"What is it?" Kainene asked. "What is it?"

Before anyone spoke, Richard knew. The soldier had been stealing from the farm. It happened everywhere now, farms raided at night, raided of corn so tender they had not yet formed kernels and yams so young they were barely the size of a cocoyam.

"Do you see why anything we plant will not bear fruit?" said a woman whose child had died the week before. Her wrapper was tied low, exposing the tops of drooping breasts. "People like this thief come and harvest everything so that we will starve to death."

"Stop it!" Kainene said. "Stop it right now! Leave him alone!"

"You are telling us to leave a thief? If we leave him today, tomorrow ten of them will come."

"He is not a thief," Kainene said. "Did you hear me? He is not a thief. He is a hungry soldier."

The crowd stilled at the quiet authority in her voice. Slowly, they shuffled away, back to the classrooms. The soldier got up and dusted himself off.

"Have you come from the front?" Kainene asked.

He nodded. He looked about eighteen. There were two angry bumps on either side of his forehead and blood trailed from his nostrils.

"Are you running? I na-agba oso? Have you deserted?" Kainene asked.

He did not respond.

"Come. Come and take some garri before you go," Kainene said.

Tears crawled down from his swollen left eye and he placed a palm on it as he followed her. He did not speak except to mumble "Dalu- thank you" before he left, clutching the small bag of garri. Kainene was silent as she got dressed to go down and meet Inatimi at the camp.

"You'll leave early won't you, Richard?" she asked. "Those Big Men may be in the office for just thirty minutes today."

"I'll leave in an hour." He was going to Ahiara to try and get some provisions from relief headquarters.

"Tell them I'm dying and we desperately need milk and corned beef to keep me alive," she said. There was a new bitter undertone in her voice.

"I will," he said. "And go well. Ije oma. Come back with lots of garri and salt."

They kissed, a brief press of their lips before she left. He knew that seeing that pathetic young soldier had upset her, and he knew, too, that she was thinking that the young soldier was not the reason the crops failed. They failed because the land was poor and the harmattan was harsh and there was no manure and there was nothing to plant, and when she managed to get some seed yams, the people ate half before they planted them. He wished he could reach out and twist the sky and bring victory to Biafra right away. For her.

She was not back when he returned from Ahiara in the evening. The living room smelled of bleached palm oil that came from the kitchen and Baby was lying on a mat, looking through the pages of Eze Goes to School.

"Carry me on your shoulders, Uncle Richard," Baby said, running to him. Richard pretended to try and pick her up and then collapsed on a chair.

"You're a big girl now, Baby. You're too heavy to be picked up."

"No!"

Olanna was standing by the kitchen, watching them. "You know, Baby has grown wiser but she hasn't grown taller since the war started."

Richard smiled. "Better wisdom than height," he said, and she smiled too. He realized how little they said to each other, how carefully they avoided being alone together.

"No luck at Ahiara?" Olanna asked.

"No. I tried everywhere. The relief centers are empty. I saw a grown man sitting on the floor in front of one building and sucking his thumb," he said.

"What about the people you know at the directorates?"

"They said they have nothing and that our emphasis now is self-sufficiency and farming."

"Farming with what? And how are we going to feed millions of people on the tiny territory we hold now?"

Richard looked at her. Even the slightest hint of criticism of Biafra made him uncomfortable. Worries had lodged in the cracks in his mind since Umuahia fell, but he did not voice them.

"Is Kainene at the camp?" he asked.

Olanna wiped her brow. "I think so. She and Inatimi should be back by now."

Richard went outside to play with Baby. He placed her on his shoulders so that she could grasp at a cashew leaf above and then put her down, thinking how tiny, how light, she was for a six-year-old. He drew lines on the ground and asked her to pick up some stones and tried to teach her to play nchokolo. He watched her lay out and arrange the pieces of jagged metal from a tin: her shrapnel collection. Kainene was not back an hour later. Richard took Baby down the road to the camp. Kainene was not sitting on the stairs in front of the Point of No Return, as she sometimes did. She was not in the sickroom. She was not in any of the classrooms. Richard saw Ugwu under the flame tree, writing on a piece of paper.

"Aunty Kainene is not back," Ugwu said, before Richard asked.

"You're sure she didn't come back and then go off somewhere else?"

"I'm sure, sah. But I expect she will be back soon."

Richard was amused by the formal precision in the way Ugwu said expect; he admired Ugwu's ambition and his recent scribbling on any paper he could find. Once he had tried to find where Ugwu left some of them so he could take a look, but he had found none. They were probably all tucked into his shorts.

"What are you writing now?" he asked.

"A small thing, sah," Ugwu said.

"I'll stay with Ugwu," Baby said.

"Okay, Baby." Richard knew that she would hurry to the classrooms to find some of the children and begin hunting for lizards or crickets. Or she would look for the self-styled militiaman who wore a dagger round his waist and ask if she could hold it. He walked back to the house. Odenigbo had just returned from work and, in the bright evening sun, his shirt was worn so thin in front that Richard could see the curled hair on his chest.

"Is Kainene back?" Odenigbo asked.

"Not yet."

Odenigbo gave him a long accusing glance before he went inside to change. He came back out with a wrapper slung around his body and tied behind his neck and sat with Richard in the living room. On the radio, His Excellency announced that he was going abroad to search for peace.

In accord with my own frequent affirmations that I would personally go anywhere to secure peace and security for my people, I am now traveling out of Biafra to explore…

The sun was falling when Ugwu and Baby came home.

"That small child, Nneka, just died and her mother has refused to let them take the body and bury" Ugwu said, after he greeted them.

"Is Kainene there?" Richard asked.

"No," Ugwu said.

Odenigbo got up and Richard got up and they walked down to the refugee camp together. They said nothing to each other. A woman was wailing from one of the classrooms. They asked questions and everyone said the same thing: Kainene had left with Inatimi early in the morning. She told them she was going on afia attack, to trade across enemy lines, and that she would be back by late afternoon.

A day passed, then a second day. Everything remained the same, the dryness in the air, the dusty winds, the refugees tilling dried soil, but Kainene was not back. Richard felt himself tumbling through a tunnel, felt the weight being sucked off him hour after hour. Odenigbo told him Kainene was probably just held up on the other side, waiting for the vandals to move before she came home. Olanna said this delay happened all the time to women who did the attack trade. But there was, in Olanna's eyes, a furtive fear. Even Odenigbo looked fearful when he said he would not go with them to search for Kainene because he knew she would come home; it was as if he was afraid of what they would discover. Olanna sat beside Richard as he drove to Ninth Mile. They were silent, but when he stopped to ask people on the roadside if they had seen anybody who looked like Kainene, she would say, "O tolu ogo, diezigbo oji"; as if repeating what Richard had already said, that Kainene was tall and very dark, would jog the people's memory better. Richard showed them Kainene's picture. Sometimes, in his rush, he pulled out the picture of the roped pot instead. Nobody had seen her. Nobody had seen a car like Inatimi's. They even asked the Biafran soldiers, the ones who told them they could not go any farther because the roads were occupied. The soldiers shook their heads and said they had not seen her. On the drive back, Richard began to cry.