What Tears Us Apart
Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart The real world. That's what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys'orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn't expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil. Their love should be enough for one another - it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita's troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but. In the aftermath of Leda's rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within.
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Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart
The real world. That’s what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys’orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn’t expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil.
Their love should be enough for one another—it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita’s troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but.
In the aftermath of Leda’s rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within.
To debianca, and redbird.
Contents
Newswire America: December 31, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya — Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was hastily sworn in yesterday, beating out Raila Odinga in Kenya’s heated election. Allegations of fraud sparked violence countrywide.
In Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums and Raila Odinga’s stronghold, thousands flooded the streets, bearing rocks and machetes, chanting, “No Raila, no peace!”
Members of Raila’s Luo tribe lashed out at their Kikuyu neighbors—the tribe associated with Kibaki—setting shops and homes aflame. The Mungiki, Kenya’s notorious Kikuyu mafia, retaliated, riots escalating into a rape and murder spree. By midnight, smoke blanketed Kibera, flames licked the sky, and mutilated bodies littered the roads as screams rang out from every corner of the slum....
Prologue
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Leda
NO. PLEASE. PLEASE, world, God, fate, don’t let this happen.
Each man’s hands on Leda’s skin are like desert sand. Hot. Gritty. Rough as splinters of glass.
She ricochets around their circle, a lotto ball in the air mix machine, fate holding its breath. Behind the lunging silhouettes of the men, the slum explodes—fire licking and climbing, spitting at the world. There’s another sound, too, mixed with the whooshing sound of the inferno. Wood, metal, bodies—all crumbling, cracking, hissing and screaming in the flames. It is a symphony of loss.
The men, who are boys really, they yell incomprehensibly, but Leda knows their intentions.
They rip the buttons on her shirt.
They yank the hem of her skirt.
A cloud of reddish dust rises from their feet, as though trying to hide her. But the dust dashes away when Leda is flung to the ground.
For a moment nothing happens.
Then it’s like vampires at the sight of a wound. The men converge—kicking, poking, laughing. They tug at all her protruding parts. Leda’s a centipede in the dust, trying to fold in one hundred legs. Trying to protect the things that matter, things that cannot be undone.
Maybe they will just beat me and go away. This is not my fight. I came to help. Leda wants to shout in their faces. I came to help.
But then she hears it, jumbled with the clatter of their words. Ita. Another one says it. Ita.
So they know who she is.
She is a fish flopping, a tree fallen. A spider in the wind.
She is Ita’s love.
For an instant, Leda thinks it will save her. But as their voices rise, she knows it has doomed her instead.
When the boy drops down on top of her, the force of it is like a metal roof pinning her in a hurricane.
Instantly, all Leda smells is him—sweat and dirt, but rancid, like musk and cheese rusted over with blood. He uses his trunk to flatten her into the ground, his rib bones stabbing into her sternum, her bare skin grinding into the rocks and trash. His legs and hands scramble for Leda’s flailing limbs. The man-boys above laugh and holler.
All she can do is flail and scream.
Leda calls out for the man she loves, the only person who’s ever really loved her.
But it’s the devil who arrives instead.
Ita’s beloved monster, Chege.
Chege’s voice arrives first—a low growl, a familiar snarl. It is the battle cry of an unchained wolf, at home in the darkest of times.
Chege is above her. His dreads close over Leda and her attacker, a curtain of night.
“Help me,” Leda says. Did Ita send him?
As Leda tries to decipher Chege’s spitting words, he yanks the man off and her body takes a breath. The rancid smell, his clawing zipper, the pain in her lungs—it all disappears into the racket above and for one second Leda feels light as a sparrow in the sky. She allows herself to breathe. There is mercy in Chege’s heart after all. He will save her. At least for Ita’s sake.
