Our Hearts. Chapter Fourteen. Symphony of Decay

The morning began with a slow, viscous surfacing from that muffled, blissful depth where neither names, nor spans of time, nor diagnoses recorded in journals existed.

He woke up to a scent. Not a sound, not the rustling of branches beyond the crumbling masonry—but a scent. Thick, dark, steeped in costus, night-blooming jasmine, rotting tree bark, and something else—barely perceptible, hot, salty, blood-like—that very magical perfume of a living body that Imani’s skin exuded when she slept.

Leo lay on his side on the narrow army cot, pinned between two hot planes: the rough soldier’s blanket and her breath. He breathed in this air slowly, greedily, deeply, like a man who had spent a long time underwater and finally broken the surface. The concrete vault of the old Belgian bunker, mottled with saltpeter, lichen, and rust stains from half a century ago, slowly emerged through the pre-dawn blue.

On his chest, with her damp cheek pressed against his collarbone, rested Imani’s hand. Her left palm lay on his ribs—slightly cupped, warm, with tightly pressed fingers. Her grandmother’s copper bracelet on her wrist gleamed dimly in the gray haze.

The past night hadn’t simply happened—it had filled all space, crowding past lives out of his memory. It was their second night, but the first one—the half-phantom, drunken one in Kinshasa—felt as if it had never been. Back then, only a message on the mirror and a scent on a crumpled pillow had remained. Now, the boundaries of their bodies had melted in the Congolese swelter, dissolving into an invisible, primordial expanse.

Leo remembered her in waves, in flashes: the rough fabric, the slightly salty taste of her skin at the base of her neck, how her long, strong fingers dug into his shoulders, and how her whisper in an unfamiliar language broke into a low, throaty moan. But something else was paramount. There, in the absolute darkness, when their breathing merged into a single ragged hum, Leo physically felt his cursed double heartbeat disappear. The alien, hydraulic, monstrous rhythm of the symbiote-organ quieted down, submitting to Imani’s steady, frantic, pure pulse. It was as if they had become a single mechanism. One circulatory system for two, closed through the searing metal of two copper bracelets. One breath. One heart for two—just like on that night of blindness, when the whole outside world had shrunk to the point of contact between two bodies.

This was better than any medical report, higher than any genetic decoding. Leo lay in the semi-darkness, listening to her steady inhalations, and for the first time in many months he felt neither fear nor exhaustion, but peace. The physical, bone-deep peace of a man whose flesh had finally ceased to be a battlefield and become a home.

Around ten in the morning, the dry silence of the forest was torn by the straining, coughing roar of an old diesel engine.

The abandoned base of the Belgian paratroopers was tiny—just two squat concrete blocks grown into the hill, and a small parade ground that the jungle had long since cracked and chewed up with the massive, knotty roots of ficus trees. Vines wove over the roofs in a dense green tent, rendering the place completely invisible to aircraft and satellites.

Kasongo—one of Ilunga’s trusted men—climbed out of the battered beige Pajero that emerged from the thicket. He was a sinewy, sun-scorched Congolese man with quick eyes, who never parted with a hand-rolled local tobacco cigarette.

“Ilunga sends his regards,” Kasongo dropped laconically, spitting out a dry blade of grass and dropping the jeep’s tailgate with a crash.

The air immediately filled with the bustle of unloading. Kasongo hauled out two fifty-liter jerrycans of diesel, sacks of yams, wild garlic, and green bananas, and then fished out a large chunk of fresh antelope meat, wrapped in fresh banana leaves and still oozing dark blood.

“The Southbridge mercenaries haven’t come down to the village yet,” he said, wiping his sweating neck with a greasy rag. “They’re pulling patrols back to the mine’s main perimeter. Waiting for something. Or tracking someone in the mountains. Ilunga told you to sit tight and stay out of the clearings.”

From deep inside the cabin, he extracted the white square dish of a Starlink antenna, a router in a protective case, a coil of cable, and a bulky fabric bag.

“Clothes. Whatever could be found at the bazaar in Likasi,” Kasongo nodded at Imani, who had taken the bags of food. “And diesel for the generator. It’s in the back annex, I checked the oil recently. It’ll start with a half-turn. By the way, Ilunga checks his email once a day. He passed on the network password: Kolwezi-1960.”

Five minutes later, the jeep turned around on the narrow track and disappeared, leaving behind only the bluish smoke of exhaust, which was immediately greedily sucked in by the rainy wall of the jungle.

They divided their duties without unnecessary words. Imani went into the main block, where an old cast-iron stove and a soot-stained stone sink remained, to put away the food. Leo handled the communications and setting up the laboratory.

He dragged the Starlink antenna onto the bunker’s flat roof, camouflaged by hanging vines, pointed the dish southwest, and ran the cable down. The indicator blinked with an emerald light—the channel was clear and stable.

Finished with the wires, Leo stopped in the kitchen doorway and stood perfectly still, leaning against the rough jamb.

Imani stood with her back to him. She had already managed to change into the clothes Kasongo had brought—simple, slightly worn jeans and a men’s khaki cotton shirt, the sleeves carelessly rolled up to the elbows. With deft, precise movements, she was cutting the meat with a wide knife on a wooden block. The rustic, cozy aroma of frying garlic, palm oil, and hot iron was already floating in the air.

Leo watched her with a sudden, aching feeling in his chest. All this time—from the gloomy bar in Kinshasa to yesterday’s campfire—he had seen her as a mysterious fatalist, a femme fatale from urban legends, an unapproachable sorceress, the keeper of an ancient and dangerous lineage. He had looked for a symbol in her, a myth, a biological enigma.

And now, an ordinary woman stood before him. A living, earthly, modern twenty-three-year-old woman. She blew a stray lock of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, frowned slightly as she checked the draft in the stove’s ash pit, and quietly hummed some old American pop song under her breath, likely heard on the radio in Kinshasa.

“…Just how your love can do what no one else can…”

In this everyday routine of hers, in this mundane, domestic movement of her hands with the knife and the board, lay such a fragile, poignant beauty that for a second, Leo forgot where they were. He desperately wanted to walk up from behind, wrap his arms around her waist, bury his face in her neck, and never leave this concrete square lost in the Congo again.

She turned around, caught his gaze, and smiled slightly—simply, warmly, without any shamanic mystery, the way people smile when they are tired alongside you and share that same peace.

“It will be ready soon,” she said. “Go busy yourself with your instruments.”

For the laboratory, Leo chose a separate, furthest room in the second block—a former Belgian command post. A blind room without windows, with thick reinforced concrete walls, smelling of musty dampness and old lime.

He cleared out the dust of rotted furniture, wiped down the long oak table, and set up the portable MinION sequencer, the sample containers, the microscope, and the reagents. He plugged the laptop into the network. The work was calming. The mechanical, familiar actions of an epidemiologist returned to him a sense of control over his own life.

After two in the afternoon, the heat became unbearable. The forest beyond the walls seemed to have died out, stunned by the tropical, ringing scorch.

Leo sat at the table, staring at the monitor. And then it returned.

First, goosebumps crawled over his right wrist. The copper band began to rapidly lose its heat, turning into a hoop of hard, piercing ice. Then this cold collapsed deep inside—into his veins, into his joints, into his bone marrow. Leo twitched; his jaws clamped shut involuntarily with a dull crack. The second heart behind his sternum woke up instantly, without any wind-up, striking with such wild, unexpected force that dark circles swam before his eyes.

The chills were gut-wrenching, all-consuming. Leo tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t hold him.

“Where?” the single, furious thought battered his fevered brain. “Where did I catch this? Where did the breach happen?”

Flashes of memories began to swirl in his head, breaking apart into a mosaic in a mad kaleidoscope.

“In the barracks? In the lab?” That day, when he hastily, with fingers trembling from nerves, centrifuged the undiluted blood serum of Maurice and the miner Benga, and a barely noticeable micro-drop of aerosol escaped from under the test tube cap, biting into his mucous membrane?

Or… or at that damned collapse into the adit?

And Leo saw it. No. Not himself. The others.

Evening, the rusty sun of Haut-Katanga, the ragged maw of the abandoned mine. The ancient, deserted drift, from which a dense, black fog erupted—thousands of giant hammer-headed fruit bats. They surged in a solid, rustling stream, knocking people off their feet, batting dirty, red faces with leathery wings. The smell—a mixture of guano, ozone, and a sweet, oppressive, purple vapor rising from the depths of the radioactive fault. They had all breathed in that dust. All of them.

Leo barely dragged himself to the door. The mortise lock had crumbled to dust long ago. With trembling, lead-heavy hands, he grabbed a massive metal stool and forcefully wedged its back under the door handle, deadlocking the panel shut.

He returned to the table and used his teeth to tear open the plastic packaging of a syringe. A tourniquet on the forearm. The needle easily entered the swollen, dark vein.

Blood rushed into the transparent barrel. It was monstrously thick, almost black, with a pomegranate opalescent sheen under the lamplight.

Leo loaded the cartridge into the analyzer, dropped in the reagent, and initiated the protocol.

Time turned into congealing jelly. His muscles cramped so hard it felt as though they were being squeezed by invisible pliers. The air felt as though it were made of crushed glass. Leo sat on the floor, his forehead pressed against the cold edge of the oak table, and listened as the hum of the MinION merged with the chaotic, desynchronized pounding of the two hearts in his own chest.

The screen blinked. Graphs aligned in a row.

Leo focused his blurred gaze on the monitor.

The virus wasn’t just in him. The RNA sequence had made a new leap. The genome had rearranged itself again. In the girls from the village of Bata Kolé, the virus fell asleep, dissolving into their tissues without a trace. But in Leo’s body—under the influence of radiation, spurred by an infernal mixture of adrenaline and his own anomalous anatomy—the strain was behaving ruthlessly. It was forcing a fusion. The virus was en masse replacing red blood cells with crystal-like, pearlescent structures. His body was burning out alive, trying to digest this biological transmutation.

He brought the dosimeter to his left arm. The device clicked in a rapid, alarming rattle. The needle froze at the mark of 140 microroentgens per hour.

His own blood was emitting radiation.

A knock at the door.

The solid wood shuddered.

“Leo?” Imani’s voice sounded muffled, but a taut string was already ringing in it. She had felt it. Through the walls, through the earth, through the vibrating metal of the bracelet on her wrist.

“Don’t… don’t come in!” Leo cried out, but only a weak, strained wheeze escaped from his scorched lungs.

“Leo, open up! What’s wrong with you?!”

The handle jerked frantically. The metal stool gave a drawn-out screech against the concrete.

“Imani, no… Go away!” Leo tried to get up but collapsed to his knees, his elbow catching a rack of test tubes. Glass shattered against the floor with a clatter. “It’s dangerous. I’m… I’m infected…”

In his clouding mind, seized by feverish delirium, a single panicked thought thrashed: he had become a biological bomb. If the process of decay broke out, he would kill her just with his breath, his blood, his sticky sweat.

He crawled across the floor. In the corner of the room, leaning against the concrete, stood one of the captured carbines. Leo convulsively seized the cold plastic stock, pulling the weapon toward himself, as if this piece of steel could protect the world from him.

Crash!

The door panel bowed inwards, as if the entire weight of the surrounding jungle had struck it. The stool slid sideways with a grating sound.

Another blow!

The old hinge snapped with a crack, and the door burst wide open with a crash.

On the threshold stood Imani. In the slanting rays of the setting sun pouring from the corridor, her eyes looked like two chalices filled with molten amber. She saw him—kneeling in a pile of broken glass, covered in an icy sweat, pale, hunched over the assault rifle.

“Don’t come closer!” Leo rasped, frantically raising the carbine and pointing the barrel at the floor before her feet. His fingers trembled on the trigger. “Go away, Imani! Get away! Blood… everything inside me is collapsing!”

Imani did not stop. She didn’t even glance at the weapon. To her, this Israeli assault rifle was just a dead, meaningless piece of iron.

She took three smooth, unhurried steps and knelt down in front of him.

“Kanga motema te…” she whispered.

Her voice dropped to the lowest register, turning into a vibrating, guttural rhythm.

“Kanga motema te… Kobanga te, nzela eza… Le nzela nionso…”

Lingala. The ancient, rounded language of the rain-soaked forests poured from her lips. Leo did not know the words, but their meaning imprinted straight into his bones, into his tearing second heart: “Do not close your heart. Do not be afraid. The path is open. Go all the way.”

Her warm, strong hands rested on his convulsively shaking arms. One soft but unyielding movement—and she easily pulled the carbine from his weakened fingers, tossing the heavy weapon aside.

Leo tried to pull away, but her hot palms framed his sweat-drenched face.

“Look at me,” she whispered, switching to French, but keeping the same hypnotic, shamanic rhythm. “Look closely at me, white doctor.”

She began to unbutton his camouflage shirt. Her fingers glided quickly over the buttons, exposing his chest, where hard, painful knots swelled distinctly beneath the skin.

The trance overtook him with lightning speed.

The gray concrete walls of the laboratory suddenly swam, rippled in unsteady waves, and began to melt into a stifling green haze. The hum of the sequencer on the table turned into the roar of a million cicadas and the rustle of massive leathery wings beneath the canopy of trees.

Leo no longer felt the solid floor under his feet. Imani pulled off his soaked shirt, her cool arms wrapping around his torso. With every touch, the bumpy knots on his ribs melted, retreated, giving off a dull pain. The second heart froze for a moment—and then fell into step with her pulse again.

She pulled him to his feet, and he obeyed, utterly devoid of his own will, dissolved in her power.

It seemed to him—or was it really happening?—that they had walked out of the bunker. Moist vines caressed his bare shoulders. The cool, wet earth sprang beneath his bare feet. A crushing, sweet scent of blooming giant trees, decaying wood, and that very crimson, radioactive moisture from the deep drifts of all the local mines hit his nose.

Imani led him by the hand. Her naked back glided ahead, shimmering in the light of an invisible moon. She was taking him deeper into the green womb of the nocturnal jungle—to a place where neither viruses, nor corporations, nor military mercenaries, nor the fear of death existed. To the place where the earth itself breathed, accepting them both into its prehistoric, vibrating, infinite embrace.

Leo closed his eyes. And before them, in the pitch blackness on the insides of his eyelids, spirals emerged. Dark, pulsating, rotating…

The spirals picked up speed. They narrowed. Contracted. And Leo slipped away.

Chapter Fifteen. Leo →
← Prologue