Nakasi walked listlessly down the streets, taking in the fruits of her betrayal. Everywhere, the town was scarred. Blood stained the sidewalks. Mauve girls gallivanted through the roads, laughing and smashing windows, kicking around little bits of debris or gorging themselves from overturned refrigerators, talking with their mouths open and spilling scraps everywhere. Five Mauves carried a one-eyed warrior above them, cheering raucously and running faster than was safe. Balancing on their shoulders, the one-eyed Mauve proudly waved a blood-stained machete in the air.
Mauve officers, or sarges, marched purposefully around the administrative buildings, some of them reeling off orders to lesser Mauves or conversing with soldiers of the CSF. At the house where the mayor had once been, triangular crimson flags flew from hastily constructed flagpoles, lit from beneath by a work light.
The CSF had marked their territory in their own ways. Chunky armored cars waited outside the biggest buildings, and soldiers jogged in formation down the right side of the road, carrying spray-cans of black and green, the colors of the CSF. On top of the hospital, a CSF officer looked down on the town with a contented smile.
Outside the inner district, every cruelty of conquest was being forced on the people of Bonde Wakulima. Under a pale street lamp, a fence which looked like it had once penned in animals now enclosed a mass of weeping women. A perimeter of Mauves watched over them, jeering and spitting at them or just menacing them with their clean, gleaming blades. A cluster of Mauves herded two more women into the fence, egging them on with threats, curses and flashes of deadly metal. This was not the only civilian corral, nor was it the biggest.
Elsewhere, CSF fighters made a pile of captured native weapons while their man-fighter sorted them into bins, counting them off on a data pad. On the old construction site, where the militia had once practiced shooting, a blood-stained wooden board marked where some unlucky woman had been messily executed. Nearby, a truck emptied corpses into a gaping pit. Bodies fell in a trash heap to rot like beast carcasses.
Most sinister of all, there were no men. Aside from the one male in the CSF, it looked as if men did not exist. In the first few hours of the conquest, Nakasi had seen the men of Bonde Wakulima being rounded up and locked into a warehouse. Beyond that, their fates were a mystery.
Nakasi had once called herself a bandit, but now she saw that she and these monstrous women were a world apart.
"Slingshot," said a hard voice.
Nakasi kept walking.
"Slingshot! I'm talking to you."
Nakasi turned, aiming a razor-sharp stare at the braided-haired Mauve sarge behind her. "My name is not Slingshot," she said coldly. "I am Nakasi, and don't you dare get it wrong."
"You're not Nakasi anymore. If Mauve gives you a name, you use it. Now come with me. Salt wants you."
"I'm in with CSF, and I don't know any Salt."
"You're about to. Now get over here before I make you."
Mumbling a curse, Nakasi followed the sarge back into the center of town, back into the police station she remembered from before she made that fateful, terrible choice. The building had been defaced, its blue marquee painted over with green, its surface ravaged by bullets that couldn't have all been stray shots. Through the doorway, from which the doors had been ripped out, two CSF women and a dozen Mauve lieutenants with hip-length hair stood in a circle around a worn wooden desk. On top of that desk stood Mauve.
But it wasn't Mauve. Mauve had been killed by a militia fighter. This was a different woman, taller, thinner and missing her right ring finger, but just as old and grim as her predecessor. One of the ceiling lights shined directly behind her head, shrouding her in a blinding, dusty halo. She stared down at Nakasi with predatory hate, and the rest of the room followed her gaze. Their eyes felt like targeting lasers on her skin.
