Crown of Thunder

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  She arches an eyebrow at me.

  “Yes, I know what ‘claustrophobic’ means,” I say, and she smiles. I was hoping for a laugh, but I’ll take it.

  “Let’s get going. I’m hungry.”

  The ledge isn’t too steep, and I scrabble up to get to a grassy plain. I figure if we follow the river long enough, it’s bound to lead us somewhere. Either way, I know I just need to move. I don’t really care which direction it’s in, just as long as we’re moving.

  Aliya climbs up after me. “Hungry?”

  “Yeah, there’s gotta be berries or something around here, right?”

  The sun’s still high in the sky when we hit the first patch of fruit trees. A bunch of them line the river, and more stretch out so far I lose track of the rows. I don’t mind walking in the sun, as it dries me out faster than expected. The sight of the kiwis on those trees has me drooling. My stomach is speaking to me. Loudly.

  “Taj, slow down!”

  But I can barely hear Aliya as I run toward the trees. I pick up a stick lying on the ground and swat at the first branch. Kiwis cascade down on me. They’re so ripe they practically burst open in my fingers. The first bite brings me so much bliss it feels like I’ve died the most peaceful death possible and joined Infinity. It feels like a blessing. Juice streams down the sides of my mouth, and before I know it, empty kiwi skins litter the ground.

  “Taj!”

  My mouth is bulging when Aliya catches up to me. My hands are full. I can’t stuff my pockets fast enough.

  “Taj! This is someone’s orchard.”

  I try to ask her what the problem is, but it comes out all garbled.

  “Taj, you’re stealing.”

  I swallow hard, then burp. The look on her face gets me chuckling. “You see all these trees? They’re not going to miss a few kiwis.”

  “A few?”

  That’s when I look at the graveyard of kiwis at my feet. I’ve cleaned out almost a whole tree. “OK, just a few more for the road. You should get some too. We don’t know how much longer we’ll need to go without food.”

  As we turn to head back along the river, I spot motion up ahead. Figures emerge from a shack in the distance. It looks like they’re wearing umbrellas for hats. In their hands are staffs as tall as they are. They’re heading straight for us.

  “Taj!” Aliya warns.

  “Here!” I toss her a bunch of my kiwis, and she catches a few just in time. The rest fall to the ground. I jump and snatch a few more from the trees and hold my shirt out to catch them, then we’re off. We skid back down the ledge to the riverbed and run, and I can’t help but laugh. Feels like when I was a kid and raided foodcarts in Kos, then had to outrun the fishmongers and butchers as they chased after me through the Forum. “Catch up!” I shout to Aliya. Kiwis fall out of my shirt, but eventually we run far enough that the cries of the people wearing the wide-brimmed straw hats fade away.

  By the time Aliya finds me hidden behind a boulder along the shore, she’s laughing too. It takes us both a second to catch our breath. Aliya settles down beside me and holds the first kiwi up in front of her face. Her robe is smudged and stained with mud. The golden Fist of Malek embroidered over her chest, faded. Some of the threads have come loose. But when she takes a bite of the kiwi, her wide eyes and big grin transform her back into that girl I first met at Zoe’s all over again.

  She looks up, sees me staring, then cuts a look my way. “Are you watching me eat?” she asks, mouth full.

  I try not to laugh, fail, give up, and laugh anyway.

  Hairy kiwi skins litter the ground around us. Without warning, she snatches one of the kiwis out of my lap. In my scramble to get it back, I drop a bunch more, but Aliya is up before I am and already out of reach.

  “You dropped your fruit,” she tells me, smiling, as if I didn’t already notice. She looks toward the riverbed, then back at me like an idea has just occurred to her. “Come here, I want to show you something.”

  “Sure,” I tell her with a smile. I wipe my palms on my shirt and get up to follow her.

  Her gaze searches the shoreline for something. Her eyes settle on a twig, and she picks it up. For several moments, she holds the kiwi out in front of her, right between her eyes. I watch her concentrating. The sun’s setting over the water, and the waves shimmer behind her. Strands of brown hair flutter around her face. Her eyes remain completely focused. She glances my way, breaks her trance, then starts scribbling in the sand with her twig. Brow furrowed, back bent, she looks like she’s digging for treasure.

  I step closer and peek over her shoulder. “What is that?”

  I lean closer and try to deciper the string of letters, numbers, and arrows she’s drawn in the earth.

  “It’s a proof.” Aliya beams.

  “A what?”

  “A proof.”

  I look at the scribbling, then at her, then again at the scribbling. “A proof of what?”

  “Of the kiwi, stupid! I drew a picture of the kiwi.”

  I squint. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing. I don’t even see a crude drawing of the fruit we were just eating. “You’re going to have to help me here.”

  “Uhlah.” She’s about to throw up her hands in frustration, but she stops herself. “OK, so you have a straight line, you see?” She draws a straight line in the ground. “And you can extend that line indefinitely in either direction, yes?”

  I nod. “Sure.”

  “And you have a circle.” She draws a circle so that the line starts from its center and cuts through. “And this right here?” She points again to the line. “This is the difference between the center and the end. The radius.” She draws another line, this one perpendicular to the first. “And you have a right angle, and assume that all right angles are equal, yes?”

  I shrug. “Sure, why not?”

  “Now, if a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side . . .” As she’s speaking, she draws another series of lines that form some weird, misshapen triangle, and she writes letters on the inside of it. I recognize some of them in her “proof,” but other than that, it’s all gibberish. “Also, remember that these are models of objects and not the objects themselves. Now, it’s all down to angle and distance; those are the only two components you need—”

  I’m starting to get dizzy. I start backing away slowly.

  “—and then you can extend that to a different plane and measure the volume of a parallelepipedal solid and from there . . .” She looks up finally and sees that I’ve walked back to where we were sitting before. “Taj!”

  “I’m sorry, but all of that is a picture of a kiwi? I haven’t seen a single kiwi in all of Odo that looks like that.”

  “It’s the kiwi in a different form.” She points to the mass of letters and arrows and other markings she made earlier. “This is its algebraic form. The equation that describes the kiwi.”

  I look at the hairy fruit in my hand. “So that’s what we’ve been eating all this time?”

  She smiles. “That’s what I see, yes. Every time I eat a kiwi, that’s what I see.” Her smile broadens. Deepens, even. She tosses the stick down, then walks over and scoops up the remaining uneaten kiwis. “Come on. It’s getting dark. We should keep heading south.”

  I follow her lead. “What’s south?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s away from those metal monsters, at least.” She turns on her heel and starts walking along the river’s beach. I catch up, and we walk side by side.

  “Hey, can you do that with everything?” I ask.

  She looks at me. “What do you mean?”

  “You think you can write one of those things for me?”

  “What, like a Taj proof?”

  I bite into a kiwi. Juice dribbles down my chin. She reaches out like she’s about to wipe it from my ch
in, but at the last second, her hand goes to her hair, brushing it out of her face. I feel my cheeks heat up. But Aliya doesn’t miss a beat.

  “There’s not enough mud in the whole kingdom to write a proof for you, Taj.”

  “Is that ’cause I’m so special?”

  She laughs. “Well, I prefer the word ‘complicated.’”

  I grin. “I’ll settle for that.”

  CHAPTER 5

  AT NIGHT, THE wind picks up.

  We’ve slowed down only a little bit, but I notice it. Aliya hugs her robe a little tighter. Her teeth chatter. The tips of her hair that frame her face under her hood glisten, still damp from our trip on the river. Or, rather, in the river. And it looks like her robe hasn’t dried out all the way either. I wish I had a coat or a blanket or something to give her, but the only thing I’ve got is my tattered shirt, and that won’t help any. So we just keep walking, and the wind keeps blowing.

  “Maybe we should head away from the river?”

  She doesn’t respond, just keeps putting one foot in front of the other. Almost mechanically, like her legs are auto-mail.

  Almost getting killed by armored inisisa, nearly drowning in a river, then being chased by people in large hats, and now shivering in the dark. I’m starting to get tired of this “adventure.” Things were easier when the Wall was the farthest I’d ever gone. When I was younger, Kos seemed like the entire world. I could wander and wander and wander and still not see everything worth seeing. I could get lost for days in the different dahia. I could walk up and down the Forum all day for weeks and not see the same thing twice. Then there were times when I would wonder what was outside of Kos. It seemed like the world ended after the Wall. I would see people come and go through the Wall, but most were going, and once they left, they never came back.

  I think of Arzu. My sicario, the one charged with protecting me when I was a servant in the Palace. The one whose mother brought her here from the west. She’d told me of things I couldn’t believe. Aki who aren’t spat on or slapped around. Aki who are revered for their ability to Eat sins. The last time I saw her, she’d pinned my best friend to the steps of the Palace with a knife to his throat. To keep him from killing me. Then an arashi came out of the sky and set the city on fire. Set my home on fire.

  I’m lost in thought when Aliya nudges me with her arm.

  “Taj, look!” She points to the sky, toward the horizon.

  I don’t even need to squint to see it.

  Red glows over the hills. Dark, purplish red. Like a bruise on the sky. It rises in rays and sways. Stars shine through the waves of light, but the silhouette of the hills shifts. Small changes at first, but enough for me to notice. Like a wildfire dripping from the clouds.

  “Is that a fire?” I ask her. I can hear the distant sound of snapping and popping.

  “Falling red flames,” Aliya says, breathless.

  “What?”

  “That’s what the scholars of old called it. In the Great House of Ideas, scholars would study the sky at night and say these lights were what happened when the sun kissed us. Before they knew what the lights were, they would call it .ut.ut.ui.u n’abal.i. Morning at night.” Her voice is thick with wonder. “The Unnamed moves the stars and the planets around us even while we sleep. Always in patterns. I never thought I would live to see it.” She breaks out of her trance and leads me closer.

  As we get closer, I can feel the heat of the flames.

  We start running with newfound strength. When we crest the hill, we slow down. There’s an entire community in the valley below. People sit around fires, others walk in and out of tents and small homes with thatched roofs that look like they were put together quickly. It’s like a small city. In the distance, I can hear kids giggling as they run around while their mothers and fathers shout after them to be careful. Someone’s kicking a leather ball in the air, bouncing it off their ankle, then their shoulder, then their head. And jewels. Everywhere I look, gemstones in ear studs, opals attached to toe rings, hands that shine with the light of so many sapphires. They glow brighter than the stars. And then I look up and see the curtains of color above us and realize that the stones have something to do with it. These people, they’re from Kos. Refugees from my city, and they brought their beautiful gemstones with them. They brought their world with them.

  I wonder briefly how much coal the people of this small makeshift city carry, how much of the dull stuff to remind themselves of the dead left behind. Since these are people from Kos, they’ll have news. They might know what has happened over the past few weeks. They might know what’s happened to Bo. If all of these people survived the arashi attack, then maybe some of the aki who fought alongside me during the Fall of Kos survived as well. I have to believe that they did. I’m tired. Exhausted and broken down. But I’m still strong enough to hope.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Aliya says in a whisper, like she’s afraid that if she talks too loudly, she’ll mess up the whole vision. “The stones . . . they’re causing the light.” I look and see that the gemstones refracting off the fire are making the sky look like it’s changing colors: blue and green and red. “It’s unclear how the light waves are interacting with the solar winds, though that may indicate our current longitude and—”

  My stomach grumbles loud enough to silence her. She shoots me a look, and I shrug guiltily. “I ate our last kiwi hours ago,” I confess.

  “Well, we should head down, if for nothing else than at least to gain news of Kos and learn of the current state of affairs.”

  “What’s the likelihood any of the others will have made it here?” I don’t specify whether “others” means the aki and Mages we left behind in the forest or those we couldn’t take with us when we first fled Kos during the arashi attack.

  “Low,” Aliya replies.

  It’s strange how Aliya alternates between being able to pull a sense of wonder out of something as boring as a kiwi and acting like a hardened general. I try to school myself into not expecting to see Ugo or Nneoma or Miri down there.

  Aliya skids down the hillside behind me. “More than zero.”

  “What?”

  “The likelihood that we’ll see any of our friends down there.” She catches me out of the corner of her eye, as though telling me it’s OK to hope. “Still more than zero.”

  As we get closer, Aliya sticks out a hand, stopping me. “Wait,” she says as she shrugs off her robe. Underneath, her dress hangs damp over the belt cinched at her waist, and I realize that this whole time she’s been colder than I’d even imagined. Slowly, delicately, to keep from dropping it, she turns the robe around. She’s reversing it, hiding the golden Fist of Malek embroidered on the front. I reach out and help her turn the sleeves inside out.

  “We don’t know who’s down there or what they might want, what they might be looking for.” She slips the reversed robe over her shoulders. “Better not to announce our presence.”

  “And what about these?” I ask, pointing to my sin-spots.

  “We’ll think of something.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Our problem—well, my problem—gets solved by a young woman, older than me but younger than most adults, who’s been handing out blankets to what look like new arrivals. I quickly wrap one around myself like a cape.

  Aliya and I didn’t see where they might have come from, but people appear in a steady stream at the booth set up on the outskirts of the camp at the bottom of the hill. And this woman smiles at each of them as she hands them a folded woolen blanket. Some of them even get their own rolled pallet. I notice there aren’t many families. Mostly adults without children and children without parents. After we get our blankets, Aliya and I wander a few steps away into one of the larger walkways, and for a while, I watch the people come through.

  “Who are you looking for, Taj?” Aliya asks me.

  Mama. Baba
. Bo. Anyone I might recognize.

  The faces of the refugees darken in the night. Here, no one wears jewels. Instead, they’re adorned with coal. Coal in the rings on their fingers. Coal in their ear studs. Coal hanging around their necks, their ankles, their wrists. Some of them have bundles, but many of them don’t, just the clothes on their backs. There’s no obvious trail leading here. We got lucky being swallowed up and spat out by the river. How do people find this place?

  “Taj, let’s go.” Aliya turns to walk away. “Maybe we can find someplace to sleep before we figure out what to do next.”

  I thought seeing the refugees would depress me, make me slower and sleepy, but angry energy runs through me. It’s injustice that has sent these people here. Their faces are gray. They’ve suffered. I remember those looks, seeing them every time a dahia was Baptized by the royal family, every time Wreckers and Hurlers were sent to cleanse those neighborhoods of sin, of sinners, raining down boulders of stone and enflamed wood. The royal family and the Mages that served them would watch while houses crumbled beneath the onslaught, claiming that the Baptism was merely to cleanse various parts of Kos of the sin that had been building up. But really all they were doing was punishing us. For bothering to live.

  I see it again now. These people have lost their homes. Many of them, their families. No matter how clean their clothes were when they left the city, they’re all gray and brown and splotched with dried blood now.

  Turning to follow Aliya, I see the camp humming with life before me. Someone here can tell me about what’s happened in Kos since we left. As we walk, I drape my blanket around my shoulders and over my neck. These people don’t need to know I’m aki. Not yet.

  Suddenly, I freeze where I’m standing. There, in the middle of the trail, almost swallowed up by the moving crowd, is Sade. Sade, who had battled inisisa alongside me during the Fall of Kos. Sade, who hadn’t made it out of Kos in time to escape the arashi attack.

  “You’re alive,” I murmur.

  Her dark purple robe is tied at her waist by a belt. Both her arms are sleeved, and she wears leather breeches. This is the fanciest she’s ever dressed—it looks like some sort of uniform. Where did she get those clothes? She sees me and heads straight for us. Too fast. She removes rope from the belt at her waist. “Put your hands out for binding.”