Papa! I sent. I sent again and again, but he did not respond. My words wouldn’t even melt away. They wouldn’t go! I shuddered with rage and then grabbed some sand and threw it, screaming, tears flying from my eyes. I stared out into the desert for a long moment. I stared and stared. Sand and sky, sky and sand. I tried to reach Okwu. Again, nothing.
I dropped into meditation, the numbers flew like water, the controls faded but did not disappear, the okuoko on my head writhed. I stood up. “I’m going home,” I told Ariya. She only nodded, her attention on the figure coming up the desert. It was Mwinyi and he was leading a camel. “You’ll go with him,” Ariya said.
“The Enyi Zinariya won’t come with us?” I asked.
She only looked at me. Then she said, “We’d come if there was a fight to fight.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant. Above, the owl circled.
*
When Mwinyi and I climbed onto the camel and got moving, the owl followed us overhead for several miles. Then it turned back. It returned to Ariya, I assumed. Its job was complete. I was Himba, a master harmonizer. Then I was also Meduse, anger vibrating in my okuoko. Now I was also Enyi Zinariya, of the Desert People gifted with alien technology. I was worlds. What was home? Where was home? Was home on fire? I considered these things as Mwinyi and I rode. But not for very long. Mwinyi had brought my satchel and now I reached into it. I worked my fingers into the pouch to touch the metal pieces of my still broken edan. I grasped the grooved golden ball. It was warm.
There was no fight to fight, Ariya had said. We’ll see, I thought, grasping the huge camel’s thick coarse fur. We will see.