She laughed humourlessly, and it was deeper than before, raspier, sugar and grit. ‘The clock is destroyed. I don’t know what time is any more.’
I held my glass to hers and we clinked. ‘Welcome to House of Aten, where the sun never sets.’
Ma’at took a sip of liquor, winced, but kept my gaze. Her eyes pierced through me as they had when I’d been on stage, and I felt like the spotlight was on me now in a different way, shining through my skin so that my soul was exposed to her. I scared myself by not minding it. She ran a finger from my forehead, to my nose, to my lips, a soft trail that made me feel delicate. She traced the shape of my lips and I felt myself relax.
When she whispered, her breath was laced with alcohol, and I inhaled deeply, tipsy with her proximity. ‘So when do you get to rest, Nefertiti?’
Ma’at held my face and my eyes closed, automatically; she kissed my lids gently and I saw stars. That night she offered herself up as a shield so I could be soft, be myself, be loved like a precious thing. She embraced all of me, kissed my jagged scar. That night House of Aten became home to a new freedom.
It was funny that I believed that I was her fantasy without it ever occurring to me that she was mine.
When an intruder entered my room the next morning, bypassing the gated security, I blamed myself. I should have known. It was Mattie’s partner. When the Duat officer dragged me from my bed and hurled me against the wall and told me to put my hands up and not to move, I didn’t move, but I did chuckle. I looked at Mattie as she pointed her gun at me, still in my robe, smelling like my soap, my cream, me. It was poetic, really. I had done this to myself.
‘Well done,’ the officer said to Mattie. ‘This must have been difficult for you.’
‘Oh, you have no idea,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’ Her gaze didn’t move from mine, heavy and inscrutable, when only a few hours ago it had been soft with lust. ‘I have this handled.’
The officer whistled low, impressed. ‘You sure? Let me do it. Please. I told them the mission was aborted, like you told me to, so this can just be our victory. But please let me do it. I’ve been dying to kill this bitch. Do we have to do it with a gun? She’s so creative. No reason we shouldn’t be too.’ The officer was a chatterbox. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. I had six guns in my quarters and not one of them was accessible to me right then. Typical. Even if I had grabbed the knife under my pillow, it would have been useless. I should have killed her when I had the chance. Last night had felt real, and safe, and sweet, and that is exactly why I should have known it was a lie. People like me, with power like mine, do not get to have real, and safe, and sweet. I deserved this. I was weak.
Mattie looked me in the eye, in the same way she did last night, those same fingers that had caressed me curled around the trigger.
‘I said I have this handled.’
‘Ugh. You get to do all the fun shit.’
I closed my eyes. I saw Akhen’s face. Bastet’s face. All the girls’ faces.
And then I saw stars.
The bang resonated through me . . . without a bullet.
I opened my eyes again to see the officer bleeding over my pristine wood flooring. It would be a bitch to get out.
Mattie was out of breath. She looked up at me with wide, wild, beautiful eyes and her gun still pointed.
‘Do we have people to clean this up or is this the kind of thing we do ourselves?
Naleli
I was hot. Like, sweltering hot. Not the kind of hot that the guys described other girls in the school as. Not the kind of hot that made boys’ eyes heavy and their voices drop a number of octaves. No, I was hot as in baking, the long sleeves of my shirt soaking up the sun and trapping all the warmth between the material and my skin. The skinny jeans that clung to my legs were quickly becoming a device of self-flagellation. Was I really sacrificing myself to the gods of adolescent social acceptance? I was a heathen! Why was I at an end-of-school pool party that encompassed everything I had spent my entire school life apostatising?
Alas, my ‘best friend’， Letsha, had dragged me here because she said it would be ‘fun’， and she had a new swimsuit she wanted to ‘try out’ and ‘you can’t just read your life away, Naleli’。 Thanks to her, I was now going to die of heatstroke. It was summer in Lesotho, mid-November, and the sun was beating down with that specific kind of ferocity that only happened a few days before heavy rainfall, as if it was determined to fight back the inevitability of the clouds.
‘You know you could just, like . . . take your clothes off, right?’ Letsha said, as she tilted her chin into the air and let out a curling plume of smoke from her mouth, her voice tight and muted from the inhalation of a pretty fat-looking blunt. She was sat on the squat brick wall next to me, considerably cooler in the black cut-out one-piece swimsuit that displayed all her soft curves.