“I’m not staying with you tonight!” Diti screamed.

“Will you two just shut up!” Luyu shouted.

“What’s going on?” I asked Binta, who was just standing there crying.

“Ask them,” she sobbed.

Fanasi turned his back to me.

“None of your business,” Diti grumbled, putting her arms around her chest.

I went to my tent, disgusted. Behind me, I heard Fanasi tell Diti, “I should never have come with you. I should have let you leave and been done with it.”

“Did I ask you to come for me?” Diti said. “You’re so selfish!”

I slapped aside my tent flap and crawled in. I wished that it had just been Mwita and me who’d left, that they’d all just stayed home. What can they do when we get to the West, anyway? I wondered. Mwita came in.

“It was supposed to make things better,” I hissed.

“You can’t fix everything,” he said. He held out a bowl to me. “Here, eat.”

“No,” I said, putting it aside.

He gave me an angry look and left. We were all falling apart, all right. We’d been falling apart since we left but when I broke that juju, the cracks became more permanent. It wasn’t my fault, I know, but back then I felt everything was. I was the chosen one.

It was all my fault.

CHAPTER 36

I FELL SICK THAT NIGHT. I was so angry and disappointed with all the bickering that I’d refused to eat anything and gone to sleep on an empty stomach. Mwita had been out most of the night, trying to talk sense into Fanasi. If he’d been there, he’d have forced me to eat before I slept. When he returned just before dawn, he found me curled into a tight ball, shivering and grumbling nonsense. He had to feed me spoonfuls of salt and then the broth from last night’s stew. I couldn’t even hold the spoon.

“Next time, don’t be stubborn and thoughtless,” he’d said angrily.

I was too weak to travel, but I was soon able to sit up and eat on my own. The camp was tense. Binta and Diti stayed in their tent. Fanasi and Mwita went off to talk. Luyu stayed with me. We lay in my tent practicing Nuru together.

“What think Diti’s problem?” Luyu asked in very bad Nuru.

“She’s stupid,” I replied in Nuru.

“I…” Luyu paused. In Okeke she asked, “How do you say freedom in Nuru?”

I told her.

She thought for a second and said in Nuru, “Think I… Diti taste freedom and now can’t without.”

“I think she’s just stupid,” I said again in Nuru.

Luyu switched to Okeke. “You saw how happy she was in that tavern. Some of those men were lovely… None of us were ever allowed to be that free in Jwahir.”

I laughed. “You were.”

She laughed, too. “Because I learned to take what wasn’t given to me.”

Late that night as I lay beside Mwita, I was still thinking about Diti’s stupidity. Mwita breathed softly, deep in sleep. I heard soft footsteps outside. I was used to the movement of the camels who often went out foraging at night or to mate. These footsteps were not big or many. I closed my eyes and listened harder. Not a desert fox, I thought. Not gazelle. I held my breath, listening harder. Human. The footsteps were going toward Fanasi’s tent. I heard whispers. I relaxed. Diti had finally gotten some sense.

Of course I kept listening. Wouldn’t you? I heard Fanasi whisper something. Then… I frowned. Listening closer. There was a sigh and then soft motion and a low groan. I almost woke Mwita up. I should have woken him up. This was bad. But what right did I have to stop Luyu from going into Fanasi’s tent? I could hear their rhythmic breathing. They went on like this for over an hour. Eventually I drifted off, so who knew when Luyu returned to her tent.

We packed up our things before sunrise. Diti and Fanasi didn’t speak to each other. Fanasi tried not to look at Luyu. Luyu acted completely normal. I laughed to myself as we started walking. Who knew there could be such theatrics in a small group in the middle of nowhere?

CHAPTER 37

BETWEEN DITI’S IGNORANT ARROGANCE, Luyu’s boldness, and Fanasi’s confused emotions, the next two weeks were far from boring. They were my distraction from darker thoughts. Luyu would set up her tent next to Fanasi’s and sneak in there late at night every few days. They would both be exhausted come morning and spend the day not looking at each other. I must say, they put on a good act.

In the meantime, I practiced dropping into and gliding through the wilderness. Each time I did, I saw the red eye in the distance, watching me. I surprised Mwita by sneaking up on him as a desert fox. I cut and healed my skin over and over, until cutting and healing myself was easy. I even started a three-day fast, trying to evoke a traveling vision. If Daib wanted to spy on me, then I could spy on him.

“How come you didn’t eat your breakfast?” Mwita asked.

“I’m trying for a vision. I think I can control it this time. I want to see what he’s up to.”

“It’s a bad idea,” he said, shaking his head. “He’ll kill you.” He left and returned with a plate of porridge. I ate, no questions asked.

I was preparing for what was to come. Still, I couldn’t ignore the time bomb about go off in our camp. One evening, I went to Luyu, who was washing clothes in her bucket.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Talk, then,” she said, wringing out her rapa.

I leaned closer, ignoring the drops of water that hit my face. “I know.”

“Know what?”

“About you and Fanasi.”

She froze, her hands deep in the bucket’s water. “Just you?”

“As far as I know.”

“How?”

“I heard.”

“Oh, we’re not loud like you and Mwita.”

“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Don’t you know what…”

“We both want it,” Luyu said. “And it’s not as if Diti cares.”

“Then why all the secrecy?”

She didn’t say anything.

“If Diti finds out…”

“She won’t,” Luyu snapped, looking hard at me.

“Oh, I’m not going to tell her. You will. Luyu, we’re all as close as you can get without living on top of each other. Fanasi and Mwita talk. If Mwita doesn’t know, he soon will. Or Diti or Binta will catch you. What if you get pregnant? There are only two men who could be the father here.”

We looked at each other and then burst out laughing.

“How did we end up here?” I asked after we got ourselves under control.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s wonderful, Onye. It might be because I’m older but oh, the way he makes me feel.”

“Luyu, listen to yourself. This is Diti’s husband.”

She sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes. Later on that night, I briefly woke up to hear Luyu sneak into Fanasi’s tent. Soon after they were at it again. This would only come to a bad end.

CHAPTER 38

WE CAME TO ANOTHER TOWN AND DECIDED to go in for supplies.

“Papa Shee? What kind of name is that?” Luyu asked. She was standing too close to Fanasi. Or maybe Fanasi was standing too close to her. He always seemed to be no more than a few steps away from her these days. They were getting lax.

“I remember this town,” Mwita said. He didn’t look as if the memory was a good one. He looked at Luyu’s map as she held the portable over her hand. It was hard to see in the sunshine. “We’re not far from the beginning of the Seven Rivers Kingdom. This is one of the last towns we’ll encounter that won’t be… hostile to Okekes.”

Not far from us a caravan of people traveled to the town, too. Several times during the day, we’d heard the sound of scooters. Once, the camels had grown extremely agitated, roaring and shaking their dusty hides. They’d been behaving strangely of late. The previous night, the camels woke us up when they started roaring at each other. They’d remained kneeling but they looked angry. They were having an argument. When we got to the town, they refused to go any closer. We’d had to leave them a mile back while we went to the town’s market.