by Kwame Mbalia
Flames.
Burning.
“Sweet peaches!” I said. “I know where to go!”
“Where?” Anansi demanded. Gum Baby tried to turn around to face us, but the unwieldy sap ball plunged to the sea below, landing with a large splash that sent up a blazing curtain of fire before it quickly subsided.
“You better say something useful,” Gum Baby said angrily. “Makin’ Gum Baby waste a perfectly good sap balloon…”
I started to continue, then paused. “Um…sap balloon?”
“Did Gum Baby stutter? Larger than a sap ball and with seven times as much sap. Rebelutionary.”
“You mean revolutionary.”
“Gum Baby knows what she means! Sap balloons are going to change the game forever.”
“What game?” Anansi asked, unable to help himself.
“The sap game. But Gum Baby wouldn’t expect y’all dunderheads to understand. Big rebelutionary things are going on over here.”
I looked between her and the replacement sap balloon she was trying to make. “Sure…okay. As I was saying, I know where to go. The Maafa basically told us. Remember? It said the angry one lived in the burned ruins of a lair. Well, where is the one place we know Bear had family ties, is currently a burned-out shell, and everyone was specifically warned to stay away from?”
Gum Baby, Ayanna, and Anansi stared at me like I had sprouted wings from my forehead. “Now, what are you babbling about?” the spider god said.
“Told you he was a Bumbletongue,” Gum Baby muttered.
I shook my head, then scooted back to the rear of the flying raft and grabbed the rudder. “Laugh it up now. You’ll see.”
“Fine,” Anansi said. “Where is Bear’s hideout?”
I grinned. “MidPass.”
MidPass.
I’d been to the island the folk heroes had called home, but I’d never seen it in its days of splendor. Before the carnage and wreckage. Before the terror and the lockdowns. My feelings of fear and failure were all I could remember about the place, and that fact made me sadder than expected.
I shrugged off my backpack and unzipped it. Inside, Nana’s quilt pieces glowed faintly in the light of day. I pulled out a square, a warm orange-and-gold section with swaying fields of corn on it.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered.
Ayanna kept one eye on her steering and the other on me. “What are you doing now?”
“Chestnutt told me I could track my grandmother by using the Story Box with things associated with her. The memories and stories she put into this quilt of hers should do the trick.” I held the fragment up to the SBP, a little unsure of what to do next, but a smile crossed my face as text crawled across the screen in gold letters:
New stories found.
Adding to database.
Author located. Plot route?
I tapped the acknowledgment button that appeared, and like some sort of magical GPS, the main screen of Alke Maps returned, this time with a glittering golden route guiding us forward.
“There we go,” I said, holding up the phone so Ayanna could see.
As the raft sliced through the sky toward MidPass, I couldn’t help but scan the sea below for bone ships. Somewhere down there was the exact spot Gum Baby and I had splashed into when we’d fallen through the hole in the sky. I still remembered the nightmarish sensation of falling forever, followed by the actual nightmare of the haunted skeleton boats.
Now the seas were calm—barely a flame sprinkled atop the surface. It felt…ordinary.
That was a good thing, right?
“Look,” Gum Baby whispered.
The ruined island loomed out of a fog bank so gray it looked like a shield of smoke. Ayanna brought the raft lower and we skimmed over the tops of waves. Trees began to loom out of the distance, and I tried not to shudder. The Drowned Forest. Me and Ayanna and Gum Baby and Fox and the other Midfolk had fled through the soggy woods, desperately trying to escape the fetterlings chasing us. Trying, and failing.
“Gum Baby don’t like seeing it like this.” The small voice came from behind me, where the little doll had sat down crisscross applesauce and looked over the back of the raft as Ayanna steered. “It’s so…empty.”
“What was it like before?” I asked.
It was Ayanna who answered. “Before the iron monsters? It was loud. Good loud, not bad loud. Voices filled the air. You could hear laughter all over the island. Smell food cooking. See everybody playing. It was happy.”
She fell into silence, and I didn’t try to nudge her out of it. Truth was, I knew exactly what she meant. Some places just have that vibe. The feeling of good times tucked into nooks and crannies, spilling out of windows and doors. Chances are you know a place just like that. When you think of it, a smile crosses your face and memories appear like hidden treasures suddenly found.
That’s how my grandparents’ house had felt these past few weeks.
“Tristan, is that—?” Anansi’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts. I held up the SBP, camera lens pointed out, so the spider god could see. Anansi alternated his gaze from the map to the world outside, looking at something off to the left. At first I didn’t recognize it—that’s how bad a toll the fire had taken. I just saw a lumpy mass as large as a building, with a tower emerging from its center.
Then it hit me.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
A sharp gasp was all that came from Ayanna.
It was the Thicket. Or what remained of it. Low-hanging clouds hid much of it. And as we drew closer, the wind began to pick up, rocking the raft and making my stomach do flip-flops. We didn’t have much time. The cooling temperature, the angry clouds—a storm was on its way.
We flew into a large clearing roughly the size of three football fields. The Drowned Forest had given way to scorched barren earth, still smoking in parts. Nothing grew. No animals moved. No birds flew in the sky above. The silence felt heavy, like a mass of soggy blankets, and it smelled…wrong.
The state of the Thicket squeezed my heart, and I felt tears prickle at the corner of my eyes. What used to be a beautiful and natural sloping tangle of woody vines, delicate flowers, and dangerous thorns—woven together into protective walls that sheltered an entire community—was now a black spiderweb of soot and ashes. Every so often a thin breeze would move harshly through the clearing, and the remnants of the magical epicenter of MidPass would rattle like bones.
Ticka ticka tickety ticka
But the most horrible sight protruded from the center of it all.
“Not too close,” Anansi warned. His face was grim. Ayanna was biting her lower lip, and Gum Baby had gone ashen and silent. I watched them—the trickster god who’d come here in disguise, the girl who’d worked harder than anyone to save the people she loved, and the sap-covered doll who’d called this place home her whole life. Their faces were mirrors of my own, I was sure, as I turned back to confront the horror before us once more.
The Tree of Power stood out of the ruins of the Thicket, shattered.
And that was where the GPS route ended.
The top half of the tree was gone. Just gone. No canopy, no branches, just a splintered trunk that still towered over everything. A shadow of its former self. Its blackened tips looked like a ruined crown, hung on a spear planted in the ground where a beloved monarch had fallen.
And maybe it had.
But even that wasn’t the worst part.
Greenish-white lines crisscrossed the trunk like veins of poison, and every so often they pulsed with a weird light. Thick clouds billowed out of the top, filling the sky.
I turned and stared at the horizon, at the storm that marched from MidPass ever closer to the Golden Crescent and the rest of Alke. The clouds were the same sickly greenish-gray color as what was leaking out of the destroyed Tree of Power. On a hunch, I pressed the adinkra flush against my wrist. Gum Baby turned around quickly at my hiss of pain.
“What is it?” she asked.
I stare
d at the tree as Ayanna pulled the rudder of the raft forward so we drifted closer. Those veins…they couldn’t be. Could they?
“Tristan,” Anansi said. “What are you seeing, my boy?”
I pointed at the ruined Tree of Power and took a deep shuddering breath. “That storm…it isn’t natural. I think something in the ruined old tree is creating it.”
Ayanna looked incredulous. “That’s where you said your grandmother and Mami Wata are being kept!”
“Yeah. And I think I know why Bear collected all the remnants of the iron monsters. He needed chains powerful enough to restrain a god, just like the bosslings and the brand flies did to Nyame. And I’m starting to think…”
Gum Baby frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.”
I nodded at Ayanna. The raft picked up speed and Anansi looked worried. “Are you sure it’s safe? What if Bear returns? I can’t do anything to help you. You three will be on your own.”
But I shook my head. Something had fallen into place, a puzzle piece I didn’t even know was missing, and its addition completely changed the rules of the game. I didn’t understand everything that was happening, but I knew one thing for sure. The storm, the kidnappings—they were all connected.
And if I didn’t do something soon, both Alke and my world would pay, and pay dearly.
AYANNA GUIDED THE RAFT TOWARD THE CORRUPTED TREE OF Power.
“How do we get inside?” Gum Baby whispered. She’d scrambled back to her perch on my shoulder and was currently gripping my hair. I was going to have to wash and rewash it for days to get the sap out. But I wasn’t going to call her on it now. We were all frightened. Even Anansi looked shaken.
Because those weren’t veins running up and down and around the trunk.
They were fetterlings, linked together like some horrible necklace. Or collar. Pulsing green as they choked the remaining life out of the magical tree. Bear had turned an area where the Midfolk had flourished into a prison.
Ayanna guided the raft carefully between the black tips of the trunk and dove into its hollowed-out middle, which was just wide enough for us to fit through. Darkness swallowed us, and I nearly panicked. Then the SBP flickered and the screen brightened.
“Here,” Anansi said. He pointed at the bottom of the screen, where another app icon was materializing. “I thought you might need this.”
I stared at the app’s name: This Little Light. That sounded eerily close to a song Nana used to sing. The rounded square was navy blue with a yellow lantern icon glimmering in the middle. I tapped it, then gasped as light unfolded from the phone like origami made of moonbeams. It bathed the raft and everything inside the Tree of Power.
Including a figure slumped over at the very bottom of the chamber.
My heart skipped a beat.
“Nana,” I whispered.
Ayanna, sensing the urgency, dropped us down in a tight spiral, ducking cobwebs and slipping around the moldy remains of the interior. The faint sound of a drumbeat danced in and out of my range of hearing, so I thought I could’ve imagined it. It sounded wrong. Offbeat.
As we dropped, the air grew thicker and staler, with the faint hint of a metallic tang, and the silver light of the SBP sent the shadows retreating. At last the raft hit the floor with a bump. I swallowed, then took a slow step forward, holding out the phone as I tried to figure out what I was seeing in front of me.
A rotted trough, roughly the size of a bathtub, sat in the middle of the damp, lumpy ground, holding a figure on a wooden stool. I couldn’t tell if the figure was breathing. I couldn’t tell if…
My foot kicked a clump of dirt and sent it skittering across the ground.
The figure sat up.
“Nana?” But as soon as I lifted the glowing phone clutched tightly in my hand, I knew I had the wrong person. In fact, it wasn’t a person at all. No person I knew had shimmering blue-green dreadlocks that floated and swayed in midair as if in water. No person I knew had an iridescent shimmer on their dark brown skin like sunlight reflecting off a still lake. No.
This was a goddess.
I stood there for several seconds, confused. What had happened? The silly GPS was supposed to have led me to Nana. I took another step forward, and her head lifted, freezing me in my tracks.
“Mami Wata?” I called softly.
The question seemed to slip through the fog clouding her eyes, and the goddess of the rivers and lakes raised her chin so that her eyes could latch on to mine. Then, as if that effort had tired her, her head dropped and her eyes closed.
Wait.
I peeked over the edge of the rotted trough, then recoiled. There was a pool of water at the bottom—a disgusting gray soup of fetterling chain links, brand-fly wings, and something lumpy that I didn’t look at too closely. Mami Wata’s feet and ankles were submerged in the glop.
“They’re poisoning her,” Anansi said. His voice was thick with disgust.
“Poison?”
“Like the brand flies on Nyame,” Gum Baby added. She hopped up onto the lip of the makeshift tub and shook her head. “Just nasty.”
“Mami Wata is a water goddess,” Ayanna said. “She is one with Alke’s different bodies of water and cares for them. By forcing her to take a footbath in iron-monster stew, Bear’s keeping her too weak to use her powers.”
“Even worse, the corrupted Tree of Power is sending this filth into the sky, poisoning the air.” Anansi wore a grim expression. “It seems Bear has learned a lot of horrible things.”
“The storm…” I said, my heart skipping a beat. “Bear’s using Mami Wata to create it. When it hits Alke—”
“It’ll destroy everything we’re trying to rebuild,” Ayanna finished. She shook her head. “We can’t let that happen.”
No, we couldn’t. I rolled up my sleeves and gripped the side of the trough. It felt slimy and cold, and I tried not to shudder at the clammy sensation. “Okay, enough talking. Let’s free her.”
“Tristan, wait—” Anansi began, but it was too late. I heaved at the old wood, and it creaked stubbornly before a large chunk of the side ripped away in my hands. I fell back on the seat of my shorts, then scrambled aside as water began to spill out. First it trickled, then it gushed, splashing onto the ground and sending its rusty metal contents everywhere.
An ominous rumble echoed from somewhere near the top of the tree.
“Uh…” Gum Baby said. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, standing and wiping myself off.
“You did something. You’re always doing something. Gum Baby thinks you need to start sitting down and learning to do nothing. Study it. Become an expert at doing nothing.”
“First of all—”
Ayanna interrupted me. “Would you two please focus so we can avoid dying?”
We both glared at her, but at that moment another rumble sounded, and a piece of rotted bark the size of a surfboard hurtled through the air and landed like a spear in the ground next to me. Gum Baby and I stared at it, then at each other, then back at it.
“You know, not dying is good,” I said.
“Gum Baby was just thinking that.”
Something clanked in the nearly empty tub. A longer piece of fetterling chain had become entangled around Mami Wata’s foot. I tiptoed across the soggy ground and leaned into the trough to try to slip it off. The metal was cold. Bitter cold. More rumbles filled the dark space above our heads, as if the Tree of Power were expressing its pain from everything it had been through. Finally I managed to pull the snarled chain from around Mami Wata, and I tossed it to the other side of the tree. I stood, only to see two glints of light several inches from my face. Her eyes had opened. She was watching me.
With lightning quickness she lunged forward, her hair floating above her head and her face twisted into a grimace as she snagged my arm and yanked me close.
“You’re too late,” she whispered, just as the Tree of Power began to splinter apart. But inst
ead of falling, the fragments remained suspended in midair as the world froze around me.
MANY THINGS CAN BE TRUE AT THE SAME TIME.
I’ve heard that said several times by different people—Dad, Mom, even a few teachers. Loving reading and disliking the books I was given to read. Being hungry and not wanting to eat what was on my plate. The sun still shining bright in the sky and yet it’s time for bed. (Thanks a lot, daylight saving time. Spring forward into the trash, why don’t you.)
But never was that statement more real for me than when Mami Wata held my gaze for those few seconds. We were standing still and yet traveling everywhere at the same time.
One moment we were in the dead Tree of Power in MidPass, and the next we stood high on a grassy hill overlooking a mighty river as wide as a freeway, the roaring waters carrying canoes filled with brown-skinned families. Children waved and parents lifted their hands to honor the goddess on the bank, sometimes even floating gifts toward her that collected in the shallows.
Then we were sitting in a turquoise grotto behind a massive waterfall, the sound of it thundering through the mist. A group of girls sat on rocks nearby, laughing and talking as they braided each other’s hair, sharpened spears, and made plans. Every so often one of them would stand, turn, and salute Mami Wata with a raised spear, the same kind of weapon I’d seen in Nyanza, with a long narrow blade at the top and rope tied to the shaft.
My eyes widened as I recognized Ninah, the river spirit who’d first warned us about Bear coming. That felt like years ago. Now she looked up, caught my eyes, and lifted a spear in greeting. I started to raise my hand, but the world went dark.
When sunlight returned, Mami Wata and I were floating above Nyanza. Not as I’d seen it with Ayanna and Junior and Gum Baby before, but as it was supposed to exist—a giant lake surrounded by several smaller ones, connected by a network of streams and floating bridges. People swam and played, fished, planted water crops, and lived their lives to the fullest.
