We didn’t feel the blast of the wind, but it was like moving from life into death in a tiny bubble. We huddled together as we moved, shuffling farther and farther from the safe danger of the Hour Glass. Behind us was the Hour Glass, a place that had been a safe space, with atmosphere and sanity before we’d arrived. Now it was momentarily a chaos of brown red violent undulating shadow. But there were no shelters where we were going. The reality of it all overwhelmed me, and I fell to my knees, breathing heavily. DNA grabbed my arm.
“Get up,” he shouted. “Get up!! They’ll realize soon. We have to get as far as we can!”
“They won’t come,” I gasped. “Easy to let us die out here.”
It wasn’t completely still in our anti-aejej’s protection. There was a soft breeze and the air smelled almost sooty, as if it were waiting for even the slightest reason to burst into flame. I coughed, digging my hand into the soft sand. Why was the sand warm? I let him help me up. He grasped my dead arm and when he let go, I felt so weighed down. The dead arm was so so heavy. “Okay,” I said. We started moving again.
It was like being on another planet. Maybe Mars during one of its planet consuming storms, or better yet, Jupiter. Witnessing the fury and chaos up so close that you could touch it. If I reached through the barrier of the anti-aejej with my flesh and bone hand, would I pull it back in as only bone? At least it would match my other arm, I thought.
We walked and walked. At some point, DNA started singing a song in Pulaar, his voice travelling no farther than to the edge of the force field two feet in front of us. It bounced back and travelled two feet behind us and bounced back to our left and right. Nowhere to go.
But his voice was sweet and I shut my eyes as we walked, and I listened. And behind my eyes, I could see that we were truly stranded for miles and miles and miles, unless we turned back. We could not turn back. And then we heard the beeping.
“What is that?” DNA asked. I could barely hear him, but I didn’t really have to. We’d been quiet for two hours. I don’t know what was going through his head. He’d stopped singing. Neither of us had taken even a gulp of the one bottle of water we had. We weren’t thirsty.
I couldn’t answer at first. I needed to stay with it for a moment. I took a deep breath, feeling my blood pressure wanting to rise. I reached out to them and was quickly told, there was no way to wirelessly charge the anti-aejej because it was too old, it hadn’t been upgraded with the compatibility. There was no way to squeeze out more energy from its dying battery, either, because it had gone beyond its emergency stores an hour ago. I stopped walking.
“We’re doomed.”
“Goddammit, there’s no sunlight here, otherwise, it would charge,” DNA said. “It was supposed to last a LOT longer than this!”
“Force didn’t account for the fact that they lose energy when you don’t recharge them often. When’s the last time he left the Hour Glass? These old ones are such shit.” I sighed again. I was so tired and hungry and all my muscles ached.
The anti-aejej beeped again.
“I want to say he should have known better,” he sighed and shook his head, looking at the anti-aejej in his hands. The screen was blank except for the green flashing dot that indicated it was working but not for long. “All too fast. All too fast.”
I coughed and rubbed my face. “Think, think, think,” I muttered. But there was nothing. We had nothing. Nothing but my bottle of water. Nothing but ourselves. We were going to die. As if to confirm this, the anti-aejej beeped again, and this time a number appeared on its small screen. Fifteen. We had fifteen minutes. We grasped each other’s hands and looked deep into each other’s eyes.
“You were great back there,” he said. “I don’t think the company will ever be viewed the same way.”
I smiled. “We’ve exposed them.”
He nodded. “Long overdue. For the herdsman, nomad culture, the people of the Hour Glass, and all those the company has crippled, including you.” He reached out and took my good hand and drew me close. As we embraced and I lay my head on his shoulder and he lay his on mine. Two minutes later, the forcefield grew smaller with us.
“They own everything,” I said.
“So they thought.”
I laughed. “Until I started glitching.” And I swear in that moment, if all of them could laugh, they did. I pressed my body to him, and smelled his sweaty dusty skin, and it was then that I had an idea. It wouldn’t save our lives. We were going to die. But that was okay if this idea worked. It would be more than worth it. I reached out and there I was before the pomegranate of eyes. Millions of them. Attentive. They started looking the moment I had the thought. And then I had my answer. I stood back from DNA and took his hand with my flesh and bone hand. “Come on. We have to move fast.”
“Where?” But he let me lead him.
“We’re close and we have just enough time if we move now.”
We put our heads down and we shuffled. Paying close attention to the border of the anti-aejej. As its strength weakened, it shrunk and our feet got closer and closer to stepping over the edge. We could see nothing with our eyes, but they showed me by other means and I could see it clearly. We were so close. One of the turbines. A Noor.
When I was a small child, I thought a lot about dying. What it would feel like. The last thing I would say. The last thing I would think. Where I would be when it happened. I knew I didn’t want to be in a hospital room or in the bedroom where I’d spent so much of my miserable life in pain. I wanted to be in the light, basking in the cleansing spirit of the sun. To be in sunlight was to dance. I couldn’t dance now, and the sun above was blocked by a chaos of roiling dust and sand and wind. I’d never see the sun again.
I wanted to sit down and wallow in this fact before the anti-aejej quit. Instead, I focused everything I had left on putting one foot in front of the next while holding DNA’s hand so tightly it had probably gone numb. “Hurry,” I said. We were shuffling now, the dome of the anti-aejej so close that this was all we could do. The tips of DNA’s feet were bloody from stepping the tiniest bit into the storm. Not for the first time I was glad to be made of metal in parts that counted.
DNA never asked where we were going. I didn’t have the breath to explain. Let him understand if there was time and reason to understand. The anti-aejej was beeping three minutes when we reached the base of the Noor. The end of the great horizontal helix, where it blasted out accelerated wind and harnessed the power, was not far to the left. But we were at a safe distance. If we’d walked a tenth of a mile to the left, we’d have walked right into the near silent stream and been gloriously obliterated.
We sat with our backs to it. I turned around and touched its surface. Sand-colored and smooth, and cool. I knocked at it with my knuckles. “So solid,” I breathed. Even in the noise, I could feel more than hear it, a deep hum.
“Had to be or it would blow away,” DNA said, leaning his head back. His face was wet with sweat. The closeness of the dome left the air dusty and hot.
“Why do you think you weren’t shot?” I asked. The question had suddenly popped into my mind. When DNA’s cattle and friends had been killed in that farmer town, he’d stood there out in the open, in shock, yet no bullet reached him.
“I have wondered, AO,” he said. “It was all happening around me, and I willed it and, maybe, something gave my will power.”
“Maybe,” I said. If there was something I had learned, it was that sometimes, will could be very very powerful. “Two minutes,” I whispered. We were still holding hands and I squeezed his tighter.
“AO,” he said, looking hard at me. “Do what you came here to do. I won’t die until I’ve seen it done.”
I stared at him and he stared back. We’d had so little time together and that time had been spent running for our lives, yet, somehow he knew me so well. He knew what I was. A man my family would see as a mere herdsman who knew so little beyond his patch of desert. One minute and ten seconds.
“Do it,” DNA repeated. He laughed and then coughed. The dome had just shrunken some more and the air was foggy with dust. The anti- aejej began to beep the last sixty seconds away. I could already feel the grains of sand getting through as they pelted my face.
“It will hurt, reaching out to so much,” I said.
“It’s about to hurt a lot more,” he said.
I looked up into the chaos above, knowing the Noor was there, near silent and sleek. I turned to DNA. He took me in his arms, and I rested my head on his chest. “It will hurt.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad I met you.”
“I love you,” he said, pressing his lips to my ear. I thought about what the sorcerer Baba Sola had said, “The world isn’t all about you, AO.” Had he known it would come to this? Probably. Maybe that’s why he’d wanted to see us with his own eyes. As DNA held me, I reached out. I stepped out, remembering my dream from only days ago. The one with the eyes, so many red eyes. The pomegranate of eyes. I looked back and reached to them and I told them. I did not request. I did not inform. I just acted. I shut them down. Not one by one, all at the same time. I could do that. It was like pressing one button, pulling one plug, sending two commands.
SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT.
I squeezed my eyes shut as pain like I’d never felt washed over me, flooding my head first. In that spot where they’d placed the chip, where I wasn’t supposed to feel pain because there were no nerves. Like fire, like ice, like being torn apart. Into DNA’s chest, I screamed and screamed and he held me tighter. I asked for death. I asked for it, then I reached out even further.
Every
Single
Fucking
Noor.
SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. “KEEP GOING!” I shouted. “ALL OF YOU, OFF OFF OFF!” I tasted blood in my mouth, felt it fill my ears. My brother’s drum beat was wild and beautiful. I would be free of all of it soon. Let my bones, metal and carbon, fly. I coughed, as my heart beat strong and steady in my chest despite the blood dribbling down my nose, from my ears, flooding my mouth. I was crying tears of blood. For myself, for what I should have been, for DNA, his cattle, everyone Ultimate Corp had stunted, deformed, exterminated, and displaced. “Today, you know us.”
The Noor we leaned against stopped. The hum was there, then it was not. DNA and I looked at each other as the anti-aejej died, then we hugged tightly, pressing our faces into each other’s chests as the sand whipped into us. Both of us had just wanted to be left alone to be what we were. Now they had all left us alone to die.
Shhhhhhhhhhhh . . .
I was straining so hard, awaiting the suffocation and sting of the sand on my face that it was several moments before I noticed the sound and the rain. Yes, it was raining. Oh my God, it was raining! Raining . . . sand. We raised our heads, looking at each other as sand fell all around us. Fell, not blew. The wind had stopped. Noor running all over northern Nigeria had stopped and now so had the winds of the Red Eye.
I grabbed DNA’s hand and pulled, “Run! Or we’ll be buried.” As we ran, I could see so much.
I could see it, though I could only really analyze it later. In the Hour Glass, everyone who could came out to watch the sand fall, and those who did not would regret it for the rest of their lives. Some were still bloody from the market riot that had been interrupted by the four-minute aejej shut down, but this did not stop them from bearing witness. The people of the Hour Glass had resigned themselves to so much in order to be who they were. They gave up natural sunlight. They gave up a connection to the rest of the world. They gave up time and endured TIME RESET. They gave up their family and friends. They gave up space. They’d been used to the swirling chaos that beat at the anti-aejej dome high above. They were used to the darkness, the distant noise.
But the rain of sand hitting the dome was a different noise all together. A steady sound, one that only had one direction, downward. It collected at the base and people ran to go see.
But before they reached the edges of the Hour Glass, they stopped to look up instead. There was a woman who threw her hands up and cried, “Praise Allah!!”
I saw because I looked and I had eyes everywhere now. So I saw the Red Eye close from above, and I zoomed the satellite image into the storm, and that’s how I saw what no other human being could see. As the sands fell, so did the bones. Finally, those people whose lives had been taken by the Red Eye in the most brutal way—stripped of life, then all flesh—and left to fly and fly, they fell to the ground. All those people could rest. And as the sand fell, all those people were also buried. Finally. Except for a few who tumbled onto and remained on the surface, rib cages, femurs, tibias, humeri, pelvises, skulls, all dust-bleached and wind-blasted a stark white. Scattered all over the Nigerian Sahel Desert. Those bones saw the sun for the first time in a long long time.
DNA and I ran, unable to see anything before us or around us. It was as if the lights were slowly turning on. And then, oh then came the most glorious sight I’d ever seen. We stopped running and stood looking up. A breeze blew, sweeping away the dust and there it was . . . clear blue sky above like the ocean!
We stared at each other, shocked, both understanding it all now. As I leaned against DNA, he cradled my left arm. “Thank you,” I breathed with relief. It was so heavy, now that it had stopped working and its weight was really starting to pull at the flesh of my arm stump and shoulder. I wiped the blood from my nose with my right hand. As I looked up at the sky as I tested it out. Yes, I could still see and the pomegranate of eyes could still see me. This was even a surprise to them. We sat down right there on the hard packed sand. A breeze blowing. We stared into each other’s eyes letting the sunshine heat the facts into our spirits: The Red Eye was a disaster. However, it was not a natural one. It had been manmade. “Now I truly understand why you were their worst nightmare,” DNA said.
Fifteen minutes later, a small drone whirred to us and dropped two bottles of water and a sunflower with an oily sack full of freshly fried sweet plantain tied to its thick stem. We drank and ate right there in the desert sun. I sniffed the sunflower. The water washed the blood from my mouth, the plantain made me forget it was ever there and the sunflower smelled beautiful. It was a better meal than the one I’d planned back in Abuja. It was all I wanted.
And in several big cities in a country far far away, the lights went out.