Prologue-KOJO （ALEMAYEHU） #2
The night is warm and the stars are bright and my belly is full of roasted antelope.
I lie on the flat rock outside my hut, staring up at the sky while my body digests the meal.
The gathering ended an hour ago, the cubs sent to bed, the elders retreating to their quarters.
The village is quiet now, just the soft sounds of families preparing for sleep.
You are getting fat, my Bouda observes. All this eating and lying around. When the Queen names you First Guard, you will be too slow to protect her.
I am savoring the fruits of my labor. My Bouda laughs. You are savoring the fruits of the antelope’s labor. The antelope did all the work of growing that meat. You simply killed it.
I snort, and the sound turns into a laugh.
My Bouda has a point, but I refuse to admit it out loud.
The night air carries the scent of dying cookfires and frankincense, and somewhere in the distance, a nightbird calls to its mate.
My muscles loosen. My Ridge flattens against my back. This is what peace feels like.
Do you think the Queen will announce her decision tomorrow? my Bouda asks. I am tired of waiting. Tafari keeps strutting around like he has already been chosen, and it makes me want to bite his face off.
“You cannot bite Tafari’s face off. He is a clan brother.”
I did not say I would do it. I said I want to.
I close my eyes and let the warmth of the rock seep into my back.
Tomorrow, maybe, the Queen will call me to her hall and place her hand on my head and name me First Guard.
My life could finally have purpose beyond hunting and waiting.
I could finally feel like I am becoming the male I was meant to be.
The sound reaches me before my mind can identify it. Engines. Distant but approaching. The growl of vehicles climbing the mountain road that leads to our territory.
Poachers, my Bouda says, and the lazy warmth in his voice vanishes instantly. Get up. Now.
I am on my feet before the thought fully forms, my Ridge calcifying along my back as the spikes harden into bone blades. The village stirs around me. Other warriors emerge from their huts, noses lifted to catch the scent on the wind.
We know this dance. We have performed it a hundred times.
The humans come with their jeeps and their rifles and their arrogance.
They think they can take what is ours, and we let them believe it.
We let them taste victory, let them think they have already won.
Then we laugh, and they fall, and we feast on their fear before we finish them.
I move toward the Queen’s compound. Protocol demands that I join the perimeter defense, but something feels wrong tonight.
The engines sound different. More of them.
And my Bouda is pacing inside my head, restless in a way I have never felt before.
Go to the Queen, he urges. Forget the perimeter. Go to her now.
The first cackle erupts from the watchtower, Makeda’s voice splitting the night with that weaponized frequency that should drop any human within a hundred meters. I wait for the screams. The crash of bodies hitting earth. The satisfying chaos of our enemies destroying themselves.
Nothing. The engines keep coming.
They are not falling. My Bouda sounds scared. The cackle hit them and they did not fall. Something is very wrong. RUN.
I break into a sprint, my claws extending as I tear through the village toward the Queen’s hall.
Other warriors cackle as I pass, their overlapping frequencies filling the air with sound that should shatter human minds.
The engines roar closer. Headlights cut through the darkness at the edge of our territory.
The humans pour into the village. They wear devices on their heads I do not recognize, covering their ears and wrapping around their heads.
Our laughter hits them and dies against whatever protection they carry.
They raise weapons I have never seen before, rifles with barrels that glow faint blue in the darkness.
I see the Queen’s compound ahead. The door to her hall stands open, torchlight spilling out into the night.
Warriors converge from all directions, but the humans arrived first. They form a circle around the entrance, those glowing weapons raised and ready.
She stands in the doorway. My Queen, her Ridge fully extended, her eyes blazing with a fury that should make any enemy kneel.
On the far side of the circle, I see Zaki. My sister crouches in the shadows behind one of the storage huts, her claws extended, her body coiled to strike. She is hunting for an opening, the right moment to launch herself at the humans and tear them apart.
I am thirty meters away. I can make it. I can reach the Queen before they fire. I can throw myself between her and those weapons and buy Zaki the seconds she needs to attack.
FASTER, my Bouda screams. MOVE FASTER.
Zaki locks eyes with me across the chaos. I see the plan form between us without words. She will strike from the left. I will come from the right. We will hit them from both sides and rip them apart before they can fire.
I open my mouth and let my cackle loose at a frequency I have never reached, a sound that tears from somewhere deeper than my throat. Zaki’s voice joins mine, her royal frequency harmonizing with my warrior’s call. Together, our laughter should liquefy the brains of every human in the village.
The humans stagger. They clutch at their head devices. One of them drops to his knees. But they do not fall.
It is not working. My Bouda’s voice cracks with something I have never heard before. Fear. The cackle is not working. They have found a way to block it.
I am twenty meters away when the first rifle fires.
The pulse of blue light makes no sound. It moves faster than my eyes can track, a beam that crosses the distance between the rifle and the Queen in less than a heartbeat. It hits her chest. Her body jerks backward. The flesh of her torso separates from her bones in wet, spiraling ribbons.
“NO!” The word rips from my throat and Zaki’s at the same moment, our voices tangled together.
The Queen’s body comes apart. Not an explosion, but a peeling.
The flesh unravels from her frame like thread from a spool, layer after layer of muscle and organ and skin spiraling outward in ribbons that paint the walls of her hall in black and red.
Her Ridge stays intact the longest, those calcified spikes holding their shape even as everything else dissolves, and then they shatter into fragments that scatter across the sacred altar behind her.
What remains is not a body. A pile of wet ruin that was once the heart of our people.
I stop running.
My legs stop working. My Bouda goes silent. The screams around me fade to a distant roar, and all that is left is the place where my Queen stood and the smell of her blood mixing with the frankincense on her altar.
Zaki’s howl splits the night, a sound that is not a cackle but rawer, broken.
She launches herself at the nearest human, her claws extended, her face twisted into a mask of fury and grief.
She takes his throat before he can raise his weapon, but she is outnumbered.
Rifles and blue lights track her every movement.
ALEMAYEHU. My Bouda’s voice snaps me back. WE HAVE TO MOVE. WE HAVE TO GET ZAKI AND RUN.
I cannot move. The Queen is dead. Nothing but meat on the floor of her own hall.
SHE IS DEAD AND WE WILL BE DEAD TOO IF YOU DO NOT MOVE RIGHT NOW.
A rifle swings toward me, the barrel glowing blue.
My Bouda seizes control of my legs and throws me sideways as the pulse tears through the space where I stood.
I hit the ground rolling, and then I am up and running.
My body knows where to go even if my mind has stopped working.
Dodge between huts. Leap over fallen warriors. Find Zaki.
I find her surrounded. Four humans with glowing rifles, closing in from all sides. She crouches in the center of their circle, covered in blood that is not hers, her cackle pouring from her throat in a desperate frequency that does nothing.
“ZAKI!” I scream her name and change direction. I will throw myself into the circle. I will die beside my sister if that is what Fate demands. She sees me coming, and our gazes lock. I read the message there. Run, she mouths. Run, brother.
One of the humans raises his rifle toward me.
Zaki explodes into motion, not toward the humans, but toward the treeline behind her.
She crashes through the circle, taking a pulse to the shoulder that spins her sideways but does not stop her, and then she is gone.
Swallowed by the darkness of the forest.
RUN, my Bouda roars. NOW. BEFORE THEY RELOAD.
I run. Branches tear at my skin. Rocks slice my feet. The sounds of slaughter fade behind me, replaced by my own ragged breathing and the thunder of my heartbeat. I run until my lungs burn and my muscles scream and the night goes quiet.
The hillside overlooks the village, and from here I can see everything.
Fires spread from hut to hut, consuming homes we built, halls where we gathered, the altar where the Queen’s blood still stains the stone.
Humans move through the flames with their weapons glowing blue, masked faces turning toward any movement.
A figure breaks from the treeline on the opposite ridge. Zaki. I know her silhouette, the sharp angles of her Ridge, how she favors her wounded shoulder. She sees me across the burning valley. Our eyes meet.
I want to go to her, to cross the distance and hold my sister and grieve together for everything we have lost. But the flames rise, a wall of fire that cuts the valley in half, and she shakes her head. Survive, she mouths across the distance. Find me later. She vanishes into the night.