Home (Binti, #2)

by Nnedi Okorafor

“Five, five, five, five, five, five,” I whispered. I was already treeing, numbers whipping around me like grains of sand in a sandstorm, and now I felt a deep click as something yielded in my mind.

“You fell out of the tree,” she said, not looking up. This was how she referred to that moment when you were treeing and then suddenly were not.

“Everything comes with a sacrifice,” Okpala liked to say. Every edan did something different for different reasons. My edan was also poisonous to Meduse; it had been what saved my life when they’d attacked on the ship.

“That was isolated deconstruction,” Professor Okpala said. “I’ve only heard of it happening. Never seen it. Well done.”

Professor Okpala was Tamazight, and from what my father said of selling to the Tamazight, they were a people of few but strong words.

The shuttle traveled five hundred to a thousand miles per hour, depending on how charged it was. I’d be in Weapons City in fifteen minutes and I hoped it wasn’t too late, because Okwu was planning to kill his teacher.

In some ways, Himba and Khoush were like night and day, but in matters of girlhood and womanhood and control, we were the same.

“When you face your deepest fears, when you are ready,” she’d said. “Don’t turn away. Stand tall, endure, face them. If you get through it, they will never harm you again.”

The three days passed, as time always does when you are alive, whether happy or tortured.

“I will wash this off soon,” it said. “It’s not good to feel this pleased with life.”

Nothing was asked of Okwu and Okwu was pleased, preferring to menacingly loom in the background behind me. Okwu was happiest around human beings when it was menacingly looming.

The Meduse worshipped water as a god, for they believed they came from it. This was the root of the war between the Meduse and the Khoush, though the details had long been blasted away by violence and death, and then angry, most likely incorrect, tales of heroism or cowardice depending on the teller.

As I sat there, watching Okwu dance with its god, I thought about how strange it was that for me to swim in water was taboo and for Okwu such a taboo was itself a taboo. I remember thinking, The gods are many things.

Dancing was like moving my body in the way that I saw numbers and equations move when I treed. When I danced, I could manifest mathematical current within me, harmonizing it with my muscles, skin, sinew, and bones.

How different my life would have been if my parents had just let me dance.

When I was five, I had asked my mother what it was like to give birth. She smiled and said that giving birth was the act of stepping back and letting your body take over. That childbirth was only one of thousands of things the body could do without the spirit.

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.