00:02 /// What Kind of Mother Are You?

Silence flickers, its embers grow faint. The night deepens into a slippery fugue. Jan and I wake, the screen black, the air cold, the words NEXT EPISODE glare across our faces.

Moremi sits, forlorn, huddled into her knees. “You . . . You didn’t kill me. They did.” I watch the credits drip down her face as they scroll down the screen. “I trusted him. But he used me.”

“Elifasi was supplying multinational corporations with microchips to control their employees,” I say, bile rising into my mouth. “How could I have not known? Jan, that’s how your father seemed clean after those allegations.”

Jan stares at his hands, into nothing. “He also used the microchips to control and mine data from his employees to get all those contracts he’s been lauded for. How is he my father? How can I be related to something like that? How could they talk so casually about rape and holding people hostage, controlling them? How are they not afraid to kill people? What the hell is wrong with them?” He spins to me. “Have you heard of this company, InSide?”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t exist. He lied.”

“Moremi tried to run away,” Jan whispers, “and we killed her.”

I stare at Moremi. I have a daughter. A full-grown daughter. Who’s been alone and hurt for twenty-two years. I have two daughters. Two. Unborn, dead. And I can’t but think what I did to my daughter, having an affair with her boss’s son. The same boss has been abusing her, only for me and her boss’s son to kill her while she was fleeing from her boss’s captivity, only for her to be straitjacketed into a violent vengeance by the Murder Trials, forced to kill. Fuck. How else would I expect anyone to deal with this trauma when coerced to face their killer? She was orphaned, and the world fucked her over. If this life was dealt to her, it would obliterate any idealized future I imagined for my unborn daughter. The life I didn’t want my unborn daughter to inherit is the life she will live. The same issues I fled from with my parents and brother manifest themselves between us, reincarnated. Regardless of how much I distance myself from my problems, they will always orbit my life, rebirthing themselves and finding a way toward me. The only solution is to submit myself to the things I haven’t wanted to face. I must do better than my parents and Limbani regardless of whether Moremi accepts me; I will understand if she rejects me.

I gingerly touch Moremi’s shoulder, afraid she’ll disintegrate. She looks up. “You’re my mother,” she says, and weeps. “They knew. That prosecutor knew. Didn’t do anything. Let me grow up without a parent. How many of us are out there? Alone. With nothing. No hope. No home. Being lied to, told we’ll be safe. By the government, the ministers, the social workers.”

“Do you remember?” I ask softly.

Tears brim in her eyes, fall to the floor. She nods, shakes her head, buries her face into her hands. “I’ve been trying to fight it, not let it claim me, but this changes everything. I’m caught between my insatiable desire to kill and the pain of memories spilling into my mind. I am burning because I’m remembering.”

I can only imagine that the recent revelation and events are like a sun, the rays burning against her memories, exposing them. They run amok in her body like a river of fire. I want to douse myself in them, to set myself aflame if it could unyoke her from the Murder Trials. A rivulet of remembrance quivers through her body. Her pupils dilate as she gives herself wantonly to the pain; for a second, the surface of her skin shimmers, and her body grows fuzzy and evanescent, as if caught between being erased and staying. In that glitchy moment, I see how to defeat her. Her weaknesses are her memories, wolves waiting to devour her. This is the opportune time to save my unborn daughter by submerging my other daughter into the fatal waters of her memories. But I can’t come to terms with saving one child by killing another. How different would it be for my child to be born to this legacy and its secrets than to the life I was reincarnated into? Not my child, but any child. My altruism isn’t solely based on maternal instincts. No one should go through this. No one.

“What happened to your father?” I ask, aware that I’m guiding her toward a feverish dissipation, but my fingers grasp hers to keep her tied to the fabric of our reality, and it burns burns burns—for in such close proximity to her I, too, close in on my death.

“I was just a year old when Mama’s lifespan—your lifespan—expired. Papa was sad, always sad. He went for his CBE and never came home. Then our home was taken, and I bounced from relative to relative.”

“Oh, nana.” I pull her into my arms, and my exposed skin begins to hiss smoke from our contact; it’s as if my self-preservation has been tangled up in my need to save her, and the fusion has become a delicious torture. “I’m so sorry. I am here now. I will protect you. You hear me?”

She cries into my chest. “You should’ve protected me in the beginning—from him.” She points a finger at Jan.

“If I had known,” Jan says, pauses, stares. “I didn’t know, but that doesn’t change what I did.”

“Jan and I were complicit,” I say.

“You hesitated, but he didn’t,” Moremi says. “But I begged you that night. How could you not tell from the core of your soul that I was your daughter? I cried for my mother. I cried. You carried dead babies in your body, and you couldn’t tell. What kind of mother are you? How could you not know me?”

My insides tremble and break. “I-I don’t know. I . . . I should’ve known.”

Tears flow down her face. “You’ve been killing your children and getting away with it.”

I shrivel inside myself. Swallow. The air, dead in my lungs.

Jan kneels beside us, holds my limp hand. “She didn’t know. That doesn’t make her a terrible mother. You saw what they do with our memories. She lost you, and they stripped that memory from her.”

“She should’ve held on to the memory of me,” Moremi whispers.

“What’s happening to all of us is a grave injustice,” Jan says. “Under the circumstances, we did heinous things to cover our tracks. It’s inexcusable, what we conspired to do. The guilt is my hell because it was my decision, she—your mother was manipulated by my decision.”

“No.” Moremi glares at him. “She manipulated you.”

The words slap my face. Jan’s grip disappears. The lonely grasp of the air helms me.

“What?” Jan’s pain, his voice, his shock scrapes at my skin, closes my lungs. “What is she talking about?”

“The microchip,” Moremi says, and I gasp, “No!”

She peers at me. “Then tell him. I know everything you felt that night you killed me, from your essence.”

I knit my fingers through each other and whisper, “You always protect me. That night I knew you’d find a way to help me—us. I believed that although the microchip didn’t stop me, it was still recording. I thought if anyone watched the footage in my CBE evaluation, they’d see I was manipulated, fed drugs, and by some miracle, I’d get the same deal I got last time, which is probation and a year’s worth of therapy. That intercepted my journey to virtual incarceration. A deal that was engineered by my husband.”

The heat from his anger flares against my face. “And what would happen to me?”

“Your father would save you like he’s done before.”

He scoffs. “And everything would be back to normal?”

“Yes. By some screwed-up logic manufactured by my panicked mind, that’s what I truly believed.”

“And your husband is the savior in all of this, nè? The man you stick to.” He laughs. “I’m so stupid, so dom. I sold a portion of my shares for you.”

I look up, stunned by the information he’s disclosed. “What?”

“I made a deal with someone who had the power to change your verdict when you failed your CBE. To save you. To engineer that same interception you so wholly believed your husband was behind.”

His revelation hits me hard. Sends a jolt through my bones. This never occurred to me. My mind jams as I try to compute how Jan could have found out. How he pretended to not know. Why he did it. Because he loves me, like he’s mentioned before. Then everything stills. A warm feeling slips inside me, and his love is all at once tangible, filling my chest, flowing through my veins. “But why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“Because you would’ve felt guilty, like you owed me, like I was buying you, which was never the case.” He stares at me, but his gaze goes through me as if I’m not there. “I’ve never meant anything to you. I’ve just been a sex toy. An object you can use for your purposes.”

“No. That’s not true.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me about your plan?” he asks.

“Because it would hurt you, Jan. I hated myself for thinking that. I never wanted you to know. You must believe, I am not the same person as the night of the accident.”

“And I am not the same person who loved you.”

Pain cascades inside my gut, up my spine, through the veins in my neck.

He looks away. “The unfortunate thing is I can’t stop loving you. It’ll take some time to go away, to leave my body.”

“I love you,” I whisper. “Please, don’t give up on me now.”

His eyes bore into me. Pain tracks tears down his face. “You gave up on me. Many times. How do I trust a love like that? I’m imprisoned by my love for you.”

“Give me time. To fix what I’ve broken.”

“I’ve no time. I’ll be dead.”

I grip his face, lean my head against his until our eyes kiss. “I love you, Jan. My love will keep you alive. Us alive. Our love will keep us alive. Keep us floating in this life. We will not be shipwrecked from reality. Please, baby, believe. Asseblief.”

He closes his eyes, seals himself in darkness. Breaths tremble from his lips, and I sip them as we sway in this seesawing reality, this unknown truth.

“We’ve murdered, but I can’t murder our love,” he whispers.

Moremi groans. “How can you still support her? After everything. What about me? Who supports me? Protects me like the fetus you’ve been obsessed about?”

I pull Moremi into our embrace. “Whatever happened, you’re my daughter. You are under my shield; nothing will touch you. It’s time we take them down. We can only do this if we work together. We have to work together. But you have to tell us everything you know. Everything.”

Her anger subsides. “You’re not lying,” she whispers. “I can feel it, your love. For the first time, I can feel the truth. I wish I had this sense when I was alive. Then I wouldn’t have trusted him. Your husband . . . but your family is not so innocent. No one is. I guess that’s what makes us human.”

Jan stirs. “What did they do?”

Moremi looks at me. “Well, Mama’s . . .” She pauses, catches herself. “Is it okay if I call you that?”

A deep pain of love wakes in my heart. I’ve been dying to hear that word from a child of my own. “You can call me whatever you want,” I say, and a tear slips down my face.

Moremi wipes it with her fingers. “The last time I said that I must’ve been a year old. It feels strange saying it: Mama. But I like it.”

“I love it, too,” I say, gripping her hand. Everything feels warm and perfect and I don’t want it to end. I want to stretch this time with my hands, pull it around us, sit in it and find out everything about her.

A smile gnaws its way up the tightly exposed cartilage in her face, and sadness explodes inside me. We did this to her. And Aarav, what he did to her, I want to make him pay.

“Your husband is not as financially incapable as you think,” Moremi reveals, staring ahead in concentration. “He has money hidden from bribes he’s taken as well as his dealings with Serati and Aarav.”

“That fucking thokolosi,” I spit. “We’d argue for hours about money, even to pay our daughter’s maintenance fee for the Womb­cubator. I can’t believe him.” My lips stutter, and I feel shock shred my body into senseless anger.

“I’m afraid of people like Elifasi,” Moremi says. “Jan’s father is openly immoral. But a man like Elifasi, who is quiet and obedient-­appearing, makes knives out of his bones that you never see he’s already stabbed you with.”

Jan perks up. “Does Eli have something he can use against us?”

“I can only see him when I need to kill him,” Moremi says. “But nothing I can sense.”

From the space leading to the stairs, my brother stirs. Wakes. Sits up. Cups his hand around his neck, stopping the flow of blood, his skin lined with dried-up blood. “Where the hell am I?” His eyes catch Moremi. “Get away from me!” He’s not halfway to death as Moremi claimed. He shakes his head. “No, no, no, it’s happening again. No. Why does this keep happening? I did nothing wrong.”

“Happening again?” I ask. My heart pounds. Fear rattles inside me. Confused, I turn to Moremi.

She frowns and the world’s slit open and thrown into the fires again when she whispers, “You’re not going to like this, Mama, but your father participated in the Murder Trials.” Her voice’s sheathed with sadness. “He was hunting. Shot a twelve-year-old kid by accident. He failed their test, and just like you”—she steers her eyes from me, resurrects the courage—“he buried the body. Buried the secret.”