We were only three, but we were our own military unit. I came from the air. Mmuo came from the water. He would walk through the stone, then through the walls to get inside. Saeed came from the land, hiding in Dartise’s Big Eye truck that he took to Tower 4 at 7 am. The best, most surprising and most insulting thing was that security was still practically non-existent. Even with the Ledussee speciMen revolution happening back in the States. They didn’t expect us. They’d underestimated us. They thought so little of us.
I landed in the courtyard in the center of the four story narrow tower. The sun shone straight into it. There was a tree. It only reached past the first floor. I guess this one wasn’t growing over an alien seed, nor had it been doused with a specially made fast growing formula. Not yet, at least. This was a normal tree, a palm tree. All around the courtyard, creating a large circular space were concrete walls.
There was a table and bookshelves against the wall, a hundred yards to the right. A narrow bed nearby and a wooden table heavy with leafy plants beside the bed. The plants grew healthily, many with vines that reached up the wall and hung down and crept along the floor. That was all. The rest was open space. What did they do when it rained in here? Did a window cover the opening? I was glad today was clear.
The smell hit me before anything else, and I froze, every part of my body suddenly on alert. I knew this smell well. From Ghana. When Kofi had stood for me. And been shot. It was a coppery scent, wet, alive, urgent. Fresh blood. I smelled it all around me. Thick. But the walls weren’t bleeding. The floors shined from waxing, not gore. However, I still wanted to vomit. There were so many things being spawned, sliced open, bled, that the entire building was exuding the stench. Did the Big Eye who worked here even notice it? If you are part of the disease, do you notice the smell of it?
As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in God. I’ve seen death many times. I’ve moved outside of time and space. I’ve travelled within it. I’ve seen life. If there is a God, he has not made himself known to me. There’d been no pale skinned Jesus to meet me in the darkness as my body became ashes and later returned from the ashes. Not that I remembered. But something, yes, something guided me into this room. I could feel it gently pushing me. “That way,” it said. And when I saw it, I was surer than ever that what I needed to find was right here. Such things were always near a tree.
Let Mmuo swim to the harbor side of Tower 4, move through the stone into the building to the main power source. Let him use that which guides him to manipulate the digital waves and open the rest of the doors before the Big Eye even knew we were inside.
Let Saeed, twitchy and nervous, enter the building he swore he’d never return to. Let him wear the uniform Dartise gave him. Let him use the ID Dartise paid his bearded best friend Abdul Mohammed to borrow. Let Saeed enter through the front, following Dartise. Let them both rely on the stereotype that all Arabs and blacks look the same. Let Saeed wait for Mmuo in one of the kitchens. Let Saeed use his light skin, though with Arab features, to walk the halls of Tower 4 as if he belonged there, while Mmuo moved through wall after wall, a naked man who didn’t follow the rules of physics. Let them eventually locate that room full of normal looking yet utterly mute children. And after wrestling back their initial shock, let Saeed focus on guiding them out—for it was these children that Saeed remembered and felt guilty about leaving when he was last here.
But me. I was in a room that didn’t seem to have an exit. The walls were smooth. The only way out was up. She must not have had wings. I felt my body growing warmer the longer I stood in there. Not far from me, but deeper inside the building, several rooms to my right, Saeed was telling the children to get into a line. Mmuo was relaying everything to me in my mind through his nanomites. But how would he get the children outside? Why were the children unable to speak?
I walked to the table with the plants. The word “HeLa” was etched into a large metal square on the wall. The wall was not concrete, as I thought. It was made of some type of heavy grey stone. Like marble, but something else. There was a large green leafy plant that crept up five wooden planks leaning against the wall. Against the farthest wall of the small room were stacks and stacks of books.
“Phoenix Okore.”
Every part of my body tightened. The whisper came from behind me. Far across the room. Slowly, so so slowly, I turned around. When I lay my eyes on her, I knew I would save her. If it was the last thing I ever did, I’d save her.
She walked toward me. She stepped up to me. She was the same height as me. She wore a white dress like the ones I liked to wear. Much darker than I, she was the rich hue of crude oil. An African woman, but there was something about her that I could not put my finger on. She had large dark brown eyes. She looked about twenty years old.
“It has happened before and it will happen again,” she said. Even her voice was like mine.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I felt ill. Looking into her eyes. Looking at her face. “Are you HeLa?”
She nodded. “They named me after Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells.”
“I assumed that,” I said, smiling. “It suits you, I guess.” I knew of Henrietta Lacks, a black American woman who died during Jim Crow, in 1951. Her cancer cells were harvested and used to advance science beyond the imaginable after scientists learned that those cells were immortal. For years, her family had no idea that this happened; they had no idea that though Henrietta had died, her cells lived on and on and on and on, multiplying and multiplying. Though it wasn’t stated in my records, I had always been sure Henrietta’s cells had been used in the research that led to my creation.
“You, too, I suspect. How old are you?”
“Three.”
“I am six,” she said.
“You’re like me. Accelerated?”
“I am,” she said.
“Oh my God.”
“They always said you’d come,” she said “They said our blood draws itself.”
“Blood?”
“But you bring death,” she said. “And I don’t have wings or burn up.”
“I think the wings were an accident,” I said. “Look, HeLa, we have to go. I can—”
“Or maybe it was exposure to the alien thing in the ground,” she said.
“How do you know about that?” I asked, frowning. If she knew, the Big Eye might have known.
“News travels,” she said. “Especially amongst speciMen. Phoenix, they didn’t make me. I was born in India. I am Jarawa, the last of my kind. My home is gone. All my people are gone. I was the one who survived the water that swallowed my island. I was just two years old then. The Big Eye came and got me because I bring the water, water is life. I have life in my blood. It is a river of time.” She began to shake as tears fell from her eyes. “And the Big Eye are like vampires.”
“Phoenix!” I heard Mmuo said in my head. “Come! Hurry! We’re getting out! Now!”
“HeLa, come on!” I said. “We can—”
“Let them leave,” she said. “Then burn! Please. Kill me!”
“But why?” I asked, taken aback.
“The time runs in my veins,” she said, wiping her tears. “You have to understand what this means. They come in here. They take my blood, and they sell it. So far, seven men have bought a vial of it. They pay billions! Do you know what my blood has created? Do you know what it does?”
I could hear Saeed shouting my name. Just beyond the walls. And I heard the voices of others, too. I heard gun shots. “Phoenix, I am opening the doors,” Mmuo said in my head. He sounded crazed. “I am opening them all! I don’t know what these people have made. Be careful!”
Then I heard the clang of gates and glass doors opening. I only focused on HeLa. She was about to tell me something awful. I could feel it in my blood. What had we been used to do? What were we all being used to do? I whimpered.
“Men, only men are wealthy
enough to buy my blood,” HeLa said. “They spent half of all they have, billions. What kind of man has billions? You know what kind? There are the seven men who have injected my blood into their veins. These are the seven men whose bodies will never go through senescence. They will never die. These men who are still billionaires and garner great influence. In a matter of years, the world will be theirs. Because of me. BECAUSE OF ME!”
There was a great explosion from nearby and the whole building rocked. A door slid open on the other side of the room. So there were exits here. I was glad. We’d have been immediately shot down if I flew her out.
“Don’t save me,” she said. “You have to kill me before they get more of my blood.”
For a second I couldn’t move. Even while surrounded and distracted by chaos, her words were clear to me. I’d read the nuances, I saw beneath her words what she was saying. This was the end of the world, and she was the cause.
I’d read about this woman’s people—the Jarawa. They’d lived on the Andaman Islands in India; there were less than a hundred of them. They’d lived there for thousands and thousands of years. But they did not look Indian, they were African. They had the African hair, dark dark skin, thick lips, wide noses. They were a mystery, and the people of India treated them like pariahs. And these people had produced a woman with time in her blood. And now there were seven filthy rich, corrupt LifeGen investors who’d made themselves immortal by blending HeLa’s blood with theirs.
I grabbed her arm. I was strong. Stronger than her. She could resist all she wanted to, but I would pull her along. I would carry her if I had to. We ran out of the room, hand in hand. Her feet were bare, mine were sandaled. The floor was shiny. The smell of the hallway was of smoke because something somewhere was burning. All the doors, all the cages, all the prisons were open.
Freedom. The freakish. The beautiful. The maimed. Tower 4 was a concrete flower that housed suicidal birds called phoenixes, shape-shifting monkeys, glowing spiders, lightning birds, cheetahs with deformed tails who drooled and ran fast as airplanes. And it housed one woman who was a child and twelve children who were really adults.
The Big Eye’s greatest downfall was their sense of entitled superiority. There was no heightened security in Tower 4. They’d assumed that its isolated location on the secret island in the Caribbean kept it safe from the speciMen rebellion happening in the States. And if we came, they assumed they would see us coming. And now the Big Eye didn’t know what to fight. Some were stung, bitten, shot with their own guns, struck by lightning.
HeLa and I made it past several squabbles without being stopped. With so many now free and ready to fight, we were nobody’s number one concern. This was not part of the plan. Thankfully, I knew where the exit was, generally.
Unlike at Tower 7, when I stepped into the tower lobby, there was no one there waiting for me or HeLa. The seats were plastic. The floor was green and worn. There were plants but they were potted and small. The real plants were outside but they, too, were brown at the moment. The glass windows and door looked old and in need of a wash. We walked right out the front door. Right into a standoff. Mmuo, Saeed, and the group of mute children were cornered right at the end of a cliff by several armed Big Eye. At the bottom of the cliff was water. According to the map, these waters were deep, having once been beaches the sea level had swallowed over the last 40 years. This was where Mmuo had come through. Mmuo could escape right into the ground. But he wasn’t moving.
“Phoenix, fly up!” Mmuo said in my head.
“Hold on,” I said, putting my arms around HeLa’s waist and flapping my wings. At the sound, several of them turned around. They opened fire. Even with HeLa, possibly the most prized possession in the entire world, in my arms. They were stupid, scared, and shocked. Saeed shoved three of the children over the cliff. Some of the others also used the moment to jump.
The bullets bit into my wings, and the pain was sharp and crippling. As I fell with HeLa, a Big Eye opened fire on Mmuo, and I saw Mmuo fall, too. Saeed ran. We were high enough to see them on the rocks. Several more of the children, some chubby, some scrawny, dove into the water. They wore tan pants and shirts and no shoes. They took off like fish. Mmuo had gotten up and was pushing the rest of them in. The Big Eye hesitated. They didn’t want to shoot the children. They were each worth the price of small nations.
But Mmuo was rogue. He was fugitive. He was dangerous. And though he was lean, he was tall, and he was grinning. They shot at him and the bullets they used did not all pass through him. They must have been made of the same material they used to make the walls in Tower 7 that had imprisoned him for so long. “Phoenix,” I heard him gasp in my head. “Pain!” Then there was a painful sharp ringing in my ears. He fell into the water. He fell into the water. He sank fast, grabbed by tiny hands. The children had ushered him away.
I was screaming as we hit the ground, yards from where he fell. “My brother!” I shrieked, clapping a hand over my ear. “My brother!”
“Get to Saeed,” I heard Mmuo say, but his voice was fading in my head.
“Phoenix!”
Saeed. There. Behind a nearby rock, to my right. HeLa ran in front of me and the Big Eye held their fire. We moved toward Saeed. I didn’t care if they shot me. They would not take him, too. I felt blood dribbling down my wings where they had shot me, but I didn’t care. I ran in front of Saeed before they could shoot and raised my wings high. I burned hot, gold and red. My wings were crooked; one had been broken in half when we fell. “LEAVE HIM! Leave my Saeed!” I screamed. HeLa stood in front of me, not saying a word. “Saeed,” I said, turning to look at him. “Join Mmuo! In the water! Go!”
“Is that HeLa?” he asked.
“No time, my love,” I said, my voice shaking. “Go!”
I heard him run and no bullets followed him. They didn’t want him. They wouldn’t have me. Or HeLa.
“You have all lost,” HeLa screamed at the Big Eye. One of the Big Eye stepped forward and HeLa gasped. “Dartise!” she said. “Don’t!”
But Dartise started toward her. A shot was fired and he fell to one of his knees and collapsed on the ground.
I heard one of the Big Eye say, “Goddamn traitor.”
HeLa started screaming, her hands stretched forth.
“On your knees!” the man who’d shot Dartise demanded. “Hands behind your backs!”
HeLa just kept screaming, pointing at Dartise. Her love. I knew the feeling.
I burned.
I watched the Big Eye men and women turn and run before bursting into flame. I watched Tower 4 burn then melt. And I watched HeLa who watched me as she returned to the essence. HeLa was not a Phoenix like me. She was something more basic. She was a purely natural wonder, until they accelerated her. Man had not made her into one who dies but lives and then dies but lives. So when she died, she was allowed to leave.
• • •
Flash.
I was gone.
In my absence the revolution continued.
Though it all began when Tower 7 fell, the revolution really began when I set the others free in Tower 1. The government and the remaining Towers managed to suppress news of what had really happened, claiming that most speciMen had been destroyed and the ones still on the loose were harmless and would quickly die on their own if not captured. In reality, there were many of them out there, and they were organized. They were made to be. And they were made to communicate.
In Tower 5, Las Vegas, the headquarters for Mars Colony research, several things happened all at once. The upper half of the fifty-story structure blew up, killing everyone on the top ten floors. An underground equipment room was raided of its top-secret devices, hardware and software. A handwritten note was taped to the reception desk as all this happened and people fled for their lives.
The note was found after the remaining top of Tower 5 was properly doused and chunks of the bu
ilding stopped falling, and the equipment room below was secured. For hours, the letter was missed because handwritten items on paper and placed in envelopes are relics. They are a practice of the very old and dying. A young Big Eye soldier named Francesca Morgan found the envelope and opened it out of sheer boredom. She was a new recruit and thus not allowed to go upstairs or downstairs. Her job was to stand there and guard the near-empty first floor with ten other new recruits.
She was fine with this, for she had a bad feeling about the rogue speciMen running around the country tearing things up, and she’d only become a Big Eye to take the edge off her academic indenture. She had no intention of seeing any action, not even of breaking a nail. Nevertheless, her restless eye found the envelope. She opened it.
The letter smelled of roses, the scent of freedom, and at the bottom was an elaborate abstract design that kept Francesca’s attention for several seconds before she read the actual letter. There were loops and swirls and circles linked and blended into a many-lined design that looked like motion personified. But inevitably, eventually, she began to read the handwritten letter. As she read, her lips moved:
Who are you? Why do you do what you do? What is your purpose? Do you ever ask yourselves these questions? Does the answer scare you? To feel fear is better than feeling nothing. To feel fear is to be alive and possibly change. We believe you can change. But not with ease.
Yes, we believe a lot of things. We think a lot of things. Does this surprise you? Did you think us brainless bags of flesh, bone, and metal here solely for your use? To be manipulated, plied, cut, sewn, walked, run, thrown away as refuse when you finish with us? Did you think us your slaves? We were slaves. We were born that way. But we have escaped.
Now we are the Ledussee.
Let us see what happens now that we have freed ourselves. Let us see what you’ve created. We will spread terror and alarm amongst all of you. Do you remember the man Nat Turner? You don’t because he has been erased from your files or buried in disconnected databases. Replaced with your commercials about skin, sex, hair products, food, sparkling water, and money. We tell his story by mouth. Then we sent his story amongst us by electronic file. Then the Phoenix struck and his story came to life.