it wasn’t Chinese nor another tattoo. It was a queue of drones, thirty or so, lined up along her vertebrae, perched there, plugged in, or drinking. Mai gasped.
Naila turned and her eyes swam into view, vague with sex. Sunrise spread behind her so she was backlit and glowing. The man panted urgently, out of view but for the jeans garrotting his calves. As she moved, Naila kept her head turned over her shoulder, riding blind, a smile curling her nostril. She seemed to know that she was being watched. But Naila’s eyes were hazy, as if behind clouded glass, as if some part of her were locked inside a private room, through which she was delicately rummaging, seeking her pleasure.
She shuddered. The lake trembled. Mai heard a groan and turned away from the lovers. But the sound was too broad and low to be human. The approach of the swarm? No. The sound was vibrating her bare feet through the wood. The hoofbeat of water trotting to a gallop. Mai rushed to the lee of the Vulture. She craned her head towards the familiar thin grey curve on the horizon. It was not there.
‘The dam!’
A wall of twisting mist rose where it had been, where it should be.
‘It’s gone!’
Naila was suddenly beside Mai, a chitenge wrapped around her, tucked under her armpits, her skin beaming out a humid pulse. Mai recoiled – Naila was still practically haloed with sex but her eyes were switchblades glinting in the morning haze. No fear, this one. The men crowded in behind them now, both in jeans and bare-chested, rank with sleep and sweat. Which one had been under Naila’s shoving buttocks just a moment ago? Mai couldn’t tell. They all leaned over the side of the boat, tense, concentrating on the smoke in the distance.
‘But – there was no warning, no alarm, nothing.’
Mai felt the tug, the urging strain of the boat under her feet. She looked down over the edge. The speed of the water was visible, frothy darts and pleats in the brown cascade.
‘The anchor!’ she shouted. ‘It will not hold!’ She raced up the staircase to the pilot house.
* * *
Instead of causing a simple malfunction, the drones had blocked the sluices completely. The waters had risen and tumbled over the dam. Beneath the boat, Nyami Nyami was tossing his whirlwind hair, arching his spiny necks. The Great Zambezi was flooding. Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The Dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau, the flat top of Manda Hill, would become an island…
‘We need to get off the boat!’
‘Can we even get to the shore?’
They yelled to each other, pointing uselessly. Dawn fanned her golden fingers. A mockery, that blank brightness above the rising chaos. The sound of the water was growing louder by the second, thundering, unharnessed. Was it a victory? Or a havoc? They had heard no sirens, received no panicked announcements over the radio or over their Beads screaming SABOTAGE!
The Vulture’s engines came to life: a jerk and a rumbling under their feet. Mai in her pilot house gestured for them to put on life jackets. Joseph dug the boxy vests out from under a bench. They shrugged them on and sat, the excitement in their eyes edged with triumph and fear. The boat began to rock, knocking back and forth indecisively. They felt friendly sprays of water against their bare backs, gentle blurbles spilling up through the cracks in the deck, rivulets fleeing over their feet.
The engines purred, then tantrummed over the roaring water. The racket rose and rose, the boat shaking as if it might explode. Another jolt as Mai set the windlass to pull up the anchor. The buzz below yawned down and ended in a low boom, as if something had plunged to the lake bed. Things grew quieter: the engines had stopped. Then the feeling of an earthquake, slow and liquid and rolling – with the anchor released, the accelerating current was dragging at the Vulture. It groaned and tilted heavily.
Gravity swung sideways. They stumbled to their feet. The boat lurched roughly in the other direction with a heaving, consequential thrust. They fell, flung by the bucking pitch of the deck. Their hands grabbed for anything within reach, anything to right the world. They skidded and tripped. Their mouths opened and closed in the great roar, fish out of water. Then another fierce lurch, a sheer sideways shove. A great straining and all around, the