“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—”