end he was running his nail across the wood of his bowl, and speaking under his breath.
"Your mother," Bhek started, and Fortus dropped his melon. The boy nailed his eyes to the floor. "A very good girl, Asha. Wasn't she, Fara?"
Faraji mimed for his father to stop.
"Bah!
"I didn't teach Asha about Amarupachaq, Fortus. Or Máti. Kanaloa…whoever…I taught her Bahari, mtwana wami."
Fortus groaned. "Not the ocean again, Babu."
Bhekizitha knocked him on his head like he was scaring off a curse. "Tlaloc made her for us, Fortus. Us. Her waves ebb and they flow, in and out. Cycles, boy. Talking like that, you push something into the water. Bahari will make sure it always bounces right back up.
"What if now, you are charged with building some new room tomorrow? In and out, Fortus, always. Umjikelezo. In and out. She is fair."
Fortus scratched his fingers together until they blistered. He was shaking his head like he was arguing with himself. He lost.
"So Asha deserved it? A cycle, that's what it was? That was umjikelezo? That was Bahari?!"
The boy spat a scornful laugh and threw himself into prostration, undulating in the old ways he'd seen Bhekizitha do on especially hard days. "Ohhh, Aquatic Mother, thank you for all our many, endless blessings—"
Bhekizitha brought his fist down over the back of Fortus' head, and the boy's face slammed into the rocky floor with a crack. His nose broke and he bled.
The boy shot up bewildered, clutching his red face in his hands.
Old Bhek shook his head and took the boy's hand. "That was the in, Fortus. You're too impatient."
Patience. Fortus laughed in his chest. Your fifty years, Babu, still too short?
"What…" Fortus started, rubbing his face. "What was Mama's out, Babu?" Questions like that made him feel like Atiena.
Bhek stood up and cradled Fortus' chin in his wrinkled hands. He lifted the boy's face to meet his eyes, and smiled.
He almost laughed when he said it. "You, mtwana wami."
The boy tore his face away and secured it to the ground. Bhek yanked it back, and rubbed his thumb over Fortus' cheek. "You have her black eyes," he croaked. His gargled voice cracked, and his pinched eye glistened like rain.
He threw his head back and laughed.
What else?
"She uses them. I see it sometimes, mtwana wami.
"Watch the sea, now and then, Fortus. For Asha."
Bhek's eyes were closed for a moment, and he just stood.
"I'm up," he finally said, and hobbled out the door back upstairs.
Fortus swallowed hard. He hated to cry in front of his family.
So he didn't.
Fortus shoved a handful of shredded goat into his mouth. The whole time he chewed that rough meat, he stared ahead with Asha's eyes— at the gnarled rocky wall in front of him, with his back to the ocean.