“Fuck!” I shouted, kicking my way out of the falling sand trying to bury me.
“Quiet,” he hissed, despite the roaring of the wind around us. And somehow above it all, I heard him. I shook sand from my skirts and hair and was just beginning to feel like the worst was over when I looked up. I shuddered and grabbed his hand, pressing close to him. He was already also looking up, and he responded by pressing close to me, too. “I could have happily lived my whole life without seeing this,” he said.
Together, we waited for gods knew what. I noticed first. The fact that the storm seemed to be opening, expanding, widening, without shrinking or slowing down. And there was something that looked like a tent yards away. But how was that possible. Though it was fairly calm, it was still windy. And inside, the tent seemed to have a glowing heart. A fire.
“There,” I said, pointing. “You see it?”
After a moment, he said, “Let’s wait a few minutes.”
I pulled DNA with me. “Come on. That’s why we came here and you know it.”
Reluctantly, he yielded to my pulling. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
I felt a tingle in my left arm and I let go of DNA to rub it. It seemed every body part that I had chosen was achy and warm. My legs, my arm, my bowels, there was even an ache at the top of my head where the implants were. It didn’t make sense. I was alive because of logical science. I’d only been able to support myself back in Abuja and Owerri as a mechanic because of logical science. Up to this point, everything, wild as it was, made sense because it was all really just logical science. But now here I was in the middle of a sand storm looking at a tent with a warm fire burning in its bowels. None of what was happening right now in this moment was logical or scientific.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go meet this wizard and see what he has to tell us.”
CHAPTER 11
Baba Sola
When we reached the tent, DNA stopped so abruptly that I ran into his back. “What are you doing?” I snapped.
“Never met him,” he said. “But I’ve heard . . . stories. You’re a southerner. You don’t know.”
True. But I wanted to. If there had ever been a time in my life where I wanted to meet someone like this, it was now. “DNA, you should be dead.”
His eyes widened at me; my words had slapped him.
“You were there the day before yesterday, with all your best herdsman friends. You were in range. They shot and . . .” I licked my lips and had to push myself to be blunt. I felt dizzy before the words even came out of my mouth. “They shot and h-h-hacked your people dead. Except you. They didn’t even seem to see you. You said it yourself.”
“I’ve heard this man moves backwards in time or something,” DNA said.
“Then we don’t have to worry that much about him, do we?”
“Also heard that he’s a white man who lives outside of whiteness.”
I laughed. “Impossible.”
“I don’t know why they’d send me here.”
“Because you’re wanted, and maybe he can help.”
“They also say he’s the worst kind of sorcerer,” he whispered.
“Okay, I need to meet this guy,” I said, smiling. I lifted the brown tent flap and bent forward to enter. The flap was heavy and stiff like a tarp and it made a dull crackling sound as I pushed it aside. The moment I was inside, two things hit me: Stark stillness and silence. As if the chaos outside didn’t exist. As if we’d stepped into outer space. The quiet was so dense that I instinctively opened my jaw wide, trying to unpop my ears. No change. It smelled of a mixture of incense, smoke, and sweat and it was comfortably cool.
The interior of the tent looked vastly larger than its exterior, plenty of space to stand up straight and walk in before arriving at the large fire. It burned logs of wood stacked in a two-foot-high tower, and though it burned brightly, its flames didn’t scorch or even blacken the cloth above. And then there were the walls of the tent, they shuddered from the wind outside, yet somehow made not a sound and none of the air current entered this strange space.
He sat across from the fire watching us. He wore heavy black robes that covered every part of his body except his face and feet. I frowned. His feet were too close to the fire. “Ah, finally grew some balls, I see,” he said. He spoke English with an accent I could recognize. Maybe it was some form of American.
“I don’t have balls,” I said, before I could stop myself. I hated that phrase.