Okwu floated up to me and said, “Remove your current.”
“No,” I said.
“We are here with you,” it said.
“We have no water, though,” Haifa said, walking a few yards away. “At least I don’t. These two will be fine out here, but you and I are gonna die.” I brought out my capture station and tossed it to her. “Oh!” Haifa said. “Well, at least I know you’re not completely suicidal.”
I kept walking.
I stopped walking when I came to a dead and dried bush.
We’d been walking for three hours and I stopped the moment I no longer felt like screaming. I let my current dissipate and then I sat down right there in the sand. “May the Seven keep me sane,” I whispered. And in that moment, they did. Haifa sat on the other side of the dried bush, facing me. The Bear, lowering herself beside her. Okwu hovered nearby me.
I threw my satchel to the side, glad to be rid of the weight. Despite the fact that Haifa had eaten most of my mini apples and was now carrying my capture station, my satchel seemed to have grown heavier by the minute as I’d walked. I looked at my arms, the desert air had dried the otjize on my skin and some of it was flaking off. I had been so focused on go go going that I hadn’t noticed.
I brought out the small washcloth I always carried and my jar of otjize.
“Are you alright now?” Okwu asked, hovering close behind me.
I slowly used the washcloth to rub off the dried otjize from my arms and then I’d get to my face. Back home, I’d never have done this in front of my parents, let alone my friends. “I’ve dragged you all out here,” I muttered. “Sorry.” I touched my okuoko and more otjize flaked off. I could see the blue of them beneath it in the bright moonlight. I frowned.
“A nice walk usually makes me feel better,” Haifa said. Then she laughed loudly and said, “Seriously, though, I hope we don’t die out here.” She laughed again.
“That would not be a respectable death,” Okwu said.
I flaked more otjize off my okuoko. My left eye twitched and I grabbed one of my okuoko. It hurt. “Okwu,” I said. “Why’d you do this to me?” I turned to it. I waited, breathing heavily. In the light of the moon, the smoothness of its blue dome perfectly reflected the sand.
“Our chief demanded it,” Okwu said.
“But it’s my body,” I screamed at it. “I went into the Meduse ship for peace. Your people, you all just… why couldn’t you have just asked?! Let… let me choose?!”
“Not everything can be a choice.”
Five five five five five five. I calmed. I could see it even in the ripples of the sand. Back home, I’d been born able to tree and I’d been born with the skill to call up current, to harmonize. When I honed that skill, it bloomed with ease and joy because I was moving in the direction of the Seven. And so my family, my people decided my fate. Or so they thought.
I got up, my legs shaking. I stared at the dried bush. I broke the number sixty-four in half, broke it again, then again, then again as I called up a current. I held up my left hand, letting the current circulate in my palm like a tiny burning planet. Then I whipped my hand toward the dried bush and let it shoot right into its center. Crack!
“Binti!” Haifa exclaimed, jumping back as the bush burst into flame, lighting the desert around us. Okwu moved away, too. Not far behind Okwu, I saw something skitter away.
“Back home, the Himba view the okuruwo as the gateway to the Seven,” I said, as the fire grew. The warmth it gave off was nice in the cooling desert air. “Okuruwo means ‘sacred fire’ in my language. The council elders keep it burning so that we are always connected to the Seven. Heat, fire, smoke, it all leads to the Seven.” I stepped a few feet to my right so that I was in the path of the smoke as the breeze blew. I let the smoke wash over me. “Centuries ago, Himba women would take smoke baths because they believed it cleaned them more deeply than water,” I said. Yet it’s unbreathable, like Okwu’s gas, I thought.
I brought out my edan and held it in my bandaged hand. I glared at it, the smoke obscuring me from the others for the moment as the desert night breeze blew. I touched the many points of its stellated cube form. It had saved my life and built a bridge of communication between myself and a prideful murderous tribe and I still didn’t know what it was. If I hadn’t found it in the desert back when I was eight years old, would I still be home?
A tiny bit of blood had seeped through my bandage, a tiny red flower. Like the red flower on Heru’s chest. Instead of casting the thing into the fire, I opened my mouth and inhaled the fire’s smoke. My chest felt as if I’d lit it afire and I coughed violently.
“Eeeeeeeeee!!”
I jumped, still coughing, unconsciously putting my edan in my pocket. Okwu, who’d been beside me, suddenly was not. I whirled around. Something near the fire was exploding! Haifa was jumping in the flames and tackling it.
The Bear had caught fire! I ran to Haifa who was rolling the Bear this way and that, trying to put out the Bear’s hair. “Throw sand! Throw sand!” I shouted. Okwu started whirling around like a top. I’d never seen it do that. Its whirling sprayed the Bear with copious amounts of sand. I scuttled about throwing sand, too. And all through, the Bear continued shrieking, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
When the fire was out, the Bear was left with a large patch of her hair burned away, revealing a bald spot of black flesh just above one of her thick legs. I saw that the Bear actually had three thick stumpy brown legs, which explained how she moved so agilely.
I lay on the sand beside the Bear as she sighed softly. Haifa lay where the Bear’s chest would have been had she had a chest. Okwu hovered beside us. “Fire can be an evil spirit,” it said.
“Why’d you have to get so close?” Haifa breathed, looking angrily at the Bear.
“Fire’s the gateway to the Seven,” I said, staring at the sky.
“It beautiful,” the Bear said.
“You should privilege life before beauty,” Okwu said.
I rolled my eyes.
The Bear was okay. It turned out that within an hour, her hair began to grow back over the bald spot and the burned flesh, though still tender, was already healing. Her kind of People were hearty. I realized that her foolish behavior wasn’t as perilous as it looked, just painful and a bit embarrassing. Even more fascinating, in a pouch near her chest, the Bear carried a sheer cloth-like thing that she could stretch into a large tent. The Bear was of a nomadic people who could sleep anywhere in comfort. With the items in my satchel and dragging my friends along, I’d come far more prepared for a night in one of Oomza Uni’s deserts than I could have ever imagined.
It took the Bear minutes to set up what I could only call… a flesh tent. It wasn’t part of her flesh, but it was made of her flesh, at least according to Haifa. The Bear placed the small square on the ground. It might have been a light purple, but in the firelight this was difficult to tell. The Bear stepped on the square and began to tap at different spots on it with her several toes. With each tap, a part of it unfolded and unfurled like the wings of a butterfly, until eventually the Bear stepped back and it was as if the thing had a life of its own… and really did become a delicate creature not so unlike a butterfly.
“What is this?” I asked, laughing, as I stepped up to it. The size of my dorm room, it was oval shaped with a sheer texture like a tinted bubble. I poked at it. “It feels like silk. Do you spin silk? That’s beautiful!”