“Ready whenever you are.”
T
HE UNIVERSE WAS
ruled by his heartbeat.
Ker-thump.
Ker-thump.
Ker-thump.
He ran through a world made of trees. Rooted to the sky, the branches hung everywhere beneath a rain of leaves. Sometimes he’d jump, leaping impossibly far, his entire body extended so that it was one synchronized piece, taut from toe to fingertip, prepared for the grasp, rotation and swing of the next branch that would propel him high into space.
He was
gree
.
Suddenly a great pain coursed through him. The greens, browns and yellows of his tree-filled universe evaporated in an explosion of white so bright that it seared his senses.
There was
gree
but it was not his.
He was not what he was.
He was something different.
His eyes snapped open. Blinding light greeted him.
“Kavika? Can you hear me, Kavika?”
Strange nonsensical warbling noises assaulted him along with the light. But the light was dimming. His vision was clearing. He could make out shadows within the light, strange warbling shadows.
“Kavika?”
“
Gree
,” he replied, searching in vain for the universe of trees and the feeling of freedom.
“Kavika!”
“
Gree
.” White hot pain and warbling. Had he fallen from the trees? Was he on the ground?
“Oh, God,” came a different voice. “His mind is gone. What if...?”
“Don’t say it.”
He felt himself being shaken. Strong hands gripped his shoulder.
“Kavika!”
“What?”
Hands held his face as his vision cleared. The white universe had faded to a smear of grays. A man stood before him, a man who he’d known from before the pairing. It was someone who he’d swung through the air with... not trees, but something else, something...
“Pali,” he murmured.
“Yes. Yes!” The face glowed. “He’s going to be all right.”
“How’s the monkey?”
“Alert.”
“So now it’s time.”
“
Gree
.” The word was said, but it was outside of his head. And it saddened him. The
gree
was gone.
“Hurry now,” came a rough warble.
Then he was pressed into a dark tunnel. A number of loud
clicks
was followed by a
clang
as darkness sprang around him. Memories were coming to him: of people he knew, of things he did. They came in a jumble and made little sense, but he did know that they were his... and not the
gree
’s.
The he was propelled violently forward. His head sliced hard into water as bubbles soared around him. He almost took a breath, but something inside of him warned against it. He bit down on his lip to keep it from opening. But the
gree
struggled behind him. It hadn’t done the same. It struggled and roared into the water, but bindings tying them together kept it from lashing out.
Then hands grabbed him. He and the
gree
were propelled deeper and deeper. His head began to hurt with the pressure, but still they went. He had to breathe, but if he did he’d die and he didn’t want to die. He wanted to return to the land of... was it trees? Or was it nets? His mind spun with the idea of swinging from net to net above a sea of ships, the dull gray horizon never-changing.
They came to a cable as thick as a tree trunk. Using that as the anchor, he and the
gree
were pulled down and down and down. Handholds on the cable were used to propel them. Deeper. Deeper. The pressure in his head was intolerable.
His face scraped the cable as he bounced lower and lower. A block of orange paint momentarily captured his eye. In it was a number—169.
Then in a flash he knew that the
gree
was dead. He was overwhelmed by emotion. His eyes flooded with tears and without knowing it, he sobbed and in the sobbing, he let the water in. He coughed violently. His body convulsed. Fear and grief surged through him in a violent riptide of emotion. His vision turned black, and everything became dull. He coughed and inhaled the ocean, and his eyes shot wide as he realized that he’d ceased to move. A face in the water hung close to his own but it dissolved as his mind succumbed to the reality of death.
He fell into nothing.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
H
E CAME TO
slowly.
Everything hurt.
His chest felt as if a cargo container had fallen on it. His arms and legs ached. His head pounded so badly he had trouble keeping his eyes open. Even when he could, the world was nothing more than a silvery smear. Twin spikes of pain lived somewhere on his back. But the worst of it was inside. Emptiness. A space where something had been was now void.
Then he remembered everything.
The attack on the Corper ship.
The battle for revenge.
The escape.
The search for Spike.
The battle with the Boxers and the death of Donnie Wu.
Then his capture.
His pairing with the monkey.
Monkey-backing.
Gree
.
He remained silent for awhile as visions of tree-filled skies and monkeys hanging from the moon captivated him, filling him with the idea of what he’d had, what he could have been, what they could have been had they just been left alone. The ennui was debilitating. A heaviness settled on his chest and stayed there for a long while.
But like the way his muscles sometimes tingled with numbness after sleeping awkwardly, the heaviness and the longing faded, until the monkey was nothing more than a memory of what he once had—like the memory of a string of islands where his people once roamed, or the memory of his father, someone who still managed to touch him from the darkest corners of his mind when he least expected it.
Kavika tried to get up to a sitting position, but the effort defeated him. He tried again and again, until exhaustion finally took over, and he fell back and turned to his left. And there, on the table next to him, lay his
gree
, his monkey. Kavika smiled and stared at his dream, eventually falling into a deep, deep sleep.
“
P
UTITA
!
W
HAT HAVE
you been doing?”
Lopez-Larou skidded to a stop. Now back in the
Los Tiburones
section of the city, she’d been free and easy with herself. They had guards posted surreptitiously watching for Boxers, Pali Boys and any other citizen who might interlope. It was the one place she could let her guard down.
“Paco.” She used to call the fat old Mexican
sir
. Not just because he’d been a lieutenant of her father’s back in Sonora, but because he was someone she used to respect.
“Putita, Putita... why?”
Used to respect
. Calling her
Little Whore
did little to endear her. In fact, each time he said it was like loading a bullet into a gun. When the clip was full, she knew she was going to turn it back on him.
She gritted her teeth. “
Tio,
I’ve done nothing. Just a girl trying to be like her
padre
.”
“What you want to be like him for? Old and fat and...”
He let the last word drift, but she knew what he’d left off. They both did.
Dead
. It was a veiled threat. Check that. It was a bald threat.
“
Tio,
my father wasn’t fat. He couldn’t have been. I remember him being so much smaller than you.”
She watched the knuckles of his left fist whiten around the end of his armrest. Paco Braun sat on a cargo container, in the shade of an immense red and white umbrella. Like always, he wore a flower-patterned mumu. His bare feet were sunburned, and his naked torso bore what used to be a series of tattoos telling the story of a matador, his lust for love, and his demise on the horns of a bull, but now the images were nothing but blue blotches, stretched beyond recognition. She was reminded of the fat Mga Tao dancing on the stage. Paco’s face was lost in the shadow of the umbrella, but she didn’t need to look at it to know that he was puckered and frowning.
She reminded herself to dial it down. After all, even if they hated each other, he commanded and deserved respect.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around,
Tio
. I know you must have been worried. I should have told you where I was.” She bowed her head and kept her face neutral.
After a moment he said, “Your friends caused quite a stir with the monkey lovers. The Corps and Boxers have no love for them either. What are you trying to do, alienate everyone so that you’ll only have the fish for customers?”
“It was unfortunate what happened with the monkey lovers. I heard they were distraught.”
“Distraught!” Braun snorted. “They were insane about it. Like if someone stole Jesus from the Pope.”
“If there was a Pope,” she said.
“Yeah, that. But you weren’t involved in any of this, were you?”
“Was I seen?”
“Not that I hear, but some of the other
Tiburones
think you were there.”
“Tell you what,
Tio
. They can think in one hand and shit in the other, then ask them to tell you which one is holding something.”
Braun chuckled. “Your father used to say that. Maybe you are a little like him.”
“Maybe I am.” She looked around for his concubines, but didn’t see any. “Where are the Marys? Have they left you?”
“No. Mary See decided to taste too much of my wares. She’s on the outs. The other three Marys are helping her pack.”
Braun named all of his consorts Mary, after a girl he’d known before the plague, when he’d been young and had dreams of being an architect of the big buildings in Los Angeles.
“Can I get you something,
Tio
? I mean until they come back.”
She felt his eyes raking her skin, but took it without blinking.
Finally, “No. I’ll be fine.”
“Call me if I can help.” Before he could answer, she’d broken into a jog. Her place was two cargo ships over, far enough that he couldn’t get to her without making a big ruckus. Which suited her just fine. She opened the lock on her container, passed all the chems and equipment, then tossed herself onto her bed. She hadn’t slept much in the last few days. Kavika’s life-and-death struggles had kept her awake. Now that he showed every chance of surviving, she had to take a moment for herself. Plus, she needed more chits, which meant she needed more product. That Braun hadn’t asked her for what she owed was a godsend, and one that she didn’t imagine would happen again.
W
HEN
K
AVIKA NEXT
awoke, the monkey was gone from his thoughts. It had been there for so long, the loss of it was stark. Even so, it was only a monkey. The importance of it not being there was lost on him, but that was the first thing he’d thought about. Strange, for him to think about a monkey when there was so much else to worry about.
Then the totality of what had happened to him took over. He began to shake. It started first in his hands, and as he held them out, he watched it move to his arms.
He’d been blood raped. At the time, that had been the worst thing that he could think of. The very act was an assault on his liberty, his expression as a free citizen of the city, and a Pali Boy. To be blood raped was a reminder of how weak he was, how dispensable he was, and how capricious life had become.
But blood rape, for all of its evil, was nothing compared to monkey-backing. The forced pairing had been an assault on his very humanity, an affront to his ancestors. Forced pairing had made him into something completely different from whom he’d been. He’d tried to stop it, to chase after his sense of self. But try as he might, he’d been completely unable to find a way to retain it.
The monkey’s mind had taken control. A flash of him picking the fleas from the back of another monkey surged through him like an electric jolt. And the worst of it... the very worst of it was that he’d loved it.
Kavika bit his lip.
The new combined creation he’d become was something stronger, better. Not human and not monkey, but something other. Something—he bit his lip until it bled—
better
. And it was in that epiphany that his rage was born.
He tried to banish the memories, but the more he tried, the more the memories of the world of trees returned. Soon he found himself speaking the names of his friends; “
Pali Boy
,” he said, and “
Live Large.
” At first he spoke slowly, softly. But his voice grew in strength and confidence. With each repetition, his true self returned a little more.
He slid from his bed. His legs could barely hold him. They buckled twice, but each time he was able to catch himself against the side of the bed. Concentrating on keeping his legs under him, Kavika staggered, one foot in front of the other, towards the opposite bed, where the dead monkey lay. By the time he reached it, he was screaming his mantra.
Its eyes had turned milky. Its hair lay flat and smelled like sweet rotting death. Before he might have felt sorry for it, but not now—not fucking now. Now he only felt hatred and rage. Rage, all day long. Fucking, fucking rage, all fucking day long.
He raised his fists, then brought them down.
Thump—
smacking into the dead monkey’s flesh.
He screamed the name of Donnie Wu.
Thump!
He screamed the name of Spike.
Thump!
He screamed the name of his father. He screamed the name of every Pali Boy he knew, and then he screamed his own name. And having finally remembered his own name, he latched onto it and screamed it over the over, all the while hammering his fists into the monkey’s corpse.
And that’s how he was found.
Kaja and Mano didn’t stop him, and it was only when he finally slumped to the floor, exhausted and human, that Kaja approached him, lifted him from the floor and held him like a long lost friend who’d finally found his way home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
T
HREE DAYS LATER,
Ivanov let him out. Kavika had been ready after the first day, but the old Russian wanted to make sure he was fit enough to go, to protect himself should he desire to continue antagonizing the Boxers. Kavika had little desire to do so; all he wanted was to make sure his family was okay and find out what had happened to Spike.