Noor(60)

“Do it,” DNA repeated. He laughed and then coughed. The dome had just shrunken some more and the air was foggy with dust. The anti-aejej began to beep the last sixty seconds away. I could already feel the grains of sand getting through as they pelted my face.

“It will hurt, reaching out to so much,” I said.

“It’s about to hurt a lot more,” he said.

I looked up into the chaos above, knowing the Noor was there, near silent and sleek. I turned to DNA. He took me in his arms, and I rested my head on his chest. “It will hurt.”

“I know.”

“I’m glad I met you.”

“I love you,” he said, pressing his lips to my ear. I thought about what the sorcerer Baba Sola had said, “The world isn’t all about you, AO.” Had he known it would come to this? Probably. Maybe that’s why he’d wanted to see us with his own eyes. As DNA held me, I reached out. I stepped out, remembering my dream from only days ago. The one with the eyes, so many red eyes. The pomegranate of eyes. I looked back and reached to them and I told them. I did not request. I did not inform. I just acted. I shut them down. Not one by one, all at the same time. I could do that. It was like pressing one button, pulling one plug, sending two commands.

SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT.

I squeezed my eyes shut as pain like I’d never felt washed over me, flooding my head first. In that spot where they’d placed the chip, where I wasn’t supposed to feel pain because there were no nerves. Like fire, like ice, like being torn apart. Into DNA’s chest, I screamed and screamed and he held me tighter. I asked for death. I asked for it, then I reached out even further.

Every

Single

Fucking

Noor.

SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. “KEEP GOING!” I shouted. “ALL OF YOU, OFF OFF OFF!” I tasted blood in my mouth, felt it fill my ears. My brother’s drum beat was wild and beautiful. I would be free of all of it soon. Let my bones, metal and carbon, fly. I coughed, as my heart beat strong and steady in my chest despite the blood dribbling down my nose, from my ears, flooding my mouth. I was crying tears of blood. For myself, for what I should have been, for DNA, his cattle, everyone Ultimate Corp had stunted, deformed, exterminated, and displaced. “Today, you know us.”

The Noor we leaned against stopped. The hum was there, then it was not. DNA and I looked at each other as the anti-aejej died, then we hugged tightly, pressing our faces into each other’s chests as the sand whipped into us. Both of us had just wanted to be left alone to be what we were. Now they had all left us alone to die.

Shhhhhhhhhhhh . . .

I was straining so hard, awaiting the suffocation and sting of the sand on my face that it was several moments before I noticed the sound and the rain. Yes, it was raining. Oh my God, it was raining! Raining . . . sand. We raised our heads, looking at each other as sand fell all around us. Fell, not blew. The wind had stopped. Noor running all over northern Nigeria had stopped and now so had the winds of the Red Eye.

I grabbed DNA’s hand and pulled, “Run! Or we’ll be buried.” As we ran, I could see so much.



* * *



—

I could see it, though I could only really analyze it later. In the Hour Glass, everyone who could came out to watch the sand fall, and those who did not would regret it for the rest of their lives. Some were still bloody from the market riot that had been interrupted by the four-minute aejej shut down, but this did not stop them from bearing witness. The people of the Hour Glass had resigned themselves to so much in order to be who they were. They gave up natural sunlight. They gave up a connection to the rest of the world. They gave up time and endured TIME RESET. They gave up their family and friends. They gave up space. They’d been used to the swirling chaos that beat at the anti-aejej dome high above. They were used to the darkness, the distant noise.

But the rain of sand hitting the dome was a different noise all together. A steady sound, one that only had one direction, downward. It collected at the base and people ran to go see.

But before they reached the edges of the Hour Glass, they stopped to look up instead. There was a woman who threw her hands up and cried, “Praise Allah!!”



* * *



—

I saw because I looked and I had eyes everywhere now. So I saw the Red Eye close from above, and I zoomed the satellite image into the storm, and that’s how I saw what no other human being could see. As the sands fell, so did the bones. Finally, those people whose lives had been taken by the Red Eye in the most brutal way—stripped of life, then all flesh—and left to fly and fly, they fell to the ground. All those people could rest. And as the sand fell, all those people were also buried. Finally. Except for a few who tumbled onto and remained on the surface, rib cages, femurs, tibias, humeri, pelvises, skulls, all dust-bleached and wind-blasted a stark white. Scattered all over the Nigerian Sahel Desert. Those bones saw the sun for the first time in a long long time.



* * *



—

DNA and I ran, unable to see anything before us or around us. It was as if the lights were slowly turning on. And then, oh then came the most glorious sight I’d ever seen. We stopped running and stood looking up. A breeze blew, sweeping away the dust and there it was . . . clear blue sky above like the ocean!