Text copyright © 2021 by Nnedi Okorafor

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781542032704

Cover illustration by Natasha Cunningham

Cover design by Alex Merto

Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

—Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I’m standing in front of this burning city and I still want peace!

—Unknown

May your ancestors punish you! May Allah punish you!” a man shouted hoarsely from outside. He laughed hysterically and pointed. “You fail! You fail! See the police? They are already here! May pigs fuck your little sisters! May dogs . . .”

Bang!

The sound of several vehicles waving black jihadist flags speeding away was drowned out by the roar of ravenous flames finally finding their food. The old old books inside the library burned faster than the screaming man outside had imagined. Those books had moldered underground, aged in the harsh sun, been nibbled at by termites over centuries, and then over the recent decades dried in this library. Their feathery pages were flimsy, thin, and near the ends of their current lives. Their next lives were as dust.

Faro heard it all—the man shouting, the loud bang that silenced him, and the flames that were freeing her now. BURN, she thought with delight. Let me out! LET ME OUT! She would have screamed it if she could. The flames were like the agents of Allah, nonjudgmental in their incinerating and, finally, yes, releasing. The last page of her book went puff, and there was a soft blast of gas and steam. The grey ash of the old book settled upon the grey ash of the newer books. And now she could scream. “FREEDOM!”

A plume of heat passed through her and she screamed again with joy. All was orange and yellow and black. Then white amid the crackling. She spotted sunlight streaming through a window and was about to rush for it, when the black caught her eye. It rested in the ashes, impervious to the flames breathing on it from all angles. The book whose pages were already black. She snatched it up. She flew at and crashed through the sunshiny window.

She flew into the clear blue sky. Several feet above, she whirled and whirled, funneling up dust into a column just over the burning library. “Ahhhh,” she sighed, stopping. Remembering. She settled into a nearby palm tree. Darkness. She’d closed her . . . eyes. Behind them, she glimpsed her home. So close, yet she could not go there. Not without help.

She opened her eyes and looked at her arms. Colors. Long dark-brown fingers, wrists draped in her favorite blue coral beads; they were the color of the early evening. Her dress was made of the same heavy blue beads. They hung from her ears too, and one was pressed to her forehead. Blue was her color, and she was happiest during the hottest part of the day.

She looked at the book in her hands and quickly decided to look around her instead. The building she’d left was on fire, a man lying in a growing pool of blood at the burning building’s door. He’d been the director, the head librarian. From where she was, she could clearly see the black hole between his eyes; the edges of the hole were burned. She could separate the subtle smell of the hole’s cooked flesh from the smoke of the burning building. The man had died like this because of his mouth, not because of the manuscripts for which Timbouctou had become famous.

All the burning books and manuscripts in the pile were newer than those, written or printed in the last hundred years. Over the last month, upon hearing rumor of the coming of al-Qaeda, several old men, one who’d been the head librarian, had leapt into action. Every night they worked, piling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of the texts dating back to the thirteenth century, records of sub-Saharan Africa’s rich medieval history. Dumping the dusty, brittle tomes in the back of an old Volvo and driving elsewhere. Faro remembered the faces of the men who’d taken them, though she was not sure if the men were good men.

So though books burned, none of the ancient texts were harmed, except for five manuscripts. These had fallen off the wheelbarrow during the first secret nightly rush. Come morning, a young intern unaware of the plan had put them on the nearest shelf; the head librarian was strict and he’d wanted everything in the library quickly tidied up. All five manuscripts were in good shape—one was even still bound with its original twine—so they gave the intern little trouble when he picked them up. The loss of these manuscripts was understandable. The men could only spirit away the texts under the cover of darkness, and they were old men with poor eyesight. For only those five manuscripts to be left behind was a miracle.

Three of those five forgotten texts were small in size; two of them were written for children, full of monsters, angels, and magic doors. Because they were made for young children, they were the size of a child’s hands. Another was written for an even smaller type of person, and thus was no bigger than a matchbox. This manuscript spoke of insects, the philosophy of a long-dead people, and how to see the future by gazing into a grain of sand. One needed a magnifying glass and a deep grasp of Classical Arabic to read it.

Then there was Faro’s manuscript, written by a man who was a terrible writer, and . . . the book with the black pages. The five texts had been tossed by the militants in the middle of the library’s largest room with the other newer books. Then everything was set aflame. All burned except this fifth one, the one she carried now.

By a random twist of fate, by fire, Faro had been set free. She frowned, squeezing the book in her hand. No, nothing that happened around this book was random or insignificant. Not even the fact that she was carrying it. She gazed at the library, which was burning brightly now. “Heat rises, but it also scorches the earth when it is hungry,” she said. “That fire is hungry.” She looked at the book she carried and shivered with amazement. She pulled her mind away from the inevitable and focused on more immediate matters. Bizarre as it seemed, from the moment of her freedom, she had sensed him nearby. It had been so long, yet this was so. She would find him. Best to get out of here anyway.

She looked over the town of Timbouctou, and the sight nearly took her breath away. So much had changed. And for the first time, she also noticed a vibration deep within herself. There was more than air here. A crowd was beginning to gather in front of the burning library. A boy stood below the tree looking up at her with wide, shocked eyes. She flew off.

Issaka sucked hard on his last red Gummi Bear as he watched the smoke billowing into the air from whatever was burning blocks away. Of all the snacks he’d brought along, that bag of cheap Gummi Bears came in handiest. The bag had fallen into the side of his leather backpack and thus survived the flight from New York to Istanbul to Niamey, and then the two-day bush taxi journey here to Timbouctou. He’d found them while digging in his backpack as he stood at this bus stop, waiting for a bus that may or may not arrive. The Gummi Bears were warm but not melted. They were the last thing he had to eat in a city suddenly under attack by al-Qaeda.

Issaka still couldn’t believe his timing. Timbouctou was normally so quiet; most people in the world viewed it as a city in the middle of nowhere. Yet somehow he’d managed to arrive during a troubled hour. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, sucking hard on the tangy, sweet Gummi Bear. It broke apart in his mouth and he reluctantly began to chew.

“These people will destroy this town,” an old man grumbled, grasping the pocket on the side of his long white kaftan with annoyance. He stood with an old woman, both of them holding each other up.

“What do they care?” the old woman muttered. She wore a deep blue wrapper, an old T-shirt that said “Nike” on the chest, and a long blue veil that draped down her shoulder. “Remember when you thought they’d do better than the government? These Arabs only care about what is theirs. Destroying someone else’s home is enjoyment for them.” She used a sandal to push the bag of dried fish sitting at her feet closer to her.

There were three other people at the stop: two young men dressed like Americans and one worried-looking woman in work clothes staring at her cell phone. Everyone was sweating in the midafternoon sun.

Issaka wiped his brow and looked up the empty street in the opposite direction of the billowing smoke. No bus. No vehicles at all. He felt his iPad buzz in his backpack and groaned. There was no free Wi-Fi around here, so this certainly wasn’t an incoming email or FaceTime call. Most likely the iPad had been awake in his backpack all this time and had just run out of juice. Electricity at his parents’ home would be spotty; recharging was going to be a pain. More of my great timing, he thought.

Across the street, a man in a long white kaftan hurried out the mudbrick mosque. He carried a cell phone in one hand and red prayer beads in the other. “You should get out of the street,” he said. “The French are coming. It’s not safe!”

The worried woman looking at her cell phone held it up. “Imam, is your mobile working? Mine cannot locate a signal!”

“No,” he said. “They’ve shut the city down.”

“Oh my God,” Issaka muttered, rubbing his face with his hand.

“Didn’t I tell you? No bus. Let’s go,” one of the young men said, and the two of them began to walk away.

“Do you people need a place to stay?” the imam asked them all. “Come to my mosque. It’s safe there. The French have finally arrived, and those stupid bastards are trying to kill whatever they can before fleeing into the desert like the djinn they are. No driver in his right mind would pick anyone up here.”

The sound of the bus hurtling down the empty street made everyone jump. The two men started running back. The imam across the street grinned and said, “Allah is great! Good good! I wish you all well.” The bus abruptly stopped, and the imam waved at the driver. However, the driver, a fat light-skinned man with powerful arms and an orange baseball cap low on his brow, didn’t wave back. “Get in, before these al-Qaeda fucks blow us all up!” he shouted.

Everyone on the bus was going in the same direction, the north side of the city, and the roads were practically deserted. Finally, something goes in my favor, Issaka thought as they trundled along. For several minutes, no one said a thing.

“They were staying in that imam’s mosque, you know,” one of the men said.

“Useless idiots,” the old woman muttered.

“Well, I don’t want those white people from France here, either,” the old man said.

The old woman sucked her teeth. “Hold this,” she said, putting the sack of dried fish on his lap. “I don’t want it on the floor.”

The old man looked sour, wrinkling his nose, but said nothing.

“My clothes smell like smoke,” the worried woman said. She was sitting just behind the driver.

“Smell like roses to me,” the driver said, staring straight ahead. They bounced over a bump in the dirt road and dust blew into the small bus. “This your stop, ma’am?” He paused the bus beside a series of sand brick homes. The woman handed him some money and climbed off the bus without a glance back.

As they drove on, one of the young men began to hum a tune to himself and Issaka turned to look out the window. The farther they drove from the burning library, the better he felt. He sniffed his clothes. The woman had been correct; the stench of smoke was on his clothes, too.

“Where are you from?” the old woman asked him. She and the old man were sitting directly behind him, so he turned around.

“She means where are you coming from?” the old man said, before Issaka could respond. “I can hear the States in every word you speak. I’m old, but my grandkids still make me watch American movies.”

Issaka laughed. “OK, yes, I’m coming from the city of Chicago in the States.”

“Oh!” the old woman said. “Al Capone! Do they really shoot people in the streets there?”

Issaka stared at the old woman. Then he looked at the old man, who was also waiting for his response. “I . . .” He trailed off and chuckled. He was tired. “Sometimes. Chicago needs work. But Al Capone was a long time ago.”

“Sure, sure, but spirits and djinn always linger when there is something to linger for.”

Issaka couldn’t argue with that.

To the driver’s obvious delight, every one of the passengers paid him more than well for his trouble. Issaka was the last to get off.

“Thank you, sir,” Issaka told the driver after handing him fifty American dollars.

The driver grinned, looking up at him from beneath the bill of his orange baseball cap. His teeth were white and straight, and he had deep dimples on each sweaty cheek. “No problem,” he said. “You thinking you should have stayed in America?”

“Maybe,” Issaka said.

The driver laughed and shook his head, grasping the wheel. “No place like home, though.”

“That is true,” Issaka said, jumping off the bus. It sped away, leaving him alone on a dirt road among the small adobe and mudbrick homes. He felt his chest swell. He hadn’t been back here in seven years, not since leaving to attend school in the States. Weeks ago, his father had told him to come home, even if only for a few days. “We just need to see you,” his father had said. Winter break had allowed Issaka to come a week earlier than his parents were expecting, and he was excited to see their shocked faces.

He paused, taking in his surroundings. This was the very spot where he’d stood waiting for the bus to take him to the airport for his journey to the United States. He had no college degree back then, and he’d been sure that he’d study medicine. He’d been so different. But now, as he looked around, he felt it seeping back into him. Home. He smiled.

Issaka savored the moment a bit longer and then pulled up the metal handle of his large rolling suitcase and started walking up the road. The tips of his fingers tickled and his legs felt like rubber as he passed the house of his best friend, Akbar. The lights were on inside and he could see people moving about. He walked faster. He wasn’t sure where Akbar was these days. They hadn’t written or called or emailed since Issaka had left, a sort of unspoken choice made by both of them. If Akbar were around, dusty and smelly and stressed out was not the way Issaka wanted to be reunited with his childhood friend.

He passed the old mosque, where he heard men praying. Then the empty market. When he reached the house of his parents, he stopped and grinned, surprised by how glad he was that the five wooden masks still hung on the front part of the fence that ran around the house. Painted a shiny black, they’d hung there since before he was born. He’d once asked his mother about them when he was little and she’d said, “They were my father’s, and before that, his father’s mother’s, and so on. I hung them the day we moved in. Some of the neighbors grumbled, but we ignored them. Allah is great, but the ancestors are always watching.”

“Who painted them black?” Issaka had asked.

“They’ve always been black,” she said.

As he had done for most of his life, he touched the mask closest to the gate—a circular one with a small fishlike face, stunned eyes, and a wide mouth—and entered the dusty front yard. The house looked the way he’d left it, no worse, no better. A modest mudbrick home that Issaka’s friends in America said looked like a sandcastle when he’d shown them photos. There were five cars parked in front of it. From where he stood, he heard loud voices and shouting. He sighed, gazing up at the darkening sky. He took the handkerchief from his pocket, wiped off his dirty face, and rolled his suitcase to the front door. He was using his key to open it when the voices behind the door grew loud and it swung open.

“Let them!” his father shouted, his back to Issaka as he faced two men in the hallway. His Uncles Taofik and Yusuf. “It’s only a building. What matters are the . . .”

“Father,” Issaka said, grinning.

His father whirled around and stared at him for a moment. His face broke into sunshine and he laughed loudly. “Son! Oh, Allah is great!” He threw his arms around Issaka and the two of them embraced each other heartily. Issaka sniffed his father’s familiar scent, tobacco with a hint of cologne.

“I thought you were coming next week!” his father said, holding him back to look at him.

Issaka smiled sheepishly. “Surprise?”

His uncles and his father paused for a moment, then his uncles each gave him tight hugs. “Surprise, indeed,” his Uncle Taofik said, quieting. “You came through Niamey?”

Issaka nodded. “Bush taxi. We didn’t know what was happening here until we were in the middle of it.”

His uncles and father exchanged a look.

“Yes,” his father said, as they entered the house. “Allah watched over you.”

“Now your son can help,” his uncle said.

“Help?” Issaka asked.

“Not now, not now,” his father quickly said, dismissively waving a hand. “Go and greet your mother.”

And it was when Issaka saw her, looking fresh, happy, tall, and strong that he finally broke into tears. Education and the future were important, but family was the true elixir of life. His mother stuffed him with his favorite dishes: savory maffay and guini. He sat and told his two uncles and six of his father’s friends about life as a physical therapy grad student in Chicago. And then, late that night, his father took him behind the house and told him a grand secret.

How could Issaka sleep when he was lying on a bed in a room surrounded by items that could get them all killed?

Al-Qaeda had disrupted the city’s internet and television services and shot several people around the city, including Ismael, his father’s best friend and the head librarian of the Ahmed Baba Institute. Ismael’s shooting had happened outside, at the library entrance, minutes after his father had driven off in the old rusty Volvo carrying the last of the very books the terrorists had sought to burn. According to witnesses, the al-Qaeda militants shot Ismael because he’d been laughing and cursing at them.

And now those hundreds of manuscripts taken from the library were stacked in the tiny room that used to be his bedroom. Issaka lay there staring at the dusty, yellowed, crumbling manuscripts stacked in messy columns all the way to the ceiling. Stacks and stacks of pages covered the wall to his left, from floor to ceiling. His father and his father’s friends, men who had (according to his father) been entrusted with guarding the manuscripts over the last forty years, had been moving the manuscripts gradually, after hearing rumors that al-Qaeda was coming.

“Yet only a few of them can read them,” Issaka whispered. He sighed tiredly. Over twenty-four hours of travel to surprise his parents with an early arrival and he was the one surprised. His father had never spoken about being some guardian of ancient books. To Issaka, Ismael was a “big uncle” he’d known all his life, a relative his father spent a lot of time with at the newly built library, drinking mint tea and talking.

He rolled over, reached into his bag, and brought out his iPad. The power was on, but who knew how long that would last. He should have been charging it all this time. He got up and plugged his converter into the wall and then plugged his charger into it. He connected the charger to his iPad and woke it up.

“Oh,” Issaka said, realizing it was far from dead. “Cool.” He somehow still had 63 percent battery power. And his background had changed from the photo of his girlfriend Olu on the beach in North Carolina, to a photo of the blue-skied desert he’d taken on the bush taxi ride from Niamey. “That’s weird,” he muttered. He frowned more deeply, bringing the iPad closer to his face. As if that would help him better understand what he was seeing. “What the . . . ?”

The strange new icon looked like a shiny blue bead. He used the mouse to click on it. Nothing happened. He clicked again. Still nothing. He tried to move it. Nothing. He’d used his iPad in the Istanbul airport to connect to the free Wi-Fi and FaceTime with Olu. As a result, some kind of glitch had changed several of the icons for his other bookmarks to the airport’s navy-blue square logo, so maybe this was another bit of weirdness from Istanbul.

He yawned as he restarted his iPad. The icon was still there. But this time it appeared at the bottom of the screen. He clicked on it and found he could move it. As he dragged it around the screen, it trailed smaller blue beads that faded like smoke behind it. When he set it down in a different spot, the icon seemed to fold in on itself like some sort of freaky sea creature. Issaka put the iPad on his bed and stared at it.

“Shit,” he whispered. “I’m definitely home.” When he was a child, he could never sleep through sandstorms, especially the powerful tempête de sable, because they always sounded like screaming women, and when he dared to look into the bellies of these storms from the window, he could have sworn he saw dancing djinn. When he was a teen, there was a green grasshopper on his mother’s shoulder when she came home. It had laughed and disappeared right before his eyes. And all his life, he’d seen people in the markets who weren’t people. He and his friends were so used to these things that they stopped talking about them when they got older. Yes, he was home. The weird icon was no big deal.

“I’ll deal with you in the morning,” he said, tapping on the surface of his iPad. “Or you can just go about your business, now that I’ve seen you.” He set the iPad on the floor and crawled back into bed. For several minutes, he stared at the books on the wall, listening to the low murmur of his father and the company in the main room. Then he drifted to sleep.

Faro was somewhere else, and it was glorious.

There were lights, heat, acrid and sweet smells, the taste of salt and metal, and billions and billions of that which she had the closest relationship to: words. In many languages. She could hear the world . . . what the world had become since her imprisonment. She’d been held to the pages, fibers, ink, glue of that book for millennia. Reading his clumsy words over and over. Issaka was his name now, but he’d gone by a different name long ago in his past life, when he’d been such a terrible, terrible writer. The book was so . . . stupid. And she’d been sure she’d be stuck there forever, or perish within that book, for who would have had such a strong opinion about it that they’d actually burn it?

And now, thousands of years later, someone had. By accident. She still couldn’t believe it. But even more so, she couldn’t believe this object Issaka carried with him. Drawn to what was most familiar, Faro had thought the slim object in his bag was a book. When she settled in it, preparing to rest and wait for the right moment, she’d been pulled into a place nearly as wondrous as home.

She’d tried to read a series of notes that she stumbled across first, but they were written in characters she could not decipher. After she studied the characters for several minutes, slowly a logic began to form. However, she was just too restless. I’ll return to them later, she thought. Something else was drawing her attention.

She sensed a path, a wide path that smelled of motion, frying fat, wind, cloth, and lightning, and so many other random, disconnected, reconnected, harmonious, dissonant things. At first, it was a tiny thread dangling from the edge of an enormity. She grasped it, and she was off. Faro had dwelled in a poorly written book for millennia, and this vastness overwhelmed her. Nevertheless, eventually, she remembered herself and that she was free.

This was all she needed.

She took off into a world within a world.

She was a natural.

The energy moved through the air in waves, and it was always there, even in this part of the world . . . once she reached for it. It was the perfect place for a freed genie.

Before Faro fully dove in, she’d spent two hours lost in a world of colors, crunching, and movement. It was early, and though she spoke many languages, she could not speak the languages she came across. Once she pulled herself out of that wild place and began to peruse the greater space, she found understanding of the French language within an hour, molding and shifting it into various dialects from various parts of the world like damp clay. Then Japanese and English.

Now, she could hear whatever language she encountered within minutes of studying it. It was her love of language, especially written language, which had gotten her trapped in the book in the first place. She renewed her knowledge of Arabic and was annoyed when she found so few places where Koyraboro Senni and Tamashek were spoken.

When she sensed the sun preparing to rise, she returned to the notes she’d initially come across on Issaka’s device. Emails, she told herself, grinning. She knew so much more now. They are emails—pages and pages of short letters, correspondences, in Koyra Chiini, French, and English. Here Faro learned that Issaka spoke with scholars and was even one himself. He still did not know how to string words together with any flourish, but he could get his point across well enough. There was a woman he loved named Olu, and reading his exchanges with her quickly grew boring.

Faro emerged from the iPad just before sunrise. She hadn’t seen the sun come up in over two thousand years. This day, she would. But she had a few more minutes and there was one thing she wanted to do first. She stood tall now, looking at him, looking at him, looking at him. She wasn’t remembering him because she’d never forgotten him. That face, the way he slept, the sound of him breathing . . . up until he no longer was. He was still tall and strong, the type of man who built his own house and grew his own food. Two thousand years, trapped in that awful book, because of him, trapped by him. She had been around for nearly four millennia, but she’d spent half that time imprisoned in that stupid, stupid book. And after such a long time, was what she felt still hate? She sat down, a foot from him, her eyes level with his.

She could feel the air on her skin, her organs breathing, clenching, releasing, filtering, absorbing. When she was near him, she vibrated at the same frequency as his consciousness. She couldn’t fly in this form, and right now she would have liked to. She wanted him to set eyes on her as she truly was for the first time in so long. Instead, his eyes would fall on her, face-to-face with him, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap, a soft smile on her lips.

She kissed her teeth in annoyance. She pulled a bead from her bracelet and threw it at him. It hit him in the nose as she’d intended, right on one of his round nostrils. She sneered at him as he startled awake, his eyes wide.

When Issaka opened his eyes, the first thing he was aware of was that his nose hurt. Just a little. He wondered if a mosquito had feasted on it. The thought made him slap at his nose. Then, still lying in bed, his hand to his face, he froze and just stared, terror washing over him. It was dark. He couldn’t even see the wall of books. Yet he saw her perfectly. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring back at him. Glowing as if lit by flames . . . but there was no smoke.

“Faro?” he whispered. He winced, feeling something give from a place in his forehead he could not reach. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, she was gone. “Who the hell is Faro?” he muttered to himself. The name had probably bubbled up from a dream he’d been having or something.

He sat up, looking quickly around his room, and then he shivered. He hadn’t been back for twenty-four hours and already that old mysticism he’d always felt when home was really making itself known. “Who was that?” he whispered. He rubbed his face and slapped his cheeks. The clock on the wall said it was nearly 6:00 a.m. If he looked outside, he’d probably see the sun rising. So he’d slept through much of the night. And he was still tired. Good. Maybe adjusting to his jet lag wasn’t going to be as bad as he’d thought.

He lay back down, but try as he did, he couldn’t sleep another wink. And no matter how much he blamed it on the jet lag, a part of him knew that sleep wasn’t coming for some other reason. He switched on the light beside his bed and reached into his backpack for the physical therapy textbook he was currently reading. He pulled the book out and lay back on his bed.

“Oh, what now? What now? What the hell?” he whispered, staring at the book. He turned it over. “What the hell?” he repeated. It was smaller than his textbook, about the size of a journal, sewn together with some sort of dense string, and the cover was thick but soft, like old old leather that had been made from a strong animal. And the pages . . . oh, the pages. “What the hell?” he said yet again, flipping the stiff pages. They looked as if they’d been dipped in tar and burned, the edges of each page eaten by flames. Issaka sniffed at the book: it had the oily smell of crushed leaves, with a hint of smoke. He sniffed it again, resisting the urge to press it to his face, the smell was so pleasant. But he didn’t want to get black soot or whatever on his face. He looked at his fingers and was surprised to see that they weren’t smudged. “What is this?”

He closed the book and looked at the cover again. No title, no insignia, no etchings, no nothing. He sighed, shutting his eyes and rubbing his forehead. He returned the book to his backpack, shoving it beside his textbook. He turned over to face the other side of the room, where things were normal—no ancient manuscripts that al-Qaeda wanted to burn, no mystery books with black pages, and no staring, pissed-off-looking ghost. He didn’t sleep a wink. He felt like something in him had opened an eye.

By the time the sun had crept a third of its way into the sky, his headache was worse, and every so often he saw double. By the end of his second day home, he was vomiting up even the sips of water he managed to swallow, and his headache was accompanied by an almost hip-hop-like BOOM-BOOM that only he could hear.

His mother stayed at his side and his father told everyone who came to say hello to give Issaka a few more days to adjust. Those two days were a blur to Issaka. The only things he clearly recalled were sitting in the sun in the back of the house, feeling as if he were both dead and just reborn, sipping a bitter tea his mother made that coated his mouth with a tangy flavor, overhearing his father meeting with some men from whom he could have sworn he heard mention of books and guns, and the face of that woman. Her face would appear with each beat of the drum in his head. By day three, his stomach was still sensitive, but the clouds dimming his mind had cleared.

“Is this yours?” his mother asked, holding the blue bead to his sweaty face.

Issaka lay on his bed, cringing at the pain in his belly as he tried to read from his physical therapy textbook. He’d taken care not to even touch the strange book still nestled in his backpack. When he saw the bead, his concentration fled. He slowly held out a hand and his mother dropped the bead into it. “Might have been Olu’s,” he said.

His mother sniffed disapprovingly. “Looks like some kind of fetish or charm. Who’s this Olu woman, anyway?”

Despite his discomfort, Issaka softly laughed. His body ached with each muscle spasm. “Mama, she’s a nice girl . . . woman.”

“There are better ones right here at home,” she said. She switched to English. “Instead you find this Nigerian from America. Uprooted and from a ruthless country.”

Issaka laughed out loud. “Did you switch to English just for that rhymey wordplay?”

His mother’s irritated face cracked into a smirk. “I did.”

It was only when he was well enough to nibble from a plate of plain couscous that he picked up his iPad. He took the iPad with him outside, where he stood in the sun, his bare feet grasping the dusty warm ground as he leaned against the house’s rough wall. He squinted in the sunshine.

“This can’t be,” he whispered.

He clicked on the browser icon and went to CNN.com. He hadn’t checked the news since he’d left Chicago over a week ago. Yet the day’s news popped right up. He felt his heart would give out. His iPad was somehow online in a town whose already spotty and sparse phone service had been crashed by al-Qaeda days ago. Not only was he online, he had a high-speed, four-bar connection in his parents’ home, which had never had any internet at all. He brought up his iPad’s home screen. There was the strange blue-bead icon still sitting in the middle of it.

He looked around, but all he saw in his mind was her face. And even out there in the bright, clear sunshine, in the heat, the noise of girls washing clothes one house away, three men talking and smoking cigarettes two houses away, his mother inside cooking dinner, his father somewhere planning God knew what, he knew that the woman he’d seen in his room that morning was real. And that she had something to do with that strange book.

“Saka,” his mother said, stepping up beside him.

He nearly dropped his iPad, grasping it to his chest instead. “Yes, Mama,” he said. “What is it?”

She slowly reached forward and grasped his iPad. She looked at the screen and touched the bead icon. She grunted and met his eyes. “Your father and the others want to talk to you.” She paused, glancing back toward the door. “Tell them no!” she whispered.

“To what?” he asked.

“Issaka,” his father said, poking his head out the door. “Come. We need to speak with you.”

Issaka looked at his mother, who was looking at him, begging with her eyes, her back to his father. As Issaka stepped past her, he took her hand and she grasped it. Then she let go and Issaka followed his father to the main room, where several of his uncles and his father’s friends sat. He was suddenly very hungry.

There were empty and half-finished glasses of beer, lit cigarettes, prayer beads in hands. His Uncle Yusuf was hungrily finishing a plate of perfumed rice. Everyone else seemed done eating. They were all looking at him. Ten scowling old men. His father, Uncle Yusuf, Uncle Taofik, Uncle Mohammed, Uncle Moussa, Uncle Traore, Uncle Gaston, Uncle Haidara, Uncle Mamadou, and Dr. Abdel. His mother had once told him that only half of them were actually blood relatives, but none of that really mattered; uncles were uncles.

The uncles sat in a half circle, the window to the front of the house behind them. His Uncle Moussa was easily the oldest and probably the one who’d consumed the most beer. “Sit down,” Moussa shouted, his words sloppy. “We want to speak with you.” On the small table before him were five empty glasses. Uncle Moussa’s skinny leg twitched beneath his white kaftan, and it would have knocked the table over if his father hadn’t been there to hold it in place. His Uncle Moussa was that predictable.

“Please sit, my son,” his father said softly.

The others were quiet as they watched him sit in the folding chair they’d set in front of their half circle. “OK,” Issaka whispered to himself. He smiled what felt like the fakest smile ever. The old men all sat there, including his father, scowling at him. After a full minute passed where nothing was said and not even a gulp of beer was swallowed, Issaka said, “What is it you—”

“He’s too tall,” Dr. Abdel suddenly commented, looking deeply concerned. He held up a hand and motioned toward Issaka’s face and then the rest of him. “Like a fashion model or one of those bodybuilders. Everyone will be looking at him!”

“Oh shut up, old man,” his father spat. “They’ll be looking at him, but only because he has an American accent. That’ll work for him. No one will suspect the other thing.”

They all grew quiet again and Issaka fought to keep quiet, too. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, he said, “Can someone please—”

“We brought you here to speak to you,” his father said. “This is very, very important. Probably the most important thing you’ll be asked to do in your entire life.”

Issaka sighed and shut his eyes. Otherwise he’d have rolled them. The elders always spoke as if their concerns were the most important concerns on earth. Yet if he told them about how tough his physical therapy program was, they’d only scoff and say that he’d better do well or he’d be bringing shame to his entire family. Failing after making it all the way to America was a disgrace.

His Uncle Moussa suddenly got up. Uncles Yusuf, Taofik, and Mamadou all jumped up and tried to get Uncle Moussa to sit back down. “Leave me!” he shouted, swaying slightly. “I’m old, but now that Ismael is dead, it is my job to make this request. For the books.”

The others all repeated, “For the books!”

“For our history!” Uncle Moussa said, no longer swaying so much. He was frail and black-skinned, having spent most of his life tending to his sheep in the hot sun. Over the years, he and his sheep had even adopted similar-looking facial expressions.

“For our history!” the men repeated, with more enthusiasm.

“For our people’s greatness!” he said.

“For our people’s greatness!”

Uncle Yusuf handed Uncle Moussa his wooden cane, and he slowly walked toward Issaka as he spoke. “Issaka, son of my brother’s son, flesh of my flesh, honor of the family, you have returned home, smarter, brighter, healthier, older, and that is good. You have no wife, but that can be fixed.” Everyone in the room laughed knowingly.

Issaka smiled and shook his head. “I have my eye on someone,” he said. “Just give it time.”

“We will do more than sit back and wait, but that is talk for another day. You speak of time and that is interesting, because your timing was Allah’s will. For you to come here, on the very day that the rebels chose to strike, it was as if Satan was given his soldiers and Allah gave us ours.” He paused, clearing his throat. “Those manuscripts in your bedroom? Do you think it a coincidence that we put them in there? And then you arrive to sleep in there with them? None of us knew you were coming so soon, but Allah knew. And he knew why.”

Issaka was growing uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat and glanced at his father. His father was eyeing him so intensely that Issaka quickly turned his gaze to the window. The sun was just setting, and he wished he were out there gazing at it while he sipped from a cool glass of beer.

“Do you know why they wanted to burn the books?” Uncle Moussa asked.

Issaka hesitated and then shook his head. “I don’t know. They seem to want to destroy all things that are about knowledge, history, and free thought.”

Uncle Moussa’s smile broadened and he nodded. “Right. These men have a perverted view of Islam. They are fundamentalists. They worship death and destruction. They’ve already taken pickaxes to ancient mausoleums all over the country. They see them as idol worshipping, and they say that the Quran prohibits that; thus they believe they must destroy them. They see the manuscripts as idol worshipping, too.” He paused and looked at the others. “But it is also more than that. They want to erase the history of our people. They want to erase our ancestors. Wipe them all away and replace them with the memory of the Arab. It is a false jihad against the genius of the black African. It is not Islam at all.”

“Wow,” Issaka whispered. Why did I even come home? he wondered. This place is so goddamn backward and confused. He remembered when his father used to talk to him on the phone about how great it was that al-Qaeda had come to Timbouctou. His father had believed they would bring a pure Islam to the city, and he and Issaka had had several arguments over this. Issaka was also fairly sure he himself was on some government list because of those conversations. How times had changed. He hadn’t wanted any part of al-Qaeda back then and he didn’t now.

“It’s unfortunate,” Issaka said. “But I don’t see what any of this has to do with me. I’m going back to Chicago in a few weeks. They won’t kill me, if that’s what you are worried about. I’ll be safe.”

His father loudly scoffed, got up, and walked to the window. His Uncle Yusuf laughed loudly and lit a cigarette. His Uncle Taofik said, “This isn’t about you, boy. It’s about your part in a bigger plan. Oh, Allah save us from these egotistical, individualist children infected by the West!” He pretended to spit to the side.

“Well . . . what about me?” Issaka asked, stung. “What about my own life?”

“Do you want me to die?” his father suddenly asked, turning from the window to face him.

“What?! Of course not, Papa!”

“Do you want your mother to die?”

Issaka blinked. “No! What . . .”

“Then you have to take the manuscripts with you, at least the ones in your room. All of them. Take them across the ocean, to your Chicago, keep them there! Not at your university, but in your home!”

“What?!” Issaka said again. “But I can’t take . . . There are enough in there to fill up one entire wall of my room!”

“We will get many metal cases for them,” his Uncle Traore said. “I work with—”

“This is crazy,” Issaka said. “Do you know how hard it was to get here with just two small suitcases? I had to travel across the desert in a bush taxi and all the way through we could have been robbed by Tuareg nomads at any moment. We went a whole day without water so we could use it to keep the truck from overheating. It was brutal!”

“They’ll come here,” his father said. “It’s only a matter of time. People talk around here. People are confused, desperate. Take the manuscripts. We’ll arrange everything. No more discussion for today.”

“Oh my God,” Issaka said, slapping the side of his face. “This is just . . . Excuse me. I—I need to go to the bathroom.” He got up and quickly left the room. Then he paused. Instead of heading to the bathroom, he went to his room. He looked at his backpack and just grabbed the whole thing rather than fishing out the iPad. Then he went to the bathroom. He shut the door and brought out his iPad, plugged in the charger, and woke it up. There was the strange bead. He smiled, welcoming the mysterious distraction.

“What are you?” he asked, as he moved it around. “Are you . . . hers?”

He clicked on FaceTime and called Olu. He hadn’t spoken to her since arriving, only exchanging a few emails. There was a knock on the door, so he canceled the FaceTime call. “I’ll be out soon,” he said.

“Did you say yes?” his mother asked.

Issaka sighed loudly. Olu was calling him back. He declined the call. “Mama, how can I say no?” But how can I say yes? he thought. Traveling with those books will get me killed.

“If it makes you feel better, I begged your father and the others to leave you be,” she said. “But you know how they think.”

Women ain’t shit, Issaka thought, remembering the words of Olu when he’d told her about the place of women in his community. He didn’t remember the conversation with fondness. As he’d described how, especially in the last three years, a woman was expected to wear the burka, agree to all her husband said, and forgo an education, he’d felt a little self-conscious about his culture for the first time in his life. Olu was so confident and free in her ways. What had attracted him to her in the first place was how she so openly talked to him without a hint of coyness, about everything, even how she enjoyed sleeping naked on hot nights.

“You’ll have to figure things out,” his mother said. He heard her walk away.

He quickly texted Olu that he’d call her back later. “Things are getting weird here, just as you predicted,” he added. “You’re going to love this.” He put the iPad back in his backpack with its charger, pushing it in beside the strange book. He paused, looking at that. When he had some time, he’d google and try to get some answers.

“No! No no no no!” he heard one of his uncles yell. There was a rush of footsteps outside the bathroom door.

“Mama?” he called. “What is it?” He grabbed his backpack and put his arms through the straps. At the last moment he slung it to his front, reached into a pocket, and brought out the dagger he’d been carrying there since his plane landed in Niamey. He pushed the backpack onto his back and, grasping the dagger, left the bathroom.

He ran to the main room and found that several of the elders, including his father, were rushing to the front of the house. “How did they find us?!” His Uncle Moussa was weaving as he stumbled toward the front door after the others. “How did they find us?”

Issaka grasped his dagger as he followed Uncle Moussa. His legs felt like they would collapse beneath him as he approached the open door. He froze, steps away. Dust from trucks driving up to the house wafted around him.

Issaka had heard plenty about al-Qaeda in the news—mostly its involvement against the United States when its leader Osama bin Laden boasted about destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York, and later about them moving into Timbouctou and harassing imams in several of the mosques. The latter he’d learned of while he was in the United States trying to study and make something of himself. During his time there, he’d even disconnected from his homeland in order to focus. His parents encouraged this, not speaking much about what was going on in Timbouctou.

Now that he was here, it all came crashing down on him. He’d arrived in town literally at the tail end of the al-Qaeda occupation; there was no better way to understand what this meant than witnessing it with his own eyes, standing in it with his own feet. Nonetheless, even at that bus stop, Issaka hadn’t seen members of the fundamentalist rebel groups that terrorized Timbouctou and the greater country of Mali. So a part of him still didn’t quite get it. But now, as they showed up in trucks at the front of the home of his parents, oh, he finally got it.

They wore sandy- and light-green-colored camouflage fatigues, carried AK-47s, and wore army boots with red socks topped with white stripes tucked into their trouser legs. Veiled turbans covered their faces, but Issaka could still see the area around their eyes. Though clearly baked by the sun, most of these men had the toffee skin tone of Arabs. They were hell-bent on leaving a wake of destruction as they fled the French army. The trucks stopped and the men in the backs of the trucks held their guns in the air, bouncing the trucks on their tires as they chanted in Arabic, “There is no god but God! We stand up for Islam!”

A tall militant in a deep-green turban and camouflage fatigues got out of the driver’s side of the truck closest to the house. He didn’t carry a gun. He pointed a finger at Issaka’s father. “You have some evil things we’ve been looking for, old man.”

“Issaka,” his mother said, grabbing his shoulder. Issaka nearly jumped out of his skin. She looked at his backpack and nodded. “Good. You have that. You have to get out of here!” She’d thrown her black burka over her head.

“But what of Papa?!” Issaka said. “They’ll kill him!”

“Son,” she said. “This will not end well.” Tears gathered in her eyes as she shoved him toward the back of the house. “I’ve had no time to tell you things. Move, move, now!” She shoved him again, and suddenly panicked rage flew through Issaka and he shoved back, moving toward the door.

“Mama, I’m not leaving Papa! Or the uncles! I’m—”

“What are you going to do?!” she hissed. “Do you know how they found us?” She sniffed the air and a look of terror washed over her face. “You have no idea. But I do. My mother said this would happen. Power must always be guarded. If not in your lifetime, then later. You have to go.” She grabbed his arm with surprising strength and pulled him to the back of the house. There was nothing he could do about it. His mother seemed to have suddenly gotten the strength of fifty men.

As he was being helplessly dragged out to the back, he and his mother heard the first CRACK! Then another CRACK! and another! As the sound of gunfire continued, there was also the sound of footsteps entering the house.

“Go outside,” his mother said.

“What is happening?” Issaka moaned. “Are they—”

“They are executing your father and the others,” his mother said flatly. “Go.” Issaka’s brain was swimming. He smelled the smoke of gunfire; he heard men shouting and chanting in Arabic in the house. His father had just been executed. “Take him with you!” his mother said. She didn’t seem to be speaking to him, but to someone near him. “You have no choice.” Then she was looking at Issaka and speaking directly to him. “Go to the henhouse! Stand there and wait!”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“No!” she snapped, then paused. “Your father was a keeper of the books. I know the unseen world. And now you are the keeper of the black pages and one of the unseen knows you.”

“Mama, you’re not making—”

She threw her hands up, exasperated. “I meant to explain all this. No time!” She pushed him toward the back door. “Go! Now! Before they see you. Something is here for me. I will face it.” She shoved him, and the strength of it made him stumble several steps. “Go!” she screamed again. She ran into the house. He stood there, watching his mother retreating from him like a ghost in her burka. She’d gone several steps in the hallway when he saw her slam—not down but up! Something was pressing her to the ceiling, hard enough to cause bits of it to shower to the floor.

Issaka felt it more than saw it. The heat and vibration made him want to move away and cover his ears. He fell to his knees as his mother grabbed at something invisible and wrestled it to the floor. She crashed down and, holding whatever it was, began to scream in a language that Issaka had never heard his mother speak, her burka billowing around her like smoke. She was lifted and pressed to the green wall hard enough to knock the breath from her chest, making her unable to continue speaking her strange words. Issaka was about to run to her when something pulled him back. Into the backyard. It dragged him toward the henhouse, flinging him forward.

He was dumped to the dirt, where he quickly scrambled to his feet, about to run back to the house.

“Be quiet,” a voice whispered. “Don’t you dare!” It sounded as if it were pressing against his ear, but he felt no flesh. Every part of him prickled with alarm.

“Who is that?” Issaka whimpered.

“Just be quiet,” the voice hissed. “Unless you want to die, too.”

“My mother . . .”

“She just saved your life. Do not waste her sacrifice.” The voice’s owner appeared beside him, materializing like mist creeping into a field. Soft, then solid. Issaka pressed his hands to his mouth to keep from screaming. The woman he’d seen that morning. Covered in blue beads, wearing blue beads, one on her forehead. She scowled at him and turned to the house. “Now let me do this,” she said.

He was kneeling in the sand beside the henhouse. He heard the hens inside, softly clucking. Three roosters ran from different directions toward the henhouse and quickly inside. There was commotion, and then things in there quieted, too.

He meant to ask who she was; instead he said, “Faro.” He clapped his hand over his mouth, staring at her.

“The one and only,” she said.

“What? I . . . don’t even know how I knew that. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Yes, you did,” she said, looking around the corner. “Quiet. It’s happening.”

Issaka smelled it. Smoke. He jumped up. “No, no, no, no!” he moaned, scrambling behind her to see. He paused, looking at her. Up close, she was solid. More than solid. He stared at the brown of her neck. To gaze at her flesh too closely hurt his eyes and nauseated him. He focused on her beads and felt less queasy, though his eyes still ached. That feeling of awakening, again. Of opening a second eye. It was because of her. She stood nearly as tall as his six-foot-three-inch frame, and he had to lean past her to see the house.

Smoke wafted from some of the windows, and he knew exactly where the fire was coming from. His bedroom was aflame. The precious manuscripts. “Oh my God,” he said.

He felt her grasp his shoulder and he winced at her viselike grip. At the same time, he felt something tugging him back. It took him another moment to realize that it was his backpack, or what was in it. Faro let go of his shoulder and grabbed his backpack. “Let it out, let it out,” she said, yanking at his backpack. “It needs air. How do you open this? Hurry.”

Issaka unzipped the pack. The book tumbled out, falling with its pages to the dirt. He bent down to pick it up. His hand was on the twine that held the pages together when Faro said, “Here it comes!”

Before Issaka could question her words in his mind, everything moved forward. A thick thrum came from inside the house and what looked like a silver bubble radiated from it, slow, like a soft explosion. When the silver passed over them, everything seemed to move backward. Faro shrieked and she grabbed his shoulder again in her powerful grip.

Issaka saw the face of his father and felt the breath of his mother. Then it was all gone.

The side of Issaka’s face was pressed to the warm, rough sand. The feel of it took him back to when he was five years old, when he had the strange habit of going to the back of the house at the height of the day and lying in the middle of the yard, pressing his face to the sand. This was one of his earliest memories.

“I’m listening,” he told his mother when she asked him what he was doing. Issaka didn’t remember what he had been listening for or what he heard, if anything, but he remembered the powerful urge to do it and the sting of the sand’s heat. His mother had let him lie there until he grew too hot to stand it and came inside. His father had never known anything about the habit.

Issaka slowly opened his eyes and immediately they started stinging and tearing up. He blinked and blinked, his eyes itching and stinging more. Desert. He was in the desert, the sand soft and hot on his cheek. But not that hot. He was in the shade of a large stone, thank goodness. A few more feet and his face would have been burning. He opened his mouth to inhale the hot hot air.

“My God,” he muttered. Not far off, the land grew gravelly, dotted with dry, stunted trees, and then climbed up to form jagged steep hills and rocky peaks that looked almost like hands cringing from the sky. He exhaled and his chest felt as if it were full of ash and flames. He coughed and pulled himself up. He fell onto his back and just lay there. Staring at the bright naked sky above.

“Mama,” he whispered. Then he saw her in his mind. Slammed to the ceiling by some invisible force. He saw his mother wince with pain, and then he saw her expression harden in a way he’d never seen her face move. She took whatever was attacking her and slammed it to the ground. There was blood in her eyes and bubbling out of her nose, but her eyes were wide and she was grinning a bloody pink grin.

He’d seen this. He curled into himself, feeling as if he’d been punched in the chest. He coughed again, his throat rough. He tasted ash on his lips and he spit.

He was still coughing when he looked up and saw . . . Faro. She was sitting cross-legged now. In the hot hot sun. It had to be over a hundred degrees out here. He blinked. Faro loved the heat. He coughed again, still trying to stare through his tear-filled eyes. In his mind, clear as if he were right there with her, he saw his mother’s head ripped from her body. He whimpered, his mouth open with shock and revulsion. He shrieked, feeling his very being pulse and then begin to tear. Something pulled his eyes to the left and he focused on her. Faro. Sitting cross-legged. In midair. What?

“Are you done?” she asked.

He shut his eyes. He saw everything rewind and now his mother slammed against the green wall, again. The green wall of the house he grew up in. He’d run past that wall on the way to and from the kitchen thousands of times as a child, teen, adult. He saw his mother pressed against its coolness by a shadowy force, her face contorted with pain, her eyes squeezed shut, her cheek flattened, her legs scrambling to be free of what she couldn’t be free of. He saw a jagged redness appear at her neck. Then a trickle of blood, then a river. A gurgle from her opening throat. He heard . . .

Issaka’s eyes flew open and he screamed, grasping his head. He jumped up and ran. He ran into the sunshine, toward Faro. She floated up as he passed her. His mouth was open; he couldn’t see, not with his eyes. He was only seeing his mother’s death. And running didn’t take him from it. He shrieked some more as he ran across the silent desert. He ran until he ran into one of the squat trees.

Its branches scratched his face and he skidded on the sand and sat down hard, jarring his tailbone. His face was wet with tears and snot as he opened his mouth and wailed into the desert. A loud bang answered his voice. He twitched, looking around. There was a tree beside him and he saw blood spray onto its trunk. His father’s blood. He was seeing the front of the house now. Where he hadn’t been. The militants had lined them all up and forced them to kneel. BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! He watched his father and uncles fall. Dead. Bullets were hitting and biting apart the masks on the fence, too. They were shooting the ancestors.

“Eeeeeeee!” Issaka keened. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Faro slapped him. “Pull yourself together!”

Issaka stared at her, rocking on his feet, his dry eyes wide. Nostrils flared. Mouth open as he breathed through it. Hands shaking.

“Are you done?” Faro asked. “Finish.”

“What is . . . My family!”

“They are all dead,” Faro said.

Issaka grasped a handful of sand. He wanted to rub it into his face. His chest heaved as he coughed again, the ash flavor in his mouth.

“We have to go back,” he said. But he didn’t get up. He didn’t even uncurl his body. His jeans were crusted with sand.

Faro was glad she didn’t smell feces or urine on him. Humans often lost control of their bowels or bladders during times like these. Sometimes they vomited. Fainted. Some even flat-out died.

“Go back to where?” she said. “To the dead? The burning house? The burned books? Do you want to die, too? You are a waste.” She turned away, disgusted.

“You . . . you’re human?” He frowned, as if waking up from a nightmare.

“No.”

“But you have flesh,” he said.

“It’s just flesh,” she snapped. “When I am here, I need it and I have it.”

“Faro,” he said.

“Issaka.”

“Why do I know you?”

“Because your mother was a great woman. And she kept our secrets and she kept them alive.”

“I don’t understand any of this.”

“You will,” she said. “And you will come with me now.”

“Because of the book?”

“Books,” she said, coming back to him.

“That book, what is it?”

She shook her head, waving a hand. “Do you want to call her now?”

“What? Who?”

“Your Olu.”

“I . . . I . . .”

“Call her now. You’ll be busy where we are going.”

“Going?”

“Call her.”

Slowly, stunned, by everything, he brought his backpack around and placed it before him. He opened it. His iPad was there, but so was the strange black book.

“Is this your book?”

She laughed. “No. More yours than mine.”

“I didn’t write it.”

“No. None of you did.” She paused, gazing at his frowning face as he looked at the book, and said, “It’s black because it is so full of words, there is no space untouched.”

“But what is it?” he asked again.

“Call her first.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

“Call her.”

He brought out the iPad and clicked open the FaceTime app. When he noticed that he had a very strong Wi-Fi connection, he felt no surprise. He was numb. He wiped the dust and dirt from his face, knowing it was a useless gesture. He looked like shit. When her face filled the screen, he stared at her.

“Issaka!” she exclaimed, grinning. “What have . . .” She trailed off, her mouth hanging open. “Where are you?”

“I . . . don’t know,” he said. The picture suddenly grew dimmer.

“Well, how are you calling?”

“No idea.”

They stared at each other some more. Issaka shielded the iPad from glare.

“Do you need help?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Yes.”

“But you don’t know where you are?”

He shook his head.

“Are you safe?” she asked.

“Now I am . . . I think.”

“You’re covered in dust.”

“It’s the desert.”

“Why are you out there?”

“Olu, listen,” he said. But the iPad shut itself off, showing a thermometer mostly filled with red and the words: “Temperature: iPad needs to cool down before you can use it.”

“Shit,” he said. “Of course.”

He rummaged in his backpack. The strange book, his chargers, his physical therapy textbook, passport, credit cards, half a bag of Gummi Bears, some money, and a bottle of water. No mobile phone; he’d left that charging in his room. He glimpsed his parents’ deaths again and felt a wave of dizziness. He brought out the bottle of water and took a deep gulp; the sensation of it reaching his belly anchoring him, steadying him, cooling him. “Just . . . hold on,” he muttered to himself. And for the moment, he did.

And then he followed Faro into the desert, unsure of what she’d lead him to. Sometimes she was the tall woman wearing the dress of blue beads, and other times she was nothing but a hot haze of air and the prints of large feet in the sand. The sun beat down on his exposed arms, neck, head. However, he did not fear that his life was over. Nor for a single moment did he think he’d never see Olu again. He wanted to scream and wail for his parents, uncles, elders, home. There would be time for that. Just not now.

For now, he followed Faro into the desert. And after a long while, when his mouth was dry, the sun was setting, the dusty, sweet herbal smell of the desert in his nose, he saw the mudbrick building in the distance. He was walking downhill, and a strong cooling breeze that had picked up ten minutes before blew at his back. He stumbled, but then he walked faster.

“Bring the book out,” Faro said, appearing right beside him. He jumped, staring at her. He stopped, brought out the book, and flipped through its black pages. In the cooling air, the sheets were smooth and stiff against his fingers. He squinted. The pages looked blacker than ever in the waning sunlight, but they also looked . . . deeper. Issaka tapped at the first page. It was flat.

“Wait,” he said, looking at it harder. As he gazed at the page, it went from flat, to brittle, to grainy. The only way he could describe it was . . . deep. Like an optical illusion. Coiled knots and strings of blackness, layered over and crowding each other, extending into the page. That’s why it’s black, he thought. Black like the ancestors on the gate. As they have always been. He focused on one of the coiled, knotted strings and found that he could read it! He looked toward the mudbrick building, which now seemed closer than it had been. There were three people standing in the doorway. And Issaka knew who they were.

“OK,” he said, as they continued walking, Faro leading the way. “I see why you’re with me. You have no choice, really. You want to go home.”

“You’re a terrible writer,” Faro said over her shoulder. “But you’re a good reader.”

About the Author

Photo © 2020 Colleen Durkin

Nnedi Okorafor is a writer of science fiction and fantasy for children and adults. She has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Hugo Awards, and her debut novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature.