After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  Abir stepped back as Balewa expanded the field, which dazzled a hazy electric blue. The field disappeared when you looked at it directly, but would tug at your vision, like a distant star, if you looked slightly away from it. On the inside she was surrounded by translucent bands of orange color that leapt and swirled inside. Each stone seemed to play with a different color of light. She repeated the sequence of notes until she no longer felt her lips moving, the sounds coming from within her throat. And in the melody she began to hear gaps, places where more notes could be layered on top. She tried clucking out another note with her tongue, continuing the humming all the while, and the field changed from the shape of a sphere to taking on a more organic form. She added yet another note, and the field seemed to draw in closer to her body. But she lost her focus and the field dissipated again.

  “That was great!” Abir said. “You found something new.”

  “I couldn’t sustain it. I ran out of breath.”

  “That’s why we practice. It looked like you, when you made those other sounds.”

  “Like me?”

  “Like a scary jiini! I didn’t know you were so frightening.”

  Balewa chuckled, despite herself. She was thin and short, by the standards of her clan, and no one had ever called her frightening. Abir was always good-natured. They were friends now, after Abir had given her a small bracelet for her wrist, woven from palm fiber, as a token of her friendship, an act of kindness that none of the other women had ever offered.

  Abir brought her a calabash full of cold millet porridge. This time Balewa slurped it down without protest.

  She had only reluctantly tried the Songstones at first, because she had never felt like singing after the rape—for that’s what it was, even if the other women wouldn’t call it that, or mention it at all—feeling that no sound was worth uttering again, not when the child of her rapist could be growing inside her. She remembered the crushing weight of the man, the disgusting stench of his breath, and the helplessness as he pinned her arms behind her, the excruciating blows to her head, chest, and eyes. How he had choked her until she passed out and she awoke bleeding, as if she had been pierced by a knife and not his sex. He hadn’t uttered a word to her or looked her in the eyes, and in failing to do so he’d robbed her of whatever modicum of dignity she had left. His indifference made her feel like an animal, or, worse, like nothing at all, a thing to be spat upon, a bug to be squashed.

  Abir could awaken the Songstones with her lilting, resonant voice, and she’d already shown that the stones responded to dissonance and half steps in the octave nearly as well as tonal purity. Balewa’s stone was ovoid in shape and had a ring etched around the middle, while Abir’s stone had sharp, crystalline structures that jutted out in three places.

  “I don’t feel well.” Balewa moved to the corner, where she vomited up the porridge. She tried mopping up the mess as best she could.

  “The nausea should be over soon,” Abir said hopefully.

  “Only when I kill it.”

  “We don’t have the right medicines for that. There aren’t any badaadi trees around here.”

  “I won’t bear this child! Let me go to a doctor in the town. I won’t tell anyone anything.”

  “We can’t let you go. You were seen at the explosion. If they find you, they’ll lock you away in jail.”

  “Please, we’ve saved enough money for a doctor. You have to let me go.”

  “The others don’t trust you anymore, Balewa. Not after you disobeyed our agreement. We were all supposed to return back here, and you ignored them. You could have been killed in the explosion.”

  “I wish I had been.”

  “Don’t say that.” Abir frowned, which caused the scars to bunch up on her cheeks, re-forming the patterns. It made her look angrier than she really was. “Besides,” she added, “it could be your husband’s child. You might be killing his only offspring.”

  “It’s not his child.”

  “How can you be so sure? Didn’t you sleep with him?”

  “It’s a bastard.”

  “If it dies, there won’t be any children left from our lineage at all.”

  “I’m telling you, Abir, it’s not his child.”

  Balewa had contemplated taking matters into her own hands by using a Songstone to kill the fetus, but she didn’t know the limits of the stones. The other day she’d seen Abir crush a calabash into fine powder after humming to herself.

  Every time they experimented with the Songstones they learned something new, but the secrets were only slowly revealing themselves. There was no instruction manual, no shepherd to lead them to a wellspring of knowledge. They did not know who had made the stones, or why, only that they were extraordinarily precious and special. Instead, they would look at the impenetrable inscriptions and scour their own memories for melodies and harmonies long since forgotten, hoping that a new song could reveal a new power.

  Music had opened this place to them, enormous caverns hewn into the rock that were adorned with exquisite markings, and several snaking tunnels that ran into the darkness. One chamber had vaulted ceilings buttressed by carved ribs of stone, which had once been painted with an ancient red dye. The dye on the stone had flecked off onto the dirt floor, melding with the dark earth, so that the caverns felt viscous, sprinkled with long-dried blood. On one wall, you could see images of cattle, crocodiles, antelopes, snakes, lions, and tall, tufted birds, as if all the creatures of the Sahel had once visited the walls. Some of the beasts—like the elephants—Balewa had heard about only in stories and had never seen in person during their migrations. Interspersed with the images of the animals were glyphs that looped in curlicues.

  They had all been afraid to enter the biggest chamber, since it was filled not with images of animals, but with terrifying humanoid forms carved from the rock that towered above them. The heads all had curving beaks that ran from their faces down around their breasts, over their swollen bellies, before erupting again outward, swirling around the legs and plunging between their stone thighs. The other women found them revolting, but Balewa was drawn to these carvings. She felt that the people who had carved the grotesque figures had also known suffering. In the middle of the chamber was a circle of large, rough stones that had once served as a fire pit. The women gathered bramble and tried to use the pit, but once they lit a fire, the smoke soon filled the chamber. If there had once been ventilation, it had since been blocked by the rubble or the passage of time. They snuffed the fire out. On cool, frigid mornings they would burn a few hot coals and warm a pot of tea and drink together before leaving for the marketplace.

  The other women weren’t as interested in the Songstones as Balewa and Abir. When the women returned from the market, Durel announced that she wanted to leave the stones behind and to quit the chambers entirely.

  “These rooms must be from the jiini,” Durel warned, sipping tea. “We shouldn’t touch anything here. Evil spirits will make us attached to such things.”

  The taboos in their clan mostly focused on relations between men and women and between parents and their children—namely, not to develop too much attachment in the face of desert hardship or it would rob you of your fortitude, hurting the entire clan. Attachment led to shame, which had to be shunned at all costs. It was Durel’s constant refrain.

  “Our own people may have created this place,” Balewa argued. “Then it would be all right for us to use the stones.”

  “We have no record of such a place or thing.”

  “They’re very old,” Abir chimed in. “Maybe they were forgotten.”

  “Our written language is Arabic, not these symbols.”

  “Then someone left them for us as a gift.”

  Durel was unconvinced. “A gift from whom? Why would anyone know about us? We’re far away from our home, and no one knew we would be here. I think we should leave them be and leave this strange place too.”

  “We could ask our Fulani neighbors for help,” Abir suggested. />
  “They aren’t Wodaabe. We know what happened after the drought. Our people left for the cities and never returned to our way of life again. Only the Wodaabe look after the Wodaabe.”

  The drought was always on their minds. Even though most of the women hadn’t experienced it themselves, because it had come before their lifetimes, they’d learned about the drought in stories and how it had scarred their clan. People had vivid memories of watching their cattle die and spoke wistfully of the animals’ passing as if their own children had perished. Some Wodaabe had fled for the cities and never returned again, the men stuck in debt bondage to traders, and the women enslaved as sex workers. Balewa’s clan had somehow survived with just five head of cattle, and when the rains returned they were able to rejuvenate their herds. That was before the Jarumi found them.

  “We need to return home,” Durel insisted, “and pick up our lives again. Then we can find our children.”

  She was too old to have a child of her own—she was a grandmother now—but the others understood her point and let her thoughts hang in the air. It had been the cruelest blow after they had been assaulted, watching the militants hoist their children, screaming and kicking, into the backs of their trucks and drive off.

  “This is not the same as the drought,” Balewa argued. “The drought came from God. Those were men who attacked us.”

  “But they also claimed to come from God. They stole all our cattle, killed our husbands, and kidnapped our children. After the drought, our people survived. This is like the drought whether it is caused by men or by God. We have to do what we can to get our children back.”

  “During the drought,” Balewa insisted, “our people went to our secret watering holes to keep our cattle alive.”

  The other women bristled at seeing Balewa, who was the youngest, argue with Durel, who was the eldest. Even if they agreed with her, they were afraid to intervene.

  “That is what I’m saying. We shouldn’t stay here. We should go to our meeting places.”

  “The routes are all blocked. And our watering holes are known by the one who betrayed us.”

  They argued some more about whether the Jarumi would know about all the watering holes.

  “We should stay here and grow stronger,” Balewa insisted. “This can be our watering hole. Once we practice enough with the stones, we can go get our children back.”

  Durel saw her chance to put Balewa in her place. “How dare you speak of children! You never had a child. Not like us. Besides, you’re trying to get rid of the one child that is left to us.”

  Balewa sank before the accusation, too stunned to reply.

  “You can’t blame her for being raped,” Abir objected. The word hung in the air shamefully.

  “I can blame her for not wanting to keep our clan alive! She should have had a child before the Jarumi came.”

  “If she’d had a child,” Abir said, “then the child would have been stolen too. All of our children are gone.”

  The others grew animated, turning on Balewa cruelly.

  “Yes! She should keep the clan alive!”

  “She can’t kill the child!”

  “It’s selfish! She doesn’t understand our pain.”

  “She still wears ankle bracelets like a little girl!”

  Balewa sank to her knees, feeling the nausea erupt again in her belly.

  Why? she thought. Why are they doing this to me?

  There had always been jealousies among Wodaabe women, but never so sustained or bitter as this. And they were usually resolved at the Geerewol festival, when husbands and wives could pick out new lovers or reaffirm their love for their marriage.

  She heard Abir come feebly to her defense as the other women used the opportunity to pounce on her, to pile on her misdeeds and her insolence for having tried to stop the suicide bomber. What’s worse, she felt that all of their accusations were true. It would be wrong to kill the child in their eyes. And perhaps they were right, that Balewa didn’t want to return to the migration routes, since her husband was now dead and she had no child to rescue. She would have to find a new husband who was generous enough to raise a bastard child whom he hadn’t fathered himself.

  She found herself reaching for her Songstone as the women continued to berate her, placing it in her palm. She began humming notes softly to herself, allowing them to hold in her throat, so that she was inhaling and exhaling in equilibrium.

  “Listen to her shrill voice!” Durel huffed. “Like a whiny desert fox.”

  Breathe. The secret was in the breathing. She could hear the women murmuring around her and Abir’s voice: “Be careful, Balewa!” The stone grew warm, hot even, as the field expanded around her. Breathe.

  She began a second melody and the field drew close. She snapped her fingers with her free hand, and the field moved beyond her. She shifted the field to surround the burning coals and the kettle. She felt that the room itself was listening somehow, echoing and amplifying her voice, as the field merged with the wall, shooting out sparks and strengthening in intensity.

  “Where did the kettle go?”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “Bring it back!”

  She sang more loudly as the field compressed inward. She wanted to draw the sounds toward the center. Breathe. But she couldn’t tolerate the pain any longer.

  She screamed out, and the stone dropped from her palm into the dirt. It had burned her hand. She waved aside Abir’s help and plunged her hand into the stone fountain.

  When she turned back, the others were looking at her in fear.

  “That’s what we can do to them!” she declared, pointing to the coals. The teakettle had been compressed into a glob of silver metal. “That is how we’ll get your children back. Now, do you still want to leave this place?”

  CHAPTER 12

  At the break of dawn, Bracket would have normally been grabbing his bike from its hook by now and lacing up his clipless shoes to go for a vigorous ride around the spaceport. He would have watched an episode of Mrs. N Hires the Help and enjoyed a full night of sleep. But this early morning he was still wide-awake, even after Op-Sec had repaired his mangled front door and left him alone with Seeta. Each ray of sunlight pierced into his eyes, as if scouring the back of his skull.

  He swallowed an aspirin.

  Seeta was busy locking and unlocking the door, reassuring herself that they would be safe if the creature returned again.

  “They said only a petty thief would have waited until we were inside,” she said, speaking quietly, “because that meant he couldn’t bypass the security codes.”

  “That thing was not petty,” Bracket said.

  “No, it wasn’t. But it did seem to be looking around in here.”

  The security guards were alarmed, but they were also convinced the attack had been an attempted robbery, even after Bracket had showed them the door that had been utterly destroyed. And they kept implying, indirectly, that it had been Bracket’s fault for becoming a target of robbery in the first place because he hadn’t properly locked his door. They had left promising to review the security tapes and to inform the two scientists if they found anything. That was an hour ago.

  Bracket righted a chair and assessed the damage throughout the rest of the trailer. His drawers and files had been ripped open. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “The skin—it was electric. Like a battery.”

  Seeta leaned against the wall, thinking now. “Is there something you have here that’s secret, Kwesi? Something special?”

  “I’ve got the same security clearance as all the project directors. Most of that is on the Loom.”

  “They did seem convinced of a break-in. Maybe they were right — that thing reminded me of what I recorded.”

  “At the pool?”

  “The sounds weren’t exactly the same. But there was…a feeling, mostly. Has anything else happened here lately? Anything that could have attracted it?” She began riffling through his belongings. �
�What’s this?” She was holding the gold handkerchief that Walid had given him earlier.

  “Gift from a guy on my crew. Walid.”

  “Why didn’t you open it?”

  “I get them all the time. I try not to show favoritism. Anyway, it’s usually tea, which I don’t drink.”

  “Mind if I look?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She untied the knot of the handkerchief. “There’s something wrapped in paper. It’s heavy.” She pulled out the crumpled form. “Look at that.”

  It was a terra-cotta vessel shaped like a teardrop, only this one was mostly intact.

  “Any ideas?” Seeta said.

  “That’s like the artifact we found before! The one Abdul Haruna ran off with. But I didn’t get a good look at it last time.”

  She handed it to him, and he saw that it still had dirt caked on the outside, as if it had recently been excavated. Walid must not have told anyone, or someone on his crew would have made a fuss about it.

  Like the first artifact, the little piece of crockery was extremely heavy for its weight, almost unnaturally so. It was ringed with some sort of script. On the underside, through a crack, he could see a dark black stone.

  “There was something inside the last one we found too.”

  “What?”

  “A rock.”

  Seeta’s index finger traced the images: “The writing might be a script or it could merely be ornamental. And these drawings, they seem to represent something. This is a scorpion, this one a dog.”

  “Detective Idriss thinks that Abdul Haruna may have been a member of the Jarumi, and that he was going to sell it on the black market. You think that thing was coming after this?”

  “I don’t think it was looking for the palm wine.”

  Bracket had a dim memory of looking at another stone like the one he could see inside the artifact. Where? At college? On the job somewhere? The heft of it was strange, the stone unnaturally dense. He tried to get a better look through the crack.