CHAPTER 6

OMAR SLEEPS UNDER a mountain of blankets. I’m in the doorway of the room in our aki compound where most of us eat, and I’ve got Bo and Ifeoma and Sade behind me. A couple littler aki crowd behind them in the hall. Ifeoma stifles a snicker. Sade shushes her.

Then I pounce.

“WAKE UP!” I shout, snatching off Omar’s blankets and tickling under his armpits. In an instant, he leaps up and swipes at my face. He lands in a fighting stance, but his eyes have barely even opened yet.

Sade doubles over in laughter. Ifeoma can barely hold herself up against the wall.

“What?” Omar mumbles, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “What is going on?”

Bo walks to the boy’s side, all stately pride, and grins down at the little aki. “Today’s your Daga Day.”

Omar looks confused, but we’re all beaming.

There is never any graceful transition between the rain season and the summer. There are a few days, maybe a week or two, of relief from the monsoons, the flooding, and the sewage overflow, then all of a sudden the sun returns. The Forum bursts with color; it blinds the eye. And everyone comes out to enjoy it. The streets are crowded with people—children playing and animals brought out after months of being cooped up indoors.

Chickens flap wildly in cages held by their handlers. Some let out their last cries before the meat-man chops off their heads. Goats roam, tethered to their owners by rope. Exotic birds preen for everyone watching. They spread their wings, and their feathers join to resemble multicolored faces looking right at you. Anyone who spends enough time in Kos can tell which birds have dyed feathers and which ones are natural. On really hot days, the dye flakes, and everyone knows who’s full of lahala.

We head south toward Gemtown, where all the jewelers peddle their wares. They can’t put their shops too close together, because people walk up needing to close their eyes to keep from getting blinded by the jewelry and wind up at the wrong jeweler’s stall. So they give enough space for shadows to fall. Here in Gemtown, you pull your cloak low over your eyes. With our white-pupiled eyes shaded and with baggy clothes hiding our sin-spots, we aki can walk around just like everyone else.

Gemtown forms a small semicircle toward the bottom end of the Forum. In some stalls, Kosians can buy fasteners for their ear-stones. In others, families who have been saving up can purchase family stones or gems for a young girl’s Jeweling ceremony. But we’re here for something darker.

There’s one storefront that’s barely a storefront at all. From the overhang, a tent flap swishes in the breeze. I hold it open, and the others walk through. Omar hangs back, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Eh-eh! Hurry up! Time and tide wait for no one.” I give him a soft kick in the backside, and he chuckles as he scurries in. When the tent flap falls behind me, we’re shrouded in darkness.

Then a beam of light sneaks through the roof, and the entire room is alight with the rays reflecting off the obsidian knives and gleaming swords and cutlasses hanging from the walls and ceilings. All types of dagas, some with bejeweled handles, some with plain wooden handles, sit neatly arranged on plush cushions behind glass displays.

Bo nudges me, and I notice Omar gawking at the wares.

“Eh-heh. You want your new nickname to be Flycatcher?” I say, laughing. The rest of the room chuckles. Omar smiles, chastened, but still very much in awe.

From behind a curtain in the back, the stonesmith emerges. The jewels he wears around his neck and ankles clink as he walks toward us. His skinny arms poke out from billowing sleeves. He clutches a cane with one gnarled hand and moves with his head down. Everyone clears a path for him. He stops a few steps in front of Omar.

The stonesmith towers over the little aki, then lowers himself, knees cracking as he does, so that they’re face-to-face. When he pulls back his hood, the stones embedded in lines along his cheekbones mirror the light in his eyes. He looks like something more than human, and the sight of him always leaves me breathless. I feel the same sense of awe I did when it was my Daga Day and I saw him for the first time.

“Child,” he says in his breathy voice. “What do you see here?”

When Omar doesn’t respond, the stonesmith tilts his face in closer.

“What do you see?”

“I see . . . I see gemstones. I see jewels and cutlasses and dagas. I see canes with jeweled handspots. I see fasteners for earstones. I see all the colors that ever were.”

Bo and I look at each other, our eyes wide. We’re both shocked at what the boy says. I don’t think either of us have heard him say more than three words at a time.

The stonesmith hums his assent. “That is interesting. I see all of those things too. But I see something else also.”

He rises, then looks around at his shop and smiles with all of his teeth. They look like they’re made of ivory. “One gray morning, a stonesmith was working in his shop. And a woman came to him. She held in her hands a broken heart and laid it on his table. The man wore a dark apron and had soot and dust covering him from his work, and the ruby jewel on his table was precious and unblemished. But it was broken. The woman asked if the stonesmith could repair her broken heart, and he replied that he would. He mended it and returned it to the woman, and she left him to his work. But she returned the following week to tell him it was still broken. It did not glow. So he worked on the heart for another week, used his best tools, and recalled the wisdom of stonesmiths before him. And he gave it back to the woman. But when she returned again to say it still did not glow, he realized what he needed to do.”

The stonesmith turns back to Omar. “So he reached into his chest and took out his heart. He put the woman’s broken heart back in his chest and gave her his own. After this, she never returned.”

He does this every time. Every single time we bring new aki here for Daga Day, he tells the same story the exact same way, walks the same few paces, stoops at the exact same height, looks at the exact same bits of jewelry. And every single time, it’s like I’ve never heard it before.

“So, little aki,” the stonesmith says. “Look around again. Tell me what you see.”

Omar stands in silence for a few seconds. Then he says, “Sacrifice. I see love.”

“Yes, child. Love.”

We all know to remain in reverent silence for this part.

The stonesmith retreats to the back room, then returns a moment later with a daga inside what will be Omar’s armband. He holds it out with both hands, and Omar lets it fall into his own. Slowly, he slides the daga out of its sheath and turns it over in his hands, gazing intently at the way it shines. How smooth it is.

Bo steps out of the circle we’ve formed, and we all unsheathe our dagas. This part is new. Originally my idea, but I let the others think Bo came up with it. I can’t have them looking up to me like I’m some responsible older brother bringing them together and building morale.

“This is my daga,” Bo says.

“This is my daga,” we all repeat, surrounding Omar.

“There are many like it.”

“There are many like it.” Omar’s voice, at first a whisper, grows louder and firmer with each response.

“But this one is mine.”

“I must master it.”

Our voices are rising so loud all of Gemtown can probably hear us, but I don’t care. “I must master it.”

“As I master my life.”

Then all together: “May the Unnamed preserve us.”

Silence hangs in the still air. Nothing, not even the jewelry hanging from the ceiling, makes a sound. Until Ifeoma practically tackles Omar and everyone else joins in ruffling his hair, nudging him, and grinning so big that he can’t help but grin too.

I hang back a little. Satisfied.

They jostle him until Sade hoists the boy onto her shoulders and dances in a circle while the others dance around them, singing a song about a boy and his new daga.

Omar’s still smiling when we leave Gemtown. He doesn’t seem to care about anything other than the daga he keeps holding with both hands. He won’t stop looking at the thing.

So he doesn’t even notice when we get to the ridge of the Sabaa dahia. The cluster of homes and estates in the valley below spreads wider than most of the southern dahia. Small villages dot the outskirts beyond the larger compounds, some of them nothing more than huts, others full clay houses with wells and pens for animals. I realize which village is Omar’s when he stops and stands completely still, looking down at what was once his home. We’re maybe a couple hundred meters away.

Outside one house, in the backyard, a group of men lounge. Some of them are young, a little older than us. The rest of them are older. And most of them stand by tables, pounding away with hammers.

“Come on,” I tell Omar, and wave him along. The others follow as we skid down the hill, one ledge at a time. We get near enough that we can see some of the people inside the house. The sky is darkening, and someone has lit a fire beneath a tree in the home’s front yard. The men pound and pound, and the metal clanks, and golden flakes fall to the floor. Then, they slide what remains on the table into calabash bowls filled with just a little bit of water and stir and crush some more.

One of the younger men is given a bowl, and he heads into the home, and I realize with a start that that’s probably Omar’s older brother. Omar hasn’t said a word. Hangs back. He looks on so shocked he’s forgotten to put his daga back in its sheath. I bet he never expected he’d get to see home again. Certainly not during his sister’s Jeweling ceremony.

The young man heads into the home, and I follow Omar’s line of sight to one of the windows. Inside that room sits a crowd of women. I can’t hear their words from here, but I know they’re praying over the girl at the center of their circle. One of the women takes the bowl from the boy’s hands and a few moments later dips her thumb into it. I know she’s going to draw a line across the girl’s forehead, and so will all the others.

A goat burns over a fire pit somewhere nearby. The neighbors must be cooking for them.

I look around and see that Omar’s found a tree to hide behind. I haven’t seen him this terrified since that first day, after we’d buried Jai. Bo stands next to Omar, and Sade and Ifeoma stand to the side, in the shadows. Even covered in darkness, their eyes glisten with envy.

The smell of the goat cooking wafts our way. My stomach hasn’t been this loud in a long time.

Quietly, I head over to the tree Omar’s standing by and rattle the branches. A whole bushel of plums showers us, and when Ifeoma and Sade glare at me, I mouth, Sorry, then start picking up the fruit.

Nobody else seems to want any, not even Omar, so I stand and eat by myself.

The women all come out of the house, the oldest at the head and the girl at the rear. The women all wear bloodstained cloth around their right hands. The ritual goes like this: Each family member uses the Family Stone to cut their palm, then they mix the blood with the gold dust and form small lines down the girl’s forehead.

Neighbors stream in from nearby, and the smell of good meat almost overpowers me. Maybe if I bite deeper into these plums, I can force myself not to give in to temptation and rush over there and eat that entire goat.

The music starts so suddenly I jump and drop half my plums. Everyone starts dancing. Three of the men have drums between their knees, and the others clap to the beat, forming a ring around Omar’s sister. In the center, she twirls and spins. Neighbors reach into their baskets and toss small gemstones onto the ground at her quick feet.

She’ll dance until her feet are bloody. Until the minerals from the gemstones and other precious metals are bathed in her essence. And then the women will tend to the girl’s feet and smile and tell her now she will bear gilded children.

Marya told me that’s how it happens, but this is the first one I’ve seen in person. I turn to look at Omar, who is peering out from behind the tree,

It was supposed to be a surprise, to give him some peace and closure. But his bottom lip is trembling now, and he’s sniffling, holding on to his daga too tightly.

Bo puts a hand to the little aki’s shoulder. “Hey, we don’t have to stay,” he says quietly in Omar’s ear. “We can go whenever you want.”

“No,” Omar says. So quietly I barely hear him. “I want to stay.”

So we stay. I chew through all the plums in my haul, but I don’t have the heart to rain more down on Omar’s head. Seems like too serious an occasion.

I let out a sigh, then watch the village feast. Eventually, the dancing ends and the men clean up and everyone says their goodbyes. I yawn and turn toward the others, ready to gather everyone and head home. But there’s no little head poking out from behind the tree.

“Hey, Bo.” I look around. “Where’s Omar?”

Sade takes a step toward the house. “By the Unnamed . . .”

Ifeoma joins us. “He’s aki. If they see him, they’ll throw him out. They might even call the Mages. We can’t let him—”

“Wait,” Bo says. Then he points right to the roof of Omar’s family’s home.

The little aki climbed up onto the roof of his old home. He’s curled up, holding his daga close to his chest. He’s going to sleep up there. I know already that there’s no way we can talk him out of it.

My room’s night-blue by the time I hear footsteps shuffle outside my door. I left the door open for ventilation, but it doesn’t make a difference in the summer heat. Even the breeze is stifling this time of year. My pillows are soaked with sweat. Sleeping under the window is no help. So I’m wide awake when Omar tiptoes past my door. He came home after all.

I wait till he’s gone, then I get up and follow him down the hall to where he sleeps with a bunch of the other aki. They’re all bundled together on pallets on the floor like snoring puzzle pieces. Omar’s back is to me as he unstraps his armband and hangs it up on a peg in the wall. The moonlight streaming in through the window catches his wrist and bounces off a new stone on his bracelet.

I’m barely back on my pillows when I see him in my doorway.

“Yeah?” I ask, pretending to be more annoyed than I really am.

“Um. Thank you.”

“What? For the daga? Eh, you don’t need to thank me. You’re one of us now.”

“No. For . . .” He looks down at his hands, then at the bracelet on his right wrist. “For bringing me back home. So that I could see my sister’s Jeweling.” He holds up his wrist to show me the small sapphire hanging from his bracelet. “This was one of the stones she danced on.”

I push myself up on one elbow. “Now you two will always be joined.”

Omar smiles. “Thank you for letting me see my home one last time.”

“It was Bo’s idea,” I lie. “You should be thanking him.”

I turn over, but I can tell he’s still watching me. He waits a beat before padding down the hall. It feels like forever before I finally fall asleep.