The Power(99)

Nastya places her fingertips at his throat and makes him speak. They’re not his words. His mouth is moving and his voice is humming but it’s not him speaking, it’s not.

His lying throat says, ‘Thank you.’

Irina plants her foot in his armpit and hauls on his right arm, shocking and burning it. The flesh at the joint crisps and turns. She has the ball out of the socket. Magda pulls with her, and they have the arm off. The others are at his legs, and his neck, and the other arm, and the place across his collarbone where his ambition sat. Like the wind stripping the leaves from a tree, so inexorable and so violent. They pull the skein, lithe and wriggling, from his living chest, just before they get his head off, and at last he is quiet, their fingers dark with his blood.





When she makes the call for Tunde, it has to be the start. Roxy Monke is coming back.

‘My brother,’ she says on the phone. ‘My fucking brother betrayed me and tried to have me killed.’

The voice on the phone is excited.

‘I knew he was lying. The little shit. I knew he was lying. The women in the factory said he told them he was getting orders from you, and I fucking knew he was lying.’

‘I’ve been gathering my strength,’ says Roxy, ‘and making my plans, and now I will take back from him what he took from me.’

So she has to make it true.

She gathers a small force. No one’s answering the phone at the factory, so some fucking thing has happened. She figures he might have people with him, even if he thinks she’s dead; he’d have to be a fucking idiot to think no one would try to take the factory from him.

She’s expecting to have to mount an assault, but the gates of the factory are open.

Her workers are all sitting on the lawns. They greet her with wild whoops, a sound that echoes across the lake, caught up and passed between the crowd of them.

How did she ever think that she would not be welcomed back here, cripple as she is? How could she have imagined she couldn’t allow herself to return?

Her coming home is a festival. They say, ‘We knew you were coming back, we saw it. We knew that you were the one we were waiting for.’

They crowd around her, they touch her hand, they ask where she’s been and if she’s found a new place for the factory, the war coming so close and the soldiers so intent on finding them.

The soldiers? ‘United Nations soldiers,’ they say. ‘We’ve had to put them off the scent more than once now.’

‘Yeah?’ says Roxy. ‘You did that without Darrell, did you?’

A look passes between the women, hooded and mysterious. Irina puts her arm around Roxy’s shoulder. Roxy thinks she can smell something on her; a smell like sweat but more soupy, a rotten tang to it like period blood. They’ve been tweaking the drug here; Roxy knows it and never stopped it. They’ve been taking off-label product. They go into the woods and do it on the weekends; it makes their sweat smell like mould. There’s blue paint under their fingernails.

Irina squeezes Roxy tightly. She thinks the woman’s going to pick her up. Magda takes her hand. They walk with her towards the cold-storage fridge where they keep the volatile chemicals. They open the door. Inside, on the cold table, is a collection of lumps of meat, raw and bloody. She cannot, for a moment, imagine why they are showing her this. And then she knows.

‘What have you done?’ she says. ‘What the fuck have you done?’





Roxy finds it there in amongst the blood and mush. Her own self, her beating heart, the part of her that powered all the rest. A thin and rotting piece of gristle. The muscle striated, purple and red.

There was a day, three days after Darrell took it from her, that she realized she wasn’t going to die. The spasms across her chest had ceased. The red and yellow flashes had disappeared from her eyes. She had bandaged herself up and walked to a hut she knew in the woods and waited there for death, but on the third day she knew death was not going to take her.

She thought then, It’s because my heart is still alive. Outside my body, in his body, but still alive. She thought, I would know if it were dead.

But she hadn’t known.

She holds her palm to her collarbone.

She waits to feel something.





Mother Eve comes to meet Roxanne Monke off the midnight army transport into the train station in Basarabeasca, a city a little to the south. She could have waited for Roxy in the palace, but she wanted to see her face. Roxy Monke is thinner, she looks pained and worn. Mother Eve holds her in a tight embrace, forgetting, for a moment, to probe or question with her special sense. There’s the smell of her friend, just the same, pine needles and sweet almonds. There’s the feeling of her.

Roxy pulls away awkwardly. Something’s wrong. She’s almost silent as they drive through the empty streets to the palace.

‘You’re President now, then?’

Allie smiles. ‘It couldn’t wait.’ She pats the back of Roxy’s hand, and Roxy moves the hand away.

‘Now you’re back, we should talk about the future.’

Roxy smiles a tight, thin-lipped smile.

In Mother Eve’s apartments in the palace, when the last door is closed and the last person is gone, Allie looks at her friend, wonderingly.

‘I thought you were dead,’ she says.