General Daib’s building wouldn’t stop burning until it was ash. Still, as we stood before it, I saw a large bat laboriously fly out the blaze like a piece of charred debris. It flew a few yards, dropped several feet, caught itself and then flew on. My father was crippled but he still lived. I didn’t care. If I succeeded in what I had to do, he would be dealt with in his own time.

We walked quickly down the street as women ran amok. No one looked twice at us. We made our way toward the lake with no name.

CHAPTER 59

“ I FEEL STRANGE,” Luyu said. Then she ran to the edge of the river and vomited for the second time this day.

I stood with my face exposed waiting for Luyu to finish. No one cared about me. People may have heard things about a crazy Ewu woman but what was happening in the town of Durfa had usurped that. For the moment.

Every single male human in the central town of Durfa capable of impregnating a woman was dead. My actions had killed them. The armies I had seen, every single one of those men had instantly died. As we’d walked to the river, we saw male bodies in the street, heard cries from houses, walked past shocked children and women. I shuddered again, helplessly thinking about Daib… He is my father and I am his child, I thought. We both leave bodies in our wake. Fields of bodies.

“Are you finished?” I asked. My face felt hot and I too felt like I was going to vomit.

She grunted, slowly standing up. “My belly feels… I don’t know.”

“You’re pregnant,” I said.

“What?”

“So am I.”

She stared at me. “Did you…”

“I made myself conceive. Something happened because of it. Something… terrible,” I looked at my hands. “Sola said my greatest problem would be a lack of control.”

Luyu wiped her mouth with the back of her hands and touched her belly. “So… not just me, then. All the women.”

“I don’t know how far it went. I don’t think it touched the other towns. But where there are dead men, there are pregnant women.”

“W-what happened? Why are the men dead?” she asked.

I shook my head and looked at the river. It was better for her not to know. A woman screamed from nearby. I wanted to scream, too. “My Mwita,” I whispered. My eyes burned. I didn’t want to look up and see bereaved women running amok in the streets.

“He died well,” Luyu said.

“A son kills his father,” I said. But Daib isn’t dead, I thought.

“Apprentice kills his Master,” Luyu said tiredly. “Daib hated you, Mwita loved you. Mwita and Daib, one can’t thrive without the other, maybe.”

“You speak like a sorcerer,” I grumbled.

“I’ve been around enough of them,” Luyu said.

“My Mwita,” I whispered again. Then I remembered and reached into the folds of my rapa. I hoped it wasn’t there. It was. I held the tiny metal disk up. “Luyu, do you still have your portable?” Inside a building across the road, a woman screamed until her voice cracked. Luyu winced.

“Yeah,” she said. She squinted. “Where’d you get the disk?”

I stepped closer as she carefully slipped the disk in. My heart was beating so fast that I clutched my chest. Luyu frowned and held me close to her. There was a soft whirring sound as a tiny screen rose up from the bottom. Luyu flipped it over.

My mother was looking right at us as she lay in the sand. My father stabbed the silver knife into the sand beside her head. I noticed that its hilt was decorated with symbols very much like the ones etched into my hands. Ting would have known what they meant. He pulled my mother’s legs apart and then came the grunting, panting, and singing, and the snarled words between the singing. But this time I was watching a recording, not a vision from my mother. I was hearing his Nuru words outside of my mother’s perspective. I could understand.

“I’ve found you. You’re the one. Sorceress. Sorceress!” He sang a song. “You’ll bear my son. He’ll be magnificent.” Another song. “I’ll raise him up and he will be the greatest thing this land will ever see.” He burst into song. “It is written! I’ve seen it!”

Something made of glass flew out the window of the house across the road. It crashed to the ground. The sound of a sobbing child followed. I was numb to it all; the images of my mother raped by a Nuru sorcerer scorched into my eyes and my thoughts grew dark. I thought of the pained women, children, old men around me, wailing hurting, and sobbing; they had allowed this to happen to my mother. They wouldn’t have helped her.

What would have happened if my mother had been the sorceress her father had asked her to be when Daib attacked her that day? There would have been such a battle. Instead all she had to protect her was her Alusi side.

“Enough,” Luyu finally said, snatching the portable from me.

People were filling the streets. They ran, dragged themselves, walked up and down, to the side of that road, going to places that I didn’t care about. Ghosts of their former selves, their lives changed forever. I stood there, my eyes unfocusing. My father actually prized this disk enough to keep it for twenty years.

“We have to keep going,” Luyu said, dragging me along. But as we walked, tears dropped from her eyes, too. “Wait,” she said, still clutching my arm. She dropped the portable. “Step on it,” she said. “With all you have. Mash it into the ground.”

I stared down at it for a moment and then stamped down with all my might. The sound of its breaking made me feel better. I picked it up and took out the disk. I crushed the disk with my teeth and threw it into the river.

“Let’s go,” I said.

When we arrived at the lake, we took a moment. I’d seen it before, yes, but during my vision I hadn’t had a chance to stop and really take it in. Somewhere in the lake was an island.

Behind us was chaos. The streets were full of women, children, and old men running and stumbling about and wailing “How can this happen!” Fights broke out. Women tore at their clothes. Many dropped to their knees and screamed for Ani to save them. I was sure that somewhere, the few Okeke women left were dragged out and torn apart. Durfa was diseased and I had caused its disease to rise up like a fevered cobra.

We turned our back to all this. So much water. In the bright sunshine it was a light blue, the surface calm. The very air felt damp, and I wondered if this was what fish and other water creatures smelled like. A metallic sweet scent that was music to my sore senses. Back in Jwahir, neither Luyu nor I could ever have imagined this.

Several water vehicles came to a stop at the edge of the water. They cut and interrupted the water’s tranquility. Boats, eight of them. All made of polished yellow wood with square blue insignias painted on the front. We quickly walked down the hill.

“You! Wait!” a woman shouted behind us.

We moved faster.

“That’s the Ewu girl!” the woman said.

“Get the demon!” another woman shouted.

We started running.

The boats were small, barely able to hold four people each. They had motors that let out smoke and a belching noise as they churned the water. Luyu ran for a boat operated by a young Nuru man. I could see why she chose him; he looked a little different from the other boat operators. He looked shocked, whereas all the others were staring at me with horror. When we got to him, the same expression remained on his face. He opened the gate to his boat. We got on.

“You… you’re the…”

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“Move this thing!” Luyu shouted at him.

“That woman killed all the men in Durfa!” a woman running down the hill screamed at the men. “Get her, kill her!”

The man got his boat moving just in time. Smoke dribbled out and it made a sharp noise. He grabbed a lever and the boat shot forward. The other boatmen scrambled to the edges of their boats. They were too far to jump on ours. “Shukwu!” one of them shouted. “What are you doing?”