He was standing thigh deep in the water wearing only his blue pants. As he waded deeper in, he hissed with pain. The way he moved, with his hands out, it didn’t seem like he could see in the dark at all. I stood up for a better look. His things were on the ground, closer to me than him. A ripped satchel, a tattered blue shirt, and a silver, very sharp looking dagger.
Quietly, I snuck to his things. I was about to reach for his dagger when he suddenly stopped. He was up to his belly; his back to me. He whirled around and before I realized what was happening, he flew at me. Fast like a hawk! I leapt to the side, grabbing his satchel. Items fell from its large hole.
He landed and snatched another small dagger from his wet pocket. Then he eyed me with such rage and disgust that I stumbled back. He addressed me in Arabic, his dagger pointed at me, “Filthy abid bitch,” he spat. “I’ll slice your belly open just for touching my things.” His wet face was scratched up, and one of his eyes was nearly swollen shut. There were more fresh scratches and bruises on his arms and his chest.
I blinked, understanding several things at once. First, he’d been recently beaten. Second, he was a windseeker, one born with the ability to fly, a product of the Great Change, tainted like me. Third, this meant he could not have been from the ship.
I was so appalled by his mauled condition and his words that I just stood there. He took this as further evidence that I couldn’t possibly understand him.
“Allah protect me,” he said, lowering his dagger. “Can this night get any worse?” He looked my age, had skin the color of milky tea and a hint of a beard capping his chin. And he had the usual windseeker features: somewhat large wild eyes and long onyx black hair braided into seven very thick braids with copper bands on the ends.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked in Arabic, regaining my composure. He looked obviously shocked that I could speak his oh-so-sacred language. Most black Africans in Niger spoke Hausa or Fulanese. I deliberately looked him up and down and slowly enunciating my words said, “There are no slaves in these lands.” Abid meant slave in Arabic.
“Hand me my things,” he demanded. “Now.”
Instead, I read him. I was close enough to him. The first thing was the scent of turmeric. I tasted something spicy, garlicky … a dish called muhammara. Ahmed, that is his name. He’s from … Saudi Arabia.
He flew this far? I wondered as I swam within his past, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. I was me but I was him. Duality. My heart was slamming in my chest as it always did when I read people.
As fast as I could, I soaked information from him like a sponge. … From a lavish home. The seventh of five sons and four daughters. All normal. Except him. Ahmed’s father loomed large to me. Larger than Ahmed. Father did not smoke or drink. Father prayed five times a day. Father hated spontaneous forests and the fact that the way to the nearby village was not always the same whenever he walked there. Father owned three black African slaves and he often cursed their black skin and burned hair.
Father hated how the quality of the air was different. And he constantly dreamed of Mars. The new world, a fresh world, the place of his birth. He was an important man in the crumbling local government. Too important to have a windseeker son, one of those strange troublesome polluted children. Ahmed understood that Father thought him ruined.
As I looked into Ahmed, I heard him step toward me. When in a reading state, I’m basically helpless. I can’t pull out of it quickly. One day, I will learn to not be so vulnerable.
Looking into Ahmed, I was surprised to find poetry and gentleness, too. Ahmed loved salty olives. Short curvy women. The beaded necklaces around the necks of black-skinned women he’d see working at the market. The open sky. Music moved him. His quiet mother, whose hands were always writing adventure stories in the notebook she hid from Father …
It came as it always did. In disorganized fragments, details, like a sentient puzzle more concerned with the shape of its pieces than putting itself together.
The day Father drove him away was the day news came about his grandfather on the shuttle returning to Earth. The first since the Great Change. Ahmed had assumed he’d never see Grandfather. During the celebration of the news, Father had turned to Ahmed. Had sneered at Ahmed. Father was ashamed of the bizarre son he’d have to present to his father whom he hadn’t seen since he was four years old. Ahmed ran away that night. A windseeker must fly … not even Father’s heavy hand and words could change that.
“You abeed are the lowliest of all Mankind,” Ahmed was telling me. “A polluted abid … you are an aberration of the devil.” These wicked words against the compelling melancholy of his past made my head ache. I fought to pull myself from him. A last fragment came to me, just before he shoved me to the ground … As Ahmed flew from the only home he’d ever known, he received a message on his e-legba. From Grandma. The attachment she’d sent took up half the space on his hard drive. Coordinates, linked tracking applications, schedules … for Grandfather’s space shuttle arrival. “Meet him,” Grandma’s message said. “He will love you.”
“Stop it!” he shouted, shoving me so hard that my breath was struck from my chest. I fell to the sand.
“Your father drove you away,” I said, quickly getting up. I backed away from him and dusted the sand from my long dress. My heart was still pounding as I fought for breath. “Yet … you speak to me … with the same words that you fled.”
“You’re Nigerian,” he growled, looking a little crazed. “I can hear it in your accent! You all are nothing but thieves!” he pointed to his pummeled face. “Who do you think did this to me? They didn’t just take my money, they tried to put a virus on my e-legba to empty my bank account! Double thievery!”
His motions, again, were so quick. Before I realized it, he’d grabbed a flashlight from the ground and flashed in my face.
“Ah!” I exclaimed, shielding my sensitive eyes, temporarily blinded. He clicked it off. “What are you doing here?” He began using his feet to gather to himself the other items that had fallen from his satchel.
For a few seconds, all I could see was red, figuratively and literally.
“Give me my bag,” he snapped, when I didn’t respond to his stupid question. I threw it at him, more things falling from the hole. He glared at me and I glared back.
My mother grew up in northern Nigeria and had traveled with her parents all over the Middle East before the Great Change. She’d told me about how black Africans were often treated in these places, but I’d never encountered it with the Arabs I met in Nigeria. My mother said it was an old, old, old problem, stemming from the trans-Saharan slave trade and before that. I only half-believed it was real. But I knew the words abeed and abid, the Arabic singular and plural forms for black or slave. Ugly, cruel words.
“What is it you’re doing here?” he suddenly asked again, once he had all his things in his satchel. “How did you know to be here?”
“I didn’t,” I snapped.
“Then get out of here,” he said. “Didn’t you hear it on the news? You people never know what’s best for you!”
“You know what? I’m here to see what’s in that ship, so stay out of my way!” I said. He stepped forward. I stood my ground. He glanced over my shoulder at the ship.
“We’ll see,” he said. He flew up into the air and eventually descended behind some trees.
“Don’t mind him,” I muttered to Plantain, who was yards away, preoccupied with a patch of fennel she’d found near a tree. “I’m not going anywhere.” I returned to my spot on my mat and sat staring at the ship, listening. Waiting.
Seven hours later, I woke to Ahmed crouching over me, a rock in his raised hand. Every part of my body flexed. I stayed still.
He had the wild look of someone about to do something terrible in the name of those who raised him. I stared at him, willing him with all my might to look into my eyes. Look, I demanded with my mind. It was my only chance. If he didn’t, he’d kill me, I knew … and it was not g
oing to be a painless, quick death. I strained for his eyes. Look, now! PLEASE!
He looked into my eyes.
He looked for a long long time.
His face went from intense to slack to horribly troubled. He dropped the stone beside my head. He whimpered. Tears welled in his eyes. I smirked. Good. To look into the eyes of a shadow speaker is to court madness. Or so the rumor went. All I knew was that people who looked right into my eyes for more than a second were never the same afterward.
He sat before me, his hands not over his eyes but over his ears, terror on his face. I began to feel a little ill. Not guilty. No. I hadn’t done anything. I was actually awash in rage. He’d been ready to cave my head in and now while he grieved over whatever he was grieving, I wanted to kick his teeth in. He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was just sitting there holding his head. I could do it. But to do such a thing was not in me; it was evil. Unlike him, I couldn’t murder. But he’d almost brutally killed me. My conflicted feelings made my stomach lurch.
Naked faced, he started weeping. His eyebrows crinkled in, his mouth turned downward, and his eyes narrowed as he wept softly.
“Look at me! I deserved to be robbed and beaten by your people!” he sobbed. “They should. …”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“Fisayo,” he whispered. It was odd to hear him speak my name. The sun was just coming up. “I …”
There was a loud hissing sound and we both looked toward the ship. A door had appeared on its side. The shuttle was finally opening.
Wiping his face with the heel of his hand, Ahmed got up. I scowled at him as I got up, too, wishing he’d stop his sniveling.
“Get it together,” I snapped. “Goodness.” He nodded, sobbed loudly, but then quieted a bit.
He was still weeping as we approached the shuttle. The sunlight was quickly bathing the desert. In the Sahara, the sun rises fast and steady. Even in a spontaneous forest. As we walked, I noticed many of the trees and bushes in the forest had disappeared or were withering, and the pond had gone foul and brackish.
“Will you stop it?” I whispered. I didn’t know why I was whispering but it seemed right. “Tell me what we should expect. Do you have information about how many are on board?”
He brought out his e-legba, clicked it on, and read for a moment. He took a deep breath. “Your eyes are evil,” he whined.
I scoffed. “It’s not my eyes, Ahmed. It was you.”
He sniffed loudly. “It says here that there are …” His voice cracked. He sniffled again. “There are supposed to be thirty-one people on board.”
As the sunlight and the heat increased, the vines on the shuttle quickly dried and began falling off, leaving the shuttle exposed. The door that had opened gave way to darkness inside. I could only see the wall, as the passageway went directly to the right.
“Why isn’t anyone coming out?” I asked.
As we moved closer, Ahmed pulled himself together … at least he stopped weeping. “So really,” he asked. “Why are you here?”
I hesitated. Then I shrugged. “I just happened to be a few miles away when I heard about it on my e-legba.”
He wiped at his eyes again. “You’re not here to steal from them?”
“No! Of course not!” I was getting more nervous the closer we got; it was good to talk about something else. “You were going to kill me.”
“I was.” He paused. He frowned as more tears began to dribble from his eyes. “I … I’m sorry.” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t think you’re human.”
“I don’t think you are either.”
We were standing at the door. Inside the shuttle, the walls were plush red and busy with buttons, small blank screens, and other things. To the right, the corridor went well into the ship. Ahmed sobbed loudly. He turned to the side, pressed a finger to his left nostril, and blew out a large amount of snot. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking distraught again, his voice strained as he tried to hold back more sobs.
“Ugh,” I said, turning to the side. I couldn’t look at him anymore. “Look … I’m going in, are …”
Ahmed had stopped weeping entirely. I frowned, turning back to him. He looked as if he was seeing a ghost. He grabbed my hand. I turned to the door just as something large and red slammed me to the ground. Hot glass! Hot glass! I frantically thought Ahmed hadn’t released my hand and was thus yanked back as I fell. I could hear Ahmed yelling but all I saw was a layer of red and all I felt were pain and heat. It was as if the world was submerged under soft ripples of red tinted waters. I could see a wavy red sun, the ship, and Ahmed kicking and kicking at whatever was on top of me.
I heard it hissing in my ear. A creature with a heavy solid body like glass. Dry, hot, and buzzing. No, not buzzing. Vibrating. I could feel it, down deep inside me. I struggled to understand. But it was pressing on my throat. A part of me could only think one thing: Look into my eyes! Please look into my eyes! If it was a thing, a creature maybe …
I was looking through … its head. Oblong but empty. Then I was falling. Shaking. Vibrating. Falling. Into. Red. The CoLoRs it knew and loved. The CoLoRs of HoME. Where everything was all kinds of RED. Until it was fOuNd. For VIbRAtINg too much with CuriositY. I fell deeper. Beyond myself. I have no words to describe it. But it was alive. Not in the same way that I knew life, but it was alive.
As its weight lifted off me, my entire body flared with pain. Nevertheless, I lived. And I knew why. I knew what the creature was. I knew many things about it now. I tried to laugh. Instead I coughed hard and everything around me throbbed red.
It stood before me. Too heavy now and sinking into the sand. It looked like a crude glass bipedal grasshopper. It was impervious to Ahmed’s attacks. Kicking it was like kicking transparent stone.
“From Mars,” I breathed as I got to my feet. My neck ached painfully and I had to bend forward. “It’s a …”
It suddenly turned to Ahmed and sent out so much vibration that I could feel it in my chest. I coughed, pressing my hands to my chest. Then it leapt at him.
“No!” I croaked. “Stop, wait!”
But Ahmed was ready. He jumped back and shot into the sky. The creature fell forward and started sinking fast into the sand. I shielded my eyes, searching for Ahmed. The creature had sunk halfway into the sand, before Ahmed returned. “What is it?” he asked, hovering several feet above my head.
I laughed, rubbing my neck. I was beginning to feel a little better. “It’s an alien.” Then I sat down hard on the sand.
In a matter of minutes, I’d gone from fighting off a racist windseeker armed with a rock to fighting off a Martian alien. As I sat there contemplating this, I stared at the door.
“You know why it didn’t kill me?” I asked, rubbing my temples and shutting my eyes. Ahmed sat beside me, anxiously looking at where the alien had sunk.
“Why?” he muttered. He hacked loudly and spit to the side. He was done crying.
“Because I’m Nigerian,” I said.
“What?” Ahmed said, frowning at me. “How would it know that? Why would it care?”
“It was held captive, and the only person to treat it with any respect before it managed to escape was a man named Arinze Tunde, a Nigerian.”
“How do you …” His eyes widened. “You read an alien?”
“It read me more,” I said.
“That cursed thing could read genetics or something?”
“Guess so,” I said. “That’s what the vibrating was. You felt it, right?”
“Yeah, like being touched by sound.”
I got up and waited a moment to make sure I was steady. Ahmed got up, too. For a moment, I felt dizzy, then everything stabilized. As I dusted off my dress, I said, “And you know why it wanted to kill you?”
Ahmed shrugged.
“Your grandpa was the one who captured it.”
He stared at me blankly as I quickly walked to the ship. I turned to him. “Come on!” I said. “The passenge
rs are locked in some room. We need to get everyone off right now. The alien is going to make the shuttle take off again.”
“My grandfather?” Ahmed said as I ran inside. “Alien? Didn’t it just sink into the sand? There’s another one?”
The soft humming was continuous and the lights flickered as we walked down the narrow corridor single file. The padded walls added to the narrowness. Everything was spotless, no dust or dirt in any corners. And everything smelled like face powder.
“I don’t like this,” Ahmed said, moving faster. “Not at all.”
I smiled. Windseekers hate tight places. “Inhale, exhale,” I said, staying close behind him. “We’ll find the passengers and then get out. Relax.”
As he loudly inhaled and exhaled as he walked, I took a moment to look behind us. So far we’d moved in a straight line and I could still see the sun shining in from the open door. I felt a little better. If it was a trap, the door probably would have shut. Eventually, the corridor did break off in three different directions. We took the one in the middle and came to a large metal door with a sign on it that said CONFERENCE ROOM B. Ahmed was about to touch the blue button beside the door. I grabbed his hand.
“What?” he said, accidently looking into my eyes. He quickly looked away, squeezing his face as if I’d stuck a pin in his arm.
“Don’t start that again,” I snapped.
“It’s your damn eyes!”
I rolled my eyes. “Let’s knock first.”
“Fine,” he said, gritting his teeth. He knocked three times. The sound was absorbed by the hallway’s padding. We stood there, listening hard.
I sighed, “Maybe, we could …”
“Arinze?” a woman called from behind the door.
Ahmed grabbed my arm, and I stepped closer to him.
“Please!” a man shouted in English, banging on the door. I couldn’t place his accent. “Open up. Just …”
“Is that English? What are they saying?” Ahmed asked me in Arabic. “I can’t understand.”
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