When we got back to Force and Dolapo’s space, Dolapo had a full spread of dinner waiting for us, and DNA was sitting at the table beside the stone hearth, eating from a plate of groundnuts.
“AO,” he said, grinning. “You look much better than you did this morning.”
I laughed sitting beside him. “You, too. Where’d you go?”
“Walking,” he said. “We’re so close to the Hour Glass border; I wanted to see it. People don’t like living near the borders, so the walking there was quiet, peaceful.”
“What’s out there?” I asked.
“Mostly farms,” Force said, sitting across from us. He took a groundnut from DNA’s plate and popped it into his mouth. “Groundnut farms. I assume you found the path that runs right alongside the anti-aejej edge.”
DNA perked up even more. “Yes! I walked it for nearly a mile, and not one person or vehicle passed me. I know why. AO, it’s beautiful and quiet, but the storm! You can see it. Whirling and swirling. And the higher you look, the thinner the dust gets, so the more you see. And you can’t hear it. So you see how violent it is, but you don’t truly know.”
“But all of us do know because we all fought our way through the damn thing to get here,” Force said. “Yep, nothing but human ingenuity is between us and the Great Flying Death.”
“I met a groundnut farmer sitting at a small hut he’d built. He was sitting on a stool watching the storm while he was digitally surveying his crops. He said that every day, he would come out there and converse with the Red Eye. He was a little strange. But he gave me this bag of groundnuts. Said he had a surplus and more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime, and if the Red Eye eventually blew this place away, he was fine going with it.”
“Ah, that had to be Sokoto,” Dolapo said as she put a huge bowl of egusi soup and a plate of pounded yam in front of me. “The man is over 80 years old and one of the few here the day they created the Hour Glass. His younger sister was one of the founders. No one sees much of Sokoto these days. You are blessed.”
I went to the faucet beside the hearth and washed my hands, taking more time with my flesh hand than my cybernetic one. When I sat back down in front of my food, I looked at Force. As it had always been with us, I didn’t need to say a word. He simply nodded, stood up, wrapped an arm around Dolapo’s waist, and the two gave DNA and me some privacy. DNA glanced at me from the corner of his eye, but said nothing as he munched on groundnuts. I paused and then tucked into my egusi soup.
For several minutes, we sat there. DNA eating groundnuts and me eating the most delicious egusi soup I’d ever tasted. My mother’s fantastic skills couldn’t compete with this because what made this soup so delicious was not in the execution, it was the ingredients. The chicken tasted amazing, tough but flavorful in a way I’d never experienced. The bitter leaf, ground melon seeds, crayfish, onion, everything tasted as if it was in its fullest color, at peak perfection. “Oh my goodness,” I said. “The taste!”
“All desert grown,” DNA said, smirking. “Even the crayfish. Dolapo said there’s some guy who has these pools where he grows all kinds of seafood he’s modified to grow small and fast. And they’re fed on the freshest ingredients. People pre-order months in advance.”
I paused, frowning at my food, then kept eating. About halfway through my meal, I stopped, wiped my hands with the napkin Dolapo had left for me, and turned to DNA. He turned to me, too. “What?” he asked.
Startled by his directness, I looked away. “N . . . nothing,” I stammered. “I was just—”
“Look, I’m not usually around people this much. That makes me pretty sensitive. And for some reason, I find you really easy to read. What do you want to tell me? Is it about GPS and Carpe Diem? I think they’re okay. Those animal rights people are treating them better than any human b—”
“No, no, Your steer are fine. In the best hands they can be in, other than you.”
“It’s refreshing,” he said, looking at his plate of finished groundnuts. “But I miss them and they’re all I—”
“DNA, I saw something,” I blurted. “It was your village.”
I quickly told him all I knew, which was actually a lot more than I let on to Force. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Force. Force had lied to me, horribly. But that was a long time ago, and I understood why. I guess. I didn’t tell Force because I felt this was information for DNA’s ears only. It was his family, his village.
“There is footage of the council, the Bukkaru, leaving with your sister Wuro. They came to your village, when the elders refused to tell them where you went, words were exchanged. That old man, the blind one—”
“Papa Ori? No.”
“Yes, he said something. The recorded conversation posted on Bukkaru networks didn’t catch it. But whatever he said, caused such rage that the Bukkaru had your village ransacked under the pretense of looking for you.”
“Where is Wuro?” he said. “Can you locate her?”
I shook my head. “They must have seen what I did yesterday. They won’t know how I did it, but they are definitely staying offline. There isn’t a whisper of her. There’s more.”
“Go on.”
I sighed. “This whole thing has sparked something. The farming communities seem to also have sent out groups of men—no, mobs of men into the desert.” I couldn’t look him in the eye when I said it. “They’re killing the last of the true herdsmen.”
“Shit,” DNA hissed.
It was the first time I’d ever heard DNA curse. I don’t think he even knew he did it.
“I’m sure this pleases Ultimate Corp,” he said. “We are a stupid people. We are killing our last source of homegrown fresh meat and milk. We’d rather eat flesh grown in a lab, or even plastic, than true food. Wish I could just leave this planet with my cows and live on the moon.” He got up, sat back down, then got up, sat back down. Frowned. Sighed. Kissed his teeth. Looked at me. “What do I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is my fault.”
“I don’t agree.”
He got up and started pacing. “What do I do, what do I do, what did Wuro say? Why my sister?”
“Because they’re trying to get to you.”
He was pacing faster now. “They burned everything?”
“Almost.”
“Where is my family now?”
“I don’t know. They’ve gone into the desert, though. Not into the Red Eye, just away.”
“I know where,” he said. He stopped, looking off toward the farms. Then he just started walking.
“Wait! Where are you going?” I asked, jumping up. He didn’t stop. He walked faster, and I had to jog to catch up with him. He walked onto a path that led between a field of corn and a field of onions.
“Wait! Where—”
“Where is there space?” he said with a shaky voice. “I need it. This way, I think.” He was practically running now, but I easily kept up. When he finally stopped, we were on a patch of sand where nothing grew. Where no soil was mixed with the sand. Between corn, onion, soybean fields. It wasn’t a wide space, just an in-between place before a field of corn began and a field of peri ended. The area in this spot wasn’t fortified with soil, so it was the sand of the land. Old. Dry. Barren. Here, he fell to his knees and clutched his head in his hands.
“Geno,” he said. “Geno, you extracted the universe from a drop of milk. Milk flowed, even out here in the desert. Please, please help me.” He dropped into Pulaar and for several minutes, he was completely lost to me. Then suddenly, he stopped his frantic praying, talking, pleading, whatever he was doing. He thrust both his hands deep into the soil and shut his eyes.
I will never believe in Christ or Allah or any other God. I will never follow any religion. Up until three days ago, I did not believe in juju. Not in oracles, charms, or anything that human beings think they can control. My life was an example that there was no such thing as true human control. But I’d been in a sorcerer’s hut yesterday, smoking sorcerer’s weed. With my mind, I’d stopped machines from executing me, DNA, and his two remaining steer. And when he buried his hand into the sand, through the sensors on the bottoms of my cybernetic feet, I felt the sand I stood on warm up like a sunrise. I swear it.
“My mother,” he said, his eyes still closed. “I saw her do this once. Her youngest brother was one of those who fought the Ultimate Corp security at the warehouse that day. She heard about how it burned and so many were killed. She needed him to come home. So she dug her hands in the dirt and prayed to our Earth to return him. He was covered in soot, but he walked into our compound two minutes later.”
I sat beside him and dug my hands in the sand, too. “What are we asking for?”
“Help. To find my sister. Help for my fellow true Fulani herdsman; we’re not terrorists.”
I shut my eyes and did my best. Instead of the Earth, I found myself talking to the pomegranate of eyes. I kept my breathing steady and deep, staying aware of my physical body. Calm. I had to stay calm. Where is she? I asked. I cannot describe the feeling but I felt and saw it all, despite the fact that my brain was unable to process it. Perspectives, voices, words, screenshots, word searches. We were sweeping. There was a text message. It said, “It’s ok. Wuro will sit.” The text had a number. We followed it. Triangulated its signal, disregarded where the number was based.
“I know where your sister is,” I said, opening my eyes. “West of the Red Eye, near the Nigeria-Niger border.”
“That’s where the Bukkaru council holds its most important meetings,” DNA said. “It’s where they know they’ll be only amongst themselves. Do you know what they’re doing there?”
“The text message said, ‘It’s ok. Wuro will sit.’ ”
He frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t know what that means. There was no other information?”
“I can dig, but not without alerting them to my presence. Might be better to do that when we have a plan.”
“True,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I smiled. “I’m fine.”
“Good,” he said. “So . . . can you do a little something more?”
It didn’t take me long to locate them. And because it was simple, finding them didn’t hurt me. DNA knew the exact details to give, but he couldn’t have known that those he had asked me to seek had arrived in the Hour Glass so recently. I located and sent them messages. Two hours later, they came through the cornfields. We’d waited there and when the corn stalks started rustling, we both thought they were something else.
“Are there wild animals here?” I asked, jumping to my feet.
“Pigeons, lizards, geckos, flies, the occasional scorpion, things like that, nothing big,” he said, keeping his eyes on the rustling corn stalks. They came one by one. Within a minute of each other. Three of them. All men. When they emerged from the corn field, they stood staring at each other, surprised to see someone else emerging from the corn. One of them couldn’t hold back his tears, and he angrily looked away. The other two held DNA’s strong gaze. I took over when it was clear none of them planned to speak.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the one who found you and sent a message. Can you tell me your names?”
“Lubega,” the one who was crying said. Tall and thin and the blue kaftan and jeans he wore made him look even more so. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
“Tasiri,” the one who looked about DNA’s age said. Tall with light brown skin, his dreadlocks were so strong that they stood straight up despite being inches long. “Who are you?”
“See them now,” the third one said, looking at Lubega and Tasiri. He could have been about thirty-five and was wearing nothing but red shorts. “This is why we came, right? To see them with our own eyes?” He pointed at DNA, glaring. “Do you understand what is happening? What you’ve done?”
“I didn’t do anything,” DNA snapped. “You know that. You saw the video. And you saw them kill my steer and my friends and their steer! I carry no Liquid Sword. I’m no terrorist.”
“Idris,” I said. He froze and stared at me. “Yeah, I know your name. I know a lot of things. Another thing I know is that I don’t have energy for this wahala. You’ve just been through hell. I understand. But I didn’t call you here to unload on DNA. He needs your help. And it’ll help you three, too.” I paused. “Please. Hear him out.” I stepped back.
“Thank you, AO,” he said. He turned to the herdsman. “Before I ask, please, I want to hear what happened to you. I need to know the details. How, why, when.”
It was surprisingly Idris who told us everything. His English was the strongest.
They’d indeed arrived in the Hour Glass hours ago. There was no one to vouch for them, so a human rights group had stepped forward to offer them temporary housing, food, and care. They’d arrived with wind lacerations having walked all night through the Red Eye with nothing but a personal anti-aejej to protect them. Personal aejejs were too weak to protect a person adequately from the strong winds of the Red Eye, so, although they weren’t swept away, they’d been pelted for hours and hours, miles and miles with the blowing sand that penetrated the anti-aejej’s protective field.
The five of us sat on the sand in a sort of circle, Lubega and Tasiri beside Idris, DNA and I across from them.
“We had no choice,” Idris said. “The three of us, we meet every month at a petrified palm tree a mile or so from the Red Eye. It’s a nice place to meet and a reminder that though we are few, we are still here. Even in these strange times. Our steer rest, and we sit and gaze at the disaster while we drink milky tea, eat whatever we have to eat, share stories and updates; then we part ways in the morning. We go in different directions every time. None of us goes north.”
“Until yesterday,” Lubega said.
“We was drinking tea,” Tasiri said. “I was the one who saw.”
“Tasiri had his back to the Red Eye because he hates it,” Idris said. “That’s what saved us. They were far away, maybe three miles, but Tasiri has a good eye, and he saw them coming, speeding in trucks. They were spread out. They meant to force us to flee in one direction.”
They got up. They got their steer up. Then they herded them toward the Red Eye, the only direction they could go. For several minutes they ran toward doom, the vehicles of the Bukkaru and farmer villages easily and quickly closing in on them. Every so often, they’d shoot into the air to show they were armed and ready. Idris couldn’t speak of what happened next. Lubega told the rest, his eyes filling with tears. He spoke in Pulaar and DNA had to translate for me.
The vehicles pursuing them stopped after a certain point and Idris, Lubega, and Tasiri and all their 125 steer kept running. The steer would follow their humans into a wall of fire and the Red Eye was no different. And this was how the three of them got to witness all their steer whisked into flying deaths by the Red Eye while they stood huddled in the force field of Lubega’s anti-aejej, a gift from his father when he’d left home to continue the ancient tradition of the herdsman life.
“Why?” DNA asked. “Why you three?”
“It was not just us three,” Idris said. “It was all of us. You see, the same day you left your village, the Bukkaru issued an order on all herdsmen.”
“An order?” DNA shouted. “That fast? No. It hasn’t even been—”
“The only thing that makes sense is that the Bukkaru must have signed an agreement with the non-Fulani farming communities weeks ago. Had it ready,” Idris said. “All they needed was a reason most would support. You gave it to them. Well, really, it was something one of your village elders said, the one with the walking stick, if we are being specific.”
“Papa Ori,” DNA said.
“Yes. The meeting in your village was recorded and it was all over the village feeds,” Idris said. “Your Elders refused to turn you over. We don’t know what it was, but whatever Papa Ori said to the head of the Bukkaru in your defense, that’s what got your village destroyed and the order executed.”
DNA rubbed his face. “So does this mean all the other herdsmen are dead?”
“All they could find,” Idris said. “They tracked most of us through our interactions on the village feeds, so they found us fast.”
Tasiri muttered something and DNA translated. “He says he thinks . . .” he sighed. “He thinks we are the only Fulani herdsmen left. No men with steer roam the north anymore. It’s the end of an era.”
“Wiped out that fast?” I asked. “It’s only been a day since we left there.”
Idris shrugged and then slumped, looking defeated. Tasiri picked at a still raw-looking laceration on his arm. Lubega looked at his hands and shook his head.
“Herdsmen only want peace,” DNA muttered. “Everyone who truly knows this knows we don’t kill anybody.”
“The ones terrorizing people are now just area boys,” Idris said to AO. “They willingly gave up their heritage because they saw no more value in it. They became like people in the cities, colonized to the point of forgetting. To them everything’s worth is measured by money and material things. My brother . . . he is one.” He sighed. “He is lazy and has no heart because he wants more than he can get. Before he turned to terrorizing, he tried to work for Ultimate Corp in the south. They wouldn’t give him a job because he could not prove his place of birth. My family have no place of birth, we are nomads. So my brother chose the way of the gun.”
Again, Ultimate Corp’s name coming up when speaking of a recent tragedy. It was the common denominator in all that had happened and was happening. I got up and walked away from them. Let them have time together, I thought. Let them be herdsmen, and let me get away from their misery. I stopped amongst the onions and inhaled their sweet spicy scent. I don’t know why I did it. There could be a thousand reasons and there could be no reason. I went inward and there I asked them to find my parents.
“Oh,” I whispered, learning something more about what I could do. It was easy and it was fast and there was my mother in her kitchen, I could see her through her phone. And there was my father outside on the balcony, looking over New Calabar, his favorite place to think. Both were quiet, seemingly at peace, as they always were. I watched them, simultaneously, for I was not watching with my physical eyes. I watched with cameras that were also my eyes, I looked at something else. I watched my father gazing across the city from the high rise they lived in. I watched my mother stir a large pot of okra soup. Then I watched the interview with them on NNN, Nigeria National News.
The story was fed not only nationwide, not only continent-wide, but worldwide. Over ten thousand news sources, including every single major news source in the world. “Oh,” I moaned. I was swaying on my feet, but I felt so far from my body in this moment. I watched my parents’ interview with NNN. It had gone live earlier today.
They sat in the living room. The very same place I’d sat in my wheelchair when I was healing from my cybernetic leg transplants. On the same couch Force and I had sat on when we’d shared our first kiss. For the interview, my mother had gotten her hair freshly braided in long gray individuals long enough to pool in her lap. My father had shaven his salt and pepper beard and looked ten years younger. He also wore a blue cap that matched his embroidered blue shirt. They looked good.
“That’s not my daughter anymore,” my father was saying. I’d begun watching in the middle of the interview. Even in my scattered state, I knew not to begin at the beginning. The meat would be in the middle. “Something has destroyed her brain function. We certainly never wanted her to get all those augmentations.”
My mother was nodding. My mother who’d birthed my broken body. Then she added, “I don’t even know where she was learning about all that. We are good Christians.” Her breath caught, but she was able to continue. “What God gives is best. Now see the devil working through her.”
My heart was breaking. It’s true, my parents had never wanted me to change myself as much as I had changed myself. I knew they tolerated me more than they embraced me. But to tell the world this was something else entirely. I shouldn’t have been so shocked, but I was. I should have stopped watching once I knew they were okay. I should not have skipped ahead to the meat of the interview.
The camera zoomed in on my father as he said, “I pray the government is able to get to her before she hurts more people. But that’s not my daughter anymore.”
Enough. No. I needed to know one more thing. And there was the information I sought: My brother had not been available for comment. I let go immediately, opening my eyes. I wasn’t only crying, my nose was bleeding. I was standing and leaning forward, as if I were about to faint and this saved the blue t-shirt Dolapo had lent me. The blood spattered onto my metal feet. My head thumped, and I stumbled forward. I knelt down, a metal index finger digging into the sand for purchase, flesh fingers pressing my temples.
“Let me just die,” I whispered. I sighed. I’d thought this many times in my life but today, right at this moment, I truly meant it. “Let-me-die. It’s enough.” I dug my whole hand deeper into the sand, more blood dripped from my nose, more thumping in my ears. I could feel it thumping in the tip of my flesh hand. Let the blood vessels in my brain burst. Let my heart clench so tightly that it cramps and stops. Let it all just stop.
They were yelling things and I jumped up, shaking. For a moment, I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Seeing out or in. I was rushing back to them before I even knew what I was doing. The four of them stared at me.
“Ask her!” Idris demanded.
DNA was about to speak, but then he noticed my bloody face, my feet, my eyes. I saw his mouth move, but I just couldn’t focus on what he was saying. I felt my eye twitch. “What?” I asked. It was like talking through molasses. Tasiri reached into his pocket and offered me a handkerchief. I took it and wiped my face.
“Are you all right?” DNA asked again.
“Fine,” I said, looking at the handkerchief. “Great.” The blood I wiped off was at least drying. The bleeding had stopped. I wanted to stick the handkerchief in my ear to wipe the dried blood. “What is it? What are you all shouting about?”
“Ask her,” Idris insisted. “Please.”
“Look at her,” he hissed.
“She’s the only one who can help,” Idris insisted. The others nodded vigorously. And then they were looking at me.
DNA looked pained as he spoke, “We need you . . . or they want . . . we were thinking . . .”
I heard him, but I didn’t hear him. I gazed at him, his face. I was still feeling lightheaded and weird and wrong and broken and adrift, but more importantly looking at his face, albeit pained, actually made me feel better. Rich brown smooth skin, roughened by the wind, clear intense eyes, that angular Fulani nose, DNA was beautiful. Not all things were bad in the world. I can live in it a little longer, I thought.
“We need you to connect us to the Bukkaru,” Idris loudly said, shoving DNA aside. “Maybe they haven’t found all the herdsmen and we can save them. And his sister. Maybe you can connect us through a phone or—”
“Tablet,” I said, holding the handkerchief to my nose. It had started to bleed again.
DNA lifted my chin to his face. “If it’ll kill you, or even hurt you, I don’t—”
“I’ll do it,” I said. I could do it. I knew that now. Up to this point, I’d used it in small ways. This was different, but I could do it.
DNA’s arms tightened on my shoulders. “AO, you don’t—”
“But I will,” I said. “Look, this happened. That happened. We’re happening. For what other reason?”
With his eyes, he pled with me, and I just shook my head and pulled away from him. “Let it be for a reason,” I said, stepping around DNA to Idris. “Get me a tablet.” I blew my nose hard into the handkerchief, and I felt a gout of blood fill it. I looked apologetically at Tasiri. He held up his hands and said, “You keep.” I laughed.
We returned to Force’s home because none of us had any devices, except DNA who had a cell phone. But this wasn’t a job for a small device. “I need something that can carry power.” It also gave me a chance to change out of my bloody clothes, take a nap, eat a large meal. DNA followed me around, looking worried. The shower was a small raised area. It sat above a container that collected the dirty water, strained, recycled, and piped it off to irrigate the fields. You weren’t allowed to use anything but raw black soap. I loved this soap, and the shower left me feeling fresh and clean. When I stepped out of the shower, DNA was standing right there holding a towel.
I stood naked before him. Let him see every demarcation, scar, nonhuman part of me. We had already made love and when we did, he’d insisted on touching every part of me, caressing and kissing every part of me that could feel. Let him see me now when he wasn’t drunk with need for me. He stood there, holding the towel out as if to catch me. He was staring. After over a minute, I said, “DNA, give me the towel.”
Slowly, he stepped forward and wrapped it around me. Then he hugged me close to him. He smelled of palm wine. He’d been drinking. I hadn’t known him long, but I knew this was very unusual for him. “Please,” he said into my ear. “We can find another way. We’re in the Hour Glass. There are people here who can hack into anything. People love us here. You and I, they’ll help if we ask.”
“They won’t be able to do it quickly,” I said. “Every minute matters now. They’re killing people.”
He hugged me tighter. “You’re going to go too far,” he said. “You’re going to do something. I can see it in your eyes.”
I pressed my cheek to his shoulder. How the hell does he know? I wondered. He was right. Oh, I planned to do something, all right. I was furious. With my parents. With Ultimate Corp. With DNA’s stupid people. With the world. And I had this enormous power that was going to kill me if I truly used it. No, I had this power that was going to kill me. Full stop. Every time I closed my eyes, I connected to them, they were looking back at me, the pomegranate. How could I not DO something with it? And how could my brain and heart endure the power that would flow through me when I did?
“I’m going to convince them to let your sister go and stop killing herdsmen,” I said.
“How?”
“I’ve already found them,” I said. “We connect to them, and you all explain. They’ll have to listen. You just make sure you speak true.”
“Why would they listen to four herdsmen?” he asked.
I said nothing. Instead, I turned my head up, found his lips, and kissed them as I pressed myself to him. “Could you live out here,” he asked in my ear, “with me?”
“Just you?” I asked, my lips close to his left ear. I pulled the towel from between us so I could press closer to him. With my left arm, I turned it down and backwards and held the towel behind me, while wrapping my flesh arm around him. My left arm could not lift the towel and, instead, dropped it to the sandy ground.
“Well, maybe with GPS and Carpe Diem and some others,” he said. “And an automated vehicle to carry all the mechanical parts you like to tinker with. You could repair people’s anti-aejejs, cell phones, tablets.”
“Out in the open desert? No roof over my head? Sand storms every few days? A capture station keeping us from dying of thirst?” We’d moved back into the shower, and he was pressing me against the ceramic wall. I turned around and within moments he was inside me, his hand reaching down my waist. I slightly lengthened my legs, so that he could meet me with perfect sweetness. Everything became silver red blue. “Yes,” I gasped. “I could.” His finger pressed in just the right place, and when I shut my eyes, I didn’t care who saw me.
A dream. For the both of us.
We returned to the Mosquito Hut. It was Force’s idea. “The computer and software here can handle whatever you’re going to do.”
I felt foolish. Using my ability to connect to the Bukkaru on an iPad would have been silly. Yes, I could communicate and control the software, but the hardware still had its limits. I didn’t blame myself, though. I had a lot on my mind. With the three herdsmen, DNA, me, Force, and Dolapo, it was a tight fit in the small upstairs room. However, with the room-surrounding screens, it didn’t feel so bad. According to the wind up clock Dolapo brought, it was seven AM, not long after the sun had come up. The time in the Hour Glass was 10:55.
“I’ll do it right after the reset. At 12:11,” I said. “I don’t want anything to interfere with the connection.”
“Where are the cameras?” DNA asked.
“All over,” Force said. “There, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there and there.” He pointed all around us, at the ceiling, and twice at the floor.
“You all should stand there,” I said, pointing to the area that faced the virtual street in front of the building. “There are three cameras in the screen and above. They’ll be able to see you as if you were standing right in front of them. I’m turning the other cameras off. Better we control the perspective. I’ll only let them see you from the waist up, like on the news.”
The four of them wore blue kaftans, tan pants, the traditional conical fiber hats the Fulani were known to wear in the old days. Where Force got them, I didn’t know, but judging from how new they looked, they were probably just fashion accessories as opposed to the real thing. Still, they added a nice effect.
DNA was pacing the other side of the room, muttering to himself. They’d all agreed that he’d do the talking. Their message would be clearest if only one of them spoke, and DNA was the “fugitive,” the wronged, the brother of the woman they wanted freed. Plus, he had the most to say. Force was speaking to him. Dolapo was laughing and chatting with Idris, Lubega, and Tasiri. I turned to the virtual street and looked up at the virtual sky. The shining sun peeked through occasionally as the blasting and blowing winds of the Red Eye thinned and thickened.
We’d brought washcloths, tissues, ice packs. Force even brought a heart defibrillator. All for me. I didn’t think any of it would help, but I kept these thoughts to myself. What I thought about most in that hour were my parents. How they’d looked during that interview. My mother’s freshly done braids, her make-up, my father’s trimmed beard and the suit I’d never seen him wear. And how relaxed they looked, despite their supposed outrage. My parents loved me, but they’d never liked me. My brother couldn’t be found for questioning. He couldn’t be there just to put in a good word for me. He loved me too. He’d seen me through all the pain and healing and breaking and re-healing; and my choices. But he’d always been a coward. Fuck them, I thought, as I followed everyone up the spiral stairs.
I imagined that with each step I took, more of what was mine fell away from me. My childhood. My apartment in Abuja. My joys. My bank accounts. My created online identity. My birth record. My memories. My pain. By the time I stepped into that room, and was surrounded by the screens, I was exactly me in that moment, and I was so much more because the place was buzzing with connections, power, and cameras.
Force had had four folding chairs and a black leather armchair brought up. None of us had to guess who the reclining chair was for. “It spins, too,” Force said, sitting in it, reclining and spinning himself around. “You’ll have a 360 degree view of what you see,” he said. “You’ll be able to zoom in anywhere.”
I nodded. The Bukkaru were being smart. They weren’t using mobile phones or tablets or anything that gave off a digital signal. Not for now. They’d gone completely analogue. But this was the desert and someone in the desert always had a drone. If not in the council camp, somewhere nearby. With a drone, I could see and hear everything in another way. I sat down on the arm chair. “Where did you get this?” I asked.
“It’s Hour Glass made,” Dolapo said, setting a metal folding chair beside me. She reached into a box beside the chair. “And I brought you snacks, cigarettes, tea, and refreshing mint-scented hemp lotion, all also Hour Glassmade.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Good,” she said, dropping the pack back in the box.
While Force showed them where the cameras were and Dolapo went through her little checklist to make sure she had everything (she seemed to be the one who’d organized all the fine details), I sat down in the chair and reclined. The ceiling was painted black and dotted with white specks that looked like stars. I felt good, calm, though I knew if I blew my nose, clumps of coagulated blood would fly out. And, even if I wanted to blow my nose, I could barely raise my cybernetic arm to do so.
DNA and the others were huddled together talking. I hadn’t asked him what he’d say. That part of it wasn’t anything I could help with, plus I had other things to worry about. “I hope his speech is good,” I muttered.
When it was five minutes to the reset, Force came to me. “You ready?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Find the drone, connect them, and hold,” he said. “Let them do the rest. Things get most taxing when you try to do too much at the same time. The human brain isn’t a computer, it’s alive, organic. It’s not made to process all that.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t enjoy nose bleeds, brain damage, or heart attacks, Force.”
“Please, AO.”
“I know.”
“And I know you.”
“I’m just going to connect them.”
He nodded and stepped to the control center. He sat on the stool, his arms across his chest because there was nothing left for him to do at the moment.
DNA came and knelt beside me. “Do you know what you’re going to say?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ll be speaking in Pulaar. I’ll narrate our innocence, review our tribal code, and . . .” He got up. “Honestly, I don’t know if this’ll work, but we’ll do our best.” He bent down and kissed me. “Let this place do the work. Keep it simple. Just connect us.”
I watched him go and take his seat. “It’s simple, all right,” I muttered, watching the clock count down to a second before 1:11. The virtual view of the Hour Glass near sunset became obscured with dust and sand. DNA and the others held hands. Dolapo said, “Here we go.” Force sat in his spot looking at me. My left arm twitched, but that was all. I felt good. I felt strong. I was clear. After sixty seconds, I shut my eyes. And then I was sweeping, searching for a drone in the northwestern part of the Nigerian desert.