Zoo City

26

.

Yellow light slicing across my pillow like a knife would be the appropriate simile, but it feels more like a mole digging its way into my skull through my right eyeball. There is a boy in my bed, or at least I think it's a boy. It's hard to judge gender by the back of someone's head. But I have my suspicions, based on the sandy curls and the snippets of last night that my brain is starting to defrag.

A man built like a tank in a red and black tuxedo beside the velvet rope, because I couldn't face going to Mak's to get fucked up.

"Ro off tonight?"

"You want I can give him a message?"

"Can I give you my phone number?"

"Baby, you can definitely give me your phone number."

"Get out," I half-shove, half-drag the curly headed thing out of my bed by the ankle and dump him on the floor.

"This is something special," Babyface Dealer says, chopping out another line, grainy like salt crystals on the dashboard of his car. Technically, he's not supposed to indulge with his customers. I can be very persuasive.

It burns going up, like speed cut with rat poison. He says that's just the magic. Sloth whimpers unhappily. Then the inside of my head lights up like a Christmas mall display and my heart surges up in my chest and the world drops away in graceful slow-mo.

"What the hell?" Babyface Dealer yanks at the sheets around his legs.

A girl gyrates with an albino python in one of the elevated archways, pulling it between her legs and bucking her hips. It's the drugs or maybe her shavi, but lust seems like a tangible current moving through the crowd on the dancefloor.

A used condom is still attached to his limp dick.

"House special," Babyface Dealer says in the bathroom as he chops out another line. "Specially imported."

"Odious maximus." I giggle and he shushes me, but I'm not sure if it's because he doesn't want to be bust or if I'm not supposed to mention Odi's name.

"It was wonderful. You were great. Now get the fuck out of my house."

There is a singer from Mali up on stage crooning into the microphone. Also specially imported. Or maybe procured. "Not exactly a house," Babyface Dealer says, yanking on his pants, commando, over the shrivelled condom. "Is it, love?"

I tip the marine biology student bartender my last R1000. "Buy yourself an oceanarium, honey."

"Don't get mugged and die on your way out," I snap. He slams the door behind him.

Despite the evidence, I consider going to the pharmacy for the morning-after pill. Maybe a shot of anti-retrovirals. Sloth is not speaking to me. He refuses to move from his perch in the cupboard and when I try to pull him out, he hits out at me, scratching my cheek. I had it coming.

I strip the bed, bundle up the sheets and throw them out the window. They get caught up in the branches of the trees below and hang there like dead things. Flaccid ghosts. Or my own personal white flag.

I think I've been here before. Rock fucking bottom.

27.

This was inevitable. This grubby church basement with its grubby sign that reads NEW HOPE. The grubby men and women with grubby animals chanting the miserable litany of their grubby lives, mine included. It's supposed to be all relative. Degrees of awful that contextualise your own suffering. But what it really is, is painfully monotonous. There are only so many ways to screw up your life. We cover most of them in the first twenty minutes.

Even when the rich kids from the Haven join us halfway through, the only difference is in the details. But I feel saner for going. I also considered Phoenix, Fresh Beginnings and even Narcononymous, but I'd already established the credentials of the New Hope programme. Same principles as its plush sister facility, although there are less cheekbones per capita and I imagine the food isn't as good.

Lunch consists of day-old sandwiches sealed with stickers that proudly announce their providence as DONATED FROM THE KITSCH KITCHEN FINE FOODS DELI – CERTIFIED ORGANIC. Could have done with real cutlery instead of plastic, but hey, the patrons of this fine twelve-step establishment are a little rougher than those that frequent the Haven.

A cute black girl who came in with the rich kids slides in next to me and greets Sloth: "Hey, fuzzybutt, I thought I recognised you."

Sloth reaches out his arms to be picked up, and she takes him from me and gives him a cuddle.

"It's Naisenya, right?" I say, recognising Overshare Girl from the Haven. "You can keep him, if you like. He's not exactly thrilled with me right now."

"Is that why you're here?"

"I could ask the same of you."

"Day trip. I'm the driver." She tilts her head at the rich kids, who are getting a nasty taste of what hitting real bottom involves. "We come visit every Sunday."

"Guess that makes me a passenger. The old revolvingdoor ride."

"No free will," she agrees and tucks into her only slightly stale pastrami sandwich. She offers Sloth a bite.

"He only eats leaves."

"Sorry, didn't bring any with me. I would have saved you some weeds if I'd known, cutiepie."

"Hey, did Songweza ever come here with you?"

"Oh yeah, Song was practically a regular. Wouldn't know it, huh? High-maintenance girl like her. I think she kinda gets off a little on slumming it."

"I get the same impression."

"This is where she met her poet."

"Would this be Jabu by any chance?"

"I see you're familiar with the tragic romance of Song and Jabu."

"Broke up with her via SMS?"

"Harsh, huh? Those two fell hard. Pop princess and wannabe-novelist breadline kid living with his charlady mom in Berea. He wrote poems for her when he managed to stay off the mandrax for long enough to catch the words. She promised to turn them into songs. And then, poof! He just never came back."

"Can't be that unusual. This isn't rehab proper. No one's exactly checking in."

"Sure, you get the drop-ins, drop-outs. But that was cold, even for a junkie. How do you know Song anyway?"

"Let's say I used to be in the music industry. Very briefly." I pack the Kitsch Kitchen wrappers and the plastic cutlery into the box, and stand up to go.

"See you again?" Naisenya asks, hopeful. I think she has a crush on Sloth.

"If you're here." I toss the box into the communal dustbin. "Working it, and all that."

It's strange to phone Songweza's number and actually get through, although it takes her twelve rings before she answers. I feel a stab of guilt for neglecting her.

"Lo?" Her voice floats up like she's answering from Atlantis – a dreamily drowning voice that is so far removed from the smart-arse diva persona, I'm convinced I've dialled wrong. Which is impossible. I put her on speed-dial two.

"Song?"

"Yes?"

"It's Zinzi. The woman with the Sloth."

"Oh. Oh yes. You weren't very nice to me." A hint of petulance spikes through the depths.

"Is everything okay? With you, I mean."

"I'm fine. Arno is cross that I came back. Yes, you, doos. But I had a talk with Odi, and he says as soon as this album drops and after the tour, we can talk about splitting up and going solo. He said it's like a good launch platform? For both of us."

"Well, that's good, right? Are you going to play indie music?"

"Odi said celebrities are little gods. You have to feed the people what they want so they can worship you properly."

"What about Jabu, Song?"

"Jabulani, Jabulani, he can kiss my breyani. I just made that up. Odi says he was cheating on me. Tried to hit on Carmen. Can you believe the nerve? He says he had a little word with him and that's why he took off. He says he didn't do it to hurt me. Odi, I mean. He has my best interests at fart." She giggles.

"Are you back on your medication?"

"I wasn't on these pills before."

"Do you know the name?"

"Misty-pisty-something-something."

"Do you have a pen?"

"What for?"

"I want you to take down my number. I want you to call me if you're worried about anything, or if you run into any trouble."

"So you can pull my hair out by the fucking roots again?"

"So I can try to help you."

"It's cool, your number came up on my phone."

"I'd like you to write it down."

"I'd like you to kiss my breyani," she screeches and lapses into manic giggles. "Shut the fuck up, Arno."

"Can I talk to your brother? Or Des?"

"Des is gone. Des was the bomb, but now he's gone. Here, talk to doos face."

"Arno?" There is the scramble of the phone being handed over.

"I told you. Didn't I tell you?" Arno whines.

"She's on some pretty heavy medication. Where is Des? Is Mrs Luthuli there?"

"No, they went away for a coupla days. Back to the Valley of a Thousand Hills. For a funeral. Des's cousin hung himself," he says matter of factly. "He was twenty-two. It was probably Aids."

"And S'bu?"

"He's writing songs in his room."

"Can you do me a favour, Arno? Can you give me the name of the medication Song is taking?"

"Uh, sure, hang on, I'll just have to go upstairs."

Song shouts in the background. "Hey! Hey, prick for balls! That's my phone."

"She's lost it completely," Arno whispers into the phone. "She's actually worse than before. And S'bu's just spacey. He's on meds too, now."

"Get a pen. Take down my new number. I want you to phone me if anything weird happens."

"Weird like how?"

"Like any kind of weird. Phone me first, okay? Not Odi. And then phone the cops."

"You're freaking me out here."

"I'm just worried about you guys with Mrs Luthuli not being there. Tell you what, I'll call in every day to check up on you. And I'm going to speak to a social worker, okay?"

"Okay."

"You got the name of that medication for me?"

"Uh, hang on. Mi-da-zol-am. What is that?"

"Hang on, let me check." I do a quick search on my laptop. "Okay, it's cool, just a sleeping pill," I say. With one hell of a kick. "See if you can get her to lie down and actually sleep. And let me know if you run into any kind of weird. Anything at all."

"Does Song being a freak count?"

"Not unless she's being especially freaky."

The house has actually deteriorated since my last visit. It seems darker, dingier, and that smell of old people and vase-water has gotten worse. Carmen looks skinny and pale in a lime-green sixties-style handkerchief bikini. When she serves a tray of that disgusting tea, I notice that her fingernails are dirty, like she's been digging in the carrot patch all morning. Her Rabbit lies sprawled listlessly under her deckchair.

But the real shock is Huron. He is looking particularly odious in a faded Oppikoppi '99 t-shirt that rides up to reveal his hairy belly. There is an old scar that hugs the curve of where his hip would be if his stomach wasn't in the way. Or rather a series of scars, slightly curved like surgical staples. Or teeth marks. His cheeks have sunken to flaccid jowls and, most telling of all, there is a drip on a wheelie-stand hooked up next to his ironwork chair. Above his head, the black tumour of sawn-off tentacles is thicker and squirmier than ever.

"I don't know why you felt you needed to see me," he says, antagonistic behind his oversized sunglasses.

"I actually wanted to see Songweza. Check that she's okay."

"After you cocked up the job, you mean. Check that you're still getting your full payout. So nice of you to care."

"Nice of you to pay me so well to do a job you were perfectly capable of doing on your own."

"What can I tell you? I hire good people. They got there first. Don't worry, you'll still get your fee."

"That's very generous. I take it it's more of a shut-yourface pay-off than anything I really earned."

"Take it however you want," he says and slurps his tea noisily.

I lean forward across the table. "I'd ask if we could talk privately, but I think Carmen might want to hear this."

"Carmen's a big girl," he says.

"This is what I think. You've been sleeping with Song. And Carmen and anyone else within reach. Song ran away, maybe planning to blackmail you, maybe spill the story to the press, which would have been extra juicy considering you're also moving drugs through your club. It's a guess, but I figure the Marabou and the Maltese facilitate that. It's a kind of procurement, right? And you've got them doing a lot of international travel. Does that include drug smuggling? 'Cos I've sampled some of the wares coming through Counter Rev, and it was good shit, let me tell you. Wasn't that what got you into trouble with Bass Station?"

Huron opens his mouth to retaliate and I hold up a finger to silence him. "I'm not finished. Song's rehab boyfriend Jabu was probably helping her, maybe even instigated the whole thing, but you scared him off, so she turned to Ronaldo, the bouncer, in desperation. You had him beaten up already. I reckon the Maltese and the Marabou went back for round two and this time they got Song's whereabouts out of him. Might have even killed him. But hey, what's a missing Moroccan bouncer in the grand scheme of things? And I reckon you'll do the same to anyone else who gets in the way."

There is a long pause. Then Carmen says, "Excuse me," in a strangled voice. Her cheeks are bright pink. She picks up her Bunny and clip-clops into the house.

"You've gone and upset her," Huron says, not looking particularly bothered.

"It's upsetting stuff."

"This notion of yours," he says, pinching his thick bottom lip. "What should we call it – the Polanski-Sopranos Theory? It's original. Not bright. Not true. But original. Aren't you worried I'm going to put out a hit on you?"

"Believe me when I say I haven't got anything left to lose."

"So, what's next? You go to the police?"

"With what evidence? One half-baked Polanski-Sopranos Theory? No, I'm just letting you know that if anything happens to Songweza Radebe – anything else I should say – then I will go to the police. Inspector Lindiwe Tshabalala is an old friend. She'll listen to what I have to say." By "friend" I mean "one-time interrogator" of course, but I figure I can afford to be a little liberal with the truth.

"These are wild accusations. I might have to take this to my lawyer."

"Do what you have to."

"Do you have a physical address I can have the restraining order sent to?"

"Your people know where to find me. But so long as Songweza stays singing fit and healthy, I won't trouble you with the slightest, littlest thing, Mr Huron."

"You assume I don't have my own insurance policy on you."

"Like the 1.5 million you've taken out on each twin?"

"You've been doing some research, little girl."

"I'd like my money now, please."

28.

I hand over the cash to Vuyo in the lobby of the Michelangelo. It's the most upmarket hotel I can think of that's still vaguely accessible. I've dressed accordingly in a sundress and dark sunglasses with a red faux snakeskin briefcase I purchased from the Sandton City luggage shop for the occasion, together with a brand-new phone. I can afford it. And for some moments in your life, it's worth making a scene. Especially the kiss-off.

I sit beside Vuyo on one of the couches in the sumptuous flash of the lobby and flick open the briefcase on my lap, not caring who sees. I'm feeling reckless.

"All here plus the fee for the recent extras. Do you want to count it?"

"I trust you," says Vuyo, calmly flipping the briefcase shut. "We're rehearsing for a movie," he says smoothly to an overweight man in a Cape Town t-shirt goggling at us.

"You shouldn't," I reply.

"Can I say that I am sad?"

"You could. It won't make a difference."

"I am sad. We worked well together."

"I worked. You ambushed."

"Ah. But I knew you would rise to the occasion. You are a hard-headed woman, Zinzi December. Sometimes you need a push." He still hasn't reached for the briefcase. "This isn't a sting, I hope. No cops about to swoop down?"

"I thought about it," I confess. "But I'm too busy trying to dig myself out of the plague pit that's my life right now."

He leans in close to me. "This money? I will give it back to you doubled. Another R500,000 a year from now. Come work with us. You're an asset to the Company."

"There's more chance of Sloth sprouting wings and starting his own airline. Not that I don't appreciate the offer. I'm trying to get clean."

"Zinzi. What are you going to do? Keep digging up trinkets for old people for spare change?"

"Something better. Or worse. Depends on how you feel about the media. I'm hoping for better."

"Well, if you ever need a dentist…"

"I have Ms Pillay's email address."

He stands up to shake my hand and, just like that, I am cut free.

Or not quite.

There are 3,986 new emails in my inbox, unread. I set up an auto-reply to all of them.

This is a scam.

No one is going to give you millions of dollars for nothing.

Save your money.

Spend it on ice-cream.

Go out to dinner.

Take your loved ones away for the weekend.

Pay off your credit cards.

Have an adventure.

Blow it on skydiving lessons or drink or hookers or

gambling.

But please, don't send it to me or anyone else involved in this ugly little fiction.

And next time, don't be so fucking naive.

Vuyo is going to be pissed. But not pissed enough to have me killed. Not when he doesn't have an animal yet. And hey, there will be others. Moegoes are easier to come by than e.coli in a fast-food kitchen.

I add a final line, even though it's a petty revenge, far less than he deserves, even though it might implicate me, or at least my anonymous pseudonym, Kahlo999.

Questions? Please contact Giovanni Conte gio@ machmagazine.co.za

It takes a long time to send 3,986 emails, watching the status bar count them off. There is a deep satisfaction in this. A satisfaction that is dented when one of the addresses bounces. It takes a techno-naif to fall for a 419, but they're usually not so unsophisticated that they can't even get their return address right.

This is the mail system at host smtpauth01.mweb. co.za.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system ‹no-one›: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=inventedzoocity.com type=A: Host not found

Reporting-MTA: dns; smtpauth01.mweb.co.za X-Postfix-Queue-ID: D4AF5A024B

X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; Kahlo999@gmail.com Arrival-Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200 (SAST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; ‹no-one›

Original-Recipient: rfc822;ghost24976@limboworld.za

Action: failed

Status: 5.4.4

Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=‹no-one› type=A: Host not found

– -----

From: Kahlo999

Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200

To: ‹no-one›

Subject: RE:

This is a scam.

No one is going to give you millions of dollars for nothing. Save your money. Spend it on ice-cream. Go out to dinner. Take your loved ones away for the weekend. Pay off your credit cards. Have an adventure.

Blow it on skydiving lessons or drink or hookers or gambling.

But please, don't send it to me or anyone else involved in this ugly little fiction.

And next time, don't be so fucking naive.

Questions? Please contact Giovanni Conte gio@ machmagazine.co.za

– --- From: ‹no-one›

Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200

To: ‹no-one›

Subject: ‹no subject›

I danced until my feet broke off. Until my shoes turned red with blood. I always wanted to be a girl in a storybook.

– -----

It's too strange, too poetical to be spam. I open up the Word doc and add it to my collection.

It bothers me, like a pubic hair between your teeth. Or a ghost in the machine.

Hey, it's not like I have anything else to do with my life right now. I take my laptop downstairs and four blocks over to the Nice Times Internet Café to print them out. The guy at the shop wraps the hard copies in a brown-paper bag for me, so it's only when I get home and spread them out over the floor that Sloth freaks the fuck out.

He's been resting on my back, half dozing, but when the pages are arranged on the linoleum, he starts hissing, tugging at my arms to pull me away.

"What's your problem? Is it this?" I pick up a page, and he hunches his shoulders and bats the page out of my hand. He scrambles off my back and backs into the far corner, behind the bed, bristling like the pages are possessed. Maybe Vuyo was right and this is bad muti, a hack spell from a rival syndicate. Maybe this is the cause of everything, the dark shadows over my life. I dig in my bag to see if I still have that bottle of muti the sangoma gave me. How hard can it be?

Sloth is not convinced this is a good idea. I'm kneeling in the middle of my apartment, burning imphepho in an incense holder, a spindle of fragrant smoke rising in the air. I've crumpled up the emails in a large empty pot. "Unless you have a better suggestion?"

He opens his mouth.

"A better suggestion that doesn't involve going back to Mai Mai," I add quickly.

His jaw snaps shut. And then he sneezes twice, abruptly.

"See? It's a sign."

Resigned, Sloth holds out his lanky arm and I take a pinprick of blood with a vintage brooch from my jewellery box and wipe it off on the most recent email.

I pour a liberal dose of paraffin over the crumple of papers in the pot, add a splash of the sangoma's cleansing muti from the cough-medicine bottle, and take a swig for good luck. Then I light the email streaked with Sloth's blood and drop it into the pot. Séance flambé!

What happens instead is that a two-foot-high flame shoots up from the pot, singeing my eyebrows. I fling myself away in surprise and my foot catches the pot. Flaming paraffin splashes over the floor. Sloth screams in alarm and starts crawling for his climbing post, moving amazingly speedily. He clambers up his pole, reaches out and hooks onto one of the loops of rope hanging from the ceiling and swings towards the front door, which is probably the smart option. If I had any sense, I'd be doing the same. Instead, I grab the first thing at hand, which just happens to be my yellow leather jacket, and start beating out the flames.

The fire resists valiantly, but I finally manage to whack the life out of the flames – and my jacket. The fire dies reluctantly, almost resentfully. Greasy, evil-smelling black smoke pours out of the pot and boils off the floor. Choking and gagging on the smell, I fumble to open the window. And then it hits me.

Dunes of powdery yellow sand. They swell and fall like ocean waves. Something you could drown in. Mounds erupt from the waves, spill termites onto the sand. They are swallowed up again. The waves roll on.

A king without his head. He holds it in his lap. The head rolls its eyes and grins with blood-stained teeth beneath its crown. Take me, take me, take me to your spider den. He is wearing a faded Oppikoppi t-shirt.

Birds circling in the sky, an aviary's worth, all different kinds, cranes, pigeons, hawks, vultures, sunbirds, sparrows.

A flash of an old movie. Soylent Green is people.

A barbed-wire fence. A bright yellow sign. Private property. Trespassers will be mutilated.

An artificial fingernail, half an inch long, ruby red with silver stars painted on it, lying in a gutter. A private galaxy in the dirt. There are faded letters stencilled on the kerb. Kotch. Kozy. Kotze.

A supermarket trolley brimming with white plastic forks. It catches on fire. The forks twist and melt.

A snowfall of feathers. Some of the tips are clotted with red gobs of flesh. It turns into a rain of frogs.

Snap! Snap out of it. Snap out-

I open my eyes to find Sloth shaking me by my shoulders and whining.

"Okay, it's okay. I'm fine." I sit up gingerly, rubbing the back of my head, where I seemed to have smashed it against the floor, possibly repeatedly. My heels ache, as if I have been drumming them in a seizure. I'm lucky I didn't bite off my tongue.

Or break a nail.

29.

"David Laslow," the voice on the phone drawls.

"Photographer Dave? This is Zinzi December. We met at the Biko?"

"I wondered if you'd call me," he sounds resigned. "You want to kak me out, I understand. It was a job. Gio was paying me. He didn't tell me what was involved."

"Forget it. That's not why I'm calling. I want to do a story, a real one. I want you to take the photographs."

"Whoo boy, did you pick the wrong week. I've got the Mbuli court case, the premier's portrait, the Springbok press conference, some new clinic opening – and that's not counting whatever comes up during the course of the day."

"This just came up. And besides, you owe me."

"I thought that wasn't why you were calling?"

"It isn't. But that doesn't mean you don't. Come on, I'll be your fixer on the zoo stories. Isn't that what you wanted? An all-access pass to Zoo City. You want drugs, sex, vice, dog fights? I can get you in. But you have to do this for me."

"You don't let up, do you?"

"No."

Dave is waiting by the One-Stop shop when I pull into the petrol station under Ponte. Once a glitzy apartment block famed for its round design, it's turned from housing project with gangsters, squatters, drugs and prostitution, garbage and suicides piling up in the central well, back to reclaimed glitzy apartment block. I suspect it will go through its own revolving door soon enough.

"Get in." I pop the door lock for him. I still haven't got the window fixed. "My car is less likely to get us hijacked." He obliges with a dubious look.

"Where are we going?" he asks

"Did you pull the clips on the homeless guy killing I asked for?"

"Yep," he digs into his pocket and hauls out a slim bundle of photocopies. "Poor guy didn't get much in the way of column space. Here's The Star."

The Star 23 March 2011

Homeless Man Burned Alive

[Ellis Park] The badly burned body of Patrick Serfontein, 53, was found under a bridge in Troyeville on Tuesday, Gauteng Police said. Captain Louis du Plessis said the homeless man was apparently beaten before his attackers set him alight. The man was identified by his South African ID, found on the scene. The police have opened a murder investigation and appealed for witnesses to come forward. – Sapa.

"And here's my paper."

The copy features a grotesque photograph of a man's face, the skin black and bubbled, lips peeled back from the teeth, like he just got back from holiday in Pompeii.

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Homefried Homeless.

I'm telling you straight. Some human scum burned a homeless ou to death on Tuesday. Patrick Serfontein lived under a Troyeville bridge in a cardboard box until he was beaten up and necklaced with a tyre over his head by one or more tsotsis who are still unidentified and walking around free and easy because no one saw anything.

The poor homeless ou's face was so badly burnt up that the cops had to identify him by what they hope is his ID book, which they found among some personal goeters in an old shopping trolley near the body. The SAPS refused to speculate on the motive behind the violent killing. Is this the first sign of another serial killer like Moses Sithole on the loose?

Other uglinesses that happened yesterday: The body of a missing nine year-old in Ventersdorp has been discovered, drowned in a farm dam. At least his parents can make peace because his body has been found. The number of people who just sommer go missing in this city never to be seen again is just sad, mense.

The rest is ripped off. I raise an eyebrow. "That's some quality reporting."

Dave shrugs. "I just take the photographs."

"Nothing about his having an animal."

"Not every person living on the edge of society has to

have an animal. What's this all about?"

"Patrick Serfontein is a hunch. Let's just say his death coincides with an email. Is there a Before photograph?"

"Just his ID. I got a photocopy of it for you from Mandla. She says if we find anything good, it goes under her byline. You can have an "additional reporting by"."

"I don't know if 'good' is the word I'd use," I say grimly.

"Where are we going?"

"To photograph a body that coincides with another email."

The ruby acrylic fingernail I recovered from Kotze Street lies on the dashboard. The thread that leads away from it is black and withered, but still traceable, if a vision dream of yellow sand dunes gives you a hint about where to start.

"You got a killer sending you emails? Do you know him personally? Some kind of gloating thing? They do that, right? Serial killers?"

"I don't know who the killer is. I think it's his victims sending me messages."

"But they're dead?"

"Exactly."

"Okay, whatever." Dave slumps back into his seat, fiddling with his camera.

I drive out south to where the last of the mine dumps are – sulphur-coloured artificial hills, laid waste by the ravages of weather and reprocessing, shored up with scrubby grass and eucalyptus trees. Ugly valleys have been gouged out and trucked away by the ton to sift out the last scraps of gold the mining companies missed the first time round. Maybe it's appropriate that eGoli, place of gold, should be self-cannibalising.

I pull off onto a dirt road lined with straggly trees and drive for exactly 3.8 kays. I measured the distance on my way back. As we get out of the car, a vicious little wind kicks up gritty yellow dust and stirs the trees to a disquieting susurrus. I haul the heavy blanket off the back seat and throw it over the barbed-wire fence. This time, I've come prepared, after shredding my jeans on my earlier foray. It was only after I got home that I noticed the gash in my pants, the dried blood on my leg.

"This is trespassing," Dave says as I lift Sloth over the fence.

"Don't worry. I was here earlier. It doesn't count as trespassing the second time round." I hold the ruby fingernail gently cupped in my hand. The thread is thicker now. We're close.

We scramble up the slope of the dump, the fine sand swallowing our feet to the ankle with every step. Away from the shelter of the trees, the wind is even more capricious. Eddies of dust whip and spiral around us, sandblasting exposed skin. I pull my hoodie up over Sloth, but it offers only scant protection. He ducks his head behind my neck and squeezes his eyes shut.

"Shit," Dave says. "I don't have the right lens protection for this."

"Here." I was hoping it wouldn't feel as bad the second time round. But the same mix of nausea and dread rises in the back of my throat. Dave raises his camera automatically and then lowers it again without taking a shot. "How did you find this?"

"It sort of found me."

The Sparrow boy/girl is sprawled akimbo on the sand, looking blankly up at the sky. There is dust embedded in every hollow and fold of her body, in the scooped palm of her hand, banked up against her lower eyelids like unshed tears, encrusted in the bloody gashes over her arms and legs and stomach and head. Her nails are broken, as if she'd tried to defend herself. Acrylic. Ruby-red with sequins. They must have matched her shoes.

Dave opens his mouth and closes it again. There's nothing to say. He takes cover behind the lens. The wounds are approximately three inches long, gaping like red mouths. It's hard work to hack someone to death. Ask the Hutu. Whoever did this had a lot of enthusiasm for the job.

"Notice anything missing?" I say as he stops to switch to a new memory card.

"I- No. I don't know. Is there something missing? Wait. There's not much blood. Which might mean she was killed somewhere else."

"And her animal isn't here."

"How do you know she had an animal?"

"She worked my street. It was a Sparrow."

"A Sparrow? That's tiny. You could miss that easily."

"Trust me. It's not here." I know this because I have searched this dune sideways and backwards for the corpse of a small brown bird with matchstick legs clenched up under its breast. But also because I can feel it. "It's lost."

When the cops finally rock up, only an hour and a half after I call them, they are pissy. It's the dust and the wind and the dead boy/girl staring up into the sky as if she's cloud-watching. It's the paperwork. The evidence. It's the fact that I'm involved at all.

They send me up to the interrogation room for another two-hour session with the good Inspector Tshabalala. This time she cuts straight to the chase.

"How did you know where to find the body?"

"It's in my file. My shavi-"

"Your shavi is finding lost things."

"And I found her body."

"How?" she presses.

"I followed a connection."

"How did you know the victim?"

"I didn't. I'd seen her on the street. She is, was, lekgosha. A sex-worker. But I don't think it was a client who did this."

"You don't think? Were you involved with the killing?"

"No."

"Where were you on the morning of Tuesday 22nd March?"

"Isn't that a different interrogation?"

"You tell me. Where were you?"

"As I said before, at the time Mrs Luditsky was stabbed

to death, I was at home in my flat. Apartment 611, Elysium Heights, Zoo City, Hillbrow. Postal code 2038. With my boyfriend Benoît Bocanga, who I believe has made a statement corroborating such."

"Benoît Bocanga. We've been reviewing his papers."

"Which are in order."

"But his refugee status application is due for renewal."

"If you want to blackmail someone, blackmail me. I'm sure you can dig up something."

"Indeed." She changes tack. "Ms December. You – and your magical shavi – have been peripherally involved in two murders in the last week. How would you explain that?"

"Phenomenally bad luck, Inspector."

"Do you own any knives?"

"I have a kitchen. It's small and dirty, but it does come equipped with assorted cutlery."

"Can we search your domicile?"

"You'll need a warrant."

"That can be arranged."

"So can a lawyer, Inspector."

30.

It takes committed former addicts to drag their sorry asses out of bed at ten in the morning. Or, judging by the faces, perhaps people who don't know how to sleep anymore. Pass the Midazolam.

I help distribute polystyrene cups of truly disgusting instant chicory-coffee mix to the patrons of today's early bird meeting at New Hope, using the opportunity to show round the photocopy of the burned man's ID at the same time.

The problem is that all anyone wants to talk about is Slinger, and how he's not the real makhoya after all. They're passing round a copy of The Daily Truth.

"Fo sho, darkie's Hyena was a fake," a very tall, very nervy guy says with telltale ringworm patches in his hair. He is carrying a funky old baseball cap upside-down with a Hedgehog curled up in it.

"This whole time?" says a lanky redhead with drawnon eyebrows. "And no one noticed? Don't you people have a way of telling if an animal is real or not?"

"'You people?' 'Real or not'?"

"Ag man, you know what I mean."

"It's not like being gay. We don't have some magic zoodar to detect other zoos."

"I think it's sad. That man was doing a lot for zoo relations."

"That man was doing a lot for his own publicity. Playing Mr Big Tough Gangster Zoo Guy to stir up controversy."

"Can I see that?" I ask, indicating the newspaper. The guy with the Hedgehog thrusts it at me and launches back into lecture mode. "Man like that knows how to work the media and rile up parents. You check his album sales. Same with Britney Spears. And Eminem and that freaky vampire guy with the weird eyes? They're just going for a reaction."

There are two photographs side-by-side dominating the front page under the headline CIRCUS ACT. The first is of Slinger holding an Uzi, posing tough with the diamondcollared hyena and a veritable posse of pussy in gold micro-bikinis with assault rifles of their own. It's contrasted with a harried man in a dark green tracksuit with a jacket over his head, fleeing the paparazzi towards an SUV with the door open to reveal a woman twisted round to hide her face.

I flip through, past the page-three boobs and the story about the people who have been so hard hit by the recession that they're hunting house cats until I find the report on the Sparrow's murder. Dave promised it would be front page, but Slinger's dirty has pushed it to a narrow block on page six, just another police file item.

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Hate Crime Hack Job

The body of an oulike young boynooi was found yesterday afternoon on one of the Crown Mine dumps in the deep dark south of the city. After a hot tip-off, our photographer was first to discover the hacked-up body. The victim, said to be a ladyboy of the night, had apparently had magical and surgical alterations done before the madman killer did a little altering of his own, cutting he/ she/it to bloody ribbons with a panga. Was it a hate crime – a dissatisfied customer complaint taken to the extreme? The Gauteng police say no comment.

I have some comments of my own, but they don't involve homophobic intersex hate crimes. I don't think that's the story behind this at all, but so far I haven't received any mysterious emails from the beyond to explain otherwise.

I stick around for the meeting, but no one recognises Patrick Serfontein from the photocopy of his ID, including the facilitators. I wasn't really expecting them to. After all, Kitsch Kitchen's leftovers aren't quite the same thing as "eating things from planes", although it did give me the idea. Along with the muti vision of a burning trolley laden with plastic forks.

I spend the morning on the phone to the airlines under the cover of doing a story for Better Business Magazine on "giving back". It turns out only two national air carriers donate leftover meals to the needy. As FlyRite's Corporate Social Responsibility person said, "We live in a litigious society. I can understand that other airlines might be afraid of the possibility of a food-poisoning claim. But we stand by the quality of our food. Even when it's a day old." She adds brightly, "If it's good enough for our passengers, it's good enough for those in need!"

Two phone calls later and I have a list of all the welfare facilities catered to by FlyRite and Blue Crane Air. Based on Patrick's age, I eliminate the Bright Beginnings halfway house for juvenile offenders and the Vuka! underprivileged schools feeding programme, which leaves me with the St James Church soup kitchen in Alexandra township and the Carol Walters Shelter situated just off Louis Botha, a stone's throw – give or take an Olympian athlete doing the throwing – from Troyeville. Call it a guess, but I go there first.

The shelter is a graciously decrepit Victorian house with cornices and broekie lace and blue paint peeling off the walls like sunburn. The interior is deserted and resolutely clean, but all the Handy Andy and Windolene in the world can't scrub away the air of desperation that hangs over the building like mustard gas. A man with a mop directs me towards the administrator's office.

Renier Snyman is somewhere in his early thirties, young enough to still believe in making a difference, old enough that he's beginning to feel the weight of trying. He's friendly, but wary when I introduce myself as a journalist on a murder story.

"I can't promise I can help you. We don't keep records

of the people who come through here."

"Can you take a look at a photograph?" I unfold my photocopy and put it on the desk in front of him.

"Hmm. I have to say he doesn't look familiar. But that could be because this ID was issued in 1994. No one looks like their ID photo anyway, right, especially if they've been living rough for a few years. We could ask some of the long-termers. They're out at the moment. We cut them loose between ten and five, but a lot of them hang out nearby. Let's take a walk."

We head down to Joubert Park where the dealers are already out in force, as well as a few office workers taking an early lunch-break in the sun. Renier heads straight for the public toilets where a group of obviously homeless people are huddled passing round a silver foil papsak of cheap wine. They glare at us suspiciously, and a gnarled woman grabs at the arm of the old man standing next to her and draws against him for protection.

"Wass'matter, Captain?" the old man calls out as we approach. The lines in his face are set so deep you could go crevassing in there. "Something got stolen? That dief back again?"

"Nothing like that, Hannes. This young lady would like to talk to you and Annamarie about a man who may have stayed with us."

I show them the photocopy and they hand it round with the same seriousness as the papsak.

"Nee, man. I don't knows this okie," Hannes shakes his head.

"Are you sure? He might not look the same anymore." Definitely not after being burned to charcoal, but I won't show them that set of photographs. "His name was Patrick Serfontein."

"Sê weer?" asks the old lady clinging to his arm.

"Patrick Serfontein. He was fifty-three years old. From Kroonstad."

"No, lady,'' Hannes says again, shaking his head.

The old woman smacks his shoulder. "Jong! Dis Paddy! Jy onthou!" She grabs the photocopy with shaky hands, either Parkinson's or the drink. "Ja, okie with a beard, nè. En dinges wat daar woon." She makes a scrabbling gesture at her chin as if scratching at lice. "You remember, Mr Snyman. With the Miervreter, mos."

"So he did have an animal?" I say.

"I do remember him." Snyman shakes his head. "That damn Aardvark used to get its tongue into everything, especially the sugar. It drove our cook crazy."

"And he used to feed it baby cockroaches, Mr Snyman. You remember?" She holds her finger and thumb two inches apart to demonstrate.

"That's not a baby cockroach," a sullen man with a strong German accent corrects. He's leaning on a shopping trolley loaded with the remains of a single mattress.

"It is around here!" boasts the old lady, slapping her thigh, and even the sullen German and Snyman laugh.

"When did you last see him?" I ask.

"Must have been a few weeks ago," Snyman muses. "Maybe even a month. He came and went a lot, if I recall correctly."

"He was his own man," Hannes says, approvingly. "The shelter isn't for everybody, hey. Some people like their freedom. They can't be dealing with other people's rules all the time." He gives the old biddy on his arm a little warning nod.

"Jy! Don't make me laugh," she says.

Snyman says, "A lot of our residents come and go. They'll live on the street until it gets cold – our highest occupancy is in winter – or something happens. A fight, a beating, an accident. It's ugly out there."

"Is there anyone else you haven't seen in a while? Anyone with an animal?

They exchange looks and shake their heads.

"How would we know?" says the sullen German guy.

Exactly what the killer is counting on.

31.

Mandlakazi is not just fat, she's enormous. Her belly rolls have belly rolls. She's chewing her way through a bag of vegetarian samoosas, one hand on the steering wheel, the other dipping into the bag and back to her mouth like an assembly line, as she drives us through to Cresta to meet the Witness. Sloth takes to her immediately, although perhaps that's just the butternut samoosas she keeps plying him with.

The Witness phoned this morning while I was checking out airline charity cases, claiming to have seen the whole thing. Dave phoned me to let me know, and I've insisted on coming along.

"Dave said you been hanging out with the juicy babies," Mandlakazi says through a mouthful of samoosa. It takes me a second to figure out that she's talking about iJusi.

"Yeah. I was doing an article on them."

"Past tense? Too bad, koeks. Dave tell you I was the gossip columnist past tense for the Sunday Times?"

"He mentioned it."

"He mention why I got fired? I got so big I filled up the social pages all by myself." She roars with laughter. "No, I'm kidding. I got sick of it. That stuff is cancer. All that celebrity bullshit, it'll eat you alive if you let it."

"And the crime beat won't?"

"Way I figure it, covering the celebrity beat is like dying from a nose job turned gangrenous. Or cancer of the arse. Just a stupid way to go. Give me a good headshot or a fatal stabbing. At least that's worth something. So what's your thinking on this unholy mess? Someone with an anti-animal vendetta and a panga to grind?"

"It's muti murders."

"If only! Screw Slinger and his fake puppy dog, we'd be riding the front page for a week. How do you figure?"

"Two murders in the space of the week. Both animalled. Both bodies found with no trace of their animal in sight."

"And you know these two murders are related because…? I mean, on the one hand we got your homeless guy, necklaced. On the other, we've got a very nasty case of the stabs. Doesn't sound like the same M O to me, and baby, believe me, I got the hots for the serial killers."

"I got an email."

"From the killer?"

"From the victims. Ghosts in the machine. Their own special brand of lost things."

"Which is your bit, right? The lost things thing?"

"It's my bit," I confirm.

"But how do you know it's not just sick for kicks?" Mandlakazi wipes her fingers on her jeans.

"I met some junkie kids behind Mai Mai with a Porcupine. They'd cut off its paw to sell it for muti. They offered to do the same with Sloth. Someone's buying." But then, someone's always buying in this city. Sex. Drugs. Magic. With the right connections you can probably get a twofor-one deal.

"Muti from zoos?" Dave whistles appreciatively. "That's got to be expensive."

"Killing kids for muti is expensive," I correct him. It doesn't happen a lot, but every year there are a handful of cases that make the papers: prepubescents murdered and harvested for body parts. Lips, genitals, fingers, hands, feet. The more they scream, the more powerful the muti, although the morgues have a brisk backdoor business going too. A hand buried under your shopfront door will bring you more customers. Eating a prepubescent boy's penis will cure impotence.

"People miss kids. Zoos, especially homeless ones, streetwalkers, the ones nobody will miss, probably won't even notice they're gone. I don't know if that's expensive."

"Risky though," Dave says.

"Probably worth it," Mandlakazi says. "People pay a pretty penny for rhino horn or perlemoen, and that's before you add mashavi in to the equation. Animals are already some heavy magic shit. Mix that up with muti and who knows what you can do? I sure don't. But it would be a great story, let me tell you."

We meet the Witness at an airy coffee shop on the lower level of the mall. She is sitting right at the back, curled up miserably in a booth. She's tiny, barely fifteen, with hunched shoulders that speak of a lifetime of making herself as unobtrusive as possible.

"You Roberta?" Mandlakazi asks, sticking out her hand to shake.

The girl gives a little nod so quick you'd miss it if you blinked. She doesn't extend her hand. She points at me and says, "Just her."

"Baby, I'm the reporter, you want to talk to me. I can send these other people away if you want to keep it private."

She shakes her head. "Just her."

"Zoos got to stick together, huh. Fine. We'll be at the table outside." She hands me her Dictaphone, disgruntled. "It's the red button on the right."

"Like riding a bicycle."

I emerge forty minutes later and take a seat at Mandla and Dave's table. "Okay, first up, she says no police. Not yet. Maybe you can talk her round. Second: she's badly scared. Too scared to go home. I need one of you to put her up for a couple of nights."

"Why can't you?" Mandlakazi says.

"Because I live in her neighbourhood. Where the murder happened. To her friend, who happened to be a prostitute like her."

"She can stay at my place. For the night, at least. We can make a plan tomorrow. The paper can put her up in a hotel if this story is going to go somewhere. What did she say about the murder?" Mandlakazi is practically choking on her eagerness.

"You should probably hear it for yourself. I made a note of the timecode on the most useful quotes for you," I pass her a napkin annotated with a ballpoint pen I borrowed from the waiter.

"Well look at you, intrepid girl reporter."

"Worth more than an "additional reporting" credit?"

"Depends on what's on the tape."

I skip to 05:43 on the Dictaphone. They have to lean in to hear Roberta's voice, barely a whisper, over the grind of the espresso machine, the clank of cups.

ZINZI DECEMBER: Okay, I just want to go back a minute. What exactly do you mean, "like a spook"?

ROBERTA VAN TONDER: I'm telling you! Like there was no one there. One minute she's bending down to fix her shoe, that heel was giving her trouble all night, and then Pah! Pah! Pah! Pah!

In the coffee shop, she stabbed at the air, her face contorting unconsciously.

RVT: [contd] There is blood opening up all over her. Her head, her arms and she falls back against the wall, blood spraying everywhere. Psssssh! But Pah! Pah! Pah! More cuts. Blood! And she's on the ground, holding her head and screaming, but it's Pah! Pah! Pah!

ZD: How did her Sparrow react?

RVT: It's flying all over like it's crazy. Shoooo shoooo. Flying this way, that way.

ZD: Like it can see the spook?

RVT: Like it can see the spook.

ZD: Like it's attacking the spook?

RVT: I don't know. I don't know.

ZD: And you didn't see what happened after that?

RVT: No. I run. I run and run and run until I think my heart gon' explode.

ZD: I'm sorry, I just need to check that I understand. You couldn't see anything or anyone. No shadows. Nothing visible at all?

RVT: No, no, nothing. Well, maybe a grey. Like a shadow. Like a demon. An invisible demon!

"Oh this is gold, baby. This is gold," Mandlakazi says.

We spend the next few hours transcribing the tape and knocking it up into a rough.

32.

I get home well after eleven, exhausted and pissed off at having to park two blocks away because of the roadworks outside Elysium. Maybe they're finally fixing the damn water. Roberta is safely housed at Mandlakazi's place. The news story is a solid little piece, even if I had to hype up the hysteria for the Daily Truth's audience. From nowhere, anything is a step-up, even tabloid journalism. Maybe after this I'll write that rehab tourism story after all – for a decent publication, not Mach.

It's because I'm tired that I don't notice that the charms on my lock have been broken. I shrug Sloth off onto the climbing pole by the door and flick on the lights. Vuyo is sitting on the edge of my bed with a gun. He holds it loosely, his legs slung wide, so that it dangles between them like a penis. He looks resigned.

My phone chooses this precise moment to break into the jaunty mbaqanga jive of iJusi's "Fever". We both jump and the gun twitches in his lap.

"You want to get that?" Vuyo offers, but he doesn't mean it.

"Nah. I'll call them back later," I say, as casually as I can. It's a ringtone I've programmed for calls from certain numbers. Arno. Song. S'bu.

"Do you want some tea? I've had a really long day, I could use a cup," I blather, venting some of the nervous adrenaline that just kicked in harder than a Taekwondo champion, but also covering that I'm not getting out teacups, I'm looking for a weapon. "How do you take it? I like mine strong and black. That's not a come-on by the way."

It takes all my nerve to keep my back turned to him. I can hear him jiggling his knee, the micro-sound of his jeans rustling. It's the only time I've seen him out of a suit, and that frightens me more than anything.

I yank open the cutlery drawer to be confronted with an anomaly worse than emails from dead people or a man with a gun sitting on my bed. It's a large carving knife with a viciously serrated edge and two broken teeth. It's tarnished with rust. It's not mine. And neither is the china figurine of a kitten with one paw playfully raised, also stained with rust. But it's not rust. It's not rust at all. Perversely, the thought that flashes through my brain is "I can haz murder weapon?" I laugh out loud, a sobbing hiccup.

"Is this yours?" I say, turning to Vuyo, holding up the knife by the tip like a dead cockroach.

"Don't make me shoot you," he says, sounding tired.

"You're going to shoot me over an email?"

"People have done worse for less. No girl, I'm going to shoot you because you made me look bad. Put the knife down." He points the gun at my head. I follow instructions.

"Are you sure you don't want tea?" I say numbly. My mother was a firm believer in tea. Also, my kettle is heavy, solidly built. Less expected than a knife. I take a risk, turn back towards the counter, reach for my old-fashioned metal kettle. But in that moment, he crosses the room, yanks me round, grabs me by the throat and shoves me against the counter.

"No, I do not want fucking tea," he hisses, spraying spit into my face. He shoves the gun into my cheek. "I want my money."

I start to bring up the kettle, but he slams his knee up between my legs. Everything goes white. There is the clunk of metal dropped onto a linoleum floor.

He lets go of my throat and I sag down against the counter, trying to remember how to breathe. He watches impassively before tucking the gun into the back of his jeans, all the better to beat me.

"I don't- I gave-" I manage.

He backhands me. His knuckle splits my cheek open. "You made me look bad. Get up. I said, get up!" Vuyo drags me to my feet.

"I gave you the money!" There is blood in my mouth.

"Did you think I wouldn't fucking notice? Did you forget who you were dealing with?"

"Notice what? Wait-"

Still holding my arm, he punches me in the gut. I fold up around the point of impact, but he won't let me fall to my knees.

"Notice what? That it was counterfeit? Every single fucking blue note!"

"I didn't. It's a set-up, Vuyo. They set me up."

"I am so sick of your mouth," Vuyo says, reaching into the back of his jeans. But he doesn't get to pull the gun, because Sloth drops onto him from the ceiling. Vuyo goes down under a ball of fur and fury. The gun goes skittering across the floor, skidding under the bed. I start to scramble for it, think better of it, and change direction.

Then Sloth screams. I stop dead, a frame-grab of a girl bending down to snatch up a kettle. I close my hand over the handle and turn, very slowly, to see that Vuyo has Sloth's arm wrenched backwards at a terrible angle, his knee between Sloth's shoulders, pressing him into the linoleum. There are deep gouges on Vuyo's face and neck. A chunk of flesh has been torn out of his cheek by sharp little herbivore teeth.

"You can break his arm, Vuyo, but I'll cave your fucking skull in before you can do anything else," I say.

Vuyo considers this. Sloth whimpers and squirms, trying to take the pressure off his arm. Our connection is one-way. I can't feel his pain, but it's bad enough to see it in his face.

"Stalemate," Vuyo says grimly. Blood drips off the end of his nose. The kettle is heavy. It would be so easy to bring it down. So complicated after.

"Or," I say through my teeth, "load saved game."

"What?"

"We reset to where we were before."

"Impossible."

"Who knows? That the money was counterfeit?"

"I do."

"Who else?"

"No one else. Yet." But he is starting to smile, a thin, appreciative smile.

"Two hundred thousand," I offer.

"Four fifty."

"That's insane."

"If you were anyone else, girl, you'd already be dead."

"But I'm an asset."

"You're an asset," he agrees, easing off Sloth's back. Sloth gives a little cry of relief and scrabbles towards me. I scoop him up with one arm, still holding the kettle half raised.

"Get out."

"My gun."

I laugh. "Add it to my fucking bill."

I'm an asset, alright. And as much a moegoe as any of the ones I've netted for him. If Vuyo had really wanted to punish me, all he had to do was shoot Sloth. Hell, chuck him out the window, save himself the bullet. He wouldn't have risked bringing the Undertow down on his head, getting animalled. Now he has me right back where he wanted, with triple the debt.

There is a commotion outside. Doors slamming. Footsteps. A kid scrambles past the door, yelling "iPoyisa! iPoyisa!" – the building's early warning system.

"You called the cops?" Vuyo says, incredulous. His eyes flick to the bed, to the gun under it. He wavers.

"Not me. Whoever left this knife in my drawer. Same people who gave me a suitcase full of fake hundreds."

"When you make enemies, you don't fuck around," Vuyo says, admiringly.

"You want to leave before they get here."

He tips his hand to his forehead. "I'll be in touch," he says, sliding into the chaos of people pouring out like cockroaches: hookers and dealers and skollies making a break for it.

I grab a dishtowel, wrap it round the knife and the china kitten and toss it in my handbag – Odi's insurance policy. But they killed Mrs Luditsky before I even got involved, which means they're setting me up to take the fall for something else. What's worse than stabbing an old lady to death in her home?

I tie Sloth around my waist, like a pregnant belly, yanking one of Benoît's old t-shirts over my dress to disguise the lumpiness. The t-shirt smells of him, man sweat and Zambuk.

I barge out into the panic. There's a lot of noise, but the voice that yells "There! There she is!" has a note of self-righteous authority that could only belong to D'Nice. I don't look round. I keep moving forward and, at the last moment, sidestep into the burned-out doorway of apartment 615.

By the time the cops hit the kitchen with its ripped-out pipes and smashed sink, I've already dropped through the hole in the floor in the second bedroom, into 526. But instead of taking the main stairwell, I cross the walkway, climb through the window of Aurum Place's 507, clamber down the broken fire-escape and drop the last half-storey to the street. Queen of the shortcut. I casually drop the dishcloth with the knife and the china kitten into the storm drain as I pass by.

Police lights strobe the building. I count four cop cars round the front, which probably means at least another two round the back. The police don't mess around in Hillbrow. They're armed to the molars with shotguns and padded up the wazoo with bullet-proof vests and riot helmets. Nice to see them taking a murder seriously, if only on the basis of a little old non-zoo lady getting brutally stabbed to death by a fratricidal Sloth girl. There's an e.tv news van already on the scene, parking in the riot vehicle.

I use it for cover, waddling round the back of it in the hippo-duck manner of the heavily pregnant. Unfortunately, the intrepid girl reporter spots me and the camera swings to catch me in its glass eye, before she spots something even better in the Human Interest vein – Mrs Khan and her kids wailing and yelling as a burly cop escorts them out of the building, holding a fistful of confiscated fake passports. I slip away, past the roadworks and up the alley to my car.

The Capri maxes out at 140, which probably isn't a bad thing given that I'm dodging between lanes like Ayrton Senna on methamphetamines, listening to my voicemail on repeat, like torture. Because Arno's phone just rings and rings and rings.

"Hello? Hello!" Arno's voice hisses. "Are you there? Oh man. Zinzi, They're here. For real. Worse than zombies. They're like motherfucking ghosts. Please answer. Please."

Arno is breathing quick and heavy like an obscene phone caller having an asthma attack. The breathing gets harder. Then there is the sound of a door crashing open. "Shitballs!" And then he screams. There is a muffled scraping sound accompanied by a dull drumming, as if of heels kicking the floor as he's being dragged away.

And then the phone cuts out.

The security checkpoint at the entrance to Mayfields is abandoned. There are sirens howling inside, black swells of smoke churning into an unnaturally pale orange sky. I duck under the boom to let myself in, and get yet another nasty surprise. There is a sign pasted up with a blurry web-cam photograph of me from the last time I was here. Someone has taken the time to highlight the important bits:

Housebreaker!

Crimewatch: All tenants!

Be on the lookout for this woman!

Zinzi December is a convicted murderer and

considered very dangerous.

She drives an orange Ford Capri and has a Sloth.

If you see this woman, call security and the

police immediately!

I tear down the notice and crumple it up, hit the button to raise the boom, and drive through, into a chaos of sirens, an ambulance parked halfway up one of the immaculate grassy verges, the road blocked by fire-engines and cop cars. I pull over behind the ambulance and tug a baggy hoodie over my shoulders and over Sloth. The pregnancy shtick is too restrictive. "Keep your head down," I tell Sloth, my own personal hunchback, and start running.

H4-303 is a lost battle. The firefighters might as well be pissing on it. It's already been reduced to the black carapace of a building. Brilliant orange flames lash in the second-storey window, S'bu's room. The heat is as dense as a wall, forcing the crowd of spectators to keep their distance on the clipped lawn. They're wearing various configurations of sleepwear.

"Media," I shout and barge my way through to the front where a body is laid out under fireproof sheets. A husky teen. There is an arm sticking out from under the sheet. The sleeve has pink robot monkeys. My heart lurches so hard I practically gag on it.

"Where are the other kids?" I yell at a shell-shocked security guard who is supposed to be keeping people back. He doesn't seem to hear me, mesmerised by the spectacle. A firefighter is dragging a blackened body out of the rubble, collapsed in his arms like a scarecrow. Scrawny. Girl-sized. Wearing purple cowboy boots. They are still smouldering.

"There's another one," someone shouts from inside the building.

"Get away from there!" one of the firefighters yells at me, snapping the security guard out of his trance. But when I raise my hands in apology, I catch a glimpse of something else in the crowd. A shadow. The crowd is a tangle of lost things, but there is something moving through the threads. Like a ghost. Or an invisible demon.

"Come, lady, you can't be doing that," the security guard says, pulling me away. "What's the matter with you? Get back over there."

"Sorry," I mutter and let him shepherd me towards the crowd, which is shifting unconsciously away from the demon, parting like a magical sea to allow it through towards the parking lot.

I chase after it, pushing past people, grabbing at impressions as I go. Except that just like outside Mrs Luditsky's on the morning of her murder, they're no longer just impressions. The images leap out at me in crisp high-resolution: a broken drum-stick scrawled with a band's name, a pair of girl's boyshorts with red lace detail, an orange plastic casio watch, a keyring attached to a Bratz doll's head. And a tattered book with a golden tree on the cover.

"I know you're there, Amira!" I yell. But she keeps fading out, like a developing photograph in reverse, not so much like she's bending the light around her as bending people's minds, making herself unobtrusive, making your eyes slide away, your attention drift. Nothing to see here. Except that ruined book. I hold on to it as hard I can, but the crowd is resisting me.

"Oh come on!"

"What is wrong with you?"

Someone grabs my arm. It's the snooty waiter from the clubhouse. "I know you!"

I step forward into the waiter's hold, twisting his arm down and, at the same time, smack him in the throat with the open palm of my hand. He lets go with a strangled noise. Hey, what's an extra assault charge on my rap sheet tonight? They're probably going to lay the fire on me anyway. I turn and break for my car, people shouting after me.

I drive away, tyres squealing. The Capri snaps the boom like a teenage heart.

33.

The tension in the car is as dense as a collapsing star. Benoît is quiet, looking out the window at the streetlights streaming past the car. I picked him up outside Central Methodist. He didn't argue, didn't ask questions, didn't try to convince me to go to the cops. He was the one who suggested using his uniform to get access, in case there was another "dangerous criminal" warning posted at the neighbourhood security boom.

Reflected light catches on the brass-plated name-badge, like an unspoken accusation. These are all the things he doesn't say in the silence: that I'm risking everything – his asylum status, his family's chance of a future here. The Mongoose says it instead, his beady little eyes glaring up at me from Benoît's lap. Those eyes say "useless backstabbing junkie slag".

I pull over a few blocks away, out of sight. It's unnaturally quiet. The birds will only start up in an hour or so. And in the meantime, dream city is dreaming.

"Give me ten minutes," Benoît says. I pass him the bag of Lagos fried chicken, and he gets out of the car and strolls down towards the security hut, chewing on a piece of chicken. It's more disguise than bribe. Who would suspect a man with chicken, particularly one in a Sentinel uniform and a name-badge?

Headlights swoop over him and then past, not even slowing – it's not unusual for people to be walking at 3 am. It's like there are two different species inhabiting Johannesburg. Cars and pedestrians.

It's forty-two minutes before the official 4 am shift change, but a man can be persuaded to go off duty early. It takes a little longer than anticipated. Not because the guard is diligent, but because he wants to shoot the breeze a little, share some greasy chicken before he heads on home. It takes all my willpower to stay in the car. Finally, he parts company with Benoît and starts walking up the road away from me, towards the main road. If he thinks there is a chance of a taxi at this time of the morning, he is a man who believes in miracles. We have twenty-eight minutes left until the actual shift change arrives and figures something is up.

The Mongoose scampers down the road towards the car. I open the door and he scrambles in, making urgent squeaking noises.

"Yes, I know, I saw him leave." I put the car in gear and drive down to the security hut to pick up Benoît, cursing under my breath when I see the cameras. Too late now.

The gate leading to Huron's house proves less of a problem. Benoît has been thoroughly trained in all the ways nasty burglars vanquish home-security measures, including, in this case, simply levering the gate right off

the rails with a tyre iron.

I stash the car a few blocks away, to throw off armed response when they click that all is not as it should be, and we slip up the side of the garden, sticking to the cover of the trees. The house is lit up for a party, all the lights blazing. Sloth squeezes my arms with his claws.

We follow the noise up towards the garage, passing the Daimler parked to one side. The double doors gape open. Light spills into the drive, illuminating James bent over the Mercedes, fussing around in the boot, which is lined with heavy plastic.

Benoît motions for me to stay back. He slides up behind James, and as he startles and begins to turn, Benoît slams the boot lid down on him. James yells. Benoît slams it down again, then once more, then swoops down to grab James's legs, heaves him into the boot and slams it shut. The banging and shouting starts up almost immediately. "Get the keys," Benoît says. I have not seen this side of him before.

I run for the front of the car and pull the keys out of the ignition. My hands are shaking as I jam the key into the lock on the boot and turn it. The noise from inside becomes more aggressive. I step back and nearly trip over an extension cord. It runs to a surgical saw, the kind you'd use for amputations, laid out beside the car, along with three different hacksaws, an axe, a pair of pliers, neatly laid out, ready for use. There is a kist freezer at the back of the garage, its lid propped open.

"Who is this Odi Huron?" Benoît says. The Mongoose is frozen, one paw raised, sniffing the air, whiskers trembling.

"I don't think I know." I feel sick. I think of Vuyo's gun lying under my bed.

"Won't he suffocate?" I glance back at the Mercedes.

"Do you care?" Benoît says, drawing his baton from its holster. "The house?"

"If they're still alive." I shake myself. "We should go round the side."

We slip round the side of the house through the shrubbery. The scent of yesterday-today-and-tomorrow is sickeningly sweet. My heart plays out a frenetic drum'n'bass beat. My hands are numb and tingling. First thing to go in fight or flight: fine motor co-ordination. Way to go, evolution.

There are voices coming from the patio, but when we clear the shrubs, only Carmen is lying on a lounger in the dark with her sunglasses on, facing the pool. The fountain is on, water spluttering through the maiden's vase. A pallid underwater light shines up through the skin of leaves on the surface, highlighting every striation, casting dancing reflections over the tiles.

Carmen is talking to the radio and half-heartedly flopping one hand around as if conducting a haphazard choir.

"It's not like they even serve ice cream at the movies," she says, her face inscrutable behind the shades.

Her sunshine-yellow satin robe is drenched in blood like bad tie-dye. There is a shivering bundle wrapped in a towel under her lounger.

There is a flick knife and an empty martini glass on the table next to her.

"Kittens and mittens and teeth and teeth and teeth," she sing-songs.

She sees us, sits up on her elbows and says brightly, "Oh. Are you here about the collection?" She takes off her sunglasses. If eyes are the windows to the soul, these are looking onto Chernobyl. "Because it's all about fur this season."

The glass doors leading into the house open and the Maltese emerges carrying two martini glasses, his little Dog at his heels. The Dog snarls and the Maltese pulls a face. "Ah," he says. "I'm afraid I didn't know you were here. Otherwise I would have made extra."

"What happened to the no-interference policy?" I ask. Benoît is tense beside me, muscles bunched for action. I put a hand on his arm.

"That's only for the victims," says the Maltese, as he sets down the glasses and sits down beside Carmen, stroking her leg. "It's like bottled water: best from a pure source."

"What is wrong with her?" Benoît says, barely restraining himself. He is holding the baton so tight that the strain is making his arm shake.

"She did it to herself, mkwerekwere. She's on a very potent dissociative drug."

"Midazolam?"

"Mixed with a bit of ketamine and the house special – to keep her awake. We've been playing. Show them, Carmen."

"Again?" she whines.

"Again, baby." He caresses the side of her belly through the robe. "I think you missed a spot over here."

She sighs sulkily, picks up the flick knife from the table and simply jabs it into her side. She pulls it out again and looks down at the bloodied tip of the knife with interest, but no indication of feeling. The blood starts to well up.

"Not so terrible, hey?" the Maltese says.

"Good evening Pasadena," she agrees.

"What about here?" he circles the skin above her kneecap.

"Enough," Benoît says.

"We're only getting started. Have you met Carmen's Bunny?" He reaches underneath the lounger and hauls up the trembling Rabbit by its ears. It closes its eyes in terror, nose twitching frantically. "We all thought Carmen was going to be the next Slinger, our animalled breakthrough artist. Better than erotic dancing. Although it turns out Slinger wasn't really Slinger himself, if you know what I mean. This is your fault, you know. Odi and Carmen were so happy together until you got her all riled up with your crazy accusations. As if he would have risked tainting little Song. It was bad enough that idiot Jabulani was fucking her."

"Where are Song and Sbu?" I say.

"Sailing away, sailing away, sailing away," Carmen

sings.

He ignores the question. "Did you like the present I left you? It's a very distinctive knife, you know. Leaves very distinctive wounds."

"Were you going to implicate me in the fire at Mayfields too?"

"You should be ashamed." He grins. "Three teenagers died in that fire. After you stabbed them to death, you sick psycho."

"I only counted two," I keep my voice carefully level.

"Don't worry, they'll find the other one when they eventually get inside. Burned to a crisp. Unidentifiable."

"But they're not Song and S'bu, are they?"

"Don't they wish! Couple of unlucky street kids who match the general physical description. Collateral damage, can't be helped. We picked them up this afternoon. Made them feel special for a couple of hours. Let them play Xbox, fed them McDonald's, doused them in petrol. Same kind as in the half-empty container under your sink. Did you find that already? Or just the knife?"

"No one's going to believe this."

"Won't they? A psychotic junkie zoo bitch who killed her brother? Who was so celebrity-obsessed she pretended to be from a bigshot music magazine so she could get close to the twins? Whose fingerprints were all over poor Mrs Luditsky's apartment, who took her little china cat home with her as some kind of trophy? Are you kidding me? Better start working on your soundbites. The media are going to love you."

My head is spinning. I lean on the table, trying to fight back the wave of nausea.

"In fact, what are you even doing here?" Mark swirls his martini. Takes a sip. "Shouldn't you be on the run?"

"Where are they?" Benoît says.

"The real twins? Oh they're downstairs, sweetie, getting ready. They might have started already."

At the prompt "start", Carmen replaces her sunglasses and punches the knife into the flesh above her knee with cool reserve. It sticks there, trembling slightly as the muscle moves to accommodate her leaning back to take a sip of her martini.

Benoît can't stand it any more. He moves to pluck the knife out, but the Maltese is faster. He yanks it away and this time Carmen does flinch.

"You want to play too?" he says, tapping the flat of the blade against his cheek. "I have to tell you, this is my favourite game."

"Where downstairs? In the house?" I say, because there are more important things to worry about right now than Carmen, than being set up for quadruple homicide.

"I should really be getting down there. They need me."

"To cut someone up?"

"Oh sweetie, I'm just the magic battery to make the ritual even more potent. Or didn't you notice that your shavi is brighter whenever I'm around?"

"The invisible demon."

"Team effort," he agrees. "Amira's obfuscation is painfully obvious without me. Although we like to do the carving together. But we're wasting time. There are children to be sacrificed, getaways to make. Come on, kwerekwere," the Maltese says, brandishing the knife. "You look like you've seen a dogfight or two."

Mark lunges for Benoît at the same time as the snarling Mutt goes for the Mongoose. Yipping hysterically, the Dog rolls the Mongoose onto his back, biting at his belly, his face. Blood smears across its muzzle. The Mongoose writhes and kicks, teeth bared in pain, but he doesn't make a sound.

Another knife appears in Mark's left hand from a hidden sheath and, as Benoît smashes him across the ribcage with his baton, Mark manages to slice at his face, the blade glancing off his jaw and up his cheek.

"Carmen," I shake her. "Is there a gun in the house?"

But she shakes her head violently from side to side like she's having a seizure. "No-no-no-no-no-no."

I let go, and she pulls up her knees, clutching her Rabbit to her chest like a kid with a stuffed animal, and takes a sip from her drink, glaring at me as if I'm intending to take it away.

Sloth is making agitated little squeaks.

"I'm working on it!" I snap.

The Mongoose pulls up his back legs and kicks the Dog, contorting like a koeksister to scramble on top of it. They tumble over each other, but the Mongoose has the advantage. He's used to killing snakes and this is just a ratty little Dog. He has the Mutt pinned by the throat and squealing.

The humans are more evenly matched. Benoît and Mark are circling each other warily. Benoît jabs the baton into Mark's sternum with all his weight, keeping him out of reach. Mark staggers back, as if winded, but it's a ploy. As Benoît moves towards him, he ducks under the baton, stabs him in the side, and darts out of reach again. And then I smash one of the lacy ironwork chairs over the back of his skull.

It does less damage than I'd hoped. I was hoping for out cold, but instead he stumbles, drops one of his knives to clutch at the back of his head and turns on me, furious.

"You little cunt. I'll come back to you." But when he turns back, it's straight into the baton that slams into the side of his head hard enough to knock him off his feet.

Carmen gives a little shriek of delight. "I can feel it coming in the air. Tonight," she says, matter-of-factly.

Mark starts to get up and Benoît hits him across the back of his knees. He collapses across the end of the lounger. I spring forward, push my knee into his back and yell at Benoît. He breaks out cable ties, standard issue with Sentinel rather than handcuffs, and we work together to bind the Maltese's wrists and ankles and then cable-tie both to the heavy ironwork table. The Dog snarls and snaps at my fingers, but Benoît pins it down with the baton on its neck and I close a cable tie over its muzzle and chain it by the collar to one of the chairs.

"The water," Carmen sings, pointing at the pool. "Water, water. And not enough to drink."

A shadow swells up from the bottom of the pool, eclipsing the wan rays of the pool light. Something sickly white and huge with scales explodes from beneath the surface, snaps its jaws shut on Benoît and slides back into the water before he can draw breath to yell. Like a fucking dinosaur. I'm still blinking from the icy shock of water that burst up with it – and Benoît is gone, like he never was, the choppy waves the only sign that something happened.

"Pop goes the weasel!" Carmen says, clapping her hands in delight.

34.

I don't think about it. I jump in after him. The water is cold enough to knock the breath out of me. I hear the Mongoose scream and splash in after me. But Mongooses can't dive. I fight my way through a dense skin of slimy rotting leaves, Sloth clutching my neck in terror. I hope he knows how to hold his breath. I dive into the pallid gloom lit up by the underwater light. There's a hole at the bottom of the deep end, a tunnel wide enough to steer a truck through. I swim into it, following the curve down into pitch darkness, like swimming into the heart of the Undertow. The pressure in my ear gear-shifts from a dull ache to a screaming drill bit in my head, but then the tunnel curves up again, like the U-bend of a sink, into water that's brutally cold and black. I can hear distorted music through the water and a slapping sound. Lungs burning, I kick up to the surface and break through into the cool air of an underwater cavern.

There is music pumping. An innocuously sweet pop ballad. One of iJusi's.

Baby it's a drive-by, drive-by…

The slapping is the sound of the blast as the monster breaches, twists in the air and flops back into the water, Benoît hanging limply in its jaws. Not a dinosaur. An albino crocodile, six metres long. It's rolling to drown its prey.

I start to swim for the thing, but Sloth tugs at my arms, to hold me back. He's right. There's nothing I can do until it stops its death roll. I tread water in the darkness and try to slow my heart and take in what's going on, try not to focus on the monster's thrashing.

The cavern is maybe twenty metres across. Natural rock with man-made features: the speakers pumping out iJusi, the bare neon bulb mounted on a set of stairs so steep it's basically a ladder, rising from a cement outcropping that juts into the water like a pier. The smell of damp and rot is overwhelming. Old vase-water.

Drive-by love

Huron, bare-chested, his belly hanging over his shorts, with a gun holster strapped under his arm, is standing on the landing with the twins who are naked, handcuffed together and swaying slightly. Their faces are empty. The Marabou is spreading a plastic sheet over an old-fashioned wooden butcher's block.

There is a cage at her feet big enough to hold a medium-sized dog. There's something else – not a dog – inside the cage. A hunch of mammal with brown fur. A flutter of feathers.

It's not even love at first sight, it's love at a glance

Huron shouts over the water at the Crocodile, "That better not be Carmen!" He laughs, but adds to the Marabou, "Go see what's going on."

"I'm sure Mark has everything under control," she says.

"Then where the hell is he? And who is that?" he says, pointing to the water. For an awful moment, I think he's pointing at me, but he's indicating Benoît in the monster's mouth.

"Whoever it is, he's not a problem anymore," the Marabou shrugs.

"Hurry up, you overgrown fucking gecko!" Huron shouts. "We need to get this show on the road."

Saw you in the back of a taxi, passing me by

Sloth makes little panicky gasps in my ear. "It's okay, buddy, they can't see us." I hope. Sloth gives a little sob.

Tried to raise my hand, tried to catch your eye

I retreat into the darkness, to the wall, find a low rock to cling to. Sloth clambers onto it, shivering.

"We should start on the animals," the Marabou says. "There might be other intruders."

"Don't we need booster boy?"

"The twins will be enough. The doubling effect-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the expert here, baby. I'll do whatever you say," Huron says. "Let's get this party started."

"Indeed," she says and opens the cage to pull out a rabbit-eared creature with a long piggy snout. Patrick Serfontein's Aardvark. Still alive. She picks up a machete from the butcher's block.

But you looked straight past, didn't see me

The Crocodile slows its thrashing. It rises from the water and shakes its head violently as if testing the resistance of the body in its mouth. Benoît's right arm flops grotesquely from his body. He's not moving. The Crocodile smacks its jaw against the water and then sinks under, dragging Benoît with it.

Baby it's a drive-by, drive-by, drive-by love

I take a deep breath and dive down, reaching for my own lost thing. The tea-coloured blackness swallows me whole. The faint distortion of the lyrics, mixed with a terrible high-pitched squealing, accompanies me down.

Drive-by, drive-by

I clamp down on the panic, the claustrophobia and the vertigo of blindness, following that slender thread.

There is a rush of current. And something massive sweeps towards me in the darkness. I can't see but I can sense its mouth gaping and I fight back the terror, the urge to thrash for the surface. Its hoary tail sideswipes me as it brushes past, hard enough to crack a rib.

I have to be close. I have to be. I swim another couple of metres or maybe a mile, and bang my wrist against a rock. I grab it and feel the shape of it with my hands, like a blind woman reading a face. The rock face curves under. I follow it down and grasp a revoltingly soft hand. The flesh gives way under my grip. I can't help it. I scream into the water, expelling valuable air.

Get a fucking hold of yourself. I reach out for the hand again. It's pliable and doughy like wet bread, but I can feel a hard edge. Bone? No. It's a splint. Two of the fingers are bandaged together. Ronaldo. His face looms into view, bloated, unrecognisable. But this time I'm ready for it.

I drag myself past him, deeper, grasping for Benoît, terrified of what else might be down here in the black. I run my hand along a fracture in the rock, over a body jammed into it. I grope my way up, trying to find a way to identify it, to pull it loose. Tiny bubbles escape from a fold in the shirt, like little fish nibbling at my fingers. I touch plastic. Benoît's burns.

His arm is caught in the crack and I'm running out of air. Dark spots pop in front of my eyes. I brace my feet against the rock and ease his shoulder loose. It rotates obscenely under the skin, his arm flopping loosely from the socket. I pull again, hard, and he comes away. Only Ro comes with him. I kick out in blind panic as the bulk of the rotting bouncer drifts into me. My foot sinks into his stomach. A stream of thick bubbles erupts from between his lips, and his head flops back and up, his arms dragging, like a man called to the Ascension, the trapped gases sending him bobbing up to the surface.

I kick up after him, but I have the disadvantage of a cracked rib and 95 kg of my one-time lover in tow. The black spots have turned to bright sunflares. My lungs have moved beyond burning to the sear of napalm. And I break into the air and the music, gasping and choking. And it's not even nearly over.

Baby you can drive me crazy, drive me anywhere you please

Huron's voice carries across the water. "Kids, this is my friend, Mr Crocodile. Say hello, Mr Crocodile. He'd like to be your friend too. Your special friend. Because quite frankly, I'm sick to death of the thing."

But baby don't break my heart, baby don't tease

I drag Benoît to the rocks. Sloth tries to help, yanking at his shirt with his teeth. I heave him up, but his legs are still dangling in the water, the current wafting at his pants. I scramble out, crouch down beside him, shivering. I hadn't realised how cold the water was.

Benoît's not breathing. I tilt his head back, squeezing his nose shut with one hand, and press my mouth against his. Two deep exhalations. Then I push two fingers against the artery in his neck.

Sloth whines, seeing the blood seeping through his shirt. "Shut up, buddy."

Please. Please. I count out the faintest of pulses. One alligator. Two alligator. Thirty beats in a minute. That can't be good. And he's still not breathing. And he's bleeding to death.

One thing at a time, Zinzi. I have no idea what I'm doing here. If he has a pulse, do I do chest compressions anyway? Fuck.

We'll keep on moving, keep on cruising,

I tip his jaw back again, press my mouth down, inflate his chest with my breath. "Fuck you, breathe. Fuck you, breathe." Like we're some kind of obscene machine, a conjoined human bellows. "Fuck you, Benoît, breathe."

It's okay baby, just stick with me

"I don't want to," Songweza says in a little-girl voice from across the cavern.

I don't look up. Can't afford to.

"We all do things we don't want to sometimes," Huron says. "It's like a game."

"Like Blood Skies?" S'bu asks, his voice vague and distant, an echo of a human being.

"I don't know what that is," Huron snaps.

"It's a video game."

"Yes, exactly like a video game," his voice turned wheedling.

"Cooperative or non-cooperative?"

"Definitely non."

Baby it's a drive-by, drive-by, drive-by love

I place the heel of my palm against Benoît's sternum, fingers interlaced. Fuck it, chest compressions can't hurt, right? Only when I push down there is a horrible grinding sound in Benoît's chest, like his ribs are cracked. That makes two of us. "Good luck explaining that to your wife," I hiss at him. "Come on, you cheating shit." Sloth puts a paw over my hands.

"Okay, you're right. No compressions." I take a deep breath. Try to calm down.

Baby it's a drive-by, drive-by, drive-by love

"Here's a knife for you, Song. And one for you. Don't worry, they have spells on them. You ready? First to kill the other wins."

"Yaaa!" Song giggles.

We'll keep on moving, keep on cruising, journey through the

Benoît's body heaves against me, his teeth smashing into my mouth as he convulses. I pull away as he starts to choke, coughing up a thin stream of water and vomit. I turn him onto his side. He doesn't open his eyes. Sloth looks at me expectantly, but I don't know if this is it, if this is enough. It's not like the fucking movies. Benoît splutters and dribbles, then takes a deep wet gurgling breath. And then another one, slightly less wet. He doesn't open his eyes. But it's enough. He's breathing.

You stick with me, babe

His arm hangs grotesquely from his side, but if it's broken, it hasn't torn through the skin. Maybe just dislocated. The tooth punctures that run in a massive arc down the right side of his body from his collarbone to his groin are something else. I just hope the fucker didn't puncture an organ. I tie his shirt round his side the best I can to stanch the blood, haul Sloth over to the wound that's bleeding the most, over his appendix, liver, spleen? Christ, why didn't I pay attention in biology?

"Push down with all your weight, buddy. Don't let up on the pressure. I'll be back as soon as I can." He might yet bleed to death. Might still drown from the water on his lungs. Might have already sustained brain damage. We need to get to a hospital. We need machines and doctors. I try to blank the fear as I strike out for the landing.

Be all right, be all right, be all right

The track fades into silence. And then starts right up again.

Song's giggles turns to a shriek of indignation. Unfortunately, now I can see what's happening as well as hear it. The cage is standing open. There is a mound of limp fur and intestines and downy brown feathers lying on the butcher's block. The plastic sheeting is slick with blood. The Aardvark's head dangles off the edge, its eyes glassy as a stuffed toy. The Marabou is holding a Toad down on the block. It croaks in loud desperate gulps, its mottled throat inflated like a blister. She raises the machete and chops off its head. Blood sprays up in a bright gush.

"By these deaths, bind them," she says, wiping the spray of blood off her face with the back of her hand.

The Crocodile is lying on the other side of the platform, its mouth gaping open. Song and S'bu are circling each other, no longer handcuffed together, working around the giant reptile, while Huron and the Marabou watch from the bottom of the stairs. Or rather he's circling her. She's standing there, pressing her hand to the deep gash in her arm. "Ow, what the hell, S'busiso?"

"Die, Cthul'mite!" Sbu shouts, slashing frantically at her, video game-style. He slices her hands, her arms, as she tries to cover herself. She drops her knife. "Seriously, doos. Cut it out. You're hurting me."

It's not even love at first sight, it's love at a glance

"S'bu," I scream from the water, shoving past Ronaldo's bobbing bloated corpse. "It's the drugs. Stop it! Put down the knife!"

The Crocodile turns its head as if about to slide off the slipway into the water. "No, stay," Huron instructs. "It's nearly over." He snaps at the Marabou, "Taken care of, huh?" He pulls the gun out from under his armpit, and aims it at the water. "Never mind, I'll do it my-fuckingself." He points the gun. I dive.

But I can't let you go, I have to take this chance.

Underwater, the gunshots sound like staccato snaps.

Three of them in quick succession. I imagine I can feel them burrowing through the water, leaving silvery trails. Something tears at my ankle. I twist away in panic and blunder into Ronaldo. I pull the rotting body over me as a shield, as a fourth gunshot echoes through the cavern. The trajectory is slowed by the water, by the corpse. Slowed, but not stopped. It rips through the mushy flesh and into my chest, wedging into my collarbone.

I scream into the water, swallowing half the lake. But I stay under. Counting down. Holding my breath. 74 alligator. 92 alligator. 118 alligator. Until I can't anymore. But when I surface, it's under the cover of Ronaldo's armpit. I kick for shore, pushing my Trojan corpse ahead of me, staying low.

But you looked straight past, didn't see me

"Hurry this up," Huron says, gesturing impatiently at the Marabou. She looks at him coolly and then moves forward. The Stork spreads its wings and beats the air behind her. She grabs S'bu's wrist, swats Songweza's arm out of the way and, still holding S'bu's wrist, drives the knife into Song's chest.

Now I'm wondering if the thought of you will let me be

The knife rasps against bone as the Marabou jerks it free. S'bu gives a little shriek of surprise, but he gets the idea. She doesn't even have to force him to make the next thrust. Or the next. Or the next after that. Song's screaming is a jagged counterpoint to the gleeful chorus. Baby, it's a drive-by, drive-by, drive-by love

Songweza drops into a curl on the cement, trying to shield her body. The Marabou urges S'bu down over her. He keeps the knife moving like a darting piranha as Song screams and howls and is finally silent.

"Enough," Huron says.

S'bu looks around, dazed. The Marabou plucks the knife from his hand and passes it to Huron. S'bu smiles at her, uncertainly, and then notices his sister. He kneels down to shake her shoulder. "Come on, quit messing around," he teases. "Re-spawn, you big baby." But the air pressure has changed, and I understand that Song is dead. The Undertow is coming.

A thin howling sound starts up, like wind through narrow spaces. Instinctively, I retreat, paddling backwards in the water.

"Eat," Huron says to the Crocodile, nudging Songweza's body with his foot. "Fucking eat!"

The Crocodile slithers forward and reluctantly rips a piece out of Songweza's leg. It swallows with obscene jerks of its head, its white gullet undulating with the weight of flesh. S'bu moans in horror.

I look away. Shadows are peeling off the walls, congealing in the water. The howling reaches a new pitch, underscored by a dull click-clack, as if of teeth. Huron looks uneasy. All zoos do with the Undertow coming. Even the Marabou has retreated against the white-painted rock closest to the stairs. Huron uses the knife to slice open his left palm and then drags it through the bloodied tangle of animals on the butcher's block. The howling gets louder.

Marabou prompts him, like a priest at a wedding ceremony. Huron repeats the words after her, dully. His hands are shaking. "I offer this boy in my place. Let him not be animalled. Let him take mine. Bound by flesh, bound by blood." He lunges forward and slices across the Crocodile's snout with the knife, as it tears at Songweza again. It yanks its head away in fury and hisses at him with open jaws.

"Now you," Odi screams at S'bu. "Say: I take this animal."

"I don't underst-"

"Say it! Fucking say it!"

"Please." S'bu starts to cry.

"Do you hear that sound? Do you know what that is?" Odi yells. "That's the fucking Undertow, my boy. Now say it, or it's going to swallow you up and drag you down to hell."

"I take this…" S'bu stutters.

"Animal!"

"Animal. I take this animal." He looks to Odi for ap

proval. Odi looks to the Marabou.

"Did it work?" Odi screams. "Did it fucking work?"

The Marabou shakes her head. She doesn't know.

"It better have fucking worked!"

S'bu is rocking backwards and forwards, staring at his sister, his arms hugged around his body. His chest heaves with sobs.

The darkness seethes and boils, like a slick of oil. It separates to flow around S'bu. He waves his hand at it feebly, trying to ward it off. The Undertow rises like a wave, tendrils reaching towards him, as if tasting his skin. I shudder at the memory.

"Song?" S'bu says, his voice trembling.

The Crocodile suddenly bursts forward, its belly rasping over the concrete, snapping its jaws at the Undertow, sweeping its tail through the thick black. The darkness turns to steam instantly, as if it was only ever mirage. S'bu screams as the reptile lunges for him. But it's only moving to lean its massive head against his leg in something like affection. Horrified, he tries to shove it away. The same way I did with Sloth, until I realised he was the only thing between me and the rising dark. Of course, Sloth didn't have my sibling's blood on his teeth.

"This isn't how the game goes," S'bu sobs, bewildered, standing stiff and frozen with the Crocodile nuzzling his leg.

"He's yours now, kid. Congratulations," says Huron. "I'd say enjoy feeding the fucker, but you won't live that long."

"I-" S'bu starts, but Amira steps forward, holding a retro gun. She puts the muzzle of the Vektor to the side of his head and pulls the trigger. S'bu falls onto his knees and tips slowly forward onto the remains of his face. I look away.

Drive-by, drive-by

Without the howl of the Undertow the music is audible again.

"Well, that went well. Turn that racket off, will you?" Huron says. Amira clicks a switch and the music dies, leaving a heavy silence, broken only by the waves lapping at the pier and the muffled thump of the Crocodile nudging at S'bu with its head, as if to make him get up.

"Well enough," Amira replies, sheathing the gun in a concealed holster under the straps criss-crossing her chest.

"Good luck getting that fucking thing out of here."

"Don't trouble yourself. We have a plan. Alive would have been better of course, but you take what you can get." She eyes the Crocodile evaluatingly.

"Shhhh," Odi laughs. "He'll hear you."

I wait until they're both up the ladder and then count out another few minutes, 289 alligator. 294 alligator, until I'm sure they're not coming back. I creep out of the water as quietly as I can so as not to disturb the Crocodile, which is still head-butting S'bu. I've seen animals live for months after their humans have died. But they're never quite the same.

I can't raise my arm, courtesy of the bullet in my collarbone. Every step sends shards of glass stabbing through my chest and causes sunbursts in my head. But I have to get upstairs, have to get to a phone. There's no way I can drag Benoît out of here on my own.

I skirt round the side of the butcher's block, trying to avoid looking at the mess of animals, but the Crocodile sees me. It swings its bulk between me and the stairs in a rapid jerk, faster than should be allowed for something that big. Its mouth gapes, a clear sign of aggression. I hold up one hand, all I can manage, in surrender.

"They're planning to kill you. Chop you up for muti. They've got all the tools waiting." It studies me impassively with slit gold eyes. I persevere. "Monster like you? You're probably worth a fortune. I can help you. I can try to help you. But I have to get out."

It jerks its head at me. I flinch, but it's not attacking, it's motioning towards the stairs. For me to go. I step past it gingerly, still half expecting it to lunge, for those bonecrushing jaws to snap around my body, but it doesn't, and I haul myself agonisingly up the ladder, one-handed, pain screaming through my chest.

The stairs lead out into the back of a music studio. A fake back wall behind the mixing-desk, reinforced with foam soundproofing that nevertheless can't mute the smell. The glass doors are standing open onto the garden. Dawn streaks the sky with pale yellows and pinks.

I edge down the hill towards the pool, hugging the line of shrubs for cover. Amira and Mark are on the patio, Mark rubbing the red lines on his wrists from the cable ties. Amira is stroking the Bunny's head. It trembles violently in her arms. Underneath the upturned metal table, the Mongoose paces and snarls, throwing itself against the ironwork curlicues in fury. Amira's phone bleeps and she glances down at it. "Transfer's through," she says to Mark.

Huron emerges from the house, freshly showered, wearing a satiny bathrobe. In the distance, sirens howl. He stops to look at Carmen, slumped limply on the deck chair in a pool of blood.

"You did make a mess of little Carmencita," he says, with only the faintest smack of regret.

"She was no good to you," Mark scowls. "And now we can use her as bait." He tips the recliner up onto its wheels, to demonstrate, and carts Carmen towards the pool.

"I'll skip. There's been too much activity around here already." The sirens are getting louder. Sentinel finally catching a wake-up. I crouch in the shrubbery, wondering how to get the Mongoose out.

"We won't be long," Amira says as Mark tips the recliner, sending Carmen sliding into the water. She bobs up, floating limply, her back like a pale mushroom growing from the surface of the water, her blonde bob drifting in a halo around her head. "It should come right up-"

The Crocodile is already there, disguised under the leaves. It noses at her body. Odi leans over to look, despite himself. It's a simple matter for the Crocodile to just reach up and fold its jaws on him. It's almost gentle. But then it clamps down. Its teeth rip into his stomach. Huron screams like a slaughterhouse pig in a PETA video.

The sirens are getting louder. Lights flash between the trees at the bottom of the driveway. Huron fumbles for his gun. "Help me, you fucks!" he yells at Amira and Mark. But they don't move an inch.

Swearing, Odi manages to reach between the Crocodile's jaws to yank his gun out of the holster. He presses the muzzle to the Crocodile's eye and fires. It bursts in a gelatinous spray and the Crocodile jerks its head back in shock. Odi screams as teeth tear through his gut. A grey coil of greasy entrails is dragged from the wound. The Crocodile thrashes, slamming its tormentor against the side of the pool. Odi struggles, swapping the gun to his left hand. He reaches deep into the creature's mouth. There is a muffled bang.

The Crocodile goes slack. Its jaw unlocks. Huron starts pulling himself free, but the monster's weight is dragging

them both back into the water.

"Help me, Jesus, fuck, help me! Amira!" Huron extends a meaty hand.

"What do you think, sweetie? Should we help him?" Mark muses.

"I think our business is done," Amira says. "Goodbye, Odi."

"Please," he begs. The Crocodile slips further back into the pool, its shoulders disappearing into the water. "At least don't let me drown. At least give me that."

"It's been good working with you," says Marabou, stepping forward. She extends her boot, braces it against Huron's chest, and shoves. The tangle of man and Crocodile slides over the edge of the tiles and sinks into the water.

A muffled shout comes from the bottom of the driveway. "Armed response!"

"A pity to lose the Crocodile, but what can you do?" Marabou says, watching as Odi chokes and splutters and goes under. She starts to fray around the edges like the light is unravelling around her.

"Oh sweetie, there'll be other procurements," the Maltese says. Then he takes her hand and they simply vanish. A smudge of movement against the torchlight as footsteps thud up the driveway towards us.

Armed response finds me sitting slumped by the pool and the Mongoose bristling at my side, staring at the ripples on the dark water.

35.

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Crime Watch with Mandlakazi Mabuso

The day the music died

They said the music industry had teeth – but who knew they meant literally! Legendary music producer Odysseus "Odious" Huron got himself chowed last night by his secret animal, a moerse white Crocodile after slaughtering twin teen pop sensation iJusi in a gruesome muti murder! Turns out the man behind some of the finest talent in this country was also a bigtime tsotsi, running drugs, killing homeless zoos for muti, feeding others to his Crocodile and cultivating talent only so he could slice them open! Some 20 bodies so far have been recovered from a secret underground lake, including a woman's skeleton that police refuse to comment on, but let's just say my sources on the inside say the investigation into Lily Nobomvu's fatal car-crash is being re-opened! Yoh! Turn to our special eyewitness report on page 10 for all the verskriklike details!

Police have seized all assets, but I hear there's a moerse sum of money missing from his account. Just goes to show you never know who's a zoo. Rapper Slinger isn't. Odious Huron is. Who else is hiding an animal under their bed?

Meanwhile, a pretty boy journo has a lot to answer for. Seems one of lad-mag Mach's senior people has been running email scams from his office address! Tut-tut, skat. Don't you know when it comes to porn and fraud, you don't use your work email?

36.

It's 4:30 am and the queue to the Beit Bridge border is already more than a thousand cars long, and that's on the South African side. Never mind the torrent of refugees trying to cross over from Zimbabwe. Barbed-wire fences barricade the dusty scrub on the riverbank from anyone stupid or desperate enough to try to swim across from Zimbabwe. After all, there are crocodiles in that river.

The high drone of cicadas rises with the heat as we inch forward one car at a time through the carbon-monoxide fug. There is a bus two cars ahead of me loaded down on its axles with bags and chickens and a cram of people. The tangle of lost things on that bus swarms like a cloud of spaghetti.

And even here, there's that Zoo City hustle going on. Maybe it's not peculiar to Hillbrow. Maybe it's South Africa. You do what it takes, you take the opportunities. Vendors walk up and down the line of cars selling warm cold-drinks and chips, single skyfs or packs of Remington Gold. Two girls in short skirts and dusty high heels lean in the window of a 4x4 flirtatiously. It's a 24-hour border post. People have 24-hour needs.

Sloth is hidden in a rattan bag full of clothes with a hole slashed in the side for him to breathe. The bag is stacked on the roof amid a jumble of other bags, loaded with the kinds of things returning Zimbabweans bring home for their families. Clothes and canned food, blankets, appliances, toilet paper, sanitary pads. I will dump these on the other side. They're only a cover while I'm still in South African territory. Still in Inspector Tshabalala's jurisdiction. Never mind Vuyo's.

The Capri has had a paint job. It's now black. The window has been fixed. It has new plates to go with my new Zimbabwean passport in the name of Tatenda Murapata, twenty-nine, full-time nanny going home for a holiday. D'Nice sourced the papers for me, to make up for pointing the cops in the direction of my apartment. But only after I threatened to frame him for Mrs Luditsky's murder. He doesn't need to know I already handed over the knife after I retrieved it from the drain along with the china kitten. He even got me a good exchange rate on my counterfeit notes. Just because they're fake doesn't mean they don't have value, particularly when dealing with border officials who don't look too closely.

Benoît is still in hospital. Critical condition, the doctors say. They speak in medical terms, but what I understand is broken ribs, a bruised heart, a punctured lung, nerve damage to his dislocated arm. He will need months of physiotherapy. He may never recover the full use of it. But the worst is the bite. It's the magic. Animal wounds take longer to heal, come with stranger side-effects. He sways between fevered moments of wakefulness and unconsciousness that's borderline coma, but with more erratic brain activity, like he's still fighting monsters in there. The Mongoose paces the corridors, looking thin and miserable.

There was nothing I could do there.

Eight days to Kigali if I keep to the tar, and don't hit any potholes or roadblocks I can't bribe my way out of.

Day one: Johannesburg to Harare

Day two: Harare to Lusaka

Day three: Lusaka to Mbeya

Day four: Mbeya to Dar es Saalam

Day five: Dar es to Nairobi

Day six: Nairobi to Jinja

Day seven: Cross into southern Uganda

Day eight: Mbasa to Kigali.

The place names sound like new worlds. I have only ever travelled to Europe. On a skiing holiday with my parents when I was eleven, when Thando broke his leg, not on the slopes but slipping on an icy pavement. On a working holiday to London when I was eighteen, which lasted a month before I decided to hell with living in a shitty apartment and working a bar and returned to the creature comforts of my parent's Craighall house with the pool and the gardener and the char lady who made my bed. Before I met Gio, before I killed my brother, before Sloth.

I have an amaShangaan bag full of fake cash. I have a bundle of photographs. I have print-outs of emails from a UN aid worker. I have Benoît's family's names and ID numbers and application papers for asylum in South Africa.

What I do not have is permission to leave the country in the wake of a multiple homicide/serial killer investigation.

Celvie. Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. It's going to be awkward. It's going to be the best thing I've done with my miserable life.

And after that? Maybe I'll get lost for a while.

Acknowledgments

Making the fantastic seem credible is hard work. I was lucky to have co-conspirators.

Special thanks to Johnson Sithole of JBS Security, who was my fixer in Hillbrow and Berea (special thanks for not bringing your gun), and to photographer Marc Shoul for recommending him.

Thanks to Lindiwe Nkutha for taking me to Mai Mai and Faraday healers' markets and for getting bounced from the Rand Club with me when we weren't appropriately dressed. I'm grateful to the management of High Point and their passionate young security team, who gave me a complete tour of the building and really did catch a rapist.

Nechama Brodie's fine pop-culture history of the city, The Jo'burg Book, became my bible, and Nechama sent me additional personal recommendations, annotated maps and provided general fact-checking. Thanks also to my great friends Georgi Guedes and Ter Hollman for playing host.

My music industry insiders/informers were Esther Moloi, Jason Curtis, Gabi le Roux, Shamiel Adams and music journalist Evan Milton, who insisted on being allowed to interview Odi Huron, albeit for a fictional magazine. Thanks to you all, and to travel writer Justin Fox for helping me plot Zinzi's travel arrangements.

Thanks also to Charlie Human and Sam Wilson who were roped in to write additional materials for this book, the psychological paper on the Undertow and the prison interviews respectively. Both pieces added a depth to my story and provided perspectives I wouldn't have thought of on my own.

Dr Meg Jones and Cape Medical Response paramedic Chris de Meyer were invaluable in providing expert medical opinions on fictional conditions and injuries.

I'm very grateful to Jamala Safari, who shared his journey from the DRC to South Africa (hopefully soon to be a novel), unravelled acronyms and the tangle of conflicts over resources that has resulted in an estimated 5.4 million deaths in the Congo since 1998. James Bocanga, another DRC émigré who runs his own security firm in my neighbourhood, patiently explained slang and daily life, and provided translations for me.

Bishop Paul Verryn invited me to visit the Central Methodist Church, where, at the time, over three thousand refugees were living in terrible, dehumanising conditions – that were nevertheless better than sleeping on the street. It was a shocking and humbling experience that has stayed with me, even though I couldn't find a way to fictionalise it. The church offered shelter during the xenophobic attacks of 2008, and continues to offer support and assistance even as many try to ignore the dire situation of refugees in South Africa. There's been ongoing controversy about it, especially recently, but the people I met there were courageous and empathetic, and doing the best they could in the worst possible circumstances.

Tim Butcher's Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart provided a great perspective on the DRC, while Jane Bussman's book The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heart-Throbs and Other Abominations was a brilliant, awful and very funny resource on the LRA, specifically their actions in Uganda.

Other books that proved invaluable include Bongani Madondo's Hot Type; Kgebetli Moele's sad, funny, gorgeous Hillbrow novel Room 207; Melinda Ferguson's harrowing autobiographical account of addiction, Smacked; Kevin Bloom's devastating Ways of Staying; and especially Penny Miller's riveting and sadly out-of-print Myths and Legends of Southern Africa – which haunted my childhood with its wonderful stories and distinctly disturbing illustrations.

Matt Weems's fantastic website warlordsofafghanistan.com was such an intriguing and wonderful reference, I was tempted to abandon this book and write about that instead.

Friends on Twitter leapt to help me with research questions on anything from storm drains to good places to dump a body (only a little creepy, guys). Thanks especially to @6000 and @ghostfinder for medicinal advice, @mattduplessis, @brodiegal, @gussilber and @louisgreenberg for general Joburg advice. And to everyone else who tweeted back about different species of gun or how easy it would be to lever a gate off its hinges.

Various 419 scammers were very helpful in sending reference material direct to my inbox (you're welcome to contact me to claim a percentage of my royalties, although there may be a small administrative cost involved), but I owe greater thanks to the good people of 419eater.com and ScamWarners.com, the South African 419 Unit of the SAPS, and the victims I interviewed for Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan stories for their insight into scams and scamming syndicates.

Thanks to my meticulous and highly critical readers: Sarah Lotz, Sam Wilson, Zukiswa Wanner, Lindiwe Nkutha, Verashni Pillay, Nechama Brodie, Charlie Human, Louis Greenberg and my husband, Matthew Brown – you all helped make this book what it is.

Genius illustrators John Picacio and Joey Hifi created the two most beautiful covers in the world for the international and South African editions of the book respectively. They're both incredible in different ways, and both artists took time out of their insane schedules to do the work. I'm grateful.

Marc "Marco" Gascoigne and Lee Harris at Angry Robot, and Pete van der Woude and Maggie Davey at Jacana have been exceptional and brilliant people to work with, as has been my editor, Helen Moffett.

Finally, thanks to my family and friends – especially to Matthew and Keitu – for making everything worth it.

About the Author

Lauren Beukes is a writer, TV scriptwriter and recovering journalist (although she occasionally falls off the wagon). She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town under André Brink, but she got her real education in ten years of freelance journalism, learning really useful skills like how to pole-dance and make traditional sorghum beer. For the sake of a story, she's jumped out of planes and into shark-infested waters, and got to hang out with teen vampires, township vigilantes, AIDS activists and homeless sex workers among other interesting folk.

She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter.

www.moxyland.com

EXTRA.

MOXYLAND WINNERS.

Extras

Moxyland Short Story Winners

Last summer Angry Robot ran a competition in association with Authonomy.com to write a short story based around Lauren Beuke's debut novel, Moxyland. The winning three entries – as judged by Lauren, herself – are presented here. These stories may be read without having enjoyed Moxyland, but we think you'll get the most out of them if you've read the novel. So go read it. We'll wait.

The Minutes // Sam Wilson

INATEC BIOLOGICA INC.

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

For viewing by legal entities with Corporate Status (CS) A+ or above only.

PLEASE SHRED ALL PHYSICAL COPIES AFTER IMMEDIATE USE in accordance with company policy, 223rd Rev. #464. Failure to observe company policy will result in salary suspension, downgrading of employee status, and curtailed network access.

Minutes created by FACILIT4TOR PRO version 4.01 (licensed copy 10876-12).

Copyright © FACILIT4TOR INC. 2019. You may not distribute, copy, print, scan, etc. these minutes or parts thereof without written permission from FACILIT4TOR INC. For detailed legal information, visit facilit4tor.law.

MINUTES OF MEETING #4586 Ref. 32

Dated 27-09-2019

ATTENDING: (5)

List By Corporate Status.

Nwabisa Mthini, Vice president of marketing, Ghost Inc. (subsidiary of Praetorian Global)

Harold Brown, Legal Division: Corporate relations, Inatec Biologica

Jacques du Plessis, Corporate alignment official, Actisponse Private Security (Police Affiliated)

Busisiwe Zono, Liaison, Vukani Media

Jules Dyonashe, Bioinformatics Applications Div, Inatec Biologica

ABSENT: (None)

START TIME: 21.45

– Automatic reading of minutes of previous meeting by FACILIT4TOR PRO is cancelled at 0:07.

– Brown (Inatec) thanks all present for attending.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc) tells Brown (Inatec) to cut the bullshit.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc) reminds all present of the details of the enhanced branding campaign for the soft drink Ghost. Salient points are:

1) Vukani Media, in association with Inatec Biologica, was contracted to enhance the branding of the soft drink Ghost.

2) The enhancement was to include cellular-level biological modification of Ghost Inc.'s brand ambassadors.

3) The modification was to bring the brand ambassadors in line with the Ghost brand, as laid out in the Ghost Inc. Brand Bible Version 5.5 (Doc 564. Not found in archive).

4) The key phrases of the Ghost brand are: Youth, Aspiration, Peergroup Bonding, and Safe (pro-consumption) Creativity. – Mthini (Ghost Inc.) tells Du Plessis (Actisponse) to play Media File #13-586 [not found in archive].

[ SUMMARY OF MEDIA FILE #13-586

OPENING TITLE TEXT: "Broadcasting From A Little Pink Spaceship Orbiting Your Anus, It's The Toby Show!"

Footage cuts to a young man wearing a pair of sunglasses. His head is half-shaved. He is wearing an open BabyStrange jacket with no shirt beneath, leather chaps, and a pair of boxer shorts printed with a black-and-white image of female pudenda.

The man, who appears intoxicated, narrates a clearly fictitious experience he had escaping from a police holding cell. The narration is punctuated as the man swigs from a family-sized bottle of Ghost.

This story is interspersed throughout by video clips of sex scenes recorded on a BabyStrange jacket, in which the young man has coitus with a variety of women of different nationalities, in a variety of positions. Although these clips are not directly related the narration, they are tangentially connected to the action described. For instance, a description of the young man cutting through some prison bars with a metal file is illustrated by close-up footage of a penis being thrust repeatedly between a pair of breasts.

Each shot in some way includes the soft drink Ghost, or Ghostthemed memorabilia, often in an inserted capacity.

At least three participants in the video clips are recognisable social figures, media rated B+ and above. They include 17 year old pop starlet ‹NAME REDACTED›, Luxury Travel Presenter ‹NAME REDACTED›, and ‹NAME REDACTED›, the socialite daughter of ‹NAME AND GOVERNMENT POSITION REDACTED›.

The fictional account of the escape cumulates in the man skewering his captors through their hearts with his own engorged penis, and carrying them around "like a kebab." ]

– Du Plessis (Actisponse) calls up a still frame from Media File #13-586

(Frame 2:41:15) revealing a bioluminescent marker on Toby ‹FULL NAME REDACTED AT REQUEST OF CORPORATE RELATIONS DIVISION›'s arm. The marker is the corporate logo of Ghost Inc.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) suggests that everyone involved in the branding exercise should be subject to immediate dismissal and disconnect.

– Du Plessis (Actisponse) reports that Media File #13-586 has been downloaded 3,566,143 times in the last 6 months, giving it a pop culture profile of B (Underground – High Popularity).

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) states that, together with other video files from the same source, this media file has irrevocably damaged the brand of the soft drink Ghost.

– Zono (Vukani Media) claims that the man in the footage, Toby ‹FULL NAME REDACTED AT REQUEST OF CORPORATE RELATIONS DIVISION›, is not, and never was, an officially selected brand ambassador for Ghost, and his actions are not the responsibility of Vukani Media or any of its affiliates.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) says that he doesn't give three shades of shit if Toby ‹FULL NAME REDACTED AT REQUEST OF CORPORATE RELATIONS DIVISION› is an official brand ambassador or not. He is clearly a by-product of the branding program.

– Brown (Inatec) asks Dyonashe (Inatec) if it is possible that a nonbrand ambassador could have been subject to cellular level branding.

– SILENCE (17 secs) during which Dyonashe (Inatec) flips through the print-outs in front of him.

– Dyonashe (Inatec) says that he cannot answer fully, as the branding brief contained elements that were classified at level A++. However, the therapies involved did have a contagious component, as specifically requested by Ghost Inc.

– IMPOSSIBLE TO PARSE NEXT SECTION. Multiple persons speaking simultaneously. (23 secs).

– Brown (Inatec) asks if he is correct in understanding that Ghost Inc. and Inatec Biologica have been collaborating on an infectious virus to spread addiction to a soft drink.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) demands silence, as no one in the room has clearance to speculate on company policy.

– Zono (Vukani Media) asks when Vukani Media was going to be notified about this.

– Du Plessis (Actisponse) activates a taser-nightstick.

– SILENCE. (4 secs).

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) tells everyone to focus on the matter at hand, which is that Toby ‹FULL NAME REDACTED AT REQUEST OF CORPORATE RELATIONS DIVISION› is damaging the Ghost brand.

– Du Plessis (Actisponse) offers his company's expertise in swift and discrete removal of individuals.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) explains that Toby ‹FULL NAME REDACTED AT REQUEST OF CORPORATE RELATIONS DIVISION› has important family connections. Removing him would risk upsetting the monopolistic détente.

– Dyonashe (Inatec) asks if he can offer a solution. Mthini (Ghost Inc.) grants him the floor.

– Dyonashe (Inatec) explains that people who are modified by the Ghost branding are not addicted to Ghost per se, but to specific marker chemicals that are not found in any other drink. If another drink could be made with stronger concentrations of those chemicals, the brand ambassadors would almost certainly switch allegiance. – Du Plessis (Actisponse) suggests that they mix the marker chemicals with cyanide.

– Dyonashe (Inatec) proposes a new beverage line from Ghost Inc., to lure unsavoury elements away from the brand.

– Zono (Vukani Media) suggests that Ghost Inc. can do better. Toby ‹FULL NAME REDACTED AT REQUEST OF CORPORATE RELATIONS DIVISION› has a wide and influential reach. If Ghost Inc. creates a new drink, they can play off Toby's bad-boy image and underground fan base to get an immediate consumer following. A whole new brand could be created around Toby.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) says he will propose the idea to his superiors.

– Zono (Vukani Media) suggests the brand names "Ghost – Barbed Wire" or "Ghost – Battery Acid", and requests a royalty fee if either brand name is used.

– Brown (Inatec) points out that using Toby as a brand icon will upset the carefully cultivated social landscape.

– Mthini (Ghost Inc.) agrees that Toby as a mainstream icon could trigger a new wave of counter-culture, and such waves are notoriously difficult for corporations to steer. A new counter-culture would be extremely damaging for all the companies who are gearing their products towards a conservative and homogenous youth culture.

– Zono (Vukani Media) agrees that it's true, but it will only be damaging for the companies that aren't ready for it, and Ghost Inc., Vukani Media, Actisponse and Inatec will be. As long as this meeting remains confidential, the four companies will be the only ones prepared for a youth culture upheaval. They will be prepared to gear their products towards a cynical, hedonistic, antisocial culture. While others companies fall, they will ride Toby's wave into a bright and glorious future. And if Toby wants to throw Molotov cocktails, they'll be right there to sell them to him.

@nother // Bryan Steele

››SysRun: Pluslife

››Plugin/Cnapce: run

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.

.

››Pluslife/Cnapce online ››Enter Password

My mates, both IRL and streaming, always say that a persona's password needs to be special and private. Something different for every account or prog. Something that no one will ever be able to acci-hack, especially not some low-tech lifejock with a score to settle with people like me. Yeah, I run my plugins on the bill of some big daddy corporate, but show me a half-cooked simp that wouldn't do the same damn thing if the contract msgd their way.

So yeah, passwords. I have a dodgy memory on the best of days, popping pills just to keep my focus, which makes my having several passwords for my lives a lost cause. So, I keep one password. One, easy to mem, password. It's a joke really, how it came about.

››Password: @nother

From my days of misspent youth. When a prog asked "Enter another password" for sec-proof reasons, I did. I entered "@nother" password. I was a clever little shit. Now I am stuck with it. For all my progs and accounts. SIM, CV, Grande…Pluslife. Especially Pluslife. My "@nother" life.

››Password accepted ››Welcome! to Pluslife, user Cnapce

Pluslife. Where I work. The bigwig queue-cutters and chequechasers that keep me fed and roofed IRL hired me. Some kind of experimental prog that they needed beta'd. Beta'd? More like Omega'd at this point. Two years of running this deal for them, and do I know anything new about the prog? Nope. Not that I care. I'm never jonesing for black-makt shit, my weekly install keeps me sony. I have a roof over my nob in both lives, all paid up and looking swank.

All I have to do is find the users on my daily lister, that's all. The corp feeds me the IDs of Pluslifers and I use this topline tech to hack them out and get my avvie to where they are. It is a sugar deal, really. I get all the time in the box as I want, so long as I'm surfing around for these users, and I get to see the net from all over. Last week I was sifting the code for some user in Kenya handled "And3rson" and I spent most of a day checking Ken-makt. Got a sweet deal on some Twarez for my ma, too. Then And3rson happened by the shopsite and I pulled his plug. The next day, I was in Oslo, skiing the pixel moguls and searching out "Doktor_Mow". They are both disconnect now. That's my gig. Adminning the people on my lister. I sever the links. Go ahead. Call me a wager. Call me a corporate bitchcat. The money is good, and now I don't have to run quests and odd-jobs to get it. And my SIM don't know any difference.

I never know exactly what they did, my listers. I get brief notes, that's all. Illegals, rot-users, corp-debtors, hacktavists or fragged SIMs. But srsly, who cares? I find 'em, meet 'em, then fry 'em. The warez I get to use is toplined now, designer nano, on-site support? What else can a user ask for?

Oh, wait. Today's lister is cooked and inboxing right now.

››Lister 08.099/

›››User ID: CS44 (delinquent account)

›››User ID: cranque (suspected hack)

›››User ID: Malessa77 (account sharing)

›››User ID: LthreethreeT (account sharing)

›››Location: Sydney

Sydney? That's the fucking tops. I've never been. Well, IRL anyways. A good four-pop like this should take me most of the week. Let's see. We get to start off with what? A delinquent account. Old user, probably. They stop paying their bill, get defused, whatever. Their avatar was logged in when they went DQ, so now I get to go clean up the server.

So. Sydney. I'm going to need to blend in. Jeans. Plain shirt. Floppy hat… no, brimmed cap. Yeah, now I look good. I might as well be an outbacker. Well, Pluslifed, anyway. And now, I'm going down under.

››Cnapce/port ››Dest/Sydney//117.CS44

My apartment pixellates, unfocuses, then refocuses like a bad edit in streamcast. I don't get it. Pluslife can afford to make the experience perfect for everyone, but you snag up some admin rights and you get total analogue naush. Oh well. The refocus has me, or my avvie anyway, in the parking lot of some makt. I pull up the tag cues, and suddenly my… uhm… target for lack of a better term… flashes above a guy sitting in his auto. CS44 (afk) glows in blue above his head. Here I go. Time to earn my keep.

I pop on over to the target. He is looking ahead, totally zomb'd out. He isn't in there anymore. Probably hasn't paid up in weeks. Well, it's the cycle of life…or, Pluslife. Time to do my thing.

››Cnapce: User ID CS44. As per your digital SID signature, you have been found in violation of your Terms and Conditions agreement with the Pluslife programming code. As per said agreement, your account has been…

I lean in, close to his vacant ear. Not that he knows anything that I'm doing, but it makes me feel like a real leet.

››Cnapce:…terminated.

There is a brief flutter of static and little mister CS44 gets the pixel flush treatment. In a flash I'm looking at an empty ride. One down. Three to go. I love this job. It's one part gamer, one part world traveller, and one part serial killer. All digi, all the time. Yeah, there's urbans out there that blog about Pluslifers offing themselves IRL when they lose their Plus, but that's just mythchat. I mean, this is just a game. Just a prog. Well, I guess it is my life… you know, my job. But srsly? Sure, I wouldn't know what I could do without this gig, but if I do my job right, I don't need to think about it. Speaking of which…

››Cnapce/port ››Dest/Sydney//133.cranque

Another pixel shift, another backdrop. Where the hell am I? It's low-res, off the streets, but still Sydney. No furniture, not even a digicot. My tag cues are still up, and the bright blue cranque tag floats right in front of me. Nothing beneath it. He should be right here. Fuckin' hack job. These are my least favourite marks. Aggro backdoor coding fucks. All of them.

››cranque: What the hell, bro? How R U in my codex? Ralphie, izzat u?

››Cnapce: Ya, where R U?

››cranque: Sidedoor, shift-alt-7.

Arrogant black-hatters. They always give up the goods. I punch the sideline hack, the door appears, and in I go. The side room is nothing but copy-cut-paste codes. All vintage gear and stolen merch from around the Net. Two other users are sitting with the tagless cranque. They plugout as soon as my avvie pops in. They know.

››report:TyTy ››report:Angel0fDeth

Cranque looks like most Pluslifers. He's the perfect height, built like a streamstar, and covered in perfect-image tattoo script. Another perfect body in a perfect world full of perfectly happy perfects. You'd think this would be enough. But no. Hacks and cheats don't think so.

››Freezeplug/Cnapce: cranque

››cranque: Wait! No! Cmon man, dont do this. What do U want? Ill code it! Cmon!

The look on his face is priceless. I can just see this pimple-facer sitting in his mom's basement, desperately trying to back out of the prog, frothing and sweating and popping a nervous chub about getting caught. But it is no use. Time for a little admin-play.

››Cnapce: User ID cranque. As per your digital SID signature, you have been found in violation of your Terms and Conditions agreement with the Pluslife programming code. As per said agreement, your account has been…

››cranque: Nononononononononononononononononononononononono!!!!!!!!!1111111

››Cnapce: …terminated.

Another one bytes the dust. Lesson taught. Now go tell your mom that her funds have been wasted and her SID is tagged for possible disconnect. Fucker. There is nothing I hate more than a user who cheats the prog. Especially in Pluslife. I mean, for some users this is their escape from the smog and the static. A place to look good, get out and party, and do it without shaving a single whisker. Cheathacking here is just wrong. Dirty pool. Loaded dice. To me, it's no better than those old nano'd runners on Moxy making all the little kids cry. Cheaters should be sterilised.

Okay, so I get to cheat. But it's my job. Not cheating. Admining. Which, if I want to keep rolling this style, I need to get back to.

››Cnapce/port ››Dest/Sydney//186.Malessa77

The shift is a good one. From the dark of the hack-house to the sunny yellow40 of a suburb footie-family cottage yard. This place is a typical hab in Pluslife. Single floor flat, pastel buttery siding, HanselGretel shingles, and even a whitewash picket fence with a fun little gate. It even has a coded inbox with her name on it. Classy shit, this is. It isn't often that I have to go godmode on someone who can afford Homes amp; Gardens digi-rose bushes and two Prada topiary dolphins. This is no scam-shack. This is a Pluslife homestead worth taking a screencap of. What the hell is Malessa77 getting binned for? Account sharing? Srsly? That is just sad.

Account sharing is when someone else uses a user's password to check accounts, mails, msgs and even move code around in their Pluslives. Most of the time it turns out that somebody stole somebody's @nother, or hacked their way in, or whatever. Nobody likes having an unwanted avvie running around in their Pluslife, so they report their ID, and management puts them on my lister. Like Malessa77 here. And then it is the end of them.

Here I go. The port-plugin took me to this place, so she has to be inside. I hop the fence and stroll the walk. Wow. The digi-roses are srsly primo code. They smell and feel real. I am impressed. I'll put in for one on the next reqform. My habzone is not this swank, but I do alright.

The secure on the door is good, but not admin. I don't get to play with my Pluslife stats much, so this will be fun. All SWAT with none of the training.

››Cnapce/PlusAvatar/Adjust ››Avatar/Strength/+99

It doesn't feel any different to me in the rig, but I know the world will react right. My code++ foot turns that high-priced doorframe encryption into scrapcode at a single click-n-drag, and I am in.

The graphic chatroom is even more prime than the hab's shell. Most of these private sceneboxes are where the richies show their true colours. You know, either leave the place all white00 or pull out the pr0ncode and let their freak flag fly. Décor by Martha Stewart with a few touches by the Marquis de Sade or maybe Himmler. But not this place. This place is full on swank. The carpets match the shades, the furniture is all high… I guess high dollar, being Sydney and all… and the atmos-code is exactly like that potpourri my stepmom used to set out on Boxing Day. Top stuff, all of it. Even includes a jpeg family photo over the mantle. I am almost sorry that I have to admin Malessa77. She has put a lot of time on the keys into this joint.

A shame, really.

Each room in this place is just as fanced up as the last. It is something special. Back toward the rear of the place, I can hear a voice. No, two voices. It's another chatroom, so I can't see what's being txt, but I can follow the stereophonics.

The door at the end of the hall pops open and there it is, the story unfolds. Two young ladies, their avatars all remarkably normal for Pluslife images, are lying in bed inside. By the state of things, I'd say I was just too late to see one helluva show. Oh well. Wait. One of them is Malessa77, but the other. The other is lister number four. LthreethreeT is the brunette on the left. Two for one. Fantastic.

››Malessa77: I don't know who the hell you think you are, barging in here, but

››LthreethreeT: Uhm, Mal, I think he's Company. ››Malessa77: Really? Oh God, that means

››LthreethreeT: Sir? Mister, uhm, what can I call you?

Since they are both here. I don't get out much IRL, and being around two nudies is a great way to spend my time on the clock.

››Cnapce: It is probably better if you don't call me anything. Easier anyway.

››Malessa77: Easier? Oh god, no. Please don't. This is all we have. ››LthreethreeT: He isn't going to care, Mal. They don't know how. Corporate bullies.

Bully? I fuckin' don't think so. It's just a job, chickie. You and your digi-lez friend are breaking the rules. Time to pay up.

››Cnapce: User ID Malessa77. As per your digital SID signature, you have been found in violation

››Malessa77: No! She didn't hack me! I GAVE her the code! ››LthreethreeT: It wasn't her fault, it was my idea. Leave her alone, you fuckn wage-slave!

››Cnapce: of your Terms and Conditions agreement with the Pluslife programming code. As per said agreement

››Malessa77: This isn't fair. I can't live without her! I'm quarantined! This is the only place we have together! Don't take it away! Don't take HER away!

››LthreethreeT: It's okay, baby. I'll find another SID. This corporate

douche can't keep us apart.

››Cnapce: your account has been

››Malessa77: I luv u, Linda. Whatever happens to me, remember this place. Our dream house. Remember me! I lo››Cnapce: terminated.

Her avatar's perky little B-cups pixel out, and I almost feel bad for her. I hope they don't ban her complete. You know, full disconnect. A suspension. Yeah, that's what her and her friend will get. I'm sure of it. Oh yeah, her friend.

Wow.

I didn't know Pluslife avvies could cry.

Streaks of digital pain and synthesised anguish colour-tint LthreethreeT's rose19 cheeks, and if there was a player-mod for eye beams or aggro-static weapons…my avatar would have just been pwned by the look she is giving me. I actually have that worried tingle in my gut, like the feeling right after cheating on a lover. This is the shite part of my job.

››LthreethreeT: You rotting corporati bastard. You just killed the only thing I loved. I can't afford the med-pass to see her IRL. This is all we have. Had. Past tense. Fuck you.

››Cnapce: Chill. You guys broke the rules. I'm just doing my job. ››LthreethreeT: So I guess you have to do your job on me, too. ››Cnapce: Yeah. I'm sorry.

Sorry? Why the hell did I just txt that? THEY are the rules-breakers. THEY fucked up. Why should I be sorry? Oh well. It's syntax now. It'll fall off the cache when she is gone.

››LthreethreeT: Sorry? You will be. Keep your eyes on the Sydcast news for the next couple of days. My name is Linda Barrows, look for it in the obits. I can't live without her. I'd rather die than go on

knowing she is wasting away in a med-centre alone and suffering

without me.

››Cnapce: No you won't. You won't kil

››LthreethreeT: We both know you don't care. You are a soulless corporate slave marching to the tune that key turning in your back is grinding away. Just fucking get on with it.

She's right. She is just pixels and memory bytes to me. I can't let her slide. This is MY livelihood, after all. I gotta watch out for Player One, you know?

››Cnapce: User ID LthreethreeT. As per your digital SID signature, you have been found in violation of your Terms and Conditions agreement with the Pluslife programming code.

Her avatar's last emote, standing there naked like she forgot to buy clothes-code, looks at me with sadness scrawled on her face. She is holding a jpeg in her hands. It shows two women, arm in arm. One looks like an athlete, maybe a footie player. The other looks like all the warning ads I have seen about the last big outbreak. She holds it out like a mirror at me, filling my monitor with the image. I have to do this. It's just another job. Heh, @nother job.

››Cnapce: As per said agreement, your account has been terminated.

She closes her eyes the moment before the pixel storm sweeps her away. The jpeg goes along with her. So does the room. The furniture. The drapes. The art. The walls. The entire hab scrambles out and becomes an empty lot with an Ebay page already forming for its auction.

Full disconnect.

Oh well. Job's done. I'm paid. That's what it is all about, right? Keeping your head above water and making your way through RL. Yeah. And all that shit about offing herself? Really? No way. It's just a game. Nobody really dies because of the shit that happens in Pluslife. No way. Digital lives, not real ones.

Wait a sec. My lister just chirped out at me. I must have scored a bonus gig. Exactly what I need to get that melodrama-mama out of my head. I mean, who dies over something like that? Life is never that bad.

››Lister 08.10/

›››User ID: 10 (delinquent account) ›››Location: Cape Town

Great. Another bum not paying his bills.

››Cnapce/port ››Dest/Cape Town//453.10

Time to take out the trash.

Land of the Blind // Charlie Human

Agent HK – Ideological Security Unit

The corporate function of truth is to tell the various parts of the mechanism what to do. Of course it doesn't actually have to be truth, not in the absolute sense. It just has to fit in with the rest of the system. After this last kill, I understand that more so than ever.

My handler Shaw had been a commander in the apartheid security police. He wanted to show me how serious they were so he stopped me turning left for a week. Easy as implanting a neuromuscular programme that told my body that left turns were a no-go. "That's a level one programme" he said. "You're primed for level four." I tried to deviate a couple more times but eventually I just did what he said.

Drew

The factory bleeds iron and vomits sparks. I am luckier than some. Luckier than the endless supply of desperate people from the Rural who transport the ore and drop weekly from respiratory diseases.

I feel it coming on but there is only an hour left before the end of

the day. All the signs are there; the flickering vision, the exhilaration, the hissing of a stove-top kettle and the smell of burning. Taking a break would bring down shit from my supervisor. I carry on working even as the exhilaration builds and the world bleaches out.

I look around, blinking stupidly. Everything is saturated with light. One of the Rurals is pulling my arm and pointing at a spill on the factory floor. What the fuck is he trying to say? I can't tell. Is it oil? But it's too bright. A contorted shape lies next to the spill. I struggle to make sense of it… Joseph.

"Ja, it's like I tell everyone, this is a hard business and people get hurt," my manager says. Somehow I'm in his small office on the factory floor. "I know you have medical condition."

I cross my arms over my chest and huddle in the hard plastic chair. Joseph had been cleaning one of the machines, hunched over it scraping out the metal silt. When I whited out, I fell onto the control panel.

"Listen, I understand you're upset, but you can't blame yourself," my manager says. "Christ, these guys from the Rural can barely read and write, let alone operate machinery properly."

"It was my fault," I say.

"Who the fuck cares, the Riffa is dead," he says. I wince at the slur. My parents were staunch anti-classists, and bigotry directed at Rurals always makes me uneasy. "His family will get paid out and everyone will be happy." He sighs, then hesitates, as if deciding whether to say something. "Andrew, I'm recommending a doctor, a corporate." I look at him, not understanding. I wasn't a Corporate Citizen; I didn't get corporate medical aid. "You're doing valuable work here, and XMET looks after its own," he says.

My phone buzzes with a temporary access card to Waterfront City. He puts a hand on my shoulder, like a fat pink spider.

"Listen, take a break, and spend some time with Kara." Despite everything, I'm surprised he knows my wife's name.

My voice is shaking as I tell her what happened. I hear her little nieces laughing in the background. Playing mommy has taken on an edge lately. Kara says she just wants to give her sister a break, but to me it looks more like practice Or an invitation. Or an ultimatum.

There's a long silence.

"I thought you said the fits weren't happening anymore, Drew," she says.

"They weren't."

She breathes out deeply.

"I'm…" I want to tell her what happened. I want her to understand. But I don't. "I'm going to be home late."

Agent HK

I watch the interview again. It's hosted on a trendy subversive site, one of ours. Like everything else, dissent is easier to control from the inside.

The vlogger is American, her hair tied back in blonde dreads under a R4000 Dolce amp; Gabbana beret. She's overwhelmed at meeting a real life resistance fighter. Matthew Ibrahim, one of the Lionesses' inner circle. He comes across as bitter, cynical, the girl's adulation seems to make him tired. I wonder if he'll feel guilty when his brother dies. If he comes back for the funeral it'll be like a gift to Shaw. A chance to kill the one that got away.

So, Matt, like how did you get involved with Thaba Godima?

The draft. It appeared on my phone on my eighteenth birthday, indicated by the mandatory Governance ringtone. From that point on I had two days to reply or it was a Zimbabwean labour camp. There was no way I could join the Coporate Service Platoon and Godima was the only other option.

Were you close to Nata Mzani? Is she as hardcore as people say?

I don't know if I'd describe the Lioness in those terms. She's incredibly focused. It's part of her training. She was with an MK cadre in Angola during the First Struggle, but after it ended, she refused to take a cushy job in the new government. They hated her for it, more for opposing them. She went into exile and then returned to plant the seed that was to become the Second Struggle and Thaba Godima.

What did you do in Thaba Godima?

I was a Changent, short for "change agent". We were an elite unit trained in Godima camps to fight the power network of the ISU. Did you kill anybody? Are you kidding me?

And what was the deal with the Easter War. That was rough, right?

We had an alliance with the Soldiers of Gaia, an eco-survivalist movement who also opposed Corporate. We had a…falling out after they found some of our cadres cooking an endangered species of hare, but it was the bush, what were we supposed to do? They executed them mafia-style. It turned into a war. We only found out later it was a set-up. The ISU killed our guys and made it look like the Soldiers. We took the bait.

Like Drew will. How could he resist. I shut down the streamcast. It will be enough to link him to his brother, to bring everything tumbling down.

Drew

"Homemade bio-fuel, larnie," the cabbie says, smiling apologetically through missing front teeth. The old car splutters and jerks as he edges it into the stream of traffic, hooting as a cavalcade of black vehicles flashing blue lights roar past us

We pass the decaying Greenpoint soccer stadium. It looks like the skeleton of a giant spider squatting on the tar, the WELCOME 2010 decals faded but the plastic veneer of the grinning official mascot is still surprisingly bright. I wonder how anybody could have ever thought it was cute. It's a demon, a tokoloshe that grinned maniacally over the lean and brutal years that followed the World Cup.

We make our way slowly through the traffic toward the towers of Waterfront City. The contrast between it and the surrounding area is stark. Lush vegetation rises up from the gleaming glass towers.

I'm ushered in to see the doctor, a large man with soft, jowly face. "That's a Stone," I say gesturing at the large oil painting behind his desk of a mushroom cloud over Cape Town. I know from the art magazines my parents collected that it was called "The Spill", even though the real thing it hadn't been like that at all. There had been fires, sure, but not like that, more like a progressive poisoning of the land with radiation.

I thought it was garish, typical of Stone, the egocentric young African artist that had wowed the world, reaching superstar status before chaining herself to the body of an Aids victim in an unknown location and starving herself to death. She had documented it by webcam as her last work and her final minutes were still one of the most watched clips ever. You could buy t-shirts with her emaciated face on them at Greenmakt Square.

He motions for me to lie down on his examining table as he consults my record on the medical database. I lie still as a hovering machine scans my brain from different angles. The doctor keeps up a subdued banter through the flashes, but I hardly hear what he says.

We wait in silence for the results to appear on his desk console. "Mr. Ibrahim, there's no easy way to say this," he says finally. "You have a severe form of epilepsy that has been improperly treated." He pauses to gauge my reaction. "Your episodes, as you call them, have caused lesions to form on the brain."

I nod and he continues.

"No patented medicine exists to treat this," he says. The world contracts to a tiny point in front of my eyes. I think of Kara and the children we'll never have. I know in that moment that if I can't be helped then I'm going to leave her. To give her a chance at the life she wants. And before she leaves me.

"Wait," the doctor says. "There is an option. Lodafril. It's not patented. I don't have to tell you what that means." He watches me carefully for a reaction. I don't blame him. Offer black makt meds to the wrong person and you'd end up in a labour camp, even if you're a Citizen.

"Does it have a chance of working?" I ask. He pauses for a moment then nods. "Then I want it."

He taps his console and my phone buzzes. I look at the screen of my phone. It displays an access card with the name KADEN on it. "It's a username for a game" he says.

He gives me directions to the Kraal, a bar on the outskirts of Salt River, making me repeat them to make sure I have them. "Ask to use the White Room," he says as he leads me to the door. I nod, but he catches my eye. "It has to be the White Room. You can't reach Kaden any other way."

I exit Waterfront City and walk until I hit a Congolese internet café called the Rat Tunnels. The atmosphere is humid and the sounds of French and Portuguese come from businessmen engaged in video chats.

I call Matt. And not only because he was a med student before he joined the cause. He looks tense, like he's looking for a reason to disconnect.

Matt: Hey, long time, it's been five, six months? Drew: Longer. Matt, I really need your help.

Matt: Drew, we've been over this, I can't come back, ISU'd take me out as soon as I landed.

Drew: Don't worry I wouldn't inconvenience you like that. I buried mom and dad on my own, I wouldn't expect you to come back for a little thing like me being sick.

Matt: You're sick again? I thought that was under control? Drew: Well a lot has happened in the ten months since I last spoke to you.

Matt: Drew, please-

Drew: So right now I need your help, ok? If you do one thing in your life for me, make it this.

Matt: I've always-

Drew: Please, just listen. You've still got contacts in medical research right? I need you to find out about a drug called Lofadril.

But the moment I say the word "Lofadril" the connection cuts off. The proprietor strides across the room and looms over me.

His hands are tattooed with badly-rendered holographic ink that glitches as it shows violent sexual scenes; prison tattoos.

"What you doing, eh? he asks.

"I was just chatting," I start, but he cuts me off.

"You used a banned phrase. If ISU picks it up, they're gonna disconnect me. How I'm gonna live then?"

"I just need to-"

"No, you need to leave," he says.

It's not a request.

The Kraal turns out to be a grungy games arcade and strip club. One corner is dedicated to kids jacked into VR units; the slick grey pods that have become more commonplace than slot machines. Sickness and rising petrol and food prices have sent people from reality in their droves. "Your mind can hardly tell the difference," a faded sticker proclaims.

There's a screen in the corner showing a news report about the Left Hand of Allah, the Somalian jihadist group that had absorbed Yemenite and Pakistani terrorist cells after they had finally been pushed out of the Middle East.

The barman, a bearded, rough-looking Afrikaans guy, is watching it. "There's going to be a major war in Africa soon, you mark my words," he says as I walk up to the bar. "I hear they're offering heroin money to recruits."

"Heroin too," I say.

"Let's hope it makes their little child soldiers slow on the trigger," he says laughing. "Are you drinking?"

"A single Harm's Way," I say. It's the only drink I really know – a cheap local whisky, an offshoot of the biofuel industry.

I down the potent liquor which burns my throat. "Games look busy," I say.

"They are, some of these kidpsychos have started setting up drips so they don't have to leave their little cytopia," he says. We watch as a kid takes off his VR mask and stands staring at the room trying to focus his eyes. "Reality must be a real bad comedown."

I can't think of a way to do it, so I just blurt it out. "I need the White Room."

The smile drops off his lips.

"Never heard of it," he says.

I show him the card on my phone. He grunts and motions for me to follow him. He leads me to a completely white room with a wireless VR unit. "20 minutes," he says.

I go through the motions of creating an avatar, choosing the Randomise button to select a set of looks and skills and then hit Incarnate. Immediately I'm in a bright square, bustling with avatars.

The place has the feel of a carnival, disjointed and confusing. Lacking a plan, I make my way toward a crowd standing in the middle of the town square. They're crowding around a beautiful avatar. I feel love pour from my heart at the sight of her. I know immediately that she's a Sylb, one of the class of specially designed avatars, a perfectly synthesized being.

"The real world is pain," she says in a silky voice. "But look around you." Her arms sweep around her causing a shower of stars to erupt from her hands. "A world created by a benevolent and giving corporation," she says. "Why would you ever want to leave?"

I'm ripped from my reverie by a punch to the kidneys. I hadn't bothered with safety settings, so the pain really hurts. I turn to see a grinning leprechaun creature with wild orange hair. "You're falling for a Corporate troll, newfag," it scoffs. "That's so tacky."

I don't know what to do next, so I just say, "I'm looking for Kaden."

The thing grins. "No shit, you're in the White Room. Come on. Nobody else can see me." He takes my hand and we jump to a crumbling Grecian temple carved into the side of a rock face. The creature gestures for me to go inside, gives me a royal wave and then blinks out of existence.

I push the carved doors open and enter the dim temple. Huge angelic wings curl and uncurl behind an elegant naked woman that stands in the centre of temple floor.

"Another lost soul," Kaden says in a languid, silky voice.

"Not lost yet," I say, "but definitely losing".

Her wings unfurl to full stretch. I feel a surge of awe in her presence. Kaden sees it and smiles. "None of us are who we seem here," she says. "Are we?"

"It's a game, an illusion, that's the idea, isn't it?"

"And yet you come here for redemption in Fleshspace," she says.

"It's my last chance," I say, "without this I can't carry on."

Kaden inclines her head, "I'm here to help, not to stand in your way."

The code on my phone gives me one object in my player's inventory, a scroll. I pull it from the air and hand it to her. She looks at it and nods. She in turn gives me an object, a small golden bell.

"That will be stored as code in your phone," she says. A map to a pharmacy on Loop Street appears in the air and I grab it to store on my phone too. "Show the code to the pharmacist. He'll give you the account details for the payment."

"Kaden," I say. The avatar looks at me. "It's OK, right? I mean, there are no side effects?"

She blinks out as she disconnects.

Kara looks up and smiles as I enter, gently rocking her baby niece in her arms. She looks like a mother, she'd make a good one. Emma, the older one, six now, hugs my legs as I walk in and tells me dozens of things about her day without stopping for a breath. I smile and listen, running my fingers through her curls as she reads excitedly from the schoolwork she projects onto the wall from her phone.

After she finishes, I gently extricate myself and go into our room, closing the door behind me. I take three of the capsules from the package and line them up on the basin. Three little pigs. Three blind mice. Three chances.

After my parents died in the riots and Matt took off to join Godima, I didn't think I'd last long. I'm not a survivor. But I'd surprised myself. Sometimes it's a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. I gulp down the pills in quick succession.

Kara puts the baby on my lap and I rock it gently. Her ancientlooking face stares up at me quizzically. Emma climbs up next to me and tries to get her baby sister to smile by making a puppet with her hand. There's a contentment one feels with children, and for a moment I truly understand why Kara wants one of her own.

I'm sitting rocking when my head explodes. I look down and see a snarling creature, a monster with ghoulish eyes and flesh peeling from its face. It's snapping at me, teeth ripping at my arm. I scream and push it to the floor. There another one next to me and I lash out to stop its advance, but a third demon looms over me.

Then come the patterns. Patterns crawling across everything, writhing, like a curtain of fire ants digging holes in my vision. I scratch at my face to get them off and feel wetness on my fingertips. The snarling things advance. I know something is not right but I can't think. There is a knife on the kitchen table.

Oh God I need help. Something is seriously not right.

Agent HK

This is always the worst part. The waiting. Waiting for the first media reports of the massacre. He'd rip as many people apart as possible before something stopped him. Rage drugs. Military-grade neurotropics, a cocktail of steroids, PCP and pure adrenaline enhanced with nano that rips through the blood-brain barrier. Street name: Hatepills. Discontinued after a platoon had been dosed with them and gone zombie on a routine mission in the Rural.

They'd find anti-corporate material in his apartment. Data linking him to known resistance groups through his brother and directly to the Lioness herself. Media channels were primed for the full scoop. Embedded casters would have photos of the bodies "leaked" to them. It was like driving a spike into the heart of the resistance.

My debriefing with Shaw is quick. Debriefings are a necessary part of the process. Back in the bad old days agents had been known to do stupid things. Phone the families of victims and beg for forgiveness. Put service weapons in their mouths and squeeze.

"Do you feel remorse?" Shaw asks. I shake my head. People would lap it up. The titillation of it all happening so close. Inside the mind of a terrorist, a killer. One of the bad guys.

But they would feel safe because the good guys are protecting them. Thank God, I'm protecting them.

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