Page 10

My head bounced against something soft. Something cool and slick pressed against my cheek, and beneath it a low, rough rumble that rattled through my skull. The darkness tilted and righted itself. One last jolt, harder than the rest, and then everything went still.

Someone was pulling at my hand. My mother’s ring dragged over my knuckle until the skin burned. Then fingers at my neck, the thin chain biting into my nape before it snapped. I whimpered and tried to open my eyes, but they were so heavy, as if they had been sealed shut.

Something wasn’t right.

It wasn’t until I felt someone tugging at my panties that I forced my eyes open.

Darkness. A smear of orange light somewhere above me. The air was thick and wet and tasted of diesel.

I heard the tear and fear paralysed me.

Weight fell on top of me, hot and heavy, forcing the breath from my chest. I immediately began to claw at anything my hands could find. Hair. Skin. A thick, sweating neck. And that cologne, filling my nostrils and the back of my throat. Woody. Citrus. The same one I had breathed in on the pavement, when I had thought it smelled expensive.

I recognised it.

Adrián.

He began to swear and I could breathe again.

The relief was short-lived. His fists came at me, fast and furious. Light burst behind my eyes. Copper flooded my mouth.

“We don’t have time for this,” someone said, flat and bored, somewhere close.

“Five minutes,” Adrián panted. “This bitch made me work for weeks.”

Fear fled and rage took over.

It surged through me, white-hot, drowning out the pain. I grabbed his hair, slick with product, and swung his head from side to side before aiming for his eyes. My nails raked through soft flesh. The press-ons snapped at the glue, and I felt them tear away from my fingertips, small bright stabs of pain I barely registered. His howl echoed off metal somewhere close. He lurched off me.

That was when I realised I was in the backseat of his car. The door hung open. Heat poured in, thick as steam, and with it the groan of a distant horn, the clang of chain on steel, the low drone of an engine. Floodlights hung in the dark like pale moons.

Before I could move, hands gripped my ankles and someone yanked me out of the car. My dress rode up and gravel tore at my back. My hands flailed in the air and I tried to protect my head, but nothing could stop the hard impact with the ground.

The breath left me in one ugly rush. Stones bit into my palms. Stars wheeled across a sky stained orange by the lights, and the taste of blood thickened on my tongue.

The last thing I saw was an incoming boot.

“Move her into the truck.”

Chapter 4

Tau

The diner was quiet and the food was adequate, but the coffee was an abomination.

Not the dark-roasted beans I had grown accustomed to. This was thin and scorched, and the bitterness clung to the back of my tongue like a coin. I pushed the cup away.

I sat beside the window. Rain had started a quarter of an hour ago, a fine, drifting drizzle that blurred the car park lights and drew the heat from the asphalt in a long, smoky breath. Wet tar. Warm concrete. The fluorescent tubes hummed. A fork scraped a plate somewhere behind me. A radio murmured at the counter, too low to make out the words.

The silence sank in, and for a moment I allowed myself to miss them.

I had so little to miss. My grandmother’s hands, rough from cold water. The low pitch of my father’s voice. My mother humming through a thin wall. Even those were not mine. They were gifts from the neighbour, handed over piece by piece as I grew old enough to hold them.

Only two things were truly mine. My sister’s laughter, bright and sudden, streaking through the dark. The way she used to carry me on her hip whenever I missed my mother. Her heartbeat against my ear. Woodsmoke in her clothes.

She had been the last of them alive.

The neighbour told me that in the careful voice you use for something that cannot be softened. He told me the rest in fragments, over years. Then came the testimonies. Truth commission hearings. Transcripts I read in a library in Gaborone, line after line of flat, steady language from people who had survived the same years. Perpetrators too, in the same dry words. Doors. Boots. Sounds that nobody could finish describing.