So Long Been Dreaming by Nalo Hopkinson Read Free Book Online Page A

found me. “Cut it!”
    I moved close to him, felt his breath on my cheeks, smelled his sweat. We had the same smell now. That brought me back for a moment. “What’s your name, tell me your name,” I pleaded, wiping my blood off his stomach.
    A stream of gibberish, a hundred tangled languages, gestures from around the world, from sequoias, bald eagles, deep-sea divers, hostages, and nuns, all broke out of me and I was nobody, flailing inside a tree. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me like an hysterical woman who could be jerked back to reality.
    “We have a job to do, remember?”
    I found Renee and held on. Twice ten thousand years of history wouldn’t swallow me.
    “I didn’t screw myself.” He stopped shaking me. Even in my anger, I could taste his best self. “I want to hear your name.”
    “All the fucked up things that happened to you aren’t my fault, Renee.”
    “I know that.”
    “For years, you don’t even let me touch you.” His grip on my shoulder softened. “And now in the middle of a job . . . you come on so strong. . . .”
    I dragged him down in the dirt. It smelled of us, of lovemaking. “I just want to know your name, hear you say it.”
    “I lost my name after Juba . . . somewhere in the goddamned desert.” He rubbed his hands against sweaty pants. “We don’t have names, causes, just a price tag. We’re gig sluts now. Not freedom fighters like in Juba, just terrorists for hire.”
    “Gig sluts?” I got a face full of sticky spider web and clawed it away. “Are you saying we’re not committed to anything?”
    “For a long time now.” He spit web from his lips also. “From the Juba fiasco on, I did every crazy revenge thing you wanted.”
    “You don’t think we’re going to make it today, do you?” Inside the tree was getting claustrophobic.
    “What difference if we do?” He stood up. “It just goes on and on. . . .”
    “Yes, yes, but it doesn’t have to.” I crawled over to my knapsack, to the griot Mission, a praise song to life. “You may be pointless. I am not.”
    “Oh, yeah? You’re fine now?”
    “On top of the world.” I couldn’t tell who was talking anymore. Axala, Renee, an angry tree. . . .
    “When you lost yourself before. . . .” He picked up his bag. “The amnesia thing after Juba, after they . . . after they. . . .” He couldn’t say what they had done to me in Juba.
    “It’s not your fault,” I murmured, sucking mucous down my throat and scratching my nose. “Let’s get out of this hole. Do the job. I can’t breathe.”
    He blocked my way. “In Juba when they jumped you, I hid in the back of the plant, where they’d stashed the stolen weapons. Listening. I didn’t do anything!”
    “What could you do?”
    “They had guns, six of them. But I didn’t even. . . .”
    I tried to wriggle past him. “So?”
    “Don’t interrupt me, let me say this!”
    My mouth clamped shut.
    “You never let me say this.” He clutched at several stringy vines.
    “Say it.” I set my face hard to listen to what Renee didn’t want to hear from him.
    He was spread-eagled against the vine mass, silhouetted by pink twilight. “They had you. I was afraid. I should have done . . . anything. But I didn’t want them on me too. I thought, please god, don’t let her tell them I’m here, don’t let them find me. You were screaming and screaming, but you told them nothing, then they gagged you, and I prayed, don’t let them hurt me. Praying not for you, still just about me.”
    The scars on my breasts and thighs throbbed with old pain, but I couldn’t see Juba, the story he told. Renee was suddenly desperate. She wanted to know. I balled up my fist and pounded his chest. “Tell me what I forgot.”
    “I can’t,” he whispered, fighting tears.
    “You’re all the memory I’ve got.”
    “I don’t know what they did.” He hung in the web of vines.
    “Tell me what you know or I swear to god, I’ll blow us up now.” I pointed my pistol at the