More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She slices through the water, imagining herself a deadly beam of black light.
1st sentence 👌
Inhaling them stings and burns her gills.
Her what
She is the largest predator in these waters.
Oh maybe shes not human. Maybe shes a shark
She remembers her last form, a yellow monkey;
When it communicates with her, asking question after question, she hesitates. It doesn’t take long for her apprehension to shift to delight. What good questions it asks.
She’s always loved her smooth, gray-blue skin,
Dolphin??
Now she is no longer a great swordfish. She is a monster.
Ah
Despite the FPSO Mystras’s loading hose leaking crude oil, the ocean water just outside Lagos, Nigeria, is now so clean that a cup of its salty-sweet goodness will heal the worst human illnesses and cause a hundred more illnesses not yet known to humankind. It is more alive than it has been in centuries, and it is teeming with aliens and monsters.
👀
She was a born-and-raised Lagosian, and she was wearing nicely fitted jeans and a sensible blouse.
Bring back the fish!!
On 12 June 1993, the day of the most democratic election in Nigeria’s history, she’d come here with her father and watched him shed tears of joy. On 23 June, her mother brought her here because her father and uncles were at home cursing and shouting over the military annulling those same elections.
:(
(and for the fact that she hadn’t had to sleep with anyone to earn it).
Queen
Last year, she’d come here to weep when her father was killed along with thirty others during a botched robbery of a luxury bus on the Lagos–Benin Expressway,
:((
The thieves had demanded that all the passengers get off the bus and lie in the momentarily empty road. In their stupidity, the thieves hadn’t anticipated the truck (speeding to avoid armed robbers) that would run over everyone including the thieves.
Nooooooooooooo
Adaora was here at Bar Beach because her loving perfect husband of ten years had hit her.
KILL HIM
Then she’d brought her hand up and slapped him right back.
THATS RIGHT QUEEN
One minute they’d been brawling, and then the next, her husband was mysteriously stuck to the floor, his wrists and ankles held down as though by powerful magnets.
👀
After what she’d just dealt with, she wasn’t about to let any man get in her way.
Thats right kween
This booming sound was so deep Adaora could feel it in her chest, and it rattled her teeth. It left cotton in her ears.
By then it had become a naked dark-skinned African woman with long black braids.
Swordfish????
Mami Wata.
Water spirit
And just before it did, he saw one of those people throw a black bird
Awww he made it
Just before it happened, one of them had released something black and evil into the air like a poison.
angles!!
she would become one of the loudest prophets of doom in Lagos.
👀
many, many neat brown braids that crept down her back.
SWORDFISH
She had piercing brown eyes that gave Adaora the same creepy feeling as when she looked at a large black spider.
Her mannerisms were too calm, fluid and . . . alien.
His still swollen face was crusty with sea salt and blood that must have seeped from his wounds and dried after they’d been returned.
Someone please help this MAN
your fellow soldiers who had just beaten you up after you tried to stop their assault of a woman?
Abu is a KING!!!
the music from under the sea
🎵 under da sea🎶
Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research.
Back then, he’d loved her so much.
When Ayodele touched the computer’s flat-screen monitor with a graceful finger, the background picture (of a menacing dragonlike lionfish in a blue ocean) flickered the slightest bit. “You people have your own”—she giggled, a creepy dovelike sound that raised the hairs on Adaora’s arms—“little inventions.”
Do . . . do you eat?” She cringed at how silly she sounded. “Eat?” Ayodele paused, seeming to think it over. “Okay.”
She’s made of tiny, tiny, tiny, metal-like balls. It’s got to be metal. Certain types of metal powders look like that at two hundred times. I think that’s why she can . . . change shape like that.
“CHRIS!” Ayodele said. Her voice was identical to Chris’s, as was her physique. Not only did she look like him, she was even wearing the same wrinkled dress shirt and jeans.
“Blame me,” Ayodele said. “Your wife is just trying to help. Calm yourself. Think.”
“Your husband?” Agu asked as he dabbed the cut on his forehead with his fingers. It had started bleeding again. “He works too hard and he’s been fasting,” she said. “It makes him a little . . .” “That man does not love you,” Anthony muttered. Silence. “You people are very interesting,” Ayodele said, smiling.
Chris shut his eyes and took a deep breath,
Surprised and intrigued that we get chris's pov!
He was too taken by his own emotions to notice the look of deep that annoyance passed over Father Oke’s face.
Lmaoooo religion is a scam
He glanced with disgust at his shoulder, which was damp with Chris’s tears.
LOL
“Thank you, Father,” Chris said as they walked between Father Oke’s Mercedes and his BMW. Father Oke frowned as Chris passed a little too close to the BMW. He’d managed to keep the vehicle in perfect shape despite the Lagos roads, and he was not about to let this desperate idiot scratch it.
DEADDDDD the author is great
“Relax, Chris,” Father Oke said, seeming to read his thoughts. They watched the woman leave the room. “It will affect nothing. Wine is the beverage of Jesus. It can only do good.”
I will jot that down :-)
“Look, Brother Chris, women are . . . weak vessels. It is identified in the Bible. Your Adaora is a highly educated biologist but she’s no different from the others. She could not change herself if she tried.”
Gross!
“You really think she’s a witch?” Chris asked. “I do, Brother Chris,” he said. “A marine witch, the worst kind. Look at her knowledge of the water. But don’t worry, no shaking, o,” he said, chuckling. “My church is powerful. It is my job to handle such things.”
Ohhh my goddd where did chris find this loon
“Eh, Brother Chris, slow down,” Father Oke said, trying hard not to laugh at this sorry lamb of his flock. “It is imperative to fast, to purge your wife’s witchcraft from your body. But you’ve been fasting so much, of late, and . . . perhaps you are not seeing what you think you’re seeing?”
Drag him dad
Ayodele. Adaora felt thick and groggy. While Agu and Anthony
I hate that they all have A names! My head hurts!
Why do all our names start with A?”
YES!!!!! THANK YOU!!!! you read my mind lol but tbf YOU picked ayodele
They acted on impulses already present in their minds.
“We can work with you people,” Ayodele said. “And we will. We’re coming.”
“Nine January, six thirty-nine a.m. You heard it directly from the horse’s mouth. One is here, the rest are coming.” She switched the camera off.
