The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3)(20)

I stepped back from him. Staring. I knew what he’d meant to say, “I shouldn’t even be speaking to you.” I should have been dead to him already, for traditionally a woman who ran away from home was useless. And one who saw the Night Masquerade no longer existed. I was a ghost to him, a spirit.

“They have taught you well,” I said. “Rigid. Have you dug a shelter beside an Undying tree where you will take all your wives and children and hide deep inside until the war passes? Will they use the red clay of the shelter’s wall to make themselves beautiful for you while you pass the time speaking natural mathematics to the Seven? Big man you are now with your beard and apprentice status.”

“You mock your own people now,” he said.

“I’m trying to save it!”

“If you hadn’t left in the first place, this wouldn’t be happening,” he snapped.

“I had to leave,” I said. “Dele, I’m not … I’m not meant to stay here. You know it. You’ve always known it. I was always going out into the desert. You know? Because it’s huge, it’s vast. When I look back, the desert and space, they feel similar.”

“Well, I was always meant to go inward, into what makes us us,” he said. “And that’s just as vast. And doing that will make me the next chief, not get us destroyed.”

His words were like a punch in the chest and suddenly I felt breathless. War was coming as we stood here arguing. Who knew what Mwinyi and Okwu were saying to the elders. And the one who knew me even before I was fully me harbored such a dislike of me that it seemed he would have been happier if I’d died on the Third Fish last year.

“Let me do my part to fix this, Dele,” I begged him. “The elders can convince the Khoush to come. I know how to call the Meduse to come. Then, the Himba Council can use Himba deep culture to get them to make peace with the Meduse.”

Dele seemed to think about this, walking away from me toward the Sacred Well. He leaned against the stone wellhead and looked down into it. He turned to me. “You can call them? How?”

I didn’t look away. I was what I was and I was many things now. I touched my okuoko. “With these.”

“Your hair?”

“They’re not hair anymore.”

“So it’s true,” he said. “You’ve become the wife of a Meduse.”

I frowned. “I’m no one’s wife.”

“You came home and you came with it,” he said. “It stayed at the home of your family. It’s been intimate with you enough that your body has changed.”

“Okwu didn’t do this,” I said. “I don’t even know which of—”

“The Meduse are a hive-minded people,” he said. “What one does, they all do. If you use those to communicate with Okwu, you’re communicating with the others, too.”

“No,” I said. “Only Okwu. And in a distant way, the Meduse chief. You don’t understand.”

“I’ve heard some of the story of what you went through from your father. Okwu would have killed you on that ship, but on Oomza University, it’s your closest companion. You’ve become Okwu’s wife.”

I dismissively waved a hand at him. “Just help me, Dele. Just go talk to them. They’ll hear you.”

“Did you really see the Night Masquerade?”

I nodded.

“Twice?”

I nodded again. “Second time was on the road outside the Root.”

“Earlier today?”

“Yes.”

“During the day?”

“Yes.”

“Unbelievable. Kai!” he exclaimed, striding away from me. Then he stopped and came back.

“What?” I softly asked as he walked up to me. I flinched as he reached forward and took one of my okuoko and lightly pressed it. My hand shot out before I realized I was going to do it and slapped his hand away. “Stop!” I said.

He looked at the otjize on his hand and then at my okuoko, whose transparent blue now showed a bit. He sniffed my otjize and then gazed at me for several moments. He eyed me as he rubbed his short beard with the otjize on his fingers, then he turned and walked away.

I stepped over to the wellhead and looked down into the water. Down into the darkness that was nothing like the darkness of space. Not as complete. Not as foreign. When I heard shouting and then rumbling loud enough to shake the building, I turned and strode outside. “No, no, no, no!” I muttered. We’d run out of time.

The Khoush sky whales, each the size of two houses, landed in the desert, close enough to whip dust into the air that nearly put out the Sacred Fire. The Khoush knew exactly where they were landing. The Khoush had no respect for my people. Each ship was covered with blue and white solar tiles with giant wind turbines under each wing. They’d always reminded me of beetles with the skin of lizards. And though they moved smoothly through the sky like water beetles in water, they landed in such a way that everyone in the area would know it.

As two of the elders scrambled to stand before the fire and hold open their garments to protect it, Dele, Chief Kapika, and Titi gathered together to meet whoever alighted from the sky whales. I ran to Okwu and Mwinyi.

Okwu, hide! I shouted through my okuoko. It turned to me. You should—

Okwu flew at me just as I heard a sharp zip! Then Okwu’s okuoko and then its dome was covering me. I felt every part of my body tense up. There was weight but not much, but also a sense of being enveloped and gently held, hugged. Protected. Okwu’s flesh smelled like pepper seed, spicy and hot. I could see everything right through it, tinted a blue. Chief Kapika and Dele were running at the sky whales, waving their hands, shouting, putting themselves in the space between Okwu, Mwinyi, and me and the sky whales. Then Okwu was releasing its gas all around us and the shocked look of Mwinyi, the laboring smoky fire, and a few of the elders who’d turned our way disappeared. I instinctively held my breath.