The local beer was called Kibo, same as the final peak of the mountain, the so-called "roof of Africa." Xander couldn't quite wrap his head around the idea of sitting in the lee of that snow-covered spire and sweating buckets and desperately needing the bitter wetness of the beer that warms in the bottle, just moments out of the small cooler plugged into the lighter of the Land Rover. He dismissed the paradox with a shrug. Much of Africa gets this reaction - slim women walking with huge blocks of porous stone balanced on their heads; a pair of elephants strolling in a leisurely fashion across a grassy plain, with the mountain's peak framed over their shoulders; the incredible density and diversity of the crops growing in carefully constructed layered gardens beneath the canopy of the primeval forest, built to funnel the shade and rain ever downward. He couldn't process the images, so he did what the Africans do: shrug and move on.
The ten-day trek out of Zambia in the Rover, which he'd decided to call Fido out of sheer perversity, had been uneventful. Uneventful for Africa, that is. Xander snorted, thinking that a mudslide, a fallen tree and a pair of stubborn water buffalo would probably rate as "events" in Sunnydale, but here they were simply hazards of the road. He carried the supplies necessary to defeat these obstacles within the battered metal walls of Fido - a box of pea gravel for traction, a small chainsaw, and three tubes of tennis balls, useful for bouncing off the sloped foreheads of the dim and smelly buffalo until they got the point and sauntered out of the way.
Ten days in the bush, ten days of mourning the little girl he'd been unable to save - the child he had sat vigil for, feeling helpless and cruel and small in his inability to give her the relief she so desperately craved. Had there been morphine, he probably could have done it - could have plunged a needle into a stick-like arm and watched her sleep, watched her drift away to finally rest. But, no. Medical supplies were scarce and closely guarded, and Xander didn't have it in him to darken the blade of his decorated Leya knife with her blood or to snap her frail neck in his tanned, scarred hands. She had died on her own, fighting to the end, and Xander doubted he'd ever forget the accusation in her eyes and the shaft of pain that look had sent through him. He wondered if that was what Giles had felt, seeing Buffy's body crumpled at the foot of the tower - that crushing failure, deep despair and cold guilt.
Ten days was not enough to mourn a life, not enough to wash him clean. It was enough, however, to let him begin to distance himself from the horror, start to feel the mental shrug - the pushing away of something that couldn't be understood that was Africa seeping into him. Africa was old. Xander knew about old. He'd seen and touched centuries-old artifacts, loved a 1200-year-old demon, stood on top of the ancient Hellmouth - he had felt age and rot and decay and timelessness. But he'd never been immersed in something so old that it had seen the birth of man, the ravages of ice ages and plate tectonics; something so old that it could collectively shrug off the unknowable and the unknown with the alacrity of having seen everything, endured everything. The shrug - Africa - had begun in him, and it let him carry on. It was enough.
Coming out of the bush into Moshi, a city teeming with life and color, had woken him up, pulled him out of himself and drawn him into its dusty streets. The porters and guides had taken one look at his safari shirt, cargo shorts, deeply tanned skin and worn eye patch and taken him for some roving ex-pat, not a tourist, and let him slip through them without the sales pitch.
At the dark bar of the Kindoroko Inn he'd found Kibo beer and small talk and a tiny measure of peace. Staying late, the locals had fallen for his cover of being a researcher, a collector of myths and stories. They had bade him sit with them and listen, saying, "Karibu," and he'd placidly eaten the ugali and the spicy braised cabbage, washing it down with more Kibo, waiting for the inevitable. In the early hours he'd heard the first rumblings of tales of a girl.
Wild. Strong. Dangerous. Deadly.
All the beer in Africa couldn't have made Xander sleep that night.
Shockingly, it isn't so hard to get a gun in Africa. The marketplace has a guy who sells them in the back of his stall, behind the fabrics and trinkets and little vials of crushed herbs and powdered horns and black, shrunken things that make Xander shudder just a little. In the back, there are wooden trunks full of carefully packed weapons, from simple handguns to things Xander knows and doesn't know in the way he does and doesn't know Army regulations and marching cadences. A little hemming and hawing, a little dropping of Council names, a lot of dropping of Council money, and he's a guy with a gun.
Xander doesn't like guns, never has. He can use one, but the patch makes it trickier than before, when he had the soldier's memories and two eyes and a different level of depth perception. It seems colder than his usual weapons - stakes and swords and daggers and axes - things that are extensions of his body. He's used to weapons that feel more personal somehow, and he laughs at himself for caring if his murder weapon is impersonal.
As it turns out, her name is Sona. She's fifteen, the same age Buffy was when she was Called. That's where the resemblance ends. Sona was unstable before the calling, but docile. Her brother sits on a bench and talks to Xander with halting English and lots of hand gestures and draws lines in the dust with the toe of his shoe. "Simple" is the word he uses, and Xander thinks it's probably a better word than "retarded" or "disabled". She was like a child, a five-year-old, her brother says - sweet sometimes, but sometimes willful and cruel, the way little kids can be.
Xander hears the stories of Sona's troubles at school and how it just got easier for her to stay at home. Her brother's eyes well with tears when he tells Xander that things changed for Sona when she turned thirteen and started to develop. The rough boys of the village didn't care that she was "simple" - that just made her a target. Xander can imagine what happened to her, and his suspicions are confirmed - the village boys, and some of the men, an uncle, more. By the time of the spell, she'd had two babies, both quickly taken away and left... somewhere. Xander can't understand the word, hopes it's "orphanage" and not "jungle".
Simply put, she was crazy, and when Xander tells this to Giles over the phone, he's startled to hear that Sona isn't the only one. He hears the story of Dana, then, and in the silence that follows, he realizes that Sona won't be so lucky. Sona won't have Spike to hurt, someone who can withstand what she can dish out long enough for the cavalry to charge in, someone who can endure until the combined resources of the Council and Wolfram and Hart can come and hit her with trank darts and sew the severed bits back on and smooth over the damages.
Sona is no Dana, and, hate it as he does, Xander is no Spike. His human frailty has never hurt quite so much as it does then. Giles' voice is soft when he asks Xander if he can do what must be done. It's softer still when he tells Xander what he did to Ben. He starts to explain himself and Xander cuts him off.
"I get it, Giles - I know why you did it. Buffy couldn't. None of us could, then."
"Can you, now?" Giles asks, and launches into an elaborate out for Xander, telling him there are operatives that can do this for him, keep his hands clean. But Xander knows the truth, knows that his hands are already filthy with the soil of this place, and that this is part of his work, part of what he accepted when he came here.
He makes Giles shut up then, and tells him what Sona's brother has told him. He tells him about the men and boys Sona has killed, that she has also killed demons - doing her job according to an ancient calling that she can't understand, but without the ability to differentiate the demons that wear human skin and give her candy before they give her pain. She kills. She maims and she tortures. All the torture groups, Xander thinks, remembering something Faith told him after Sunnydale, when everyone was big on confessing and forgiving.
Giles doesn't have to tell Xander what to do, and Xander doesn't make him say the words, he simply promises to do what must be done and to call afterwards. Before he hangs up the phone, he asks about Spike, Spike's hands. Giles tells him that the lines of communication with Angel's people have been severed, and Xander gets a creepy visual of Spike's fine-boned white hands too far away from the rest of him.
Oddly enough, he finds himself thinking of Spike a good deal while he does what must be done. While he tracks Sona through the jungle, finding carcasses that are demon and human and maybe neither. He thinks "what would Spike do?' laughing at himself all the way, wondering if he should get a T-shirt made. But it helps to think like a predator, helps him push aside the voce that tells him that life is sacred, helps him listen to the voice that talks about fields of fire and collateral damage. So, silent in the night, he finally finds her and does what must be done.
He thinks to himself that this place - Africa - is where Spike came to reclaim his soul, and, standing over Sona's body as the mountain looks down upon him, he wonders if it is where he's come to lose his.