Busted Flush

“Hey, she followed me from camp to camp for eight years,” he said. His tone stayed light. It didn’t deceive Hei-lian. “We had some narrow escapes, sure. But I kept her with me. I kept her safe. People asked lots of times why I exposed her to that. The answer was: I’d never turn her over to the Man. Never.”

Intelligence agencies had long speculated that their relationship was not decently that of father and daughter. Weathers was a notorious womanizer, a male chauvinist as unapologetic as the 1960s revolutionaries he aped. But no one had turned up a whiff of incest. Even before Sprout’s interruption of their ménage à trois, Hei-lian had known the relationship was not incestuous. Tom was fanatically protective of Sprout. He was capable of many things—some, Hei-lian knew, quite dreadful. Harming his daughter in any way was simply not among them.

That vulnerability appealed to the yin in Hei-lian, her feminine side. But the yang knew it was a vulnerability.

“Living is obviously easier in a palace than in the bush,” she said. “But doesn’t it make her a more visible target?”

His smile was ugly. “Anybody makes a move on her gets to find out how they like orbit. Without a spacesuit.”

“But you can’t be always around. Especially with the war to liberate the Oil Rivers heating up.”

“She stays,” he said, like a door shutting.

Hei-lian felt the pressure of Lilith’s eyes. Don’t you dare pity me! she thought.

She made herself smile. “Whatever you say, lover.”

She lay back beside him. Tom stayed tense, staring at the ceiling.

Lilith leaned in to kiss his lips. She swept her hair back to give Hei-lian a clear view. Was it gloating? An invitation? Beneath a pang of resentment Hei-lian felt arousal stir. She almost resented that more than Lilith’s casually proprietary way with Hei-lian’s lover—and asset.

“I’m sure your life story is fascinating,” Lilith breathed. “I’d love for you to share it with me. I’d find that . . . exciting.”

Tom responded. Not the way either woman expected. He got up abruptly off the bed.

“I wanna show you something,” he said.

He went to a chest of drawers and opened the bottom one. The two women knelt naked at the edge of the bed to watch. The drawer was full of clean socks and underwear, neatly folded and placed by the palace staff. Great egalitarian Tom Weathers saw nothing incongruous in being waited on hand and foot by people of color like a colonialist of old, it seemed. Then again, neither did the president, nor his sister, nor for that matter any “revolutionary” leader Hei-lian knew of. And she knew them all.

Tom brought out what looked like nothing more than a roll of athletic socks. When he unrolled it a big peace medallion fell into his palm.

“Here.” He handed it to Lilith.

Her eyes went wide. By its obvious weight in the other woman’s palm Hei-lian guessed it was solid gold. At today’s prices Weathers had a young fortune stashed in his sock drawer.

“Your old medallion!” Lilith said. “I’ve read about it. You used it a lot in your early career. People theorized it served as a sort of focus for your powers. I’ve wondered what became of it.”

Tom shrugged. “I guess I just stopped needing it.”

“Didn’t it used to glow?” she asked, handing the golden peace sign back.

His face shut down briefly. “Used to,” he said. He rerolled the medallion in the sock.

“It just got dimmer and dimmer,” he said, putting it back. “Then it went out.”

He shut the drawer with a bang.

Wearing only an outsized Grateful Dead T-shirt of Tom’s, Sun Hei-lian padded into the suite’s darkened living room. He had wakened her, moaning in his sleep. Another of his nightmares. They seemed to be coming more often.

Nshombo and his retinue temporarily occupied a palace built by Mobutu Sese Seko, the longest-lasting Congolese dictator, who had named the country Zaire. A colossal new People’s Palace was being built in the heart of the former Kinshasa. Dr. Nshombo had no known vices. A vegan, he ate sparingly. He neither smoked nor drank. His personal quarters were ascetic in the extreme: a pallet, a lamp, a well-stocked bookshelf.

Yet while Alicia Nshombo enjoyed power’s perquisites quite visibly, even her extravagant tastes couldn’t account for the new palace’s sheer scale.

Hei-lian understood. The colonialists, like their feudal ancestors, had built their residences and administrative buildings in order to cow their subjects. Kitengi Nshombo built to cow the colonialists back.

Sitting on a sofa with legs tucked beneath her she switched on satellite TV. The first thing she saw was . . . herself, reporting from the Niger Delta swamp with the pale grass blowing about her legs and the pipeline on its scaffolding gleaming like bone in the background. Her face pleased her: quite well preserved. She could even see beauty of an austere kind. She might stay before the cameras for years yet, if her masters so decreed.