Noor(36)

Three minutes, the drum beat its rhythm.

Two minutes, the sound bloomed and I could no longer hear the howl of the window outside.

One minute, oh the pressure, and what was I seeing when I closed my eyes? I could not open my eyes.

“It’s gone,” I heard DNA say.

“I know,” I whispered. My ears were blocked with pressure, the pounding in my head was so loud that I wasn’t sure if DNA could hear me. But I was seeing things behind my eyes. There was chaos outside and chaos inside my head. Yes, like when I’d arrived at DNA’s village. The sensation was so overwhelming that I decided to just fall into it. Let it take me, I thought. Anything was better than this. If I die, I finally die.

One moment, I was there with DNA, sensing his worry and helplessness, the next, I was swept into blackness. I was falling, though I had no body. I was warm, as if I were falling into something alive. But I had no body. I was not my body. I was . . .

And there were the eyes. Red. So much like the inside of a pomegranate. I don’t know when it happened. I began the process long ago. Maybe it started the day I murdered those men. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I knew everything in that moment. And I knew it before them all. I laughed. I had no body but I laughed.

When I opened my eyes, I tasted blood. And blood was running down my nose. I felt it dribbling from my ears. My head was on DNA’s lap and he was using his shirt to dab at my wet ears as he wept and said my name over and over, “AO, AO, AO, AO.” I lay there for a bit listening to him, my eyes itchy with sweat, my head still pounding, my body aching. His voice was bringing me back. “AO, AO, AO, AO.”

We’d stopped because the GPS no longer had a destination. The wind shook the truck and the steer in the back whined with fear, crowding to the front, trying to be as close to DNA as possible.

“I’m okay,” I croaked. I coughed, clearing my throat. “I’m okay.”

“Are you?”

“I know where the Hour Glass is,” I whispered. “Half mile . . .” I paused, reaching out. They answered. “North. There is an entrance. The anti-aejej is like an enormous infinity-shaped dome. It goes pretty high. People have space.” I sat up and my head felt like gravity was trying to pull it to the truck’s floor. When I shook it, the pounding deepened, so I stopped.

“How do . . . ?” DNA asked.

“I can see it,” I said. Can shut it all down, if I want to? I wondered. They will listen to me. I didn’t want to talk about it with DNA or anyone. I wanted to just sit in silence and consider the question of “What am I what am I what am I?” Because WHAT WAS I? I could see it. The Hour Glass existed because an insanely powerful anti-aejej was pushing the storm back so that the hidden desert city of Hour Glass could exist. And on top of that, there was a digital cloaking firewall up that prevented any type of surveillance. Well, unless it was me.

I was seeing, touching, communicating, controlling.

I could CONTROL.

I sniffed and tasted more blood. Was my brain bleeding? What was all this costing me? But I felt so much better. I touched the screen. I didn’t even have to know how to operate it. I told it how to operate and, as I did, I could see that infinite pomegranate of eyes shift to focus more closely on me. A steering wheel template popped up on the touch screen and my seat lowered so that I was eye to eye with it. I put my palms on the screen as the truck began to move again.

“Allah is great,” DNA muttered.

I just shook my head. “I’ll never ever be able to explain,” I said.

We were picking up speed. In the back, GPS mooed loudly as the truck was buffeted by the winds. “I agree,” DNA said. “But it could be worse.”

“There’s going to be an archway,” I said. I’d closed my eyes and I could see it. But only because that archway was threaded with surveillance cameras. “I can see us coming. Hour Glass security can, too.”

The archway was made of heavy red crystal. Digitally, I could touch it, smell it, search its history. This archway was all that was left of a film set for an old Nollywood movie made by a Nigerian billionaire with little creative vision and lots of time. A movie buff, he’d been determined to make a movie that was greater than Star Wars. He’d insisted on writing the script, directing and even acting in it. Then he’d distributed his cinematic creation all over Africa. The film had been so terrible that to this day it was still known throughout the continent as the “Worst African Movie Ever Made.” And this solid rhodochrosite crystal archway that the billionaire had demanded be constructed was all that was left of the film’s elaborate africanfuturist set.

All this I could pull instantly from the Internet right in my mind, as I looked at our truck approaching. “There are people guarding it. It’s the only way in . . . and out because of the anti-aejej. If you try to go out anywhere else, the velocity of the wind repelling from the anti-aejej will tear you apart. It’s actually kind of genius.”

“And dangerous,” he said. “I don’t like places with only one exit.”

“Good point,” I said. I could always shut it off, I thought. I really could. Maybe. And destroy the Hour Glass in the process. And maybe myself, too. “But let’s go in,” I said. “If we have to get out, we’ll get out. We’ll find a way. We just escaped an execution, getting out of the Hour Glass can’t be much harder.”