I tuned them out for the moment because I was climbing into the tree as I looked out the window. The shuttle was slowing down; we’d reached our stop. My thoughts went inward as I decided. To clear my mind, I worked an equation through my mind, Euler’s identity, eiπ + 1 = 0, one of the most gorgeous formulas I knew. An equation that showed the connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics. It was the formula that connected all things because everything is mathematics. I slowly turned to Haifa as she said, “Come on, you two, this is our stop. Okwu, we’ll see what’s what when we get to exams. You know at the end of the year, we get to battle each other with the weapons we built?”
Okwu’s dome thrummed harder and the three of them began to move to the front of the train. I didn’t move. It was Okwu who stopped first. “Binti,” Okwu said. “Come.”
“No,” I said. I retreated higher into the tree. And from there, I felt a clarity sharp as brittle crystal.
Okwu returned to me, as did Haifa and the Bear. The shuttle was stopping now. “Binti,” Okwu said, switching to Meduse. “Get up.”
“No.”
“It’s our stop,” Haifa said. “We have to get off. We’ve all got homework. And you know what the next stop is and that’s not even for another hour.”
“No,” I said, again. But even from the tree, my eyes welled up with tears. I gasped, wiped them away, but I didn’t move.
“Is she alright?” Haifa asked, turning to the Bear. The Bear moved to me, but she still said nothing. The closeness of her hairy body made my right arm feel warm.
“What… what are you doing?” I asked. I stared at her.
When she spoke, her voice was muffled because it came through layers of hair. “Red desert is next stop, Himba girl.”
“I know!” I said. And I said this from so deep in the tree that my voice must have resonated with it. Everyone getting off at the front of the shuttle stopped and turned to us.
“Okwu, move aside, I’ll pick her up,” Haifa screeched. “The shuttle’s going to leave soon!”
Haifa took only one step toward me before she stopped. The current I called up zinged an inch from the Bear’s hairs and both the Bear and Haifa moved back. We were the only ones left on the shuttle now. I held up my edan at Okwu, even if Okwu could withstand my current, my edan was poison to it. “I’m-not-getting-up,” I growled. All that was going through my mind at this point was one word over and over, “Go.” I needed to go. Away from my memories, away from my pain, away from my questions, go go go go go. I’d felt this only once in my life, back on the day I found my edan, when I felt my life was being controlled by everything but me. I’d wanted to dance and instead everyone else decided that I was not allowed.
“I’m going into the desert,” I said, more tears falling from my eyes. Pleading. “I have to go to the desert. I have to. I have to go.”
They stayed with me on the shuttle. My friends.
As it pulled off, I looked out the window and it was like I was leaving the planet. I watched us pass the Math City buildings and then our dorms. And then we were on our way, the only ones left on the shuttle. No one went to the red desert except those who were doing research and certainly not at this hour. And the final stop on this line was a small Oomza sterile swamp lab that was only active in the first morning because of the plants that used the evening time to digest everything in the area by the morning; no one went there at night, not even the shuttle, which stopped and returned an hour’s walk away from the swamp.
“Well, what are we going to do in the desert?” Haifa asked.
“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Just stay on the shuttle until it goes back.”
“We’re not leaving you there,” Okwu and Haifa said at the same time.
“You’re really going to do this?” Haifa asked.
“Yes.”
“You don’t have any water,” Okwu said.
I shrugged. Plus, I did have a capture station and a few mini apples in my satchel.
The shuttle stopped and in several alien languages including Meduse, some that vibrated and lit up the whole cab, it said, “Please exit the Shuttle.” I got off before it got to the three human languages. I walked down the walkway on legs that felt like warm rubber. What am I doing? I thought. But at the same time, it felt so good to do something, to get off the tracks. I paused, flaring my nostrils. One of those pitcher plants that secreted shuttle track oil that smelled like blood was growing on the other side of the tracks. I shuddered, pinching my nose and quickly moving down the red metal walkway. It ended where the sand began. I stopped, looking out at the desert. Behind us, the shuttle zipped away, gone in seconds. The silence it left us in was so complete that it was like wearing noise-cancelling headgear. So much like home.
“This was not how I planned to spend my evening,” Haifa said, walking past me. She broke into a sprint, jumped with her arms stretched in the air and launched into a series of flips.
“This place has no water,” Okwu said, floating past me. “It is a dead place with no goddesses or gods and too many spirits.”
The Bear brushed swiftly past me, seeming to run after Haifa who was still doing flips and laughing. “Come, show me what you can do!” Haifa shouted and the Bear began to spin like a top, flinging sand everywhere. Haifa laughed harder, spreading her arms out and letting the sand the Bear flung up hit her squarely in the face, her eyes and mouth closed.
I turned from them all and started walking into the Oomza Red Desert of Umoya. When I had arrived on Oomza Uni, in that first week when I barely left my room, I’d obsessed over the hologram of the planet Oomza Uni on my astrolabe. I was acclimating myself. When I saw it with my own eyes on that day when Third Fish landed, after all that had happened, I’d wanted to know every detail about the planet.
This desert was not very big, but if you were human you could still die out here if you tried to cross it unprepared. If you didn’t die from the heat, then from the lack of water or the packs of roaming dog-like creatures the size of baby camels called cams, though you had to go in at least fifty miles to get to them.
I removed my sandals and dug my feet into the sand. It was just like home—cool and soft, but beneath the surface, it became warm like the flesh of a great beast. “Oh,” I sighed, closing my eyes. How I missed this. I called up a current and let it wash over my body like a second skin. Then I walked, bits of sand occasionally popping and sparking from my feet. The others followed.
We left the shuttle port behind. I left behind all the stares and gossiping, the People that knew I’d been on a ship where everyone had been killed and I’d been made genetically part of the killers. I left Professor Okpala behind. I left behind the fact that I was further from home that I had ever been. I kept walking.
Behind me, Okwu and Haifa bickered about whether they should grab me and risk getting zapped. The Bear’s hair near the bottom of her body grew full of sand and the sound of her gait got heavier and heavier. Oomza had one large moon and it was lit by the two suns, so the desert had plenty of white purple light. And because all deserts have a certain sameness, no matter the planet, I knew that after walking for what my astrolabe would have measured as a half earth hour, the land was about to change. My astrolabe would have shown this on its map, too, but I didn’t look at that. I didn’t want maps here.