Sankofa glanced around the place and then sat in one of the armchairs and looked hard at him.
“No one is here,” he said, his eyes still closed, rubbing his hands down his face. “I sent my girl away two hours ago, told the houseboy not to come in today.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew The Adopted Daughter of Death was coming to collect her debt. Why not just let me die of bad bad malaria, eh? Why come here with your nonsense trouble? Following and following slow slow, just leave a man to rest.”
“You have something of mine,” she said.
“So you make me sick to slow me down?”
“I don’t make people sick.”
“No, you just kill them.”
“I only take life when people ask me to, when people are sick and in too much pain to live. The word is euthanasia… or when people threaten my life.”
“Death’s daughter, so merciful. Is that normal to you, though? Were you always like this? Poisoning people with some sort of body radiation that comes from your ovaries or whatever… it has to be a female thing, this type of witchcraft thing. Nothing else is believable.” He seemed to be growing more and more delirious as he spoke. “It’s evil, satanic, rain fire upon you in Jesus’ name!”
“Why did you have to steal it?!” she shouted.
“Why not?” he said with a laugh. “Parliament Member Kusi was a fraud. He had me stealing it from you to give to LifeGen, that fucking big American corporation that’s probably going to eventually destroy the world. Who knows what this seed thing is or does… the world should thank me.”
Sankofa had heard of LifeGen in passing. In some of the hospitals where she’d taken lives. In the cancer wards. LifeGen made a lot of the drugs patients took. The LifeGen symbol was a hand grasping lightning. But clearly, their drugs didn’t work very well. And clearly, pharmaceuticals weren’t their only focus. “Where is it?” she asked.
“Not here!” he screamed. The action seemed to drain the rest of his energy. Sankofa groaned and let her head fall into her hands. She felt it now. She knew. Why hadn’t she known before? It wasn’t here. It was close but it wasn’t here. “I’ve wanted to get rid of it since the day I stole it. What did I need with some artifact when I had bank cards full of millions in stolen money? You know I got half of that money out of those accounts before he was able to shut down the account within the hour. That’s why I was on the run.” He cocked his head and twisted onto his back. “But that damn seed thing… it had a pull. Couldn’t sell it, throw it away, couldn’t even leave it behind. Damned thing.”
“Then why’d you just get rid of it?”
“I didn’t! I lost it after I got sick and came here. It’s been days.” He suddenly sat up and pointed at her. “Now you show up here, instead of leaving me alone and following it. Evil evil goddamn thing.”
Sankofa stood up. He pointed a gun at her. It must have been in the couch. He’d truly been waiting for her. “I was just leaving,” she said.
“No. I’ll never rest until I know you are dead,” he said. “Five years of looking over my shoulder for a devil child. No more. I will get over this damn malaria, but I’m not going to go back to fearing you.” He blinked, his hand shaking.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. But the man with one eye was stupid. Tired, sick and stupid. He stood up, still pointing the gun at her as he swayed.
“FIVE YEARS!” he screamed. “Fear, nightmares, anxiety! My woman left me, I have no friends, I couldn’t come home! I wish I’d never set foot in your dirt patch of a village, never laid eyes on you and your family! Why couldn’t you just die, too!?”
Sankofa could have talked him into putting the gun down. He was practically delirious with malaria fever and she certainly knew how that was. Nevertheless, she was glowing and he was falling before he even pulled the trigger. She let the full range of her light fill the room. Anything that was alive would be dead, except Movenpick who stood outside, waiting.
She hadn’t realized the depth of her fury until he had answered the door. Her heartrate had not increased, she had not begun to sweat or even think violent thoughts. But the moment she stepped into the house, she knew one thing for sure: She was going to take this man’s life. This man had looked up at her in that tree, scoffed at her and gone inside and taken what was hers, leading to the death of everything for her and this life of wandering and wandering, her parents dead. Her brother dead. Her entire town dead. She unleashed it and he burned. Skin, fat, muscle, blood, bile, lymph, finally bone. Nothing but a rib was left when she pulled her light back in.
As the mysterious wind blew his ashes around the living room, the rib tumbled to her feet like an offering. She stared at it. Then she sat on his couch. The rib was clean of meat, a dull yellow, old already. Never had she killed a man out of rage. She got up. She sat down. She stared at the rib. She got up. She left.
Sankofa sniveled, walking past the man’s two dead vehicles, her chin pressed to her chest. Movenpick joined her, trotting at her heels, knowing to stay out of her line of vision but in her line of thought. An invisible comfort as always. She was glad. As she walked up the paved road, she shut her eyes and searched, feeling and seeing the green light beneath her eyelids. There. Her seed in the box wasn’t far. It was so close that it seemed to toy with her to come, come, COME. It might have been in one of this town’s local markets. Maybe being sold as some juju object or piece of junk. With the one-eyed man who’d kept it for years dead, who would know or care what it was but her?
However, Sankofa decided not to follow the internal radar that had been guiding her for years. She walked in the exact opposite direction. And that direction led her to a road and she walked down that road. She walked for days.
“Let it rot in hell,” she muttered to herself over those days like a mantra. “Evil thing will not take me with it.”
CHAPTER 7
ROBOTOWN
Sankofa’s leather sandals slapped her heels softly as she walked. Her small swift steps with small swift feet led her to RoboTown.
It was a tiny town, but to Sankofa’s eyes it was huge and monstrous like she imagined the Nigerian city of Lagos. She had been walking the Northern region, going from village to village, town to town, spending a few months here, a few weeks there. By this time, she had started specifically asking for and wearing her mother’s style of clothes, elaborate outfits made of beautiful stiff wax cloth. Seamstresses often made them specifically for her.
They’d put the clothes aside and keep them until news came that Sankofa was coming through. These seamstresses were always able to locate where to deliver the clothes and, for this reason, they were the heroes of their villages and towns. Sankofa arrived at the crossroads of the northern entrance to RoboTown. She turned around to see if Movenpick were still trailing her, but he was gone. He always seemed to instinctively know when to make himself scarce.
She paused on the side of the mildly busy road and stared at it for several moments, her mind trying to place what she was observing. It was night and the lights built around the giant silver robot illuminated it like an alien. A real and functioning robot, not just a decoration. As people walked and drove up and down the street, the robot moved its head this way and that, monitoring people. And it spoke instructions in Twi using a firm amplified mildly female voice.