Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Author:Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

NGOZI

Stars painted the edges of Ngozi’s vision. The engineer’s grip on his neck was viselike. She crashed him into a wall, pinned his shoulder blade, clamped him there. He couldn’t move or breathe.

Then there was Yekini suddenly between them, her elbow over Tuoyo’s outstretched arms, prying her hands off.

“Let … him … go,” she was saying, but was quickly cut off by screams from outside.

Ngozi first felt the coldness at his feet, something tickling against his socks. He shrieked, thought it was a creeping reptile or cockroach at first, but then there was the sound of rushing.

Water poured into the closet from underneath the door, and pooled around all their boots in a cold embrace. Outside, full panic mode had taken hold, and many began to bang on the door.

“Shit, shit, shit,” said Tuoyo, splashing backward, releasing Ngozi. She grabbed her handheld. “They’ve opened the doors!” She tapped at it some more. “They’re doing it in small waves to regulate the pressure. We don’t have time!”

“Listen, listen!” Yekini was in Ngozi’s face now, her breath just as panicky as his. “You’re not special. They don’t care about you. You’re just as expendable as we are. So, you will do this. You will do it, or we all die. All of us.”

She guided him toward the opening, and this time, Ngozi did not struggle or hesitate. Instead, he received the GripAnything gloves and pulled them over his shaky hands. Taken over by some kind of autopilot, neither here nor himself. Tuoyo handed him Yekini’s boots—“Suction grip, don’t fall,” she said—and he wore them in zombie-like movements.

The water came thick and fast, and brought with it a green-gray sheen and the odor of sick left unattended too long. The panic outside the closet rocketed—the banging became more insistent. The noises faded, slowly, and Ngozi was elsewhere, back to when he was a small child on this tower.

He didn’t know they called here Lowers back then. He didn’t even know what the towers were called. All he knew was that they had lived somewhere, and then that place was no more, and they had to move here. He and his sister, Lotachukwu, and a flood of many others like them, braving the journey over sea and spray foam, paying bribes to be smuggled into this new place. Too many bodies, packed illegally into a tiny residential unit. Restless, irritable, aggressive. He remembered little of it. But the images were imprinted in his mind, haunting him over the years. People shitting in the same spots where they rolled up their clothes for pillows. He and Lota, skinny as sugar cane, sucking on orange rinds for sustenance. The constant beating of his heart—the same way it did now—next to a hundred other similar hearts, each one living every day in the fear that they would be discovered and thrown back out to the mercy of the sea.

She used to be bigger than him, back then, Lota. Taller, reedy, a perfect candidate for that sport—basketball, was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.