The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3)(37)

Dele was not a harmonizer, but he had come of age with me and he had to have learned something about himself after what happened with the Himba Council. He’d just started his apprenticeship to be the next Himba chief and, rigid and traditional as he was, he’d already broken out of the mold when he believed the council had made a mistake. His love and protectiveness of his people was strong enough to push tradition to grow. Dele was ready for what was coming and I felt good about what he’d do.

It was then that I remembered something else and my heart began to pound like crazy because it had already been three days. There was no going back home with ease. I reached into the pocket of my right hip where I had kept it. I wasn’t wearing the same dress, but maybe … my shoulders slumped. The edan pieces and its inner golden ball weren’t there. It was lost.

“New Fish,” I said. “Okay, I am ready to hear your explanation.” I reached into my left front pocket as I sat down. I felt the edge of something sharp. I grinned as I shoved my hand further in and grasped the golden ball. “Thank the Seven,” I whispered. “And thank my family.”

“I am young and there wasn’t much time,” New Fish said to me.

Mwinyi was sitting on the floor, with his chest pressed to it, his arms out as he pressed his palms to the floor. “It’s how I hear her clearest,” he said when I looked at him questioningly.

I nodded at him and looked at Okwu, who just said, “Tell me when she has finished.”

“I don’t know much,” New Fish continued. “Most Miri 12s never do this. We don’t become more. We are ships because we like to travel, that’s what mother said. Until she harbored you. Then she started thinking. Even before Mwinyi called out to her. So she told me about ‘deep Miri’ and how I had to work it. We have breathing chambers.

“My mother said that before I was born, my chambers were seeded from her inner plants. Those plants not only produce the gases for us to breathe when we leave planets with breathable atmospheres, but they also carry bacteria, good viruses, and other microorganisms, and these microbes go on to populate every part of my body. But they populate the breathing chamber most passionately when a Miri 12 is new born like me.

“When your body was placed in my chamber, my microbes went to work. You are probably more microbes than human now.”

I frowned. “What does that mean? I look and feel like myself. I remember who I am. I was dead, right?”

“That is the ‘deep Miri’ my mother said would happen. I don’t understand it, myself. But they blended with your genes and repaired you, regrew your arm and legs, then pulled you back. There is one thing, though.” She stopped talking for a moment and I was relieved. I needed to think.

I was dead. This fact echoed through my brain, ricocheting off the walls and slamming back again and again. I was dead, I was dead, I was dead. I remembered joining the Seven. Was I even me now? I was physically more Miri 12 than human. I touched the okuoko on my head and my temples throbbed. I raised my hands and typed and pushed the message to Mwinyi with more ease than I’d experienced while on Earth. “Am I still Enyi Zinariya?” I asked. My world stayed steady and there were no voices. I didn’t look toward the window to see if there was a tunnel in space or a strange planet bouncing beside Saturn.

“You will always be Enyi Zinariya,” he responded, his green words appearing before me in crisp letters. I touched them and they faded away like incense smoke.

“What is Enyi Zinariya?” New Fish’s words floated at me in bright pink and I gasped.

Mwinyi gasped too.

“Did she send it to you, too?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I’ve absorbed some of you, too, Binti,” she said. And again, the room lit up with the orange-pink color.

“The Enyi Zinariya are my tribe, our tribe,” Mwinyi said. “We got our name from the Zinariya people who visited and changed us long ago.” He cut his eyes at me and added, “You might know us as ‘the Desert People.’”

“Oh,” New Fish said. “Yes, my mother liked to talk about Binti’s dark skin, dense hair, and old African face. She said that may be what gave Binti her fight, desert bloods. We weren’t even sure if you were really Himba.”

“I am Himba,” I snapped.

The room became orange-pink again, and this time stayed that way. Mwinyi rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, yes, Binti, you are Himba. No one’s taking that from you.”

I frowned even more deeply and turned my back to him, for the moment angry and frustrated with too many things to focus on a response.

“Can I ask you something, New Fish?” Mwinyi said.

“Ask,” New Fish said.

“If you were only born a few days ago, how come you can communicate so well?”

The ship’s room flashed a soft orange-pink so pleasant that I instantly felt less annoyed. It was the same color as the ntu ntu bugs on Oomza Uni. “I have been talking to my mother for five Earth years and my mother is old, so very smart. A Miri 12 is ‘pregnant’ when she is near her time to give birth. And birth is not the beginning for us; it’s just a change.”

Mwinyi nodded, looking amazed. “So you have been inside your mother for five years and you two talk?”

“I’ve been all over the galaxy with my mother, who was born on Earth. But mostly to Earth and Oomza, since my mother has been doing that route since I spawned. This is why I can speak Khoush.”