I felt it before we saw anything. It certainly wasn’t as enormous as the storm, but it was huge and was abuzz with life I could sense. It was like being in the presence of a whale who was the size of a city. No living thing should be so enormous, but the city was just that. I rubbed my forehead. “What is this?” I whispered.
“What?” DNA said, his eyes still closed.
“I think we’re getting close.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “The Hour Glass is surrounded by a firewall. The Red Eye isn’t the only way it stays hidden. I hope it doesn’t do to you what the firewall around my village did. It’s much bigger and stronger.” He looked at the GPS and frowned. I looked too and groaned. The hour was almost up. We had three minutes before the Hour Glass became undetectable to our GPS.
“I hate to say it, AO, but you might be the only way we can find it.”
“I’m not even sure I want to find it anyway,” I said. “What if they don’t want us? What if they know who we are and they think we’ll just bring trouble?”
We stared at each other. Where else could we go? If we turned around and went back, it wouldn’t be robots and drones waiting for us, it would be human government soldiers. We’d just escaped execution; I just wanted to flee.
“What is it you feel?” he asked.
“Drums,” I said.
“You hear drumbeats?”
“Sort of. I hear them, but also feel them. Like the beat is trying to smash my brains. And there’s pressure, too.” I suddenly wanted to stop the truck, but one look out the window and I was reminded of where we were and what awaited us on the way back. I let the truck keep going and the clock kept counting down. “My brother used to play the drums. They gather people.”
Three minutes, the drum beat its rhythm.
Two minutes, the sound bloomed and I could no longer hear the howl of the window outside.
One minute, oh the pressure, and what was I seeing when I closed my eyes? I could not open my eyes.
“It’s gone,” I heard DNA say.
“I know,” I whispered. My ears were blocked with pressure, the pounding in my head was so loud that I wasn’t sure if DNA could hear me. But I was seeing things behind my eyes. There was chaos outside and chaos inside my head. Yes, like when I’d arrived at DNA’s village. The sensation was so overwhelming that I decided to just fall into it. Let it take me, I thought. Anything was better than this. If I die, I finally die.
One moment, I was there with DNA, sensing his worry and helplessness, the next, I was swept into blackness. I was falling, though I had no body. I was warm, as if I were falling into something alive. But I had no body. I was not my body. I was . . .
And there were the eyes. Red. So much like the inside of a pomegranate. I don’t know when it happened. I began the process long ago. Maybe it started the day I murdered those men. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I knew everything in that moment. And I knew it before them all. I laughed. I had no body but I laughed.
When I opened my eyes, I tasted blood. And blood was running down my nose. I felt it dribbling from my ears. My head was on DNA’s lap and he was using his shirt to dab at my wet ears as he wept and said my name over and over, “AO, AO, AO, AO.” I lay there for a bit listening to him, my eyes itchy with sweat, my head still pounding, my body aching. His voice was bringing me back. “AO, AO, AO, AO.”
We’d stopped because the GPS no longer had a destination. The wind shook the truck and the steer in the back whined with fear, crowding to the front, trying to be as close to DNA as possible.
“I’m okay,” I croaked. I coughed, clearing my throat. “I’m okay.”
“Are you?”
“I know where the Hour Glass is,” I whispered. “Half mile . . .” I paused, reaching out. They answered. “North. There is an entrance. The anti-aejej is like an enormous infinity-shaped dome. It goes pretty high. People have space.” I sat up and my head felt like gravity was trying to pull it to the truck’s floor. When I shook it, the pounding deepened, so I stopped.
“How do . . . ?” DNA asked.
“I can see it,” I said. Can shut it all down, if I want to? I wondered. They will listen to me. I didn’t want to talk about it with DNA or anyone. I wanted to just sit in silence and consider the question of “What am I what am I what am I?” Because WHAT WAS I? I could see it. The Hour Glass existed because an insanely powerful anti-aejej was pushing the storm back so that the hidden desert city of Hour Glass could exist. And on top of that, there was a digital cloaking firewall up that prevented any type of surveillance. Well, unless it was me.
I was seeing, touching, communicating, controlling.
I could CONTROL.
I sniffed and tasted more blood. Was my brain bleeding? What was all this costing me? But I felt so much better. I touched the screen. I didn’t even have to know how to operate it. I told it how to operate and, as I did, I could see that infinite pomegranate of eyes shift to focus more closely on me. A steering wheel template popped up on the touch screen and my seat lowered so that I was eye to eye with it. I put my palms on the screen as the truck began to move again.
“Allah is great,” DNA muttered.
I just shook my head. “I’ll never ever be able to explain,” I said.
We were picking up speed. In the back, GPS mooed loudly as the truck was buffeted by the winds. “I agree,” DNA said. “But it could be worse.”
“There’s going to be an archway,” I said. I’d closed my eyes and I could see it. But only because that archway was threaded with surveillance cameras. “I can see us coming. Hour Glass security can, too.”
The archway was made of heavy red crystal. Digitally, I could touch it, smell it, search its history. This archway was all that was left of a film set for an old Nollywood movie made by a Nigerian billionaire with little creative vision and lots of time. A movie buff, he’d been determined to make a movie that was greater than Star Wars. He’d insisted on writing the script, directing and even acting in it. Then he’d distributed his cinematic creation all over Africa. The film had been so terrible that to this day it was still known throughout the continent as the “Worst African Movie Ever Made.” And this solid rhodochrosite crystal archway that the billionaire had demanded be constructed was all that was left of the film’s elaborate africanfuturist set.
All this I could pull instantly from the Internet right in my mind, as I looked at our truck approaching. “There are people guarding it. It’s the only way in . . . and out because of the anti-aejej. If you try to go out anywhere else, the velocity of the wind repelling from the anti-aejej will tear you apart. It’s actually kind of genius.”
“And dangerous,” he said. “I don’t like places with only one exit.”
“Good point,” I said. I could always shut it off, I thought. I really could. Maybe. And destroy the Hour Glass in the process. And maybe myself, too. “But let’s go in,” I said. “If we have to get out, we’ll get out. We’ll find a way. We just escaped an execution, getting out of the Hour Glass can’t be much harder.”
I slowed us to a stop and as if by my command, white flood lights lit up the darkness, showing the swirling dust storm retreating and lifting. And there was the red crystal archway. This close to it, I could see the famous etchings, from Nsibidi to Vah to Adinkra.
“Allah is here,” DNA whispered.
“Someone definitely was,” I muttered.
All around us was quiet and still. We were in the field of the Hour Glass’s giant anti-aejej, but this part of it was like the entrance. In the back of the jeep, GPS mooed softly and the quiet was so profound, I could hear the worry in his voice.
“We’re here,” I said. “They’re going to send . . .”
Ding. It appeared on the screen in bright yellow words.
“How’d you know they were sending that?” DNA asked. “Just curious.”
“I can even hear them typing the message,” I said. I chuckled.
The message was five words, “Step out of the truck.”
“Can they turn their anti-aejej off?” DNA asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “We’re just past the borders of it. But if they move the border, I’m sure I can move it back.” I really was sure. I just wasn’t sure if I could do it before the Red Eye’s violent winds swept us away or if doing something big like this would hurt me. The thing that had shifted or ruptured in my brain—what if flexing or pushing that something damaged my brain? Maybe I could drop dead at any moment, from a brain aneurism, a heart attack, or stroke if I attempted the wrong thing.
Another message came on the screen. This time it was six words. “Get out of the truck NOW.”
“Or what?” I muttered. But we’d come here for a reason. We wanted in. I turned to DNA, “Come on. Let’s go.”
DNA didn’t wait for me to ask again. I opened my door and got out on my side. I carefully took my mask off. The first thing I noticed was that air was free of dust and it was warm, the anti-aejej removing every speck of sand and dust in the air. The Hour Glass would not have dust problems as most places in the desert did. And the quiet was amazing, despite the storm that roiled and raged about a half mile behind and hundreds of feet above us. Beyond the archway, although it was through a veil of whipping dust, I could see the Hour Glass: buildings of stone, giant tents made of fortified weather-treated polymers, glimpses of outdoor camps, and knots of markets. More lights, so many lights, because the storm kept so much of the sunshine from coming through. A refugee city in the shadows.
I walked in front of the truck where DNA met me, followed by GPS and Carpe Diem. We stood facing the archway.
“Wait,” DNA said, taking his mask off. Then he shut his eyes.
I nodded. We had to wait anyway, but I knew what he was doing, and it was damn important, in my opinion. I hadn’t forgotten what he told me when we first met. How before he and his people had gone into that town, he’d paused. Of all of them, he’d paused. And he’d done what his mother had taught him to do and it had saved his life. Now he was doing it again. Grounding.
I looked down at my metal feet. Was it even possible for me to ground? Could the energy of the Earth, the aura of the Hour Glass, travel through the bottoms of my cybernetic feet, into my flesh, all the way to my brain, centering and informing me? I didn’t think so.
DNA grunted and looked at me.
“Okay?” I asked.
“We’ll see.” DNA muttered. “What now?”
“We wait some more,” I said.
He nodded, looking ahead at the arch. “No problem.”
For over a minute, there was nothing, and the silence was amazing. No wind, no grains of sand tumbling, not even the sound of the city just beyond the archway. We were in a type of sound-proof bubble. Then, “AO and DNA.” The voice was female, loud and strikingly clear, and it spoke in Igbo.
We looked at each other yet again. “Do you speak Igbo?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
“That is us,” I replied in Igbo. No point in trying to hide who we were. These days, privacy was a myth and there clearly was no secrecy when entering the Hour Glass, anyway. “But DNA doesn’t speak Igbo.”
“You’re on the run, both of you,” the voice continued in Igbo. “AO, you’re responsible for publicly murdering five men in a market.”
“That’s an overly simplified way to put it,” I said in Igbo.
“We’ve all seen the footage. We know it was complicated.” The voice switched to English. “DNA, you were involved in the incident in Matazu that led to the deaths of seven people and seventy six steer.”
DNA shook his head, raising his hands. “I was there. I was involved, but not—”
“We’ve seen the complete footage,” the voice said.
We were both silent. This wasn’t our decision to make.
“You’ve come here to hide,” the voice said. “Most people do.” There was a long pause and GPS mooed loudly. Carpe Diem grunted at him as if to say, “Shush!” DNA patted her side.
“You’re both legends here. We’re proud to have you.”
I saw nothing shift, but I felt it and we both heard it. PHOOOWOOOOOOSH! The veil of dust dissipated and then the sound of vehicles, voices, generators, music, laughter, reached our ears. The sounds of the Hour Glass. The voice spoke again, “Every hour at 1:11, all clocks reset to 12:11, all satellite locations and communication, all passwords reset, as well. We call that The Rotation of the Glass. We live within the chaos. Welcome to the Hour Glass.”
DNA and I herded the steer into the back of the truck again. When we got inside, there was another message on the screen for us. “The Force wants to see you. All remote navigation?”
“The Force?” I asked. “What is that? Some Star Wars reference?”
“Does it matter?” DNA asked.
“I don’t like the idea of . . .”
DNA reached forward and touched the “OK” button. I frowned but that was that. He was starting to know me. We entered the Hour Glass.