Our Hearts. Chapter Thirteen. Imani

The dirty-orange, sun-baked clay burned the soles of their boots even through the thick rubber.

Leo climbed out of the pickup’s bed, freezing for a moment and convulsively exhaling the scorching air. The fabric of his camouflage shirt was soaked through—sweat, diesel soot, the fine dust of Katanga eaten into his pores, crunching in his teeth and packing under his nails. The forest road looped here and came to an end: a trampled clearing at the base of a gigantic terminalia tree, whose tangled roots, as thick as the legs of fossilized monsters, thrust straight out of a small precipice.

The air here hung moist and dense; it felt as though it could be touched with bare hands. It smelled of fermented wild fruits, raw earth, and the subtle, barely perceptible, yet intoxicating aroma of costus—a nocturnal flower that made the back of Leo’s head clench with a sweet, aching pain.

Both pickups hid in the shade of the thicket, concealed on both sides by dense green undergrowth. Ilunga killed the engine. The suddenly descending silence of the forest brought no peace—it pressed heavy on the ears. Behind the tree, Ilunga’s Congolese fighters lined up in silence: five men with battered Kalashnikovs, mute, their faces dark with sweat.

Leo approached the elders.

“I… I absolutely need to get to the village,” he said, trying to suppress the hoarseness in his voice and wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “To the WHO hospital. Understand, this… this is important. I have the results, there are people there…”

The elders stood motionless. Two dry, tall old men in washed-out white shirts made of homespun canvas. Their faces looked as if they had been carved from petrified wood. The old sorcerer behind their shoulders—in his colorful cape, festooned with bones and dried paws—did not even turn his head, listening intently to the invisible life of the jungle.

The eldest of them shook his head. Unhurriedly. Gravely. Categorically.

“No.”

“Listen to me!” Leo lunged forward, but Ilunga smoothly yet firmly caught him by the elbow. The partisan’s fingers clamped down like steel pincers.

“Stop, Leo,” Ilunga said quietly, persuasively, barely parting his lips. “You don’t understand what you’ve gotten into. I don’t know exactly what you stole from IC Waze… but trust my experience: they will turn the whole area upside down. Bata Kolé will be the first place their PMC shows up. Show your face there, and you’ll put everyone in the crosshairs. Yourself, the village, and your doctors.”

Imani stood slightly behind, leaning her back against the side of the second pickup. The hem of her dress was stained with clay; her short, coarse hair gleamed with sweat. Leo shot her a quick, searching glance. Her black eyes stared him down point-blank. For a second, her gaze lingered on his lips, after which she shook her head barely perceptibly, almost imperceptibly:

“He is right, Leo… Don’t.”

Leo gritted his teeth. It was pointless to resist—here, the rules were dictated by the jungle and these people. He reached into his pocket, pulling out a crumpled notebook and the stub of an indelible pencil. Pressing the paper against the heat-vibrating hood, he quickly scribbled a few jagged lines:

“Sarah, Remy. I’m alive. I have samples of the primary strain and some materials on the virus. I need everything: PCR reagents, hazmat suits, laptop, my MinION. Pass them through Ilunga. Not a word to anyone in the camp. This is important.”

Leo folded the note in four and handed it to Ilunga.

“Give this personally to Sarah Huybrechts or Remy Gaillard. No middlemen. Please.”

Ilunga tucked the note into the breast pocket of his fatigues and nodded.

“I’ll be back in two hours. Wait here, don’t go out on the road.”

The diesel of the first pickup roared. The truck, coughing bluish smoke, turned around on the narrow track and headed toward the village, kicking up a pillar of red dust.

The elders silently wandered back into the thicket along the trail.

Leo and Imani were left alone. The second pickup stood off to the side, covered by branches.

“Let’s go,” Imani said softly. Her voice sounded velvety and very close. “Under the tree. You need to sit down.”

They settled onto the dark, moisture-soaked earth, between the roots of the old tree sliding into the small ravine. Here, in the deep penumbra, twilight reigned. The air was thick, warm, and dense as a heavy syrup.

Leo leaned his back against the rough bark. His carbines, propped against the trunk nearby, gleamed with blued steel.

Imani sat opposite him. Too close. Very close. Her knees almost touched his legs, and Leo physically felt the dry, alluring warmth radiating from her. In the gloom, her dark skin glowed with an inner luster, and deep within her black, amber-veined eyes, the patches of sky showing through the foliage were reflected.

“Why…” Leo cleared his throat; his voice lacked breath. He looked at her lips, then raised his gaze to her eyes. “Why me, Imani? Why did you drag me into this in the first place?”

Imani froze. Her fingers, lazily tracing the edge of her dress, went still. She remained silent for a long time, looking somewhere near his neck, where a small vein throbbed rhythmically.

“I…” she stumbled, pausing, exhaling with a slight hiss. “I really don’t know, Leo. Truly.”

She swallowed, slowly searching for words—as if she were trying to translate something ancient into a foreign, forgotten language:

“That evening… in Kinshasa. I was putting on the bracelet. The very one that is on your arm now. I wore it… well, I’ve always worn it, since childhood. The copper fit me like a glove. But that evening… it just slipped off my wrist. Fell to the floor. And it rang so strangely.”

She looked at him in a way that made his breath catch. And a short, electric spark flared between them—even the air near their faces grew several degrees hotter.

“I picked it up. Put it on again. And it… fell again. Four times in a row, Leo. The bracelet of my ancestors seemed to be rejecting me. As if… as if it didn’t want to be mine anymore. And in the morning, when I tried to put it on again—it fell off once more. It’s silly, but I decided to… well, experiment. I took it with me.”

She leaned forward slightly. The distance between them shrank to a mere handful of inches. Leo felt her breath—it smelled of wild mint and something tart.

“And when there, in the church, I slipped it onto your arm…” her voice dropped to a whisper, then broke off. “I suddenly felt it. A flash. As if everything fell into place. As if everything became right. The bracelet was looking for you, not me. But… how could I explain that to a white doctor? ‘You know, Leo, my copper band has decided that you’re its new master’? You would have thought I was insane…”

She reached out and rested her fingers on his wrist—exactly where the warm bracelet gripped his skin.

At her touch, a powerful jolt of electricity surged up Leo’s forearm. The skin beneath her fingertips instantly flared with heat.

The second heart in his chest—a dark, nonexistent symbiote organ—responded with a heavy, hollow thud that stole Leo’s breath. Imani’s gaze darted to his sunken cheeks: she had felt that spasm.

Leo began to breathe heavily. He swayed to the side—his body was suddenly seized by violent, burning chills. His teeth chattered, icy sweat rolling down his spine.

“Leo…” a kind of passionate, hungry alarm slipped into her voice, as if she had sensed something inside him.

Imani immediately moved flush against him, throwing a leg over and practically sitting on his lap to steady his trembling shoulders. Her thighs pressed tightly against his body, burning through the thin fabric of their clothing, and her palm rested on his forehead—cool and damp.

“Here, drink,” she fished a dark brown glass bottle from her bag with her free hand. “Please, drink it.”

“What… what is it?” Leo forced out, trying to focus his blurring vision on her lips, which were dangerously close.

“Water. From the West. From the well at my grandfather’s house. He told me to bring it… Drink, don’t speak.”

Leo wrapped his parched, stuck-together lips around the neck of the bottle and took a few greedy gulps.

The water had a staggering, utterly surreal taste. Neither rust nor bleach—it was a dense, oily liquid with the distinct flavor of raw clay, aged iron, and a rich, sweetish-resinous undertone of wood. It scorched his throat like liquid metal.

And the effect washed over him instantly.

The chills retreated in a matter of seconds. The fiery wave subsided, the dull ache in his ribs dissolved. The second heart slowed its pace, falling into step with the even, deep rhythm of the first. Leo let out a sigh of relief, feeling his muscles relax.

Imani was in no hurry to pull away. She continued to sit intimately close, her chest rising and falling in time with his breathing. The fingers of her left hand still grasped his wrist, stroking the copper band.

“The elders…” Leo spoke quietly, almost against her lips, unable to look away from her fathomless eyes. “They were talking… about your great-grandfather. He… he worked at Shinkolobwe?”

Imani slowly shook her head, her breath tickling his neck:

“No… Joseph—my great-grandfather—came here from Mbanza-Ngungu in the early forties. On a contract. He did geological surveying for the Americans. Hunting for veins.”

“And… what happened?”

“My grandfather and grandmother…” she paused, drawing a shaky breath while looking straight into his pupils. “They never talked about it. Taboo. But I’d heard, from chatter in the village… Something happened in the mine. Down in a deep adit. They found something. And after that, my great-grandfather stopped digging. He dropped his pickaxe, threw away his tools… Stopped digging the earth. Altogether. He married a local girl… my great-grandmother, and settled here. Until her death.”

“And… your parents?” Leo carefully raised his hand and covered hers with his palm. Her skin was incredibly soft and searing hot.

“Dead,” she answered curtly, steel flashing in her voice for a moment. “I was very little. Four years old. A raid. Tribal feuds.”

“And your grandfather?”

“After my grandmother died, he couldn’t stay here. He moved back to my great-grandfather’s homeland, to Mbanza-Ngungu.”

“And you…” Leo gave her fingers a slight squeeze, drawing her another millimeter closer. “Did you go with him?”

Imani froze. A shadow flitted across her gaze—dark, dense, full of hidden tension.

“No,” she replied quietly. “I stayed then. With my husband.”

Leo went rigid.

The air jammed in his chest. The word “husband” struck his brain with a hollow, resonating echo. He stared at her in mute astonishment, feeling reality slipping from under his feet.

Imani did not avert her gaze. On the contrary—she squeezed his hand tightly, until her joints cracked, covering the bracelet.

“Ilunga is my husband, Leo,” she enunciated clearly. Without a trace of shame, but with some kind of concealed, wild anguish in her voice.

The pause dragged on. Leo needed time. The seconds flowed like thick pitch. He looked at her face, at those chiseled cheekbones, at her dark lips; he felt the weight of her body on his lap and tried to reconcile the grim partisan with an assault rifle and this woman who was blowing his mind.

“Between us is paper and a copper ring on a nail… Ilunga drank whiskey and knew. He knew from the very beginning.”

“But…” Leo cleared his throat; his voice sounded hollow. “But why did you leave after all? You said so yourself… back then, in Kinshasa.”

Imani lowered her head, her forehead resting against his shoulder for a moment. Leo felt the silky coarseness of her hair.

“Leo. All the women in our lineage were sorceresses. Keepers… But when my great-grandmother married an outsider—a geologist… and especially after what happened in that cave…” she sighed heavily. “Our family line was cast out. The elders declared us blood traitors. We became pariahs. There was no place for us, not among our own people, nor among strangers. I had to leave…”

The slap of tires on loose clay and the growl of a diesel engine shattered the intimate silence of the forest.

Imani quickly pulled away—rising smoothly to her feet like a cat and straightening her dress. Leo stood up after her, still smelling the scent of her hot breath.

Remy Gaillard leapt out of the arriving pickup. His face was pale, his hair disheveled, and in his hands, he clutched a hefty orange container.

“Gonzales! Damn you, old man!” Remy yelled, nearly tripping over the roots. “You’re alive?! We thought the Southbridge mercenaries had already cut you into ribbons!”

And, eyeing the weapons, he scoffed:

“What, did you decide to start a little war on the way?”

Sarah stepped down from the passenger seat with dignified composure. In her hands, she carried his laptop and a massive metal case stamped with biohazard warnings.

“Shut up, Remy,” Sarah cut in, though immense relief could be read in her eyes. She walked up to Leo, critically assessed his sluggish demeanor, and nodded. “Your note knocked us for six. We brought everything we could carry out: the portable MinION sequencer, reagents, hazmat suits, your files.”

Sarah set the case on the ground and crossed her arms over her chest:

“And now explain—what are you planning to do with all this? You wrote that you have samples of the source strain?”

“Leo,” Remy interrupted, breathless with excitement. “You won’t believe this! We rechecked that miner—Mbula Benga. He’s… he’s on the mend! The fever has broken, his liver lesions are regressing!”

“And the girls? Those sisters from Bata Kolé?”

“They have no trace of the virus whatsoever! None! We ran the PCR three times! We think we made a mistake with the initial tests…”

“We didn’t make a mistake,” Leo said quietly. “The virus hasn’t gone anywhere. It is just changing.”

Sarah narrowed her eyes:

“Give the samples to us, Leo. We’ll take them to the hospital lab. It’s sterile there, they have the equipment, we’ll send the genome to Geneva…”

“No,” Leo firmly cut her off. “The hospital is target number one. If the PMC raids it, they’ll take everything and eliminate you as witnesses. It will be safer for everyone this way. The samples stay with me.”

“And where will you go with them?!” Remy threw his hands up. “Into the jungle? To live in a hut and sequence DNA using solar power?!”

Ilunga, who had been standing silently by the pickup’s fender, took a step forward. His stern face remained unreadable.

“A couple of hours’ drive from here is an abandoned Belgian military base,” he stated calmly. “We use it sometimes. There are dry concrete bunkers there. Some supplies, water. And most importantly—there is a working diesel generator.”

Imani imperceptibly shifted her gaze to her husband. Something akin to silent approval flickered across her face.

“Alright,” she agreed. “Take us there.”

“What about the mercenaries?” Leo asked.

“They’ve locked the gates; they’re combing the road.”

“One more thing, Ilunga. I’ll need a satellite connection. Starlink. To dump the data array. Can you get one?”

The partisan gave a curt nod:

“I’ll bring it. Tomorrow morning.” Then, turning to the doctors, he added: “My boys will take you back to your camp.”

They said their goodbyes.

“Good luck to you, old man,” Remy told him, shaking his hand.

“Take care of yourself, Leo,” Sarah added.

Ilunga’s men began quickly transferring the gear. Boxes of reagents, cases of biological material, the laptop—everything was carefully packed into the bed of the pickup.

When everything was ready, Leo walked over to the tree. Lying on the roots were the two Israeli Emtan MZ-4P assault rifles and tactical vests loaded with ammo, stripped from the mercenaries.

With practiced, routine confidence—without any fuss, accompanied by sharp metallic clacks—Leo checked the bolts, popped out the magazines to confirm they were loaded, and effortlessly tossed the weapons and ammo boxes into the back of the pickup.

Imani watched him with mute incomprehension. To her, he was a doctor, a scientist, a white intellectual from America. But right now, standing before her was a man who handled assault rifles as if he had been born with them in his hands.

Leo looked at her and said nothing.

She turned her head toward Ilunga.

The partisan met his wife’s gaze. Not a shadow of surprise registered on his calm face. Ilunga merely gave her a silent, barely perceptible nod. He knew how people who know how to kill moved. And he had already realized that Leo Gonzales was one of them.

“It’s time,” Ilunga nodded.

Leo jumped into the truck bed first, offering his hand to Imani. She placed her palm into his fingers, feeling his grip tighten for a fleeting moment just a little harder than propriety demanded.

The engine roared. The pickup tore off, its treads biting into the brown clay, and quickly disappeared into the dense, pitch-black greenery of the Katanga jungle.

The old Hilux moved heavily along the worn track, growling, its treads chewing into the plasticine, searing clay. The ribbed metal floor of the truck bed transmitted a constant, fine tremor into their joints. The diesel engine spun the shaft at its limit, and this low, visceral vibration—at just under eight hundred revolutions per minute—penetrated through the soles of their boots in a strange, almost infernal manner, climbing up their shin bones and layering in precise resonance over the rhythm of the quieted “second heart.”

Leo sat with his shoulder blades pressed against the blistering side panel. His right hand rested on his knee, and in the place where the dark copper touched his skin, a quiet, continuous chemical reaction was unfolding. Imani’s bracelet was still reacting to his feverish sweat, to the water absorbed by his metabolism, and to the dry scorch of the jungle. The metal wasn’t just heating up—it imparted into his flesh a steady, dense, almost electrical pulsation. Beneath the lower edge of the copper on Leo’s pale, thinned wrist, an insidious, malachite-green mark had surfaced—verdigris, eating directly into his pores. This fragile, chemical “tattoo” smelled sharp and acrid: of an old copper-nickel coin, wet river pebbles, and sour, oxidized blood. The skin beneath the bracelet itched slightly, but this itch carried no pain—it felt like a suture keeping the alien tissue in his body from disintegrating.

On a steep incline, where the tangled roots of a ficus had formed a natural staircase, the pickup stalled for a second. Ilunga depressed the clutch, making the vehicle freeze on the slippery slope, and looked back through the open rear window of the cab.

Absolute silence hung in the truck bed, broken only by the chirping of cicadas.

The partisan’s gaze—attentive, cold, and piercing—glided over Imani, whose hand still rested on Leo’s thigh, and then slowly shifted to the doctor himself.

Leo did not look away. He continued to hold one of the captured Emtan MZ-4Ps on his lap: the safety was off, his finger was not on the trigger but neatly extended along the trigger guard, and the barrel was pointed strictly toward the side panel at a forty-five-degree angle.

Ilunga looked at those fingers. At the familiar, professional grip. At how the weight of the tactical vest was naturally distributed at Leo’s feet.

Neither jealousy nor malice flared in the partisan’s black, fatigue-filled eyes. Deep, silent understanding surfaced within them. In this place, where the boundary between life and instant oblivion had thinned to the width of a dry rubber leaf, all conventions—paperwork in Kinshasa, a copper ring on a nail, tribal taboos—lost their weight against a simple fact: before him sat the man she had chosen, and not just some doctor whining in fear.

Ilunga unhurriedly reached into the pocket of his faded fatigues, pulled out a flat English tobacco tin, and, without saying a word, tossed it through the window straight into the truck bed. The tin landed with a rattling metallic clang on the floor next to Leo’s boot. Inside lay three hand-rolled, dried leaves of wild forest tobacco.

Leo nodded silently, a brief and barely perceptible dip of his head. In response, Ilunga merely tightened his lips slightly, shoved the shifter into first gear, and stepped on the gas. The pickup roared, spitting a fan of liquid orange clay from beneath its rear wheels, and tore off once again through the closing green wall.

Chapter Fourteen. Symphony of Decay →
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