humming and swaying. Naila ran towards the steps, where she met Joseph and Matha. Jacob was still crouched at the edge of the stage. His eyes met hers just as he jumped down into the mass of people.
* * *
Some said that if the SAC security forces hadn’t arrived with their bullying guns, their shouts and their shoves, the Kalingalinga rally would have stayed peaceful. Respectful. No one even knew what they were there to protest! Others said that Matha Mwamba was the one who had disturbed the peace, incited the violence, that she had unzipped her bomber jacket and bared her breasts like Mama Chikamoneka. They swore that, right before she sent The Weepers back into the crowd – their wrists locked in front of them, demanding to be arrested – Matha had said: ‘Burn it down.’
Naila’s feet hit the ground just as it began to tremble. For a moment, she thought it was an earthquake, like the one The Change had brought in 2017. But the vibration was not coming from below. It was blasting from above – surpassing, total. The crowd was immersed in it, sounds were lost in it, the air was glitching with it. People stopped running and pushing and stood where they were, shocked by its sheer volume. Then their Beads shut off, all of them, all at once. Everyone stood in the blaring dark, their hands over their ears, their eyes looking up.
Naila saw the night sky vanish. It was so sudden that she gasped. It was like the stars had fallen to the earth, blossoms shaken off by a mighty wind. Or like a great black sack had swept across the sky and caught them up. Or like the sky had always been an onyx scroll with white Braille letters, and it had just swiftly rolled up tight. Something was up there above them in the sky, moving over the face of the crowd, blocking out the heavens. All around was the swell of that fierce, quivering vibration. A dark immensity lowered.
A wheezing grunt, a shriek of hinges, a crash of thunder – more than one – five or six in succession, some near, some far. The earth bucked the crowd off its feet. Naila landed on a woman, who scrambled out from under her and grabbed her son, who had toppled nearby with the impact. The gushing vibration abruptly ceased. The thing hovering above them had settled onto the ground – the slams had been its feet, hundreds of yards apart.
Then there was light. A blinding cone of it blasted down from the darkness above. The light captured the upturned faces of the crowd, their fallen bodies in unwieldy tangles. Human sounds started to come back to life: people called out to each other, men moaned in their bruising and wounding, babies cried, grandmothers shouted, women said tuleya, mwebantu! Car alarms wailed, honked, beeped, accompanied by the smash and tinkle of broken windows.
Then a new sound. At first Naila thought it was the congregants again, humming their way through the crowd. But this was closer to a ringing, the electric sound of pylons growing steadily unbearable. It looked like smoke was pouring through the air, cutting in and out of the cone of light. People shouted and the mother next to Naila pointed. Her boy nodded. Mulilo, he said. Fire.
But there was no burning smell, no searing heat, no flame. The smoke’s syrupy sweep through the cone of light reminded Naila of a starling murmuration. It swung around, its ringing sound drawing near, then far, flooding thick, spiralling wide. Its outer edge swept past her and she saw tiny buzzing bits within it. Not smoke, microdrones. She heard the mother say it. Udzudzu.
Naila felt the cumulative touch of them on her face and neck – a whispering feeling, as if a furry wind were passing by. Then she felt the gentle needling. A dozen twinges, a hundred, a thousand, each no more painful than a normal mosquito bite. The swarm – they were Jacob’s Moskeetoze, she was sure of it, the ones he’d sold to the government – had landed upon the crowd and begun to puncture them.
In and out of the blueblindingwhite cone of light, people ran and stumbled. Their clothes grew black under the swarm, as if turning to cinder. The boy beside Naila grew hairy with drones. His mother tried beating them off, but they bounced right back, or onto her instead. Naila cried out, for Jacob,