Lkossa’s stars twinkled like diamonds against its obsidian-black night sky. Through her barred window, Koffi could not see them.
It had taken her several minutes to understand where she was as pieces of consciousness seeped back into her, as her body self-assessed its damage. She was sore in places, cut, and never in her life had she felt so thoroughly drained. Slowly, she blinked away the grit in her eyes and tried to bring her unfamiliar setting into focus. She was on her back, staring up at the granite ceiling of a building she did not know, but the mildewy smell was vaguely familiar.
The hard surface beneath her was strangely cool and damp, and the air she breathed slightly dank. Something small and hairy skittered over her foot, and she shot straight up.
Alarm coursed through her as her head spun, sending her into absolute darkness for a moment, but her heartbeat steadied as her eyes adjusted. She was surrounded on three sides by walls of granite, perfect matches to the ceiling overhead. Before her, a set of thick blacksteel bars reached from ceiling to floor. She couldn’t make out much beyond them, but somewhere down the hallway, a dull orange light flickered. She was in some kind of prison, she realized, but where? How? The questions came in a sudden onslaught; she had no answers for them.
Who had put her here, and why? Just like that, the sharp, horrible fragments of a memory returned to her like pieces of broken pottery. Each one hurt, and none of them made sense. The last thing she remembered was the Greater Jungle. She remembered a small pond, the sound of warriors whooping, and then a roar. She cringed. The memory was becoming clearer. There’d been an attack. Someone had—inconceivably—come after them in the jungle, someone had tried to take Adiah away, and . . .
Ekon.
It was the last piece of the broken pottery, and when Koffi placed it in her mind, fresh pain stabbed at her side as the rest of the memory came to her. It hadn’t been just anyone who’d attacked them, and it hadn’t been a surprise. They’d been ambushed, sabotaged, and Ekon had been behind it all. He’d betrayed their plans, betrayed Adiah, betrayed . . . her. A sour taste filled the back of her mouth that made her want to spit, but at the sound of approaching footsteps, she looked up.
“Ah.” A gruff voice rang out from the darkness. “She’s awake.”
Koffi jumped to her feet as someone else snickered just out of sight. She ran to her cell’s door and wrapped her fingers around the bars. They were cold to the touch, and stank of old metal, but she held on to them, looking up and down the corridor until the owners of the voices emerged from its shadows. One of them, a young man of stocky build, was carrying a small pot filled with a suspicious yellow-gray mush; the other boy was taller, with the saddest attempt at a beard Koffi had ever seen. He carried only a spear and a smirk.
“Dinnertime for the daraja rat,” the first one said, holding out the bowl. “Here!” He stuck a hand through the bars and waited until Koffi reached to take the bowl from him before deliberately letting it slip from his fingers and shatter on the floor. At once, the slimy grayish goop—whatever it had been—splattered all over Koffi’s legs, and a new foul smell soured the air. She stepped back from the bars, disgusted, and the warriors snickered again in earnest.
“Where am I?” Koffi tried to sound confident as she asked the question, but when she spoke, she found her voice was hoarse and scratchy, as though she hadn’t spoken in days. Panic flitted through her. How long had she been here?
“Well, well, it speaks.” Peach Fuzz cocked his head, amused. “You’re exactly where you belong, Gede: in prison, which is where you’ll stay until you face your punishment tomorrow.”
Punishment. Another shiver of panic rattled through her body at the ominous words, and more questions darted through her mind. What “punishment” was this warrior talking about?
“What happened to A—um, the Shetani?” The question slipped from her mouth before she could stop herself, and at once she regretted asking it. The smiles fell from the warriors’ faces instantly as their eyes hardened.
“That monster will be burned to a crisp,” Peach Fuzz said in a dangerously low voice. “Right after we deal with you.”
They were words that should have scared Koffi, should have sent her into a deeper panic. Instead, she thought of Adiah. Her stomach roiled as she envisioned what the warrior had said. That monster will be burned to a crisp. With a terrible, twisting pang, she imagined Adiah being led to the city’s square like a sacrificial cow. She saw the masses of jeering faces, spitting, hissing, and booing as she was tortured. The thought of it made her want to retch, but her body had nothing to give. She steadied herself and met Peach Fuzz’s eyes again.
“Sir.” She did her best to sound gracious. “Please, I need to speak to Father Olufemi. The Shetani isn’t what people think it is at all. It—”
“Shut up.” Peach Fuzz’s eyes flashed dangerously, and at once, Koffi clamped her mouth shut. There was an unspoken foreboding in the warrior’s eyes as he leaned in as far the bars would let him. The other warrior watched, wary-eyed. “That abomination has killed people for years. Tomorrow, it will pay.”
Koffi’s heart sank, but she couldn’t give up. “Please. Something else has been killing Lkossans, and it’s still out there. It could be—”
“Enough!” Peach Fuzz’s voice cleaved the air, cutting off the rest of her words. “It’ll be killed tomorrow, right after your flogging. If I were you, I’d spend the rest of this night making your peace with the Six. You may not have another opportunity to do so.”
Dread seeped into Koffi’s bones. Her mouth went dry as she tried to summon more words, anything to make the Yaba warriors listen, but it was too late. As quickly as they’d come, they shot her final derisive looks before leaving her in darkness again. In their absence, it was painfully quiet, and the creeping thoughts that had waited in the back of her cell seemed to crawl forth to meet her.
You failed.
The two words latched on to her like talons, clawing at her and digging in no matter how hard she tried to shake them off. They hung stale in the fetid air, choking her, making her head pound each time they echoed in her mind. She tried to send them away with a hard swallow, but they stayed lodged obstinately in her throat.
You failed. You failed everyone.
There was no way around it, no way to avoid it. The truth of those words rolled over her in tides, each one crashing against her. She wasn’t going to make good on her bargain. Mama and Jabir weren’t going to be free. Adiah was going to die.
Her tailbone ached as she hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth, considering plan after plan. Each one was like a bird, fluttering in and out of her mind too quickly to be logical, but she considered them just the same. She could beg the Kuhani for mercy, appeal for the clemency of the Six. But no, something told her that the old man would know. As soon as he laid eyes on her, saw the identical fear in her eyes, he’d recognize her from the temple. If her punishment was bad now, it would worsen tenfold when he pieced that together. There would be no mercy from him. Her eyes flitted again toward that tiny, barred cut-out window several feet above her. It wasn’t within easy reach, but maybe . . . A third idea slithered into her mind like a poisonous asp.
You could run, it suggested. Use the splendor and break out. Leave, and never look back.
The thought curdled in Koffi’s stomach, sickening, and she knew at once she couldn’t do that either. She couldn’t leave Mama and Jabir behind to suffer for her mistakes, or leave Adiah here to die after she’d promised to help her. She could neither help them nor leave them; she could do nothing. Slowly, she returned to the cell’s stone floor again, letting that familiar cold seep back into her bones and, with it, resignation. She wasn’t sure when she first heard the new set of footsteps, only that once she did, they echoed, hard and deliberate against the stone outside her cell. She sat up just as a figure appeared on the other side of the bars.
“Koffi?” The voice that said her name was familiar. “Are you in there?”
Her teeth gnashed together at the same time something jolted in her chest. It was a confusing feeling, happy and angry all at once. Ekon stepped forward, the hall’s torchlight casting one side of his face in shadow. What little stubble he’d had the last time she’d seen him was gone; he was clean-shaven and wore a Son of the Six’s telltale blue tunic. His expression was tentative.
“Koffi,” he whispered in a voice only she could hear. “Koffi, I’m so sorry. I . . .”
Something rose in Koffi just then, a heat. It wasn’t pleasant or tingling, it wasn’t like the way she’d felt when the splendor had coursed through her, and it wasn’t anything like the joy she’d felt when Ekon’s lips had found hers in the jungle. This time, the words came from her mouth unbidden.
“I hate you.”
They sliced the air like a blade, and she watched as they found their mark on Ekon’s face. He recoiled, eyes flashing a hurt that almost made her sorry. Almost. His gaze dropped from hers as he looked to his feet, mouth set in a tight line. “Look, Koffi. I know you’re mad at me. You have every right to be. But I—”
“All those words . . .” It took every bit of Koffi’s willpower to keep her voice from trembling as she spoke. “None of them were true.”
“They were.” Ekon looked up, and though one side of his face was still obscured in shadow, the other side was pleading. “I wanted to say something, to stop them—”
“So why didn’t you?”
Ekon stared at his hands, as though trying to find the words, before he spoke.
“For a long time, the only thing I wanted was to be a Son of the Six,” he said quietly. “It was the only way I knew how to honor my family and my baba. Everything I did, every choice I made, was with that goal in mind. When I made my deal with you, it’s what I had in mind. I didn’t care about anything else. You were a means to an end.”
Koffi flinched, surprised at how much the words stung. The deal they’d struck felt like something from another life, from a Before. That was how things felt now, two parts of a whole, cleaved into the time Before Ekon had betrayed her, and the terrible After.
“But once we got into the jungle,” Ekon went on, “things started to change. What we saw while we were in there, what we did . . . I wasn’t expecting it. And then, I started to change, started realizing that maybe I did still want to be a Son of the Six and make my family proud, but I wanted something else too, I wanted”—his gaze dropped—“I wanted you.”
Koffi swallowed.
“Then my brother came to me,” said Ekon. “And it was like being ripped from a dream. It was like I was being pulled into two directions, pulled between something old and something new.” He looked up at her. “Haven’t you ever felt that, that pull?”
Koffi didn’t answer, she didn’t want to. She had felt that pull, she had been pulled between things. For most of her life, she’d been pulled between following her heart and her mind. In the end, it had been Ekon who’d told her she didn’t have to give in to that pull. He’d been the one to tell her she could follow both. She looked up and found Ekon’s eyes had locked on hers. She couldn’t read the expression on his face. Another minute passed before he spoke.
“Just so you know, I feel like dirt,” he said quietly. “I’ve never felt so bad in my life, and I know that still isn’t enough. I know I can’t ask you to just forgive and forget what I did.”
Koffi didn’t know if she could forgive and forget it either.
“But I’m going to get you out of here,” he said, voice strained. “I’m going to make this right.”
“What about Adiah?”
Ekon tensed, looking away from Koffi and down the hallway before leaning in. “That’s why I’ve come. I know what’s really been killing Lkossans now.”
Koffi straightened. “What?”
“It’s been”—Ekon hesitated—“it’s been the Sons of the Six.”
Koffi stepped back. Cool dread coursed through her body as Ekon’s impossible words sank in. No, it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be. The Sons of the Six could certainly be brutal, terrifyingly dedicated to their duty, but they weren’t murderers. Their job was to protect the city’s people. It didn’t make sense.
“How?” Her voice was hollow. “How could they do such a thing?”
Ekon was shaking his head. “I’m not sure they fully understand what they’re doing. They’re being . . . drugged. When I was in the temple, I saw Father Olufemi with one of the warriors. The warrior could only kind of remember hurting people, but he described it like a dream, something he wasn’t sure was real. Then Father Olufemi gave him something to smoke, packed into one of his pipes.”
Koffi swore, feeling the blood drain from her face. At Ekon’s confused look, she met his gaze. “I saw that pipe when I was in the Kuhani’s study looking for Nkrumah’s journal. It was on his desk, but I couldn’t see what was in it.”
“It was hard for me to see too,” said Ekon. “But it looked silver, like one of the plants I read about in Nkrumah’s journal. I think it’s called hasira, or—”
“Angry leaf.” Koffi went still. “My mama and I use that stuff at the Night Zoo to sedate the bigger animals. It’s incredibly dangerous. If a human ingested it—”
“The side effects are really bad,” said Ekon. “It’s a hallucinogen, and a highly addictive one at that. I think the Kuhani has been giving it to Sons of the Six, then ordering them to kill people.”
Koffi shook her head, disturbed. She thought of the people, the countless people, who’d been killed; she thought of Sahel and the way his body had been found, lacerated. She shuddered.
“There’s something I still don’t understand,” she said. “Why would Father Olufemi do this, Ekon? What does he have to—?”
They stilled, coming to the same understanding at once. They said the name at the same time.
“Fedu.”
“Badwa said whatever was really killing Lkossans would come from him,” said Ekon. “What if he’s already here, controlling Father Olufemi?”
“But where would he be?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we need to find Adiah and get her out of here before he gets to her.”
“Those other warriors.” Koffi nodded in the direction the other two had gone. “They said they were going to kill her tomorrow afternoon, right after . . .” For the first time, she felt the cold touch of fear. “Right after I’m flogged.”
Ekon’s face hardened. “That’s not happening. I won’t let it. I’m going to get you out of here, Koffi, I promise, and then we’ll get Adiah out too. We’ll get to the Kusonga Plains and end this.”
The words were noble, and Koffi found herself reminded of another time Ekon had said some noble-sounding words that had inspired her. She’d believed him then too, but . . .
“How? How are we going to do any of that?”
Ekon pressed his folded hands to his mouth, deep in thought for a second before he looked up again. “I have a plan, but I need you to trust me.”
Koffi stiffened. She didn’t trust Ekon at all. “What are you—?”
“Hey, Okojo!” A voice rang from down the hall. Peach Fuzz. “You still down there?”
Ekon looked down the hall, then back at Koffi. “Please.”
The words tumbled from Koffi’s mouth before she could stop them, and she prayed she wouldn’t regret them.
“Let’s go.”