am?”
“You’re Sankofa, the one who sleeps at death’s door,” Edgar
said. He eyed her as he slowly took a sliced fried plantain.
Sankofa took a few of the oily slices, too. They were sweet and
tangy. Edgar seemed to relax when he saw that she enjoyed the
same food as him.
“You should get a plate,” Sankofa said. Before Edgar could
look around, the young woman placed a plate before each of
them. The girl took all of two plantain slices and the boy loaded
his plate with plantain and roasted goat meat. Sankofa liked the
boy.
“You don’t look as ugly as they say you look,” he said.
Sankofa laughed. “Really?”
“No,” he said, biting into some goat meat. “Your outfit
reminds me of my mom.”
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“Reminds me of mine, too,” Sankofa said. “That’s why I
wear it.”
They ate for a moment.
“So what’d you get for Christmas?” she asked.
“We haven’t opened presents yet,” he said, laughing. “It’s
Christmas Eve.”
“Oh.” She fixed her eye on the girl. “Ye,” she said.
The girl jumped at the sound of her name.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Sankofa said.
“How do I know that?”
Sankofa frowned, annoyed. “You’re not very good
company.”
Edgar leaned forward. “We only hear about you from our
cousins,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “So is it true? Can you …”
“Can I what?”
He glanced at his sister. She had stopped eating and was
frowning deeply at him.
“I can,” Sankofa said. “You want to see?”
The party adults moaned. “This boy is an idiot,” she heard
one of them hiss. “You don’t tempt the devil!”
“Charli, make him shut up!” someone else whispered. “He’s
going to get us all killed.”
Sankofa glanced at the adults and then looked piercingly at
the kids before her. She smirked. “Turn off the lights.” The boy
jumped up, ran, and shut the lights off. She smiled when she
heard him snatch his arm from his protesting mother and take his
seat across from her.
In the past, it had been difficult to control. And there had
been terrible consequences. But not any longer. Since she’d
turned thirteen, months ago, she could keep herself from killing
by accident, as long as she was not in pain. It was like flexing a
muscle.
Right there in the darkness, she glowed a dim green. Ye
whimpered. Sankofa could see tears freely rolling down the girl’s
cheek. The boy’s eyes were wide and he had an enormous grin
on his face. “Real life ‘remote control’!” he whispered. “Wow!”
She relaxed herself and her glow faded and then winked out.
Someone flipped the lights on.
“What is this town called?” she asked getting up.
“Nsawam,” Edgar said.
“Relax, Ye,” she said. “You won’t see me here again.”
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Decision Points
Ye wiped the tears from her face, then got up and ran out of
the room. Sankofa and Edgar looked at each other.
“So where are you going next?” Edgar asked.
“Accra,” she said. She smiled, glad that he had not run. She
hated when that happened. It always made her feel that ache she
worked so hard to mute.
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know yet. I just have a feeling. But I’ve
been walking on foot for a month.”
“You really can’t ride in cars?”
She shook her head.
“That’s so cool,” he whispered.
“Not really.”
“Are you a child of the d—”
“No,” she snapped. The conversation ended there.
*
She left the house an hour later having eaten her fill, taken
some leftovers, and showered. She’d traded No Orchids for Miss
Blandish for another paper novel Edgar insisted she read titled
Mouse Guard. He said he’d gotten it from the trip his family
recently took to the UK and that it was one of the only paper
books he owned. She hadn’t wanted to take such a precious item
from him but he insisted.
She now wore a brand new blue and white wrapper, matching
top and headband. She walked with her head up and looked into
the night with the confidence of a leopard. She liked to imagine
that she was an Ashanti princess walking the moonlit road
toward her long lost queendom. If she had to guess, her mother
would have been proud of the way she chose to carry herself …
despite it all.
There were footsteps behind her. She whirled around. It was
the gateman from the house she’d just left. The one who had
looked at her as if she were a smear of feces on some child’s
underwear.
“Evil witch!” he cried. “Obayifo!” He was sweating and
weeping. “Kwaku Agya. Do you know this name? Do you
remember my brother’s name? Does the child of the devil
remember the names of those it kills?”
“I know the name,” she said. Sankofa remembered all the
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names.
Surprise and then rage rippled across his face. He raised
something black in his hand.
Blam!
Time always slowed for her during these kinds of moments.
The misty white smoke plumed from the gun’s muzzle. Then the
bullet, this one golden, short and dented. It flew out of the gun’s
muzzle followed by a larger plume of white smoke. The bullet
rotated counter-clockwise as it traveled toward her. She watched
this as the heat bloomed from her like a round mushroom. During
times like this, it was near involuntary. From somewhere deep
within her soul, a primal part of her gave permission. That part
of her had been on the earth, walking the soils of the lands known
as Ghana for millennia.
The night lit up.
The empty road.
The trees.
The houses and huts nearby.
The eyes of the silent witnesses.
The gnats, mosquitoes, flies, grasshoppers, beetles, some in
flight, some not. The hiding, always observing spiders. The birds
in the trees. The lizards on the walls. And the grasscutter crossing
the road a few feet away. Washed in light that did not come from
the moon.
The corona of soft green light domed out from Sankofa. To
her, it felt like the shiver of a fever. It left a coppery smell in her
nose. The bullet exploded feet from her with a gentle pop! The
molten pieces flew into the flesh of a palm tree beside the road.
Sankofa shined like a moon who knew it was a sun. The light
came from her skin. It poured from her, strong and controlled. It
washed over everything but it was only hungry for the man who
shot at her. It hadn’t always been this way. In the past, her light’s
appetite was all-enc
ompassing.
The man stumbled back. The gun in his hand dropped to the
ground. Then he dropped, too.
Sankofa walked up to him, still glowing strong. She knelt
down, looking into the gateman’s dying eyes. “Your brother’s
name was Kwaku Samuel Agya and his cancer was so advanced
that it had eaten away most of his internal organs. I did not cause
this cancer, gateman. I happened to walk into the village when
he was ready to die. He asked me to take him. His wife asked me
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Decision Points
to take him. His son asked me to take him. His best friend asked
me to take him.” Tears fell from her eyes as she spoke. Then she
pushed away the pain in her chest. She muted it. Her tears dried
into trails of salt as her skin heated. She stood up. “When was the
last time you spoke to your brother, gateman?”
His skin crackled and peeled as it burned orange. It
blackened, flaking off into dust. His entrails spilled out in a hot
steaming mass when his skin and abdominal flesh burned away.
Then that burned, too. The muscle and fat from his limps flared
up and then fell to ash, as well. There was little smoke but the air
began to smell like burning leaves. As always, a mysterious wind
came and swept away the ash and soon all that was left was one
bone. It dried, snapped, splintered, and then cooled. Someone
would find it.
She turned away, opened her bag and brought out the jar of
thick yellow shea butter. She scooped out a dollop. She rubbed
it in her hands until it softened and melted. Then she rubbed it
into the skin on her arms, legs, neck, face and belly. She sighed
as her dry skin absorbed the natural moisturizer. Then she walked
into the night as if she were her own moon.
*
Nnedi Okorafor's books include Lagoon (a British Science
Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Who Fears
Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel), Kabu
Kabu (a Publisher's Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013), Akata
Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the
Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African
Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award
winner). Her adult novel The Book of Phoenix (prequel to Who
Fears Death ) was released in May 2015; the New York Times
called it a “triumph”. Her novella Binti was released in late
September 2015 and her young adult novel Akata Witch 2:
Breaking Kola will be released in 2016. Nnedi holds a PhD in
literature/creative writing and is an associate professor at the
University at Buffalo, New York (SUNY). She splits her time
between Buffalo and Chicago with her daughter Anyaugo and
family. Learn more about Nnedi at Nnedi.com.
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33
Next, award winning author Jennifer Brozek takes us to the
future and a world where families live with the fear of being
ripped apart by Takers, who choose children and taken them
away at a certain again. Is that a gift or a curse? No one is
certain.
T H E P R I N C E O F A R T E M I S V
By Jennifer Brozek
“A princess is a servant to all of her people. She’s supposed to
care for them and never let them down. Ever,” Lanteri said.
Hart nodded at his little sister. “What’s the first rule of being
a princess?”
“Never, ever abandon your people—for they need you more
than you know,” she said in a tone so serious that it would have
indicated satire if it had not come from an eight-year-old’s
mouth.
“You’re a very good princess.”
“I’m trying.” She smiled at her older brother. “But
sometimes, it’s hard.”
“I know. As Dad says, ‘Nothing good …’”
“‘… ever comes easy,’” they both finished together and then
grinned.
Lanteri bent over her pixel board and continued to draw her
idea of the perfect castle. She drew each line slowly, dragging
the pixel pen over the board. Whenever a line was not exactly as
she wanted it, she turned the pixel pen over to erase the offending
pixels, before going back to her masterpiece. She had been
working on this particular picture for weeks.
Decision Points
Hart watched her, envying both her ability to manipulate the
pixel board and her imagination. He, himself, had never had her
artistic talent and had not drawn anything since that night five
years ago … since Toor was Taken. Though only thirteen, Hart
felt old. He felt like his parents must feel after a long day in the
fields of harvesting the purpuran flower buds. He hoped that
Lanteri would never have to feel the way he did right now.
Especially as the double moons of Artemis V readied themselves
to rise in their annual double-full arc tonight.
The opening and closing of the front door signaled the arrival
of their parents. Neither child moved from their respective places
in their shared bedroom. The conversation between their parents,
or argument as it seemed to be, echoed through the small
Company-provided house.
“They all look at me like she’s already been Taken,” Hart
heard his mother say. He could imagine the distressed flush of
his mother’s face. “We’ve got to do something.”
long as the purpuran flowers are harvested and the royal dye is
made, they don’t care.” In his mind’s eye, Hart could see his
father’s drawn face and strength failing in his old man’s body.
“We’ve got to do something. Anything. Stop the purpuran
shipments. Get their attention.” His mother’s voice had softened
to the whine of a wounded animal. “I can’t go through this
again.”
“Saneri, the last time we tried something like that the
Company almost starved us to death. The only thing that grows
on this mudball is the purpuran flower. The Company doesn’t
care. The empire doesn’t care. The empress herself can’t know
of this and even if she did, would she care? No. I don’t think so.
There are no rescuers. No brave guardsmen. No heroic Hedari.
No stranger SLINGing in from another galaxy who’ll come
roaring to the rescue. We only have us to depend on. That’s how
it’s always been.”
“I can’t go through this again. I can’t lose her.”
Hart reached over and closed the bedroom door to shut out
their parents’ pain and worry, and most of all, their helplessness.
He hoped Lanteri had not heard their parents’ despair but, as all
hopes were dashed on Artemis V, this one was too.
“In my world,” Lanteri said without looking up from her
pixel drawing of a castle in a beautiful sunny landscape, “there
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Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
are no Takers and no one’s afraid of losing their children.”
*
“I’m going to Nori’s,” Lante
ri called as she headed out the
door.
“Wait!” Saneri called.
Hart, sitting at the kitchen table, heard the panic in his
mother’s voice and hoped Lanteri would not. He also hoped that
their mother would not ground Lanteri on what might be her last
day alive.
Lanteri stopped, turned and gave her mother an impatient
look. “What?”
“Uh, don’t forget your coat.”
“I’m just going next door, Mom.”
“Don’t you sass me. Go get your coat or you’re not going
anywhere.”
Lanteri sighed and stomped back to the bedroom to get her
coat. Hart listened as their mother paced, then fussed with
Lanteri’s coat. “You be back before dark. You hear me?”
“It’s not like it’s gonna get all that dark with the double full
moon, Mom.”
Hart smiled at the defiance in his little sister’s voice.
“Lanteri …” Their mother’s voice had a warning note in it
that promised pain and punishment if she were not obeyed.
Another sigh. “Yes, ma’am. Before dark. Can I go now?”
Lanteri asked.
There was a pause before their mother’s reluctant answer
came, “Yes. Ok. Go.”
Hart knew their mother would not make that kind of fuss
about him if he wanted to go over to a friend’s house today. It
made him hurt a little more inside. He waited for his mother to
come to the kitchen.
Saneri was wiping at her face when she entered. Seeing her
son there surprised her. “Hart? What’s wrong?”
“You look at her as if she’s already been Taken.” His voice
was flat and full of anger.
Saneri blinked at her eldest in shock and realization. Shock
turned to anger in a tightening of her lips. “You don’t know what
it’s like.”
“I lost Toor, too. He was my brother. My twin. He was closer
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Decision Points
to me than you. You act like … like … you’re the only one who
lost him.”
The tightened lips turned into a white line while bright
splotches of red shone on Saneri’s cheeks. “Don’t you dare!”
“No, don’t you dare!” Hart stood up, his chair falling away
from him to clatter on the floor. “We all lost him when he was