Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

Then Sloth screams. I stop dead, a frame-grab of a girl bending down to snatch up a kettle. I close my hand over the handle and turn, very slowly, to see that Vuyo has Sloth's arm wrenched backwards at a terrible angle, his knee between Sloth's shoulders, pressing him into the linoleum. There are deep gouges on Vuyo's face and neck. A chunk of flesh has been torn out of his cheek by sharp little herbivore teeth.

"You can break his arm, Vuyo, but I'll cave your fucking skull in before you can do anything else," I say.

Vuyo considers this. Sloth whimpers and squirms, trying to take the pressure off his arm. Our connection is one-way. I can't feel his pain, but it's bad enough to see it in his face.

"Stalemate," Vuyo says grimly. Blood drips off the end of his nose. The kettle is heavy. It would be so easy to bring it down. So complicated after.

"Or," I say through my teeth, "load saved game."

"What?"

"We reset to where we were before."

"Impossible."

"Who knows? That the money was counterfeit?"

"I do."

"Who else?"

"No one else. Yet." But he is starting to smile, a thin, appreciative smile.

"Two hundred thousand," I offer.

"Four fifty."

"That's insane."

"If you were anyone else, girl, you'd already be dead."

"But I'm an asset."

"You're an asset," he agrees, easing off Sloth's back. Sloth gives a little cry of relief and scrabbles towards me. I scoop him up with one arm, still holding the kettle half raised.

"Get out."

"My gun."

I laugh. "Add it to my fucking bill."

I'm an asset, alright. And as much a moegoe as any of the ones I've netted for him. If Vuyo had really wanted to punish me, all he had to do was shoot Sloth. Hell, chuck him out the window, save himself the bullet. He wouldn't have risked bringing the Undertow down on his head, getting animalled. Now he has me right back where he wanted, with triple the debt.

There is a commotion outside. Doors slamming. Footsteps. A kid scrambles past the door, yelling " iPoyisa! iPoyisa! " – the building's early warning system.

"You called the cops?" Vuyo says, incredulous. His eyes flick to the bed, to the gun under it. He wavers.

"Not me. Whoever left this knife in my drawer. Same people who gave me a suitcase full of fake hundreds."

"When you make enemies, you don't fuck around," Vuyo says, admiringly.

"You want to leave before they get here."

He tips his hand to his forehead. "I'll be in touch," he says, sliding into the chaos of people pouring out like cockroaches: hookers and dealers and skollies making a break for it.

I grab a dishtowel, wrap it round the knife and the china kitten and toss it in my handbag – Odi's insurance policy. But they killed Mrs Luditsky before I even got involved, which means they're setting me up to take the fall for something else. What's worse than stabbing an old lady to death in her home?

I tie Sloth around my waist, like a pregnant belly, yanking one of Benoît's old t-shirts over my dress to disguise the lumpiness. The t-shirt smells of him, man sweat and Zambuk.

I barge out into the panic. There's a lot of noise, but the voice that yells "There! There she is!" has a note of self-righteous authority that could only belong to D'Nice. I don't look round. I keep moving forward and, at the last moment, sidestep into the burned-out doorway of apartment 615.

By the time the cops hit the kitchen with its ripped-out pipes and smashed sink, I've already dropped through the hole in the floor in the second bedroom, into 526. But instead of taking the main stairwell, I cross the walkway, climb through the window of Aurum Place's 507, clamber down the broken fire-escape and drop the last half-storey to the street. Queen of the shortcut. I casually drop the dishcloth with the knife and the china kitten into the storm drain as I pass by.

Police lights strobe the building. I count four cop cars round the front, which probably means at least another two round the back. The police don't mess around in Hillbrow. They're armed to the molars with shotguns and padded up the wazoo with bullet-proof vests and riot helmets. Nice to see them taking a murder seriously, if only on the basis of a little old non-zoo lady getting brutally stabbed to death by a fratricidal Sloth girl. There's an e.tv news van already on the scene, parking in the riot vehicle.

I use it for cover, waddling round the back of it in the hippo-duck manner of the heavily pregnant. Unfortunately, the intrepid girl reporter spots me and the camera swings to catch me in its glass eye, before she spots something even better in the Human Interest vein – Mrs Khan and her kids wailing and yelling as a burly cop escorts them out of the building, holding a fistful of confiscated fake passports. I slip away, past the roadworks and up the alley to my car.

The Capri maxes out at 140, which probably isn't a bad thing given that I'm dodging between lanes like Ayrton Senna on methamphetamines, listening to my voicemail on repeat, like torture. Because Arno's phone just rings and rings and rings.

" Hello? Hello!" Arno's voice hisses. "Are you there? Oh man. Zinzi, They're here. For real. Worse than zombies. They're like motherfucking ghosts. Please answer. Please."

Arno is breathing quick and heavy like an obscene phone caller having an asthma attack. The breathing gets harder. Then there is the sound of a door crashing open. "Shitballs!" And then he screams. There is a muffled scraping sound accompanied by a dull drumming, as if of heels kicking the floor as he's being dragged away.

And then the phone cuts out.

The security checkpoint at the entrance to Mayfields is abandoned. There are sirens howling inside, black swells of smoke churning into an unnaturally pale orange sky. I duck under the boom to let myself in, and get yet another nasty surprise. There is a sign pasted up with a blurry web-cam photograph of me from the last time I was here. Someone has taken the time to highlight the important bits:

Housebreaker!

Crimewatch: All tenants!

Be on the lookout for this woman!

Zinzi December is a convicted murderer and

considered very dangerous.

She drives an orange Ford Capri and has a Sloth.

If you see this woman, call security and the

police immediately!

I tear down the notice and crumple it up, hit the button to raise the boom, and drive through, into a chaos of sirens, an ambulance parked halfway up one of the immaculate grassy verges, the road blocked by fire-engines and cop cars. I pull over behind the ambulance and tug a baggy hoodie over my shoulders and over Sloth. The pregnancy shtick is too restrictive. "Keep your head down," I tell Sloth, my own personal hunchback, and start running.

H4-303 is a lost battle. The firefighters might as well be pissing on it. It's already been reduced to the black carapace of a building. Brilliant orange flames lash in the second-storey window, S'bu's room. The heat is as dense as a wall, forcing the crowd of spectators to keep their distance on the clipped lawn. They're wearing various configurations of sleepwear.

"Media," I shout and barge my way through to the front where a body is laid out under fireproof sheets. A husky teen. There is an arm sticking out from under the sheet. The sleeve has pink robot monkeys. My heart lurches so hard I practically gag on it.

"Where are the other kids?" I yell at a shell-shocked security guard who is supposed to be keeping people back. He doesn't seem to hear me, mesmerised by the spectacle. A firefighter is dragging a blackened body out of the rubble, collapsed in his arms like a scarecrow. Scrawny. Girl-sized. Wearing purple cowboy boots. They are still smouldering.

"There's another one," someone shouts from inside the building.