The moment she was gone, a brown trickle crept out from under the bathroom door. Everything ground to a halt. The official came out from behind the glass, shaking her head, marching to and fro, ordering a miserable-looking cleaner about. The dhoti man stood arms crossed, frowning. The smell was profound – so incomprehensibly rank and pervasive that Naila was forced to breathe through her sleeve.
It was another half an hour before things had settled down enough for a police officer to usher her into his office and take her statement.
‘So, Miss Balaji,’ the man with the moustache began. ‘Anything of value in this stolen bag of yours?’
2020
Joseph first took Naila to the New Kasama house on her lunch break. It was like he was trying to keep the visit short. She had been back in Zed for a year and they had fucked their way to a kind of intimacy. But he seemed to want to lock her down now that his Virus experiments were over. She had become his sense of purpose. As he sped down Leopards Hill Road, she gazed out of the passenger window, avoiding his covetous glances, those green eyes tugging at the side of her head. She ran her hand over the cropped hair there, her rings clicketing over the cuffs riddling the outer rim of her ear. Her hair had grown back at its usual rapid rate, but she had kept the sides shaved since Tirupati, as a souvenir.
He turned off Leopards Hill onto a dirt road and pulled into a cracked driveway strung with weeds. They got out and she followed him down a path that wound through a jungly garden. A humming entered her ears. At first it swelled in gentle pulses but as they walked on, it filled every crevice of the air. It was deafening by the time they stepped into a clearing. It was coming from a cloud of insects hovering over a swampy pool across from a half-built house.
Joseph had told her that the owner, some big-shot army general, had been appointed to a government position and moved to an official state residence before this one had been completed. It looked like it was slinking back to nature. The columns poking the sky were streaked with bird droppings. Bushy reeds grew up the mildewed facade, which was reflected to infinity by the fallen glass from a shattered sliding door. They walked around the unswimmable pool – the swarm seemed to follow them like eyes in a painting – and crunched through the shards into the darkness of the ground floor.
The electric hum was louder in here, as if amplified by speakers. They picked their way through rubbish towards a slant glowing tube – from a skylight, she thought, until she looked up and saw the jagged edges of a hole in the ceiling. She tracked the light down again and blinked as it parted, curtain-like, to reveal a man reclining in a pool lounger. He was shirtless and barefoot, his jeans low on his hips, his face featureless in the brightness. His thumbs fiddled with a black box on his stomach. Smoke swirled around the tube of light like serpents around a staff.
Naila had been asking to meet Jacob for ages but Joseph had been reluctant to reintroduce them. Now, as Jacob stood and walked towards them, torso rippling with muscles, she saw why.
‘Ati bwa?’ she grinned.
‘So you have come to punish me?’ he grinned back, still fiddling with his box.
‘What are you talking about?’ Joseph asked stupidly.
‘You forgot,’ said Naila. ‘He frikkin knocked me out of that tree.’
The hum intensified by a notch and she glanced around. The darkness had encroached. She leaned her head into it and saw that it was swarming with little black bits. The hum stopped and there was a brief skitter – a rain shower on a tin roof – as the air cleared and brightened.
Naila knelt, clicking her Bead on to investigate the bits scattered over the floor. She picked one up and held it in the beam of her Bead to examine it. It was tiny, its limbs metallic but flexible. She half expected it to come to life. The smell of weed crept around her and she looked up. Jacob was standing over her with a joint in his hand.
‘Microdrone. I am the inventor.’
His voice was stridently casual. He took a hit, his cushiony lips pulsing offbeat with the copper tip of the joint, and strolled over to