I won’t tell you the words. Just know I spoke them. Then I flared my nostrils and drew on the anxiety, rage, guilt, and fear swarming around me. I had unknowingly done this at Papa’s funeral and knowingly done it with the goat. I crossed over. What will they see? I wondered, suddenly afraid. Well, it can’t be helped now. I dug deep into what made me me and took them into what my mother went through.

I should never have done this.

All of us were there, only eyes, watching. There were about forty of us and we were both my mother and the man who helped make me. The man who’d been watching me since I was eleven. We watched him get off his scooter and look around. We saw him see my mother. His face was veiled. His eyes were like a tiger’s. Like mine.

We watched him ravage and destroy my mother. She was limp beneath him. She’d retreated into the wilderness and there she’d waited as she watched. She always watched. She had an Alusi in her. We felt the moment my mother’s will broke. We felt her attacker’s moment of doubt and disgust with himself. Then the rage that came from his people took him again, filling his body with unnatural strength.

I felt it inside me, too. Like a demon buried under my skin since my conception. A gift from my father, from his corrupted genetics. The potential and taste for amazing cruelty. It was in my bones, firm, stable, unmoving. Oh, I had to find and kill this man.

There was screaming from everywhere, from everyone. The Nuru men and their women, their skin like the day. And the Okeke women with skin like the night. The din was awful. Some of the men sobbed and laughed and praised Ani as they raped. Women called to Ani for help, a few of these women were Nuru. The sand was clumpy with blood and saliva and tears and semen.

I was so transfixed by the screaming that it took seconds for me to realize that it had started coming from the people in the market. I pulled in the vision as one folds up a map. Around me, people sobbed. A man fainted. Children ran in circles. I didn’t think about the children! I realized. Someone grabbed my arm.

“What have you done?” Mwita shouted. He pulled me along at such a fast pace I couldn’t immediately answer. People around us were too stunned and shaken to stop us.

“They should know!” I shouted, when I’d finally caught my breath.

We’d left the market and started up the road.

“Just because we hurt doesn’t mean others should!” Mwita said.

“It does!” I shouted. “We’re all hurting whether we know it or not! It has to stop!”

“I know!” Mwita shouted back. “I know it more than you!”

“Your father didn’t rape your mother to create you! What do you know?”

He stopped walking and grabbed my arm. “You’re out of control!” he hissed. He threw down my arm. “You only know what you’ve seen!”

I just stood there. I was far too defiant and unwilling to own up to the stupidity of my comment and my lack of self-control.

“I will tell you,” he said, lowering his voice.

“Tell me what?”

“Move,” he said. “I’ll tell you as we go. Too many eyes here.” We walked for two minutes before he spoke. “You can be really stupid sometimes.”

“So can…” I shut my mouth.

“You think you know the whole story, but you don’t.” He looked behind us and I looked too. No one was following us. Yet.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s true that I traveled east alone until I met Aro. But there was some time there, just after… When the Okeke and the Nuru were fighting and I turned myself ignorable to escape, I didn’t know how to stay ignorable for long. Not yet. Only for a few minutes, really. You know how it is.”

I did. It took me a month to sustain it for ten minutes. It required serious concentration. Mwita had been so young; I was surprised he was able to hold it at all.

“I made it out of the house, out of the village, away from the real fighting. But out in the desert, I was soon captured by Okeke rebels. They had machetes, bows and arrows, some guns. I was locked into a shack with Okeke children. We were to fight for the Okeke side. They killed anyone who tried to run away.”

“That first day, I saw a girl raped by one of the men. The girls had it worse because they weren’t just beaten into obeying, as we all were. They were raped, too. The next night, I saw a boy shot when he tried to escape. A week later, a group of us were forced to beat a boy to death because he’d tried to escape.” He paused, flaring his nostrils. “I was Ewu, so they beat me more often and watched me more closely. Even with all the sorcery I knew, I was too afraid to attempt an escape.

“They showed us how to shoot arrows and use machetes. The few of us who showed that we had good eyes were taught to shoot guns. I was very good with guns. But twice I tried to kill myself with the one given to me. And twice I was beaten out of doing so. Months later, we were taken into the fighting against the Nuru, the race of people I was raised to live with as family.

“I killed many.” Mwita sighed and continued, “One day, I got sick. We were camping in the desert. The men were digging mass graves for those who’d died in the night. There were so many, Onyesonwu. They threw me in with the bodies when they saw that I couldn’t get up.

“I was buried alive. They moved on. After a few hours, the fever I was suffering from abated and I dug myself out. Immediately, I went looking for medicinal plants to cure myself. And that was how I was able to travel east. I’d spent two months with those rebels. If I hadn’t looked dead, I’m sure I’d be dead. Those are your innocent Okeke ‘victims.’ ”

We’d stopped walking.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” he said. “There is sickness on both sides. Be careful. Your father sees things in black and white, too. The Okeke bad, Nuru good.”

“But it’s the Nuru’s fault,” I said quietly. “If they hadn’t treated the Okeke like trash, then the Okeke wouldn’t be behaving like trash.”

“Can’t the Okeke think for themselves?” Mwita said. “They know best what it feels like to be enslaved yet look what they do to their own children! My aunt and uncle weren’t murderers, Onyesonwu! They were killed by murderers!”

I was deeply ashamed.

“Come,” he said, holding out his hand. I looked at it and noticed for the first time, a faint scar on his right index finger. From the trigger of a hot gun? I wondered.

A half hour later, I stood outside Aro’s hut. I’d refused to go in.

“Then stay here,” Mwita had said. “I’ll tell him.”

While Mwita and Aro talked, I was glad to be alone because… I was alone. I kicked the hut’s wall with the heel of my foot and sat down. I scooped up some sand and let it run through my fingers. A black cricket hopped over my leg and a hawk screeched from somewhere in the sky. I looked to the west where the sun would set and the evening stars would rise. I took a deep deep breath and held my eyes wide open. I stayed very still. My eyes grew dry. My tears felt good when they came.

I stood up, took off my clothes, changed into a vulture and rode the late hot afternoon air into the sky.

I returned an hour later. I felt better, calmer. As I was putting my clothes on, Mwita poked his head from Aro’s hut.

“Hurry up,” he said.

“I will come when I please,” I mumbled. I straightened out my clothes.

As the three of us talked, I found myself getting riled up again. “Who’s going to stop it?” I asked. “It won’t stop once the Nuru have killed all the Okeke in their so-called land, will it, Aro?”

“Doubtful,” Aro said.

“Well, I’ve decided something. This prophecy will come true, and I want to be there when it does. I want to see him and I want to help him succeed at whatever it is he will do.”

“And your other reason for going?” Aro asked.

“To kill my father,” I said bluntly.

Aro nodded. “Well, you can’t stay here anyway. I was able to stop the people from coming after you before but this time you dug your talon into a sore part of Jwahir’s psyche. Plus your father is expecting you.”