These were the only times that my mother and I were in danger during our nomad days. My mother said it was only by Ani’s will that we survived the ten ungwa storms we encountered.

This one wasn’t far and it was coming fast. All around us was flat dry land. Not a dead tree in sight, not that trees would help. We’d have been in even more danger if this storm had caught us at those stone trees. The wind picked up, nearly blowing my veil off. We had about a half hour.

“I… I know a place we could take shelter,” Mwita suddenly said.

“Where?” I asked.

He paused. “A cave. Not far from here.” He plucked Luyu’s portable from her hand and pressed a button on the side of it for light. The clouds had just snuffed out the sun. Though it was about three p.m., it looked like late dusk. “About ten minutes… if we run.”

“Okay, which way?” Luyu screeched. “Why are we…”

“Or we could try to outrun it,” he suddenly said. “We could head northwest and…”

“Are you crazy?” I snapped. “We can’t outrun an ungwa storm!”

He muttered something that I couldn’t hear because of the rumble of thunder.

“What?”

He frowned at me. A stroke of lightning cracked the sky. We all looked up.

“Which way to your cave?” I demanded.

Still he said nothing. Luyu looked about to explode. Each second we stood there brought us closer to death by lightning strike.

“I… I don’t think we should go there,” he said after a moment.

“So we should stay out here and die?” I shouted. “Do you know what will…”

“Yes!” he snapped. “I’ve been through it, too! But the shelter… that place isn’t right, it…”

“Mwita,” Luyu said. “Let’s go, there’s no time for this. We’ll deal with whatever’s there.” She looked fearfully at the sky. “We don’t have a choice.”

I eyed him closely. It was rare to see fear in Mwita but there it was.

“So you can push me toward a masquerade riddled with needles and demand that I face my fear but you can’t face a stupid cave?” I shouted waving my arms about. “You’d rather get us all killed? I thought you were the man and I was the woman.”

My words bit deep but I didn’t care. It started to rain along with the lightning and thunder. He pointed a finger in my face and I looked fiercely back at him. Luyu screeched at an especially loud crash of thunder. She pressed close behind me.

“You go too far,” he said.

“I can go much farther!” I shouted, angry tears falling from my eyes and mixing with the rain.

In the middle of nowhere, an ungwa storm about to set upon us, we stood glaring at each other. He snatched my hand and began to pull me along. Over his shoulder he bellowed, “Luyu?”

“I’m right behind you!”

We didn’t run. I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid-I was too angry. Mwita pulled me along at a steady pace, Luyu held my shoulder, her head down. I don’t know how he could see his way in the heavy rain.

We weren’t struck. It wasn’t Ani’s will, I guess. Or maybe it was our will. It took fifteen minutes. When we got to the large granite formation with the cave yawning at the base, we stopped. Luyu and I instantly knew why Mwita didn’t want to come here.

The rain was coming down hard causing streams of water to drape the cave’s opening but with each stroke of lightning you could see them clearly. They swung in the storm’s wind. The bodies of two human beings hanging at the cave’s opening. Bodies so old that they were dried and shriveled from the heat and sun, more bone than flesh.

“How long have they been there?” I whispered. Neither Luyu or Mwita heard me.

There was a loud blast as lightning struck the ground not far behind us. A strong wind shoved us toward the cave. Mwita led the way but he didn’t let go of my hand. I had demanded that we go into the cave so we were all going.

The water falling over the entrance flowed down on my head and shoulders as we entered. My attention was focused on the swinging bodies to my right. They had been a woman and man, at least according to the sun-bleached raggedy clothes. The woman wore a long dress and veil and the man a caftan and pants. You couldn’t tell if they were Okeke, Nuru, or anything else. They hung from thick ropes looped around copper rings embedded in the cave’s ceiling. We had to press against the side of the cave’s entrance to avoid touching them. Inside was too dark to see the cave’s depth.

“The cave isn’t that deep,” Mwita said, pushing some rocks together. I helped, trying to ignore the cave’s tangy, almost metallic scent. We needed to get a nice big rock fire, more for light than warmth. Luyu just stood there staring at the two dead people. I didn’t bother asking her to help. Both Mwita and I had experienced our own deaths. Luyu had not.

“Mwita,” I said quietly.

He shot me a heated look.

I defiantly endured it, mumbling, “I stand by what I said.”

“Of course you do,” he said.

“You have to face your own fears, too,” I said. “And you were going to get us killed.”

After a moment, his face softened. “Okay.” He said. He paused, then said. “I’d never get either of you killed. I just needed a moment to think.” He began to turn away but I took his hand and turned him back to me. “Were they there when you…”

“Yes,” Mwita said, avoiding my eyes. “They were much… fresher back then, though.”

So these people had been hanging here for more than a decade. I wanted to ask if he knew what they had done. I wanted to ask him many things but it wasn’t the time.

“Luyu,” he said minutes later, after he and I had made a nice pile of stones. “Come over here. Stop staring at them.”

Slowly she turned as if coming out of a trance. Her face was wet. “Sit down,” Mwita said. I walked over and took her hand.

“We should bury them,” she said as I sat her before the pile of cool stones.

“I tried that,” Mwita said. “I don’t know how they were put up there but they can’t be pulled down and their bones won’t fall down.” He looked at me and I understood. Juju kept them up there. Who had they been?

“We’re not even going to try?” she said. “I mean, that’s just rope and you were here, what, as a kid? They should come right down.”

Mwita ignored her as he got the rock fire going. What its light illuminated was enough to drag Luyu’s attention from the dead bodies. I was already feeling unease, now I just wanted to run out into the rain and chance the lightning. In the back of the cave, half covered with sand that had swept in over the years, were possibly hundreds of computers, monitors, portables, and e-books. Now I knew where the metallic smell came from.

The ancient monitors were a half inch thick, not even close to the monitors you saw used today that were much thinner, and most were smashed or cracked. The desktop computers were too large to hold with one hand. Old and amazingly ancient things packed in a cave in the middle of nowhere and long forgotten. I looked at Mwita, appalled.

The Great Book spoke of such places, caves full of computers. They were put here by terrified Okekes trying to escape Ani’s wrath when she turned back to the world and saw the havoc the Okeke had created. This was just before she brought the Nuru from the stars to enslave the Okeke… or so the book said. Did this mean that parts of the Great Book were true? Had the Okeke really crammed technology away in caves to hide them from an angry goddess?

“This place is haunted,” Luyu whispered.

“Exactly,” Mwita said.

There was nothing I could say. We were in a tomb of humans, machines, and ideas while a deadly storm raged outside.

“How did you find this place?” I asked. “How’d you end up here?”

“And how did you remember the way so well?” Luyu added.

He went over to the swinging bodies. Luyu and I joined him. “Look up there,” he said, pointing at the copper rings. “Who would drive those into stone like that?” He sighed. “I’ll never know what happened or who these people were. When I came, it must have been just after they were hung. They still had… flesh. I’d say they were about the age we are now.”