CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I know you’re hiding in there,” Maurie said.
She banged on the metal work shed’s siding. Pascaline gave her a glare through the glass door and returned her focus to the expanded comm screen. These modular offices fit on the back of a truck. Maurie had bought dozens of them. Their metal roofs shone in the morning light like spilled silver beads scattered all the way from the base station to the top of the construction zone. They even had their own, very low-capacity, solar and battery installation on top. Sadly, it was insufficient to run an air conditioner.
A long snake’s hiss attempted to distract Maurie, but she didn’t have time for Mami-Wata’s nonsense today. The raging headache wasn’t enough to make her eyes water, quite, so each less distracting symptom was going to be treated with the same ruthless contempt.
“Pascaline, you brat.” Maurie raised her voice to make absolutely certain her cousin would hear it through any mild sound dampening the thin walls and door might provide. “I need you to approve the level-two build plans. We can’t keep regrading the route indefinitely. At some point it has got to be good enough. And I need to order more concrete if you don’t like the positioning for the pylons I went ahead and approved for you. We need decisions yesterday!”
A cough lodged in Maurie’s throat, stopping her from continuing to yell. The morning fog encircled the mountain’s upper slopes and seemed thicker in places. A whiff of it did make her eyes water. Even wet, half-dead snake shouldn’t stink that badly. She might need to go back to the last medicine regime that had allowed a lot of auditory hallucinations but only infrequent visual waking fever dreams.
The car accidents from when she’d swerved off the roadway to avoid hitting massive snakes weren’t that bad. Discovering that no one else at the scenes had seen the snakes had triggered her request to readjust her meds. But these side effects weren’t better. That smell was foul. She could switch back and make Pascaline drive more often. And really? A stink hallucination? The medication warning lists had not included phantom smells.
Maurie concentrated and took another breath. The air stopped tasting quite so foul. That’s it. Mind over matter. Maybe she could stay with these meds. She turned to glare at the fog. There weren’t any coils in that thick gray mist. It was completely normal for the mountain’s drop-offs to make some parts of the sky look like bands of blinding whiteness. The scrub bushes freckling the upper slopes moved in the wind like the scale-speckled skin of a giant boa sliding deeper under a boulder in search of the earth’s heat on this cool mountain morning. Just a trick of the eye, she told herself.
“I said, ‘I’m busy, and I’ll get to it when I get to it,’ Maurie.” Pascaline slammed the metal-framed clear door for emphasis. “It would help if some people would stop interrupting me constantly.” Pascaline scowled and failed to meet Maurie’s eyes. The screen behind her displayed a solitaire game with a lot of new high scores. “Give me a few minutes to work in peace, and maybe I’d be done already?”
“Look,” Maurie said, “I get that it’s tough to be making these calls, but there’s no one else. We can ask Uncle Chummy for some help, okay?”
“Right,” Pascaline said. “Do you really think I haven’t tried that?”
Maurie thought she could smell rotting snake roadkill mixed with freshly laid blacktop in the air now. Not fair! She hadn’t even hit the ghost snake the second time. She’d swerved and had significant auto repair shop bills to show for it. No, Mami-Wata, not today. Focus. This morning is about Uncle Chummy’s project and Pascaline’s need for someone to hold her hand and tell her it is okay to make some freaking decisions already.
“I don’t know,” Maurie said with forced calm. “Did you ask Uncle Chummy?”
“Yes,” Pascaline hissed. “I did. And I couldn’t get through thanks to his assistants. His assistants. Can you believe that?”
The ground wiggled in the lift-and-drop feel of a snake writhing underfoot. Maurie ignored it.
“Assistants,” Pascaline repeated. “I could only talk with his assistants! And you are not to call him ‘Uncle’ to the TCGers. Not ever. Just Chummy. Everyone in TCG is supposed to have no idea Chummy is related to us. One of the assistants figured out the family connection and read me the riot act for a single use of the title ‘Uncle.’ He thinks it’s a big, big problem. But, I, unlike some people, am doing the extra work and am in the process of taking care of it.”
“How?” Maurie tried to keep the suspicion out of her voice, but the clouds kept distracting her.
“I introduced him to Adamou, of course. The Bakweri have a special knack for handling foreigners. Did you know that this mountainside was never occupied by colonialists or cross-desert invaders? This despite other tribes trying to sell it a few times to undercut the Bakweri. And a particularly bold squadron of pirates sending up a ground force of slaver-sailors to try to take it.”
“Living on the slopes of a volcano with a tendency to erupt on a timeline convenient to the Bakweri has nothing at all do to with that history, I’m sure.”
“Fako looks out for his own.” Pascaline smiled and made a bow toward the higher of the twin peaks not visible through the thickening fog. “Good Fako.”
“Are we part of Fako’s own now?” Maurie rubbed her eyes to wipe away the sense of the clouds thickening around them. “We might still be outsiders.” They are clouds, damn it. They are not coils.
“We should be so lucky as to get swallowed up in magma,” Pascaline said. “Chummy is going to get fired when this project fails. And it’s going to fail, because the launcher pylons…I just don’t know. The numbers aren’t right yet. So, fine, yell at me, it’s really going to help.” Pascaline reopened the shed’s door as if she intended to go back inside and slam it in Maurie’s face.
Maurie tried not to react when the mountainside gave a panicked death gasp and the ever-present clouds circled around like enormous boa coils.
Pascaline ran out of the shed. She tore the door off in her hurry and tossed the flimsy thing to the side. “Go!” she yelled. “What are you waiting for?”
Mami-Wata’s wide-eyed face appeared in the mist. The spirit in her woman-snake guise waved panic-stricken coils and mouthed, “Run!”
Pascaline turned back. She grabbed Maurie’s arm and dragged her over to the vehicle. She paused with a finger over the Jeep’s power button and looked up the site’s only access road. Pascaline’s horror-filled face mirrored Mami-Wata’s. The rough construction vehicle trail ran sharply upslope and wrapped out of sight around the mountain before, eventually, it met up with a turn down around a half kilometer further on.
Pascaline threw herself back out of the vehicle. Maurie followed. They dropped to the ground, and with the encouragement of another rumble, lay flat in the dirt and crawled under the vehicle.
“‘Expect some rumbles,’ Adamou said,” Pascaline yelled. “‘Some rumbles’! I’ll some rumble him!”
“Oh, thank G—”
Pascaline pressed a dirty hand over Maurie’s mouth. “Not on the mountain.”
Oh, for Mami-Wata’s sake! “That was going to be a prayer, not a curse,” Maurie said.
“I don’t care what it wasn’t,” Pascaline said, “I don’t want to piss off the spirits while we are in the middle of an eruption.”
The ground stopped moving.
The scent of, yes, sulfur, not burning snakes, hung heavy around the work site. Nothing fell from the sky. So, it wasn’t going to be a big enough eruption to kill them all and put Pascaline out of Maurie’s misery.
She took slow, deep breaths to control her rage. It was not appropriate to strangle the project’s technical lead. Not appropriate.
“Adamou predicted this, you say?” Maurie asked.
“Yeah, of course. And I canceled all on-site work upslope of Buea’s elevation to make sure nobody got hurt in the rumbles. You’d think that’d mean I’d get to be alone up at this site since it’s above the line, but, no, you had to come pester me during the morning eruption event.”
They both crawled out from under the Jeep. Pascaline dusted herself off and gave a distrustful glance up the mountain. “I don’t know if he predicted all of that. We should go find out how much got destroyed.”
“Maybe if we’d been building on schedule, we would have had some stuff in place to get only partially damaged instead of utterly destroyed in the warehouse. Better luck next time,” Maurie said. “I’m sure it’s slipped your mind that most of the lengths of maglev track and cement and rebar and all the rest are in downslope warehouses or still mounded in construction yards at the Limbe depot. All behind schedule, thanks to you. I’ll let you tell the Bakweri and Adamou,” she added.
“Every single one of our warehouses has a top-of-the-line mudslide barrier, and everything that needs to stay dry is either under a roof or heavy tarps. So, you could say, ‘Thank you, Tech Lead, your requirements—those ones that all the foremen whined about—just saved us from a potential total loss of build materials.’ But, sure, instead you can keep complaining about the maglev rail build timeline. Fine, whatever,” Pascaline said. “I’ll quit and go to work as a barista at Kilimanjaro. You can tell Adamou that.”
Maurie blinked at her cousin. “You stood him up on a date again, didn’t you? You got busy studying the project details again and forgot you had a date, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t say that.” Pascaline would’ve made a very good snake woman. She had the hiss down to a science.
“Didn’t deny it either,” Maurie noted.
A familiar ringtone sounded from inside the shack. Pascaline looked the other way, so Maurie stalked inside and answered Adamou’s call.
“Well, you didn’t kill us with your pet volcano god yet, witchy priest man,” she said.
Adamou squinted at her behind a thickly fogged helmet visor and replied with something unintelligible.
Maurie had a momentary pang of pity for him. “Pascaline is fine. She’s avoiding you.”
He made a gesture that Maurie had no trouble interpreting as Put Pascaline on. “I said she was avoiding you. And if she goes to extreme measures, I’m getting stranded at this work site. I have another migraine. I don’t want to have to walk down to the next work site with all the sulfur smoke making my lungs feel super mystical and choked up.”
Adamou made another unintelligible comment.
“She did stand you up, didn’t she?” Maurie asked.
Adamou stopped moving.
“That’d be a ‘yes,’ then.” She grinned at him. “Don’t take it personally, she does it all the time. I bet she lost track of time and forgot you existed until the volcano reminded her of the existence of the parts of reality outside of launch equations.”
Pascaline’s hand descended from the top of the comm and shut the call off.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said. “Adamou’s weather report for the day said, and I quote, ‘Mild tremors for up to a half hour followed by a moderate chance of steam and toxic gases at upper reaches. Heavy rainfall and downslope flooding likely by afternoon.’ If that was mild, I want to be far out of the way for moderate.”
Pascaline drove. Maurie took slow, deep breaths. She ignored Mami-Wata’s repeat appearances in the cloud line and urgent gestures to get down the mountain faster.
She needed to add breath masks to the list of gear they provided to the construction crews working on the upper slopes, and maybe some helmets. She’d been hoping to install the shorter of the TCG advisors’ proposed rail line lengths. But with Pascaline being unwilling to make decisions quickly, Maurie—as project manager—needed to be ready for installation of the tech designs that used the whole of the mountainside for the maglev rail.
A longer rail meant more time for the vehicle to be thrown by forces energetically paid for with geothermal energy instead of from onboard fuel. She decided to continue the construction on all the additional geothermal plants. They were probably overbuilding, but better to have more power and not risk giving Douala rolling brownouts. As far as the launch was concerned, the more kinetic energy transfer that happened while on the ground (or the elevated rail) the better for their mass cost equation.
When the Jeep whipped around a curve, they broke through a cloud bank, and fat raindrops began falling on the dirt road.
Pascaline grunted irritation and picked up speed as if she could outrun the sky.