The Rosewater Redemption Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Tade Thompson

  Excerpt from The Last Astronaut copyright © 2019 by David Wellington

  Excerpt from Velocity Weapon copyright © 2019 by Megan E. O’Keefe

  Author photograph by Carla Roadnight

  Cover design by Charlotte Stroomer—LBBG

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10104

  orbitbooks.net

  First Edition: October 2019

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

  The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937525

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-44909-0 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-44911-3 (ebook)

  E3-20190920-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude to Redemption

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The Reprise

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Last Astronaut

  A Preview of Velocity Weapon

  By Tade Thompson

  Praise for Tade Thompson

  To Hunter.

  Middle children are the bestest!

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  Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five senses.

  William Blake,

  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  Prelude to Redemption

  Last Days

  I am the wrong person to tell this story, but nobody else is willing. The few who have all the facts, or at least more facts than I, have no interest in reliving it. I have no interest in reliving it, but I do want to tell the story, so I will. Some say information, like energy, can never truly be destroyed. I don’t know about that, I’m not omniscient. I do know that the edges of my reality are blurring, so I’d better tell this quick.

  I am the wrong person to tell this story because I am too close to it and not at all objective. I may even change some facts to make myself more relatable. If you can accept those caveats, then listen: my name is Oyin Da, and I’m here to tell you the beginning and the end.

  I’ve been chased about for most of my adolescence and all of my adult life. The government says I’m dangerous, and I am, if you think ideas are dangerous. A bullet is an idea.

  So is a shotgun. At times I wear a djellaba so people can’t know what time I am from.

  There is a problem with my time travel. Not that it isn’t working; it is. What’s problematic is the how. The guy who originated the machine, Conrad, he was… intelligent, but, from what I saw of his writing, deeply psychotic–I mean, what the hell does “hucfarlobes” mean? All Conrad’s papers are full of such nonsense words, neologisms and metonyms. No extrapolations by me, my father or the professor could change it into the Lijad. Not to mention the kind of miniaturisation required for my cyborg parts.

  We should start. There is no time to waste. And yet I’m wasting time right now. It’s not knowing where to start. So much has happened; so much is happening and so much is yet to happen. Rosewater is on the world stage, with the African Union debating what to do with it. It won’t be hard–they absorbed all of the Caribbean islands recently. Rosewater will be easy. Except nothing about Rosewater is easy or predictable. Yes, it has free icing sugar, but you pay for the cake. You do.

  I am Oyin Da, the improbable, the Bicycle Girl. I am an artist; history is my clay. Follow me closely. There will be turns, sudden shifts of perspective, hurricanes without warning.

  I am Oyin Da, the improbable, and these are the last days of Rosewater.

  Killing in Rosewater

  In 2068, because healing happens all the time now, instead of once a year, it is nigh-on impossible to kill anybody within Rosewater city limits, and my crew of four has been shooting this man for fifteen minutes, reloading, firing right into his brain, trying to destroy it so completely that when it regenerates, the person he was will no longer be, and the aliens can’t use the body as a container.

  “Wait,” I say. “Try a chem charge.”

  The skull is open, the face obliterated, but even so, it is growing back. Tolu places a charge in the middle cranial fossa and runs for cover. “Fire in the hole.”

  The blast is muted, but a chemical fire flows everywhere, and I know his brain cannot possibly survive that. We already have his ID chip.

  “Come on, before the constables arrive,” I say.

  They escape their way, and I fade into the xenosphere.

  Koriko means Grass

  She likes the mornings. She likes to hear the earthworms gently turning in the soil and the birds trying out their songs, and to feel the moistness of morni
ng dew. The sun is just over the horizon and the new brightness causes a surge in all the life forms that surround Alyssa, including the humans and her people, the Homians. She has slept outside again, and from the crystals on her body, tendrils have grown into the soil and branched, covering her with a burst of delicate, branching stems. She yawns and breaks it all off by stretching, then stands.

  From here she can see the Yemaja Valley, and the city growing out centrally and the sprawl on the periphery. The boundaries with Nigeria enforced by robot sentries and the tech-jacketed humans of the night shift.

  Where the biodome used to be, there is an airport. Adjacent to that, the Honeycomb, where Homians are managed.

  This is what she has always wanted–not the human part; her Homian self–a world unblighted by toxins and unbridled industry. There are no foreign drones in the air. The Nigerians have learned to stop sending them, too expensive to keep replacing after the numerous ganglia kept shooting them down.

  She is the city and the city is her. Wormwood’s nerves run up the walls of every structure, reticulated under the topsoil, in the river. Everything is hers, everything is her.

  Thus, she both feels and hears the bang of an explosion. Too far away from her body, but her consciousness moves into thoughtspace–into what the humans call xenosphere.

  What do they call me? Koriko, which means grass. They must call me something in order to worship me. I don’t know why. I never answer their prayers and I attend only to Homian business, but I hear them all the time. Some of them think of me as the city and call me Rosewater. There is some truth to that, although Wormwood is the reason the city exists in the first place. As I think this, Wormwood stirs, warming thoughts, affirmation of affection, but not for me. It is dreaming of my predecessor, Anthony, of its old, dead avatar. It preferred him, I think. For me there is silence.

  It’s a playground. Or was. A bomb crater, new, contains dead and damaged human children. Unexploded ordnance from the insurrection bombings, no doubt. The metal of the swings and slides is twisted, hot, smouldering. Sixteen children are wounded, and Alyssa heals them within minutes, before the distressed parents come around.

  Alyssa hears prayers, but she does not falter, her resolve untouched. She gives the instructions, and deep beneath the city, Wormwood stirs. The ground shifts and rumbles for the second time, and tendrils break free of the soil. They coil around the five dead children and take them inward, embracing Wormwood’s bosom, amid fierce, futile supplications from parents.

  Do they not know? Why do they ask? Why do they keep asking? Billions still wait on the Homian moon for an Earth host, and Alyssa-Koriko is their psychopomp.

  “Look to your own gods,” she says to those praying.

  She leaves her place of slumber to tend to the five.

  Limits

  Oyin Da watches Koriko walk away. She has to remind herself that every problem has a solution, to ward off hopelessness. She senses the same attitude from Tolu Eleja, who lurks beside her. Since she and Kaaro rescued him back in ’66, Tolu has taken to the resistance with gusto, untiring, effective against government agents, focused on the main objective, a good soldier. Unfortunately, Koriko presents a different situation from what anybody anticipated, and Tolu’s skills are not so impressive for the task at hand.

  Tolu says, “She is too powerful and unapologetic.”

  “I know,” says Oyin Da.

  “How will we—”

  “I don’t know,” says Oyin Da. “But I want us to test the limits of her ability. Let’s go.”

  Mafe

  The witness tells Aminat that the dead man was always going to die young.

  “His name was Jackson Mafe and he was a fool. I don’t care how patient you are, Jackson could piss you off. He was a bit… you know?” The witness points an index finger at his own temple, then circles the tip while raising his eyebrows. Aminat nods. Jackson was learning-impaired in some way. Go on.

  “Six a.m. on Lumumba Road, I’m setting up. I see Mafe march past, I say hello, he doesn’t. I shrug. A few minutes later, he walks by in the other direction, only he’s not walking. He’s marching, but not regular marching. What do you call it when you raise a boot really high? When you don’t bend the knee?”

  Goose-step.

  “Yeah, that’s right. He was goose-stepping.”

  Whatever the case, Mafe is stiff and cold now, frozen in the position he fell, wet from the sweet Rosewater morning dew, wearing the clothes people saw him in the day before, face somewhat peaceful, unlined and expressionless. He can’t have been dead long. The ghouls haven’t claimed him yet, and while stuck there he’s become a reanimate. You don’t see many of those any more. The Homians are fast to colonise any available body, sometimes mere moments after death. By the time Aminat has finished reviewing witness statements Mafe is a mass of uncoordinated twitching and his eyes are open. It seems to Aminat that his gaze is on her, accusing.

  She takes a contingent of detectives aside and orders them to arrest the suspects.

  “Why?” says one.

  Because that is your job, says Aminat, which provokes laughter in all. This dies when they see her stony face.

  Four arrested, one in the middle of a meal of abula, a handful of which he insists on bringing along because “prison food is rot”. Despite being handcuffed, he bites off a piece and smiles.

  Their ID scan shows multiple errors, as Aminat expects. They have government-issue civilian tags, but also military upgrades due to the war, and ghosted IDs, which the entire criminal class has. Aminat herself has a ghost ID, which she used when she was a fugitive during the insurrection.

  Before Aminat arrives at her office, the mayor calls.

  “Let ’em go,” he says.

  Let who go? Aminat plays stupid.

  “You know who I’m talking about. I have a lot to do today, and so do you. Stop wasting your time on war heroes.”

  War heroes? They bullied a vulnerable man to death. They made him—

  “Did they shoot a person in cold blood? Stab? Bayonet? Beat?”

  No.

  “Then release them, Aminat. Jesus.”

  This was not in the service of a… business enterprise.

  “Good bye, Aminat.”

  Aminat gives the necessary order, but authorises arthrodrone surveillance off the books, and has the data streamed to her subdermal. She follows all four intermittently all day. The pathologists say Mafe has walked away, not repossessed, just standard reanimate. Koriko must be too busy.

  Later, she steals out of her house using the ghost ID Bad Fish made for her. She feels apart from her lover, but in some way thinks there is time to fix the relationship, while also feeling the emotional equivalent of rolling down the side of a mountain just ahead of an avalanche.

  Not Really Asleep

  Kaaro wakes as soon as Aminat leaves the house, torn from a dream about scraping his cheek against rough-textured adobe plaster, forced conscious by the severing of their psychic link. He does not get up, does not even stir. He knows what comes next. She will be gone for a couple of hours and return sore and bruised, but will not speak of it, and Kaaro will not look inside her mind for the answer.

  His phone glows, and at first he thinks it’s a message from Aminat, but it’s a software update notification for his subdermal phone, which he accepts and switches to night mode.

  He turns over and goes back to sleep.

  Fishy Business

  An important part of Bad Fish’s world disappears, and he stops his research into non-contiguous network connections to investigate.

  He takes off the connection helm and blinks, adjusting his eyes to the light of his workroom. Three Yahoo-yahoos are asleep on the floor in various poses, one with his mouth open. Hanging on the wall is a connection suit Bad Fish is working on–almost finished. He slides to one of his five workstations, missing a leg by inches, then calls up the details in hologram.

  Bad Fish has a map of all the ID chips, with people of int
erest highlighted.

  Kaaro is one of the top five; Bad Fish checks him assiduously every day.

  Kaaro’s ID just disappeared.

  This could mean many things. Software error, entering a hardened facility, or even death.

  Bad Fish refreshes his system, brings hard focus on Rosewater, but Kaaro does not reappear. He looks for Aminat, and finds her in ghost form. He calls up surveillance and other footage around her ghost, no mean feat since she is cyber-invisible in that form, and there are other crude ghosts around her. The Yahoo-yahoo closest to him farts, and Bad Fish kicks him.

  He rubs his chin. Aminat looks to be in the middle of some kind of operation, and to contact her now might compromise things. He could call Kaaro, but the asshole might be part of the operation, even though he is “retired”. Bad Fish runs a minute check on his hardware instead, battling unease the whole time.

  Bad Smell

  I know something is wrong, but I’m not sure what. I sit staring at the wall with pinned information on all the players. My last trip to 2067 felt odd, mostly because I have been to that exact moment before, and I remember it differently from what I saw this time. Is that a problem of memory, or is the machine drifting into other, alternate dimensions?

  My eyes ache, and I rub them, then take in the board again.

  Kaaro. Aminat. Jack Jacques. Hannah Jacques. Alyssa, or Koriko. Taiwo. Femi Alaagomeji. Bad Fish. Wormwood. Rosewater.

  A vortex swirls around all of them, the future of humankind in the balance. Perhaps I am the only person who can make sense of what needs to be done and when. I hope.

  I rip off all the papers and throw them up in the air, then I gather them, stack them together at random and pin them up in a new order, hoping this will jog something loose, triggering new inspiration.

  I bang on the wall twice. My room is like the inside of a water tank, which it probably was at some point. All screens dark; the emanations distract my thinking. A port opens and a hand holds a cup of steaming coffee, my fifth in the last hour alone. I burn my tongue, but barely notice. Something acid churns in my belly–apparently man cannot live on coffee alone. Neither can woman.