Gravity is a constant. But in the moments before a total solar eclipse, even gravity feels unsure of itself.
I lay flat on the corrugated zinc roof, the heat of the metal searing through my heavy denim overalls. My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic rhythm that matched the rising panic in the street below.
To the south, the mob was screaming at our front shutters, a tidal wave of superstition crashing against our defenses.
But directly below me, in the narrow, garbage-strewn alley to the north, a different kind of threat was moving.
Razor.
He moved like a disjointed puppet. From my vantage point, looking down through the gap between the roof gutter and the pharmacy wall, I could see the top of his head. He wasn't wearing his usual muscle shirt and gold chains. He wore a heavy, grease-stained mechanic's jacket that looked two sizes too big, as if he were trying to armor himself against the world.
He stopped at the back door of the shop the heavy steel door that protected The Lab.
He didn't attack the door immediately. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal. I could hear him muttering, his voice drifting up through the stagnant, darkening air.
"Go away," Razor whispered. It was a sound of pure, distilled exhaustion. "Lucas... go away. I paid the priest. I paid the juju man. Why you still dey here?"
He turned his head sharply to the left, staring at an empty pile of crates.
"I see you," he hissed at the nothingness. "You stand there with the blood on your head. You want the money? I no get the money again! The Bookman take am!"
He was unraveling. The photo I had sent the image of his younger self standing next to his victim had done its work. It had dragged his past into the present, and his mind, brittle from years of violence and kola nut abuse, had fractured.
But a fractured man is dangerous. He held a pair of massive, iron bolt cutters. The jaws were rusted but thick.
"Kill the boy," Razor muttered, steeling himself. "Kill the wizard. If the wizard die, the ghost go die."
He raised the bolt cutters.
"Collins," I whispered into my handheld radio, keeping my voice barely audible. "Status."
Fifty meters away, perched invisibly on top of the pharmacy's water tank, Collins lay prone with a pair of binoculars.
"He is crying, Nkem," Collins' voice crackled in my ear. "Water di comot for yi eye. But he hold the cutter tight."
"Is Officer Abah in position?"
"He is at the junction. Waiting for the signal."
"Hold," I said. "Let him commit."
I shifted my position on the roof. My hand hovered over the control board I had bolted to the rafters.
I had three switches.
Switch 1: Main Array (The Halogens).
Switch 2: Mortuary (Remote Trigger).
Switch 3: Perimeter Defense.
I rested my finger on Switch 3.
I had anticipated a breach. A padlock is only a delay. To truly secure the Lab, I had turned the door itself into a weapon.
Inside the Lab, sitting on a shelf above the door, was the Capacitor Bank from the Thunder Stick project ten massive 330-volt electrolytic capacitors scavenged from disposable cameras and old flash units, wired in parallel.
I had connected the positive lead to the steel door frame. I had connected the negative lead to a copper plate buried in the mud directly in front of the door.
The door frame was now the positive terminal. The wet ground Razor was standing on was the negative terminal.
If he touched the metal frame while standing in the mud... he would close the circuit.
Razor took a breath. He sniffed, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He opened the jaws of the bolt cutters. He stepped forward. To get leverage on the heavy padlock, he placed his left hand on the steel door jamb to steady himself.
"Goodbye, Lucas," Razor whispered.
He squeezed the handles.
"Now," I said.
I flipped Switch 3.
CLICK.
CRACK!
It wasn't a spark. It was a thunderclap contained in a bottle.
Three thousand volts of stored static charge dumped instantly.
The blue arc was visible even in the daylight. It jumped from the frame, through Razor's hand, across his chest, down his legs, and into the mud.
Razor didn't scream. The human larynx cannot work when the muscles are locked in a tetanic seizure.
He went rigid. His back arched backward in an impossible curve. He vibrated, a blur of motion, as the electricity overrode every nerve impulse in his body.
ZZZZZ-POP!
The capacitor bank discharged in a split second.
Razor was thrown backward as if he had been hit by a truck. He flew three meters through the air, his limbs flailing, and landed with a wet, heavy thud in a pile of rotting cardboard and mud.
The bolt cutters clattered to the ground, smoking.
Razor lay there. He was twitching violently, his eyes rolled back into his head, foam gathering at the corners of his mouth. He wasn't dead the amperage was low, designed to stun, not stop the heart but his nervous system had just been rebooted hard.
"Target Down," I whispered. "Collins, signal the Blue Team."
From the shadows of the alley entrance, three figures emerged.
They didn't run. They walked with the grim purpose of the law.
Leading them was Officer Abah. He was young, his uniform crisp, his face set in a hard line. He was the one honest cop I had found or rather, the one cop who hated the Bookman more than he loved money.
He walked up to the twitching form of Razor. He kicked the bolt cutters away.
He knelt down. He didn't look at me on the roof. He knew I was there, but he played his part perfectly.
He reached into Razor's jacket.
He pulled out a weapon.
Not a gun.
A long, rusted, heavy tire iron. The metal was pitted with age, but the weight was undeniable.
It was the murder weapon. The same iron bar Razor had used to crack Lucas's skull in 1988. In his paranoia, believing the ghost was coming for him, Razor had gone back to the swamp where he buried it and dug it up. He thought it would protect him. Instead, it condemned him.
Officer Abah held the iron up. He checked it against the photo in his other hand.
"Albert Che," Abah announced to the semi-conscious thug. "You are under arrest for the murder of Lucas Nua. You have the right to remain silent, but I think you have said enough."
He slapped the handcuffs on Razor's wrists. Click-click.
Razor groaned. His eyes fluttered open. He looked up at the sky. He saw the sun dying. He saw the police.
"The ghost..." Razor gargled, his voice a broken rasp. "The ghost brought the lightning..."
"No ghost," Abah said, hauling him to his feet. "Just the law."
They dragged him away. The Bookman's Wolf, the terror of Commercial Avenue, was dragged through the mud, his heels leaving furrows in the dirt. He was broken. Not by magic, but by a 10-year-old boy who understood psychology and capacitors.
I watched them go.
I exhaled.
One threat down.
Five thousand to go.
I crawled back to the front of the roof.
The situation below had deteriorated.
The sky was no longer grey. It was a deep, bruising purple. The temperature had plummeted fifteen degrees in twenty minutes. The sudden cold created a pressure differential that whipped the wind into a frenzy. Dust devils swirled in the street, dancing like spirits.
The crowd was terrified.
"It is cold!" a woman screamed, clutching her arms. "The sun is dead! He has killed the sun!"
"Nyongo! Nyongo!" The chant was louder now, a rhythmic, stomping beat that shook the building.
< Atmospheric Anomaly Detected: > Gemini warned. < Shadow Bands appearing. >
I looked at the white-washed wall of the pharmacy across the street.
They were there.
Elusive, snake-like ripples of light and dark that race across the ground just before totality. They are caused by the turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere refracting the thin sliver of sunlight.
To a physicist, they are fluid dynamics.
To a terrified mob, they are monsters.
"Snakes!" a man shouted, pointing at the wall. "Look! The sky is weeping snakes!"
"The Witch is summoning them!" another screamed. "Break the door! Burn the shop before the snakes eat us!"
The mob surged.
They hit the shutters. BOOM.
The metal groaned. The lock strained.
"Papa!" I shouted into the radio. "They are breaching! Are you clear of the door?"
"I am at the breaker panel!" Tashi's voice yelled back. "Liyen is holding the line! The women are singing, Nkem! They are singing louder than the stones!"
I could hear it. Through the vents, a sound drifted up.
The sound of forty women singing "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah."
It was defiant. It was powerful. It was the only thing holding the chaos at bay.
The sun was a fingernail now. A tiny, blinding sliver.
Through my welding goggles, I saw the moon's mountains breaking up the last edge of the sun. Points of light sparkled on the rim. Baily's Beads.
Then, the Diamond Ring.
A single, brilliant explosion of light on the edge of the black disk. It hung there for a second, a perfect, celestial jewel.
And then, it vanished.
11:12 AM: Totality
The world fell into a hole.
It didn't just get dark. The universe turned inside out.
The sky became a black velvet dome. The stars popped out Mercury and Venus shining with a terrifying, piercing brightness right next to the sun.
And the sun...
The sun was a black hole.
Around it, the Corona exploded. A ghostly, wispy halo of pearlescent white plasma, stretching out into the void like the tentacles of a spirit.
It was the most beautiful, terrifying thing a human being could see.
The silence that hit the city was absolute.
The mob stopped screaming. The pounding on the door stopped. The chanting stopped.
Five thousand people looked up.
And felt, in their bones, that they were nothing.
The generators of the rich in Up Station sputtered and died as the cold air choked their carburetors.
The streetlights of Bamenda were dead.
The city was a tomb.
I stood up on the roof. I took off my goggles.
It was dark. Darker than night, because there was no moon to reflect the sun. Just the ghostly glow of the corona and the harsh stars.
I looked at the mob below. They were huddled together, clutching each other. The anger was gone, replaced by a primal dread. They were children in the dark, waiting for a monster.
"The Bookman took your light," I whispered to the wind. "He told you to fear."
I put my hand on Switch 1. The Master Array.
"But I am Tashi's Son," I said. "And we sell solutions."
I keyed the radio.
"Papa. IGNITE."
I slammed the levers forward.