She groaned as they laid her down. I knelt beside her. I could feel it already.

“Step back,” I said to everyone. To Nuumu I said, “This may hurt.”

I began to pull it in, all the energy around me. It was good to have the others so close and so afraid. It was good to have her brother so concerned and full of love. It was good to have Mwita there, locked in on only my well-being. I took from all this. I gathered what I could from the sleeping town. There were brothers arguing nearby. There were five couples making love, one of them two women who loved and hated each other. There was an infant who’d just woken up hungry and whiny. Can I do this? I wondered. I must.

When I had enough, I used it to help me dig as much energy from the land as I could. There was always more to replace what I took. I felt the warmth rise into my body, into my hands. I placed them on Nuumu’s chest. She screamed and I grunted, biting down on my lower lip, as I fought to keep my hands still. Her body began to slowly shift. I could feel her pain in my own spine. My eyes watered. Hold on! I thought. Until it is done! I felt my spine curve this way and that. My breath left me. And in that moment, a revelation came to me. I know exactly how to break Diti, Luyu, and Binta’s Eleventh Rite juju! I shelved the knowledge in the back of my mind.

“Hold,” I whispered to myself. If I removed my hands, a shock wave would burst from me and her spine would remain curved. My hands cooled. It was time to remove them. I was about to. Then Nuumu spoke to me. Not in voice. We didn’t need that. We were connected as one body. It took great courage to admit what she admitted to herself, to me. I looked down at her. Her lips were dry, cracking, her eyes were bloodshot, her dark skin had lost its shine.

“I don’t know how,” I said, tears wetting my face. But I did. If I knew how to give life, I knew how to take it. I held her eyes a moment longer. And then I did it. I used my spirit hands to reach into her instead of the earth. Green green green green! was all I thought as I pulled the greenness from her. Green!

“What’s she doing?” I heard Nuumu’s brother scream. But he didn’t come near us. I don’t know what would have happened if he had. I pulled harder until I felt something snap and something else begin to tear. Her spirit finally gave. It shot from my hands into the air with a high-pitched scream of glee. Fanta started screaming again. This time he came running.

The sky was a swirl of colors, mostly green. The wilderness. Nuumu’s spirit traveled straight up. I wondered when she would return. Sometimes they came back and sometimes they didn’t. My father had left my mother and me for weeks before he returned to guide me during my initiation. Even then he didn’t stay long. Without moving, I willed myself out of the wilderness back into the physical world just in time for Fanta’s fist to connect with my chest, knocking me back. Mwita pulled Fanta back. My hand ripped from Nuumu’s chest, leaving a dried mucusy hand print.

“You killed her!” Fanta screamed. He looked at Nuumu’s body and sobbed so hard that I thought my body would shatter. Diti, Binta, and Luyu helped me sit back up.

“I could have healed her,” I said, sobbing and shaking. “I could have.”

“Then why didn’t you!” Fanta shouted, tearing his arm away from Mwita.

“I am nothing,” I cried. “I don’t care what it would have done to me. What other purpose do I serve? I could have healed her!” My temples throbbed as phantom stones battered my head. Only my friends kept me from wallowing in the dirt, like the low thing I felt I was. Low like the gray beetles of disease and death in the Great Book that came for the young children of those who’d done terrible wrong.

“Then why didn’t you?” Fanta asked again. He’d tired himself out and Mwita let him go. He draped himself over his limp and cooling sister.

“She wouldn’t… she wouldn’t let me,” I whispered, rubbing my chest. “I should have healed her anyway but she didn’t allow me to think to do it. It was her choice. That’s all.” My actions were an abomination to the natural order of things, though I understand now, weeks later, that this was for the best. The immediate consequence of my actions for me was an almost unbearable cloak of sorrow. I felt like scratching at my skin, gouging my eyes out, killing myself. I sobbed and sobbed, ashamed of my mother, disgusted with myself, wishing my biological father would finally erase my body, memory, and spirit. When it passed, it was like a black thick foul smelling veil lifted.

We all just sat there for several minutes, Fanta weeping over his sister, Mwita patting Fanta’s shoulder, me lying spent in the dirt, and the rest staring. Slowly, Fanta lifted his head and looked at me with swollen eyes. “You are evil,” he said. “May Ani curse all that you hold dear.”

He did not ask us to leave. And though we didn’t discuss it among ourselves, we decided to stay for one night. Mwita and Fanasi helped Fanta bring the body inside. Fanta started sobbing again when he saw that her spine was straight. All she’d had to do was let me let go. She’d have lived. I stayed as far from Fanta as possible. I also refused to go into the house. I’d rather sleep under the stars.

“No,” I told Luyu, who’d wanted to sleep outside with me. “I need to be alone.”

Binta and Diti cooked a large meal in the kitchen, while Luyu swept out the entire house. Mwita and Fanasi stayed with Fanta, afraid that he might try something rash. I could hear Mwita teaching them to chant. I wasn’t sure if I heard Fanta’s voice in the chanting but one didn’t have to chant along to be affected by the chanting.

I unrolled my sleeping mat under a dry palm tree. Two doves were nestled in the tree’s crown. They’d stared down at me with their orange eyes when I’d pointed a palm-light up the tree. Normally, I’d have been amused.

I moved my mat over. I didn’t want to be bombarded with their feces all night. My body ached and my headache was back. Though it wasn’t full blast, it was bad enough to force my thoughts to the West. What would I be by the time we got there? In the same night, I’d spared the lives of men who’d tried to rape me and taken the life of the Ada ’s daughter.

“Sometimes the good must die and the terrible must live,” Aro had taught me. At the time, I’d scoffed at the idea and said, “Not if I can help it.”

I rubbed my temples as a particularly hard phantom stone smashed the side of my head. I could almost hear my skull crumbling. I frowned. The crumbling sound wasn’t in my head. Sandals on sand. I turned around. Fanta was standing there. I got to my feet, ready for a fight. He sat on my mat.

“Sit,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Mwita?” I called loudly.

“They know I’m out here.”

I looked at the house. Mwita was watching from one of the upstairs windows. I sat beside Fanta. “I was telling the truth,” I said when I couldn’t take his silence anymore.

He nodded, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it sift between his fingers. From somewhere nearby came the loud whoosh of a capture station. Fanta sucked his teeth. “That man,” he said. “People complain to him but he still acts disrespectfully. I don’t know what he needs water for at this hour.”

“Maybe he likes the attention,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. We watched the thin white column extend to the sky.

“It’s cold out here,” he said. “… Why don’t you come in?”

“Because you hate me,” I said.

“How did she ask you?”

“She just did. No, not ask. To ask implies a choice.”

He pressed his lips together, scooped up another handful of sand, and threw it.

“She told me once,” he said. “Months ago, after she’d become bedridden. She said that she was ready to die. She thought this would make me feel better.” He paused. “She said her body was…”

“Making her spirit suffer,” I said finishing his sentence.