The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3)(12)

“These are the Zinariya, the aliens who gave us the zinariya technology,” Mwinyi said, awed. “We loved them so much we named our tribe after them. I’ve never seen them before. Not like this! I’ve never thought to ask.”

“And this was the launch port,” I said, as we watched the second one shoot into the sky. When the third one stepped onto the platform, it stopped and turned to us. Mwinyi’s hand clenched my arm tighter and we pressed closer to each other. It leaned down and brought forth an arm whose end became a hand with long, long fingers. In its hand was what might have been the golden center of my edan, except its surface was smooth, not fingerprint ridged. As Mwinyi and I watched, silver slivers rose from the golden ground, flipped up, and fitted around it, clicking and clacking, until it became the object that I had known until recently. It dumped the edan to the ground but instead of falling, it hovered before us. Then the world around us shifted, the sand rose, and the Zinariya people disappeared and we were back where we had been.

“Do you know what that meant?” Mwinyi asked.

I shook my head and was about to say more when a ship zoomed in from the north toward my village. I could see its sleek yellow design. It seemed to land nearby. A Khoush ship in Osemba. Unheard of. I started walking home.





Chapter 3

When Elephants Fight

The Root was still burning.

It was made of stone and concrete; how was it on fire? The bioluminescent plants that covered it had burned to ash. The solar panels on the roof had wilted like plants, some of them were probably puddles of synthetic steel in the debris. Six generations of my family had lived here. The Root was the oldest house in my village, maybe the oldest in the city. This was where we had family and community gatherings because the living room was so spacious that it could fit a hundred people.

Powerful Khoush weapons had been shot into it, exploding and then burning so hot that they could even combust and melt stone. All the floors of the Root had collapsed, burned, and smoldered into a heap. Chunks of concrete and rubble blown out when the house exploded were littered around the heap. What remained looked like a giant mound of still smoking blackened char.

“Mama!” I called, walking toward it as I looked around wildly. I coughed as smoke wafted in my direction. “Papa!” I stopped yards away, everything around me was silent but the sound of embers crackling and softly popping. I looked away. Then, slowly, I turned to face what was left of my home. Because of me, I thought. And I could feel my okuoko begin to writhe on my head and against my back. My Meduse anger sharpened everything. The Khoush had always seen my people as expendable, tools to use, toy with, and discard, useful animals until we weren’t useful anymore. During war, we were just in the way.

“When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” The green words appearing before me seemed so out of place and the words so profound that I was snapped from my dark thoughts. Mwinyi had sent them to me through the zinariya.

My eye went to the base of the house where the embers were glowing.

“It wasn’t just called the Root because it was a family place,” I said. “Most of the house’s foundation was actually built on the old root of an Undying tree.” My mother had told me this when I was about five years old. I’d been sure she was just joking until the next thunderstorm when I realized the house wasn’t groaning because of the wind. “The cellar was—” I couldn’t say it. I knew what we’d find in the cellar.

Mwinyi left me and walked around the house.

As I stood there, I felt it more than I heard it and every part of me reacted. My okuoko writhed, one of them actually slapping the side of my face as if to say, “Look!” The zinariya contracted and expanded my world and I heard distant voices commenting from a distant place, just softly enough for me not to understand. I automatically called the simple equation that always focused my mind, a2 + b2 = c2. Then over and over, I spoke the number that relaxed me, “Five, five, five, five, five, five, five.” I let my mind follow the zipping dancing fives and with each triangular motion, I steadied. When I looked toward the road leading to the Root, I was thankfully calm enough to simply observe what stood there like the spirit it was.

The Night Masquerade. Again. This time during the day! And now I was seeing it from much closer than I had the first time when I stood in my bedroom a few days ago, before my bedroom had been burned to ash. It looked taller, standing about my father’s height. Its raffia body cracked and snapped as it stretched an arm to point its long finger at me, fingers of gnarled sticks. The wooden mask’s mouth was full of yellow teeth.

Only men were supposed to see the Night Masquerade and it was believed its appearance signified the approach of a big change; whether it brought change with its presence or change came afterward was never clear. The Night Masquerade was the personification of revolution. Its presence marked heroism. To also see it during the day was doubly unheard of. My family was dead; what more change could I endure? What was heroic about this happening? If this was a revolution, it was an awful one.

It spoke in Otjihimba and its voice was like the sound of a vibrating Undying tree during a thunderstorm. “Death is always news,” it said, the acrid smoke billowing from its head thickening.

I felt the world swim around me as the weight of my family’s death and my own terror tried to pull me down. Around it, everything seemed to vibrate. My eyes watered, and I kept blinking and blinking away the blurriness. The Night Masquerade slowly stepped toward me and I nearly screamed. Instead, I coughed as I inhaled a great whiff of its smoke.