“Oh my god,” Sarah was saying. “I think we need to get away from here.”

I smiled sleepily. Yes yes, I was thinking. We always need to get away from here. Wherever here is, there is always a good reason to get away from it. That is the story of my life. Always running, running, running, without one single moment of peace. Sometimes, when I remember my mother and my father and my big sister Nkiruka, I think I will always be running until the day I am reunited with the dead.

Sarah grabbed my hand and tried to pull me up.

“Get up, Bee,” she said. “There are soldiers coming. Up the beach.”

I breathed in the hot, salty smell of the sand. I sighed. I looked in the direction Sarah was staring. There were six soldiers. They were still a long way away, along the beach. The air above the sand was so hot that it dissolved the men’s legs into a shimmer, a green confusion of colors, so that the soldiers seemed to be floating toward us on a cloud made of some enchanted substance, free as the thoughts of a girl waking up from dreams on a hot beach. I screwed up my eyes against the glare and I saw the light gleaming on the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles. These rifles were more distinct than the men who carried them. They held their firm, straight lines while the men beneath them shimmered. In this way the weapons rode their men like mules, proud and gleaming in the sun, knowing that when a beast beneath them died, they would simply ride another one. This is how the future rode out to meet me in my country. The sun shone on its rifles and it pounded on my bare head too. I could not think. It was too hot and too late in the afternoon.

“Why would they come for us here, Sarah?”

“I’m sorry, Bee. It’s those policemen in Abuja, isn’t it? I thought I’d paid them enough to close their eyes for a few days. But someone must have put the word out. I suppose they must have seen us in Sapele.”

I knew it was true, but I pretended that it was not. That is a good trick. That is called, saving one minute of the quietest part of the late afternoon while the whole of time is ending.

“Maybe the soldiers are just going for a walk by the sea, Sarah. Anyway, this is a long beach. They will not know who we are.”

Sarah put her hand on my cheek and she turned my head until I was looking in her eyes.

“Look at me,” she said. “Look how bloody white I am. Do you see any other women on the beach this color?”

“So?”

“They’ll be looking out for a girl with a white woman and a white boy. Just walk away from us, okay, Bee? Go down to the point down there, where those other women are, and don’t look around till the soldiers have gone. If they take me and Charlie, don’t worry. There’s no way they’ll do anything to us.”

Charlie held on to Sarah’s leg and looked up at her.

“Mummy,” he said, “why is Little Bee got to go?”

“It’s not for long, Batman. Just until the soldiers have gone.”

Charlie put his hands on his hips. “I don’t want Little Bee to go,” he said.

“She has to hide, darling,” said Sarah. “Just for a few minutes.”

“Why?” said Charlie.

Sarah stared out to sea, and the expression on her face was the saddest thing I ever saw. She answered Charlie, but she turned to me when she spoke.

“Because we still haven’t done enough to save her, Charlie. I thought we had, but we need to do more. And we will do more, darling. We will. We won’t ever give up on Little Bee. Because she is part of our family now. And until she is happy and safe, then I don’t think we will be either.”

Charlie held on to my leg.

“I want to go with her,” he said.

Sarah shook her head. “I need you to stay and look after me, Batman.”

Charlie shook his head. He was not happy. I looked away down the beach. The soldiers were half a mile away. They came slowly, looking left and right, checking the faces of the people on the beach. Sometimes they stopped and did not continue on their way until someone showed them papers. I nodded, slowly.

“Thank you, Sarah.”

I walked down the slope of the beach to the hard sand where the waves were breaking. I looked out at the hazy horizon and I followed the deep blue-and-indigo of the ocean from that distant line all the way to the beach where it crashed into waves of white spray and sent its last thin sheets of water foaming and hissing up the sand to sink away to nothing in the place where my feet were standing. I saw how it ended there. The wet sand under my feet made me think of how it was when the men took me and Nkiruka away, and for the first time I began to be fearful. I was fully awake now. I knelt down in the shore break and I splashed the cold salt water over my head and my face until I could think clearly. Then I walked quickly along the beach to the point that Sarah had shown me. The point was two or three minutes away. A tall ridge of dark gray rock came out of the jungle there at the height of the treetops, and it ran across the sand and then out into the sea, getting shorter as it went but still as high as two men at the point of the rock, where it stuck out into the surf. The waves crashed against it and sent explosions of white foam into the silver-blue sky. In the shade of the rock it was suddenly cold, and my skin shivered when it touched the dark stone. There were some local women resting in the shade there, sitting on the hard sand with their backs against the rock while their children played all around them, jumping over their mothers’ legs and running into the shore break, laughing and daring one another to go out into the white roaring foam where the great waves crashed against the point of the rock.

I sat down with the other women and smiled at them. They smiled back and talked in their language, but I did not understand it. The women smelled of sweat and wood smoke. I looked back along the beach. The soldiers were close now. The women around me, they were watching the soldiers too. When the soldiers were close enough to notice the color of Sarah’s skin, I saw them start to walk faster. They stopped in front of Sarah and Charlie. Sarah stood very straight and she stared at the soldiers with her hands on her hips. The leader of the soldiers stepped forward. He was tall and relaxed, with his rifle riding high on his shoulder and his hand scratching the top of his head. I could see he was smiling. He said something and I watched Sarah shaking her head. The head soldier stopped smiling then. He shouted at Sarah. I heard the shout but I could not hear what he said. Sarah shook her head again, and she pushed Charlie behind her legs. Around me the local women were staring and saying, Weh, but the children were still playing in the shore break and they had not noticed what was occurring farther down the beach.

The leader of the soldiers, he took the gun down from his shoulder and he pointed it at Sarah. The other soldiers gathered in close and they unslung their weapons too. The leader shouted again. Sarah just shook her head. The leader pulled back the barrel of his gun then and I thought he was going to push it into Sarah’s face, but just then Charlie broke away and he started to run down the beach toward the rocky point where we were sitting. He ran with his head down and his Batman cape fluttering behind him, and at first the soldiers just laughed and watched him go. But the leader of the soldiers, he was not laughing. He shouted something at his men, and one of them raised his rifle and swung it round to point at Charlie. The women around me, they gasped. One of them screamed. It was a crazy, shocking sound. At first I thought it was a seabird right beside me and my head snapped around to look, and when I turned back toward where Charlie was running, I saw a jet of sand flying up from the hard beach beside him. At first I did not know what it was, but then I heard the rifle shot that had made it. Then I screamed too. The soldier was swinging the barrel of his rifle, taking aim again. That was when I stood up and I started to run toward Charlie. I ran so hard my breath was burning and I screamed at the soldiers, Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, I AM THE ONE THAT YOU WANT, and I ran with my eyes half closed and one hand spread out in front of my face as if that would protect me from the bullet that would come for me. I ran, cringing like a dog from the whip, but the bullet did not come. The leader of the soldiers, he shouted out an order and his man put down his rifle. All of the soldiers stood there then, with their hands at their sides, watching.