She tried pushing those treasonous thoughts from her mind. Focus. Her job was not to understand the Tribe’s decrees or to find solutions to their problems. Hers was only to execute them.
A grim expression replaced the smile Cortland had worn seconds earlier, tightening as he watched the defendant get out of his car. She saw Smith from the back. Who was this man? She hadn’t asked for intel on him. She should have. But when she received an assignment, she had tunnel vision, her sole purpose being to learn the ins and outs of her mark. Smith was insignificant since he was supposed to live, for better or for worse—worse, she decided.
She swung the scope toward the bustle of local news media jostling for the perfect shot of the defendant. Smith turned and waved as if he were some politician on the campaign trail and not a criminal.
And Nena’s world stopped spinning on its axis.
It was as if the last decade and a half hadn’t happened and she was fourteen and back in N’nkakuwe.
He was still morbidly obese with watery, yellowed eyes giving away years of nicotine abuse, eyes as deadly as the most venomous snake. He might be older and richer and use a different name now, but he was the same Attah Walrus.
He was supposed to be dead. The Tribe had said Attah, Kwabena, and Paul were dead. Nena had let herself believe. Yet here he stood, still up to no good, grinning from a well-lived life he didn’t deserve. The gall of him. He basked in the glow of his celebrity, not embarrassed, not ashamed. He didn’t look like there was a day he thought of the countless tortures and rapes and mutilations he’d inflicted on her people.
Of all the places in the world for him to show up, he turned up in the one place she had made a home.
Her memory went to Attah as his arms came down, machete in hand. She heard his phlegmy laughter piercing through her screams.
Her breathing slowed.
She could taste the salty sweat flung from his disgusting body as he plucked her and other N’nkakuwean girls from their parents’ clutches. Bile rose in the back of her throat.
She moved her scope to her mark.
Focus, Echo.
Her eyes narrowed, honing her vision. She couldn’t waver. But she couldn’t help the questions crowding her mind. How was he alive? And if he was, what about the others?
She blinked.
Then exhaled, the air released in a steady stream from between her lips.
And squeezed.
By the time the crowd realized what had happened, she had the window rolled up and was disassembling her weapon. She placed it in its case, then the case in her backpack. She pulled the blind off the window, rolled it tightly, and slid it into a cylindrical portfolio case.
No one noticed the woman with sunglasses and box braids driving her 4Runner down two levels and parking it on the other side of the garage, where the Cleaners would pick it up to dispose of it. No one noticed her wiping down the car of any leftover prints. There were no second glances at the young lady in med-school scrubs wearing a rucksack. They didn’t see her enter the hospital stairwell and leave through the front doors on the ground level, now clad in navy-blue Converse All Stars, dark-washed denim jeans, and a crisp striped blue-and-white button-down shirt.
She even stopped to help a woman struggling with a flower delivery while entering the hospital. Nena caught the falling vase, placed the rogue bouquet back on the woman’s cart, and asked what was with all the sirens.
“You’re a lifesaver,” the older woman gushed, checking her deliveries. “There was a shooting or something at the federal courthouse over there. Some guy who was supposed to be on trial. It’s like a scene out of Law and Order!”
Nena widened her eyes as she cooed, “Love that show.”
“I know, right?” The woman clucked her tongue. “Anyway, dear, thanks ag—”
But when the florist turned to properly thank her Good Samaritan, no one was there.
18
BEFORE
Papa finds me among all those jackals, and our eyes lock. He stares seemingly through me to the depths of my being. “Aninyeh,” he says, “this will not break you. Let it make you stronger.” How I manage to hear him from where Papa kneels, surrounded by men ready to pounce, I do not know.
All that is good about him, Papa gifts to me in that moment. There is only your before and your after. How many times have my brothers and I heard this and not known what Papa had meant? It is what you do after that matters.
“What the fuck does he even mean?” Paul snarls, enraged by Papa’s stoicism. It must be driving him mad, because he lunges at Papa, grabbing his shoulder and plunging the knife he holds deep into Papa’s chest.