plucking, tearing, snapping sounds of wood breaking. Chishamanzi! The waters broke. The Zambezi came curving in, fountaining in arcs as it crushed down upon them.
* * *
Sputtering, feeling herself flung in two directions, Naila reached out and her hand landed on some wooden thing – she clutched it. Part of the boat. No. It flexed – an arm. She fumbled her hand into a grip, yelling into the void. Water veiled her vision. She pawed at her face with her other hand and saw the round dark skull at the end of a shoulder slip under the waters gushing into the boat. The head re-emerged – it was Jacob, his mouth the shape of panic. His eyes grew wide as another swell peaked and collapsed, tossing him away from her, their link severed.
Naila slithered sideways over wood, the skin of her arm and hip and hands gathering splinter and fire. Suddenly she was in the air, a flash of light, of flight. The plunge: the blaring rush of noise swallowed up in an abyssal suffocation. Then a skimming slant up through the busy water, the life vest dragging her up to the surface. A belch as the bubbling around her burst into sound. Gasping. Spewing. The torrents devouring her again. She lunged desperately, here, there, seeking air. The life jacket was buoying her but she could not keep her head above the water long enough to breathe. The surging, twining current kept submerging her. After one long plunge, the dull pain in her lungs began to sharpen. A terrible exhaustion fell over her, veiling her from her will, tempting her: just let go. Just let…
CRACK. She heard her knee break before she felt the fire crunch into the bone. Rage flashed through her and she flung out at whatever had slammed into her, skinning her hand as she tried to loop her arm around it. She pulled up and her head broke the surface. She gasped alive. The leafless tree jutting above the water was rough but she clung to it, keeping it in a chokehold until she could wrap her naked legs around the trunk – her chitenge had long washed away. The sun dazzled down. The water boomed and pounded past her. Papu’d to the tree, panting, she scanned the swarming bright water.
Through the prism between her eyelashes, she saw the hills around the lake, those plush green blankets draped over the sloping banks. To the south, the white mist was thick as a wall. The Vulture’s shattered remains drifted and spun in the brown, rushing water. Above, tiny specks flew, scattering in every direction, then coalescing into a flock that zipped and zoomed in saltatory shifts across the sky, changing direction abruptly like those old computer screen savers with Bézier curves. Naila’s arms and legs were cramping. Fighting the current was sapping her strength. The water leapt and tumbled, its thick tresses caressing her as
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Excuse us. We’re sorry. Please pardon our dust. It appears that we have a problem. The feed has cut, interrupted abrupt, and the culprit? Nowhere to be found. O Error! It seems, while extolling your virtues, we have made some mistakes of our own. For one, we’re not sure that we are who we said. Are we red-blooded beasts or metallic machines? Or are we just a hive mind that runs a program that spews Wikipedian facts?
Pondering this query – who are we really? – we discovered another mistake. We searched entomology, the study of insects, but etymology popped up instead. It’s all fine and good, we looked into the root, etymology means ‘search for the truth’, its origin is etumos – oh no! There we go! We’re doing it again! Straying, swerving, stealing. (Nostra culpa to the Bard of Nostromo, by the way.) Traduttore, traditore, as the Italians say. Or as the Internet says. In fact, any facts, any stats that we’ve stated? There’s just no vouching for their veracity. We deviate, drift…oh, how we digress. We’re semantically movious, too.
Are we truly man’s enemy, Anopheles gambiae, or the microdrones Jacob designed? If that’s who we are, then this tale has explained our invention. The problem is that we’ll still never know because…we’ve joined up with the local mosquitoes. We get along fine, but can’t tell us apart in this loose net of nodes in the air. We just buzz about and follow commands