Our Hearts. Chapter Eight. The Return

Red clay dust, kicked up by the worn tires of the old bus that rattled agonizingly over every rut, seeped through the dried-out window cracks, settling on skin, hair, and fabric in a viscous, suffocating layer that left the taste of burnt iron on the lips.

Imani stepped off onto the scorching shoulder of the road while the sun, having passed its zenith, still mercilessly scorched the stiff stalks of elephant grass along the way. Fine sand, dry as gunpowder, immediately packed into her sandals, burning the soles of her feet. She adjusted the hem of her light dress, using sharp slaps to knock the terracotta powder from the folds of the fabric, and for a second pressed a damp palm to her neck—where sticky perspiration pulsed beneath her thin skin.

The news had preceded her. Rumors in Katanga travel faster than radio waves—they flow like invisible subterranean rivers between villages, alongside the drivers of passing trucks, alongside the tart smell of dried cassava from street vendors, and the bare feet of girls running after sparse transport. Even at the hilly pass, passengers in the bus had begun whispering, passing the words down the line: in the night, mercenaries from the Israeli mine had raided the WHO mobile camp. They took a black plastic bag from the morgue. With a dead body. And they took the white doctor. Alive. Meanwhile, the government army soldiers had stood quietly aside, limply lowering the barrels of their assault rifles.

Imani crossed the territory of the humanitarian mission, leaving the dry, hoarse calls of the guards at the gate unanswered. The air in the camp felt thick, poisoned by the corrosive smell of soot, sour old sweat, and the sharp, nostril-burning stench of formalin wafting from the gaping maws of the medical tents.

The FARDC captain was sitting on an overturned wooden ammo crate in the thin, shifting shade of a canvas awning. He was lazily fanning himself with a crumpled topographic map whose paper edges had long since frayed into dust, but upon seeing the young woman walking straight toward him, he frowned and rose to his feet heavily, with a dull grunt.

“You let them take him. Leo Gonzales, the American,” Imani said immediately, as if cutting off any avenue of retreat.

Her voice sounded quiet, even, with a frightening calmness, but it harbored that dense, dry threat that makes men’s shoulders involuntarily turn to stone.

“I know. Armed men entered a UN facility, took a man, and your soldiers left their weapons on safety. Why are you doing nothing?”

The captain pushed his sweat-soaked, faded beret to the back of his head, exposing a forehead covered in oily sheen. He cast a long, irritated, sticky glance over Imani, struggling to guess her status.

“Go on your way, woman,” he muttered, hiding his eyes behind a thick veil of indifference. “These are matters for the army command and diplomats. I am spared the necessity of explaining my subordinates’ actions to every local.”

Imani took a short step forward, gathered the hem of her dress to bypass the rusty barbs of torn wire underfoot, and looked him straight in the face—unflinchingly, piercing right through him:

“You will be explaining your orders to the people who pay your salary when this American disappears without a trace. How do you plan to get him back?”

Her sharp voice forced the dead silence of the camp to part. The flap of the laboratory tent fluttered, and Lukala Mbuyi and Rémi Gaillard stepped out into the scorching air.

The Frenchman, rubbing his inflamed eyes, red from chronic sleep deprivation, stopped halfway. His disheveled appearance and crumpled lab coat, covered in ingrained stains of chlorhexidine and blood after several days in the field hospital, betrayed extreme exhaustion—that threshold beyond which the body moves purely by inertia.

“Imani?” Rémi blinked, doubting his own eyesight for a second. He shifted his gaze from her terracotta-dust-covered dress to her face, instantly recognizing the features of the girl from the stuffy, tobacco-soaked bar “Le Copacabana” in Kinshasa. “What are you… What are you doing here? How did you even get here?”

Imani ignored his presence. Her brown eyes with their yellow rims continued to drill into the FARDC captain.

“Why did you stand aside when they took him away?” she repeated, hammering out each word like stones dropping into an empty well.

Lukala took a step forward, raising open palms and placing himself between her and the heavy-set military man.

“Calm down, Imani, I beg you,” the Congolese doctor tried to speak softly, though his own face looked grayish, parched by anxiety. “I am Lukala. We have already contacted the general staff in Kinshasa and the WHO representative office. We reported it to the consulate. They promised to resolve the issue through official channels. The IC Waze company is a major legal player; they won’t provoke an international scandal over one biologist.”

He tried to offer a weak smile, but the corners of his lips only twitched in a nervous tic.

“Leo will be fine. They simply need his opinion on the strain.”

Imani gave Lukala a long, scrutinizing look. Then she shifted her eyes to Rémi. In her silence lay a bottomless depth of astonishment—astonishment at how sincerely these people believed in phone calls, headquarters, and stamped official papers. The capital remained endlessly far away. Here, among the scorching, heat-bleeding hills of Haut-Katanga, all legality ended exactly where the towers with halogen floodlights and rows of barbed wire began.

She turned around, smoothly adjusting the strap of the light bag on her shoulder, and walked away from the camp, leaving the doctors in a sticky, suffocating silence.

She passed the sanitary cordon—a yellow ribbon sagging in the shimmering heat haze—and headed toward the village of Bata Kolé itself.

The settlement lived its usual, monotonous, sluggish life. Women rhythmically pounded dry cassava in massive wooden mortars, and these dull thuds resembled the measured heartbeat of the earth itself; dove-gray, bitter smoke wafted above clay hearths, settling on the tongue with the taste of burnt leaves. Imani walked confidently, navigating the labyrinth of narrow, trodden alleys until she reached the most massive structure on the outskirts. A high fence of porous gray cinder blocks, massive metal gates, and a roof of corrugated iron searing in the sun.

By the wicket gate, sitting on a low plastic chair, was a young guy in faded camouflage pants, holding a worn Kalashnikov assault rifle on his lap. Seeing Imani, he tensed up. His fingers reflexively gripped the warm wooden handguard, but upon recognizing her face, he relaxed his shoulders. The guy stood up silently, and the gate flap, shedding flakes of peeling paint, opened with a drawn-out creak, letting her into the courtyard.

The fence hid a spacious lot sheltered by thick shade. Beneath the broad canopy of an old, spreading mango tree, three men were cleaning weapons, having laid out the matte-gleaming bolt carrier parts and oilers on an oil-stained tarp. The air smelled thickly of gun lubricant and heated metal.

Imani stopped in the middle of the yard, smoothing the fabric of her dress over her hips with sweaty palms.

“Call Ilunga,” she said, addressing the nearest of the men.

He raised his head, nodded, and disappeared into the cool twilight of the house. A minute later, Ilunga stepped out onto the porch. He wore loose army trousers and a gray t-shirt; damp, matted hair at his temples and water droplets on his collarbones indicated he had just been washing up. He descended the creaky wooden steps and, with a short, commanding motion of his chin, signaled his men to withdraw to the far gate.

“Hello, Imani,” his voice sounded even, carrying that drawn-out, fatalistic intonation with which one speaks of meeting the inevitable.

“You know they took Leo,” she declared bluntly, bypassing the greeting once again.

“Yes. My men saw their vehicles out on the night highway.”

Imani took a step toward him. Between them remained a meter of dry air vibrating from the heat.

“He must be brought back. I need him.”

Ilunga fell silent. His gaze slowly slid over her left arm. On the dark, velvety skin of her wrist dimly gleamed a copper hoop—thin, heavily etched with parallel grooved cuts. The “emblematic” hoop of the Ngoy clan elders. Ilunga knew all too well the weight and significance of this metal to the locals.

Imani caught his gaze. She raised her hand unhurriedly and ostentatiously, with a light, defiant pressure, rotated the bracelet with her fingers, letting the copper flash in the sun, before looking her husband straight in the eyes:

“You asked me to find someone from the WHO. I went to Kinshasa. I found someone. Now you must return him to me.”

Ilunga calmly slipped his hands into his pockets. But a muscle rolled like a mound along his jawline.

“I talked to the soldiers from the camp guard,” he began hollowly, drawing out his words. “For a couple packs of cigarettes, they blurt out everything. They said your doctor lunged at their commander himself. He provoked the mercenaries. Picked a fight with a man holding an assault rifle.”

Imani frowned slightly. This contradicted the image of Leo she had built in her mind. He was a doctor, accustomed to calculating risks. A cautious man.

“Maybe he wanted to be taken?” Ilunga continued.

“Why? What is the point of that?”

“I don’t know. Did he ask you about the mine when you met in the capital?”

“We talked about other things. What makes you think that?”

Ilunga remained silent. He turned, climbed heavily onto the porch, and disappeared behind the door. He returned a few minutes later, clutching two plastic water bottles in his broad palms. Their sides were covered in a thick, prickly web of icy condensation, and transparent drops ran swiftly down his dark fingers.

He held one bottle out to Imani.

“You need to cool down,” he remarked, watching as she drank greedily, almost choking as she latched onto the narrow neck. “The road was long. You can stay here. Your room is free, it’s clean.”

The icy water burned her parched, dust-coated throat. Imani lowered the bottle. A cold drop, refracting the sun’s rays, broke away from the ribbed plastic and fell onto her wrist, exactly onto the scorching copper bracelet.

“And then what?” she asked. “Are we just going to sit and wait until they kill him?”

Ilunga looked somewhere past her head, at the dense, dark-green crowns of the trees beyond the fence.

“At the mine, right at the edge of their territory, stands an outbuilding,” he began quieter, almost dropping to a whisper. “It sits flush against the precipice, right over the old exhausted quarry. We don’t know what they’ve set up inside. But the white mercenaries go there every day. And exclusively whites. Locals aren’t allowed anywhere near it.”

He glanced at Imani, tilting his head slightly:

“An older woman—by all appearances, she leads them. And two others. If they are accompanied by guards, the guards stay back. That barrack is located in a blind spot. There are no stationary towers there, only the ‘Egoza’ razor wire fencing and a ‘Danger! Keep Out!’ sign.”

Imani listened to him, looking at him point-blank. Every detail instantly, with geometric precision, aligned in her head into a clear, practical plan.

“Go on.”

“If Gonzales is taken there,” Ilunga traced the outline of the structure in the air with a rough finger, “we will have a chance. My guys know a hidden path along the very sheer face of the quarry. We can approach the outbuilding from below, from the side of the stone cliff. From there, a person can be pulled out unnoticed by the guards at the gates.”

“Alright,” Imani nodded. Her fingers, white from tension, squeezed the bottle. “I’m staying.”

Ilunga took a sip. A faint, bitter smirk surfaced on his thin lips.

“Did you speak with the elders upon arrival?”

Imani cut him off harshly:

“I came for something else.”

Ilunga accepted her answer silently, without unnecessary questions. In a union forged by the will of others, borders had long been established that both preferred not to cross.

“Alright,” he nodded. “That is your business. Go inside the house. It’s not so hot there—the fan is on… Everything is just as it was.”

He had already turned toward the doorway, intending to return to his men, but stopped and threw over his shoulder:

“If you need food, clothes, or communication—tell me. I’ll arrange everything.”

Imani watched him go. This harsh, choppy promise lacked warmth, but she could feel the cold-blooded, fundamental reliability of a man accustomed to keeping his word.

She turned and walked toward the house, feeling on her skin how the icy drop of water on her left wrist was gradually warming up, absorbing the heat of her own body.

The room on the second floor of the house where she had once lived met her with stale, stagnant air—small, scrubbed clean, with a window overlooking the courtyard. Everything remained as before: the narrow, spartan bed with its crisp white sheet; a simple wooden chair, a small table, a clay water jug. Even a bowl of cassava, carefully covered with a linen napkin, sat in its usual place. The walls were freshly whitewashed, and on the wall, above the headboard of the bed, hung an old crucifix, darkened by time and covered with a thin layer of dust. Next to it was an ebony carving familiar to Imani from her earliest childhood: small, rounded, with huge eyes, an all-seeing gaze, and thin arms reverently pressed to its chest. Ilunga’s mother had called it the “keeper of the wells.”

Imani set her bag on the plank floor. She placed the plastic bottle of well water on the table. She sank onto the edge of the bed, feeling the springs creak softly under her weight.

The bracelet on her arm caught a ray of light from the window opening, blazing with a blinding copper fire. Parallel lines. Punched dots between them. Mother. Grandmother. Moist, fertile earth.

Imani closed her eyes.

Behind her closed eyelids, Leo appeared before her. This vision came from that twilight, dangerous border zone between sleep and reality, where the body’s memory proves sharper and more honest than the mind. His face, painted by the colored glints of stained glass. His hand—with its copper bracelet—reaching out to her in the semi-darkness of the church. His voice, with a slight rasp: “Why did you delete your number?” His heart—she heard its rhythm, perceiving the vibration not so much with her ears as with the very bone, the temporal bone pressed tightly against the pillow in Kinshasa—his heart beat evenly, confidently, with American reliability—and suddenly it stumbled.

Stumbled.

She knew the essence of this word. Not as a formal medical term denoting arrhythmia, but as a piercing physical sensation: that exact moment when you are walking along a dark, unfamiliar road and your foot suddenly falls into a hidden pit. One step—even, familiar, entirely your own. The next—frightening emptiness. The body inexorably lists forward. And the world loses its balance. And you lose everything: the solid earth, the support, the ground beneath your feet—and you fall, you fly downwards. You fall into an alien, broken rhythm, into a different, unfamiliar space, into the very core of a stranger’s heart.

And Leo was falling. She knew it.

Chapter Nine. The Camp →
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