Kamau dropped.

His knees hit first, then his shoulder, then his face like a puppet with cut strings.

“Kamau!” Nyah shrieked, racing toward him, Elijah close behind.

Bette was already moving, skidding along the ground toward his body. His limbs were twitching violently now, fingers clawing at the air as if trying to grab something unseen. Foam began to bubble at the corners of his mouth, his eyes glassy, unfocused, locked on nothing.

“No, no, no… stay with us!” Nyah dropped beside him, cradling his head, hands trembling. She glanced up at Bette, panic overtaking every line of her face. “We need the antivenom! Bette… we need…”

“There is none! Look around you, the place is ablaze!” Bette shouted, kneeling hard. Her hands hovered helplessly over his back and shoulders. “There’s no time, he’s been hit three times, face, neck… Jesus, it’s in his bloodstream… so much of it!”

Kamau’s body seized, arching once before it collapsed again, motionless.

His breathing stopped.

The crackle of fire seemed to draw in closer, louder, as though the world were closing in around them. The sky glowed red.

Behind them, the water tower groaned loudly on its partially severed legs.

Nyah’s head whipped toward it. “The tower,” she breathed, her voice thin with dread.

The groaning deepened, metal straining against the last fibres of its strength. It rose above the sound of the fire, above the hiss of the scorched earth, a low and aching wail that seemed to vibrate through their bones.

Bette turned just in time to see it sway; a skeletal behemoth reeling on weak legs. The final support beam cracked with a report like a rifle shot.

Time seemed to slow.

The frame twisted, buckled. Then, with a groan that felt like the last breath of the compound itself, the water tower began to fall.

It toppled forward, groaning and shrieking, the rusted bolts shearing like snapped tendons. The tank burst mid-air, metal rupturing like a squeezed tin, and the water came.

It was not a spill or a stream. It was a deluge.

A roaring, thunderous wall of water slammed down the gentle slope, slicing through smoke and flame in a silver blur. It hit the side of the house first. The deck shattered in a spray of broken timber and splintered beams. Tina’s planters, the lavender beds, the clay feeders, the acacia saplings, gone in an instant, ripped from the ground like paper in the wind.

“Run!” Bette shouted, though the sound was devoured by the cascade.

She and Nyah turned, Elijah close behind but there was no time.

And Kamau…

He stood slumped near the hessian sack, unmoving, his arms limp at his sides, head bowed in eerie stillness. Red blotches marked his neck and jaw, swelling beneath the skin. The black mamba was long gone, disappeared into the night, its wrath delivered but its final act lingered.

The wave hit.

It swallowed the slope and everything on it. The three survivors were thrown forward, battered by water and pressure. They tumbled, limbs flailing in the liquid force, the ground vanishing beneath them, air ripped from their lungs. Bette collided with mud and debris, choking on ash and grit, her fingers clawing for traction that didn’t exist.

Elijah’s cry cut through the water. “Kamau!”

But when Bette looked back when all the chaos slowed for one terrible moment, she saw Kamau’s body, slack and lifeless, snatched into the current. It rolled and twisted as it was carried downslope, head submerged, limbs limp as it was swept between the trees.

And then he was gone.

Gone like the garden. Gone like the deck. Gone like the fire, crushed beneath the flood.

The surge passed, pouring itself into the trees below, flattening all in its wake. It left behind a graveyard of charred wood and ash, the earth soaked, a pile of steaming mud.

Bette staggered upright, coughing hard, her chest heaving. Mud clung to every inch of her, her hair plastered to her face. Beside her, Nyah was on her knees, hacking up water and dirt, her hands shaking.

“Elijah..” Bette rasped.

“I’m here,” he gasped. “But Kamau…”

Silence fell like a hammer.

Bette turned, barely able to speak. Her eyes scanned the field of wreckage and saw nothing. No sign of Kamau. Just a trail in the sludge. A  shapeless smear vanishing into the trees.

Bette stood motionless for a long moment. Steam curled around her shoulders. Behind her, the compound hissed as fire surrendered to flood, smoke giving way to silence.

Kamau was gone.

They were alive.

But the cost had just been named.