Binti: The Complete Trilogy

Binti: Sacred Fire

I even missed my sisters.

And it wasn’t just because it was one of those nights. You see, there’s something that happens to a child of the soil when she leaves her soil. It’s a death, then a painful rebirth… but first you have to walk around the new world as a sort of ghost. I was a ghost at Oomza Uni. Displaced but still in the place I needed to be. The place where I wanted to be. If only people understood that. Understood me.

And I even missed my sisters.

I squatted there in the dirt. This place beside my dorm was a favorite spot of mine because the soil here was dry like back home. There was also a flat green sturdy plant that grew in a crack at the edge of the dorm building’s wall. It grew in fives, five leaves on five branches in bunches of five. And the plant smelled nice at this time of day. My mother would have loved these plants as much as I did and my father would have wanted to study them and see if their leaves conducted current. They didn’t; I’d tried running a current through them already. Nothing. But the plants knew mathematics, which was even godlier. Praise the Seven for these plants of the fives, my new favorite number.

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine I was with my sisters. Anything to drown out the sight of Heru and his always bursting chest. Over and over, warm blood spattering my face, no sound coming from him. His face frozen with shock. The stinger of one of Okwu’s people driven through his back… or was it the stinger of Okwu itself? I refused to ask. Never. But I wondered wondered wondered. The one Person on this university planet whom I had a connection with, who was the closest thing I had to family, family through war, may have killed the boy I had a crush on, killed Heru right before my eyes.

I grabbed my okuoko and squeezed, knowing I was smearing off some of the otjize I’d rolled them with. My okuoko had a firm yet almost gelatinous texture and it was still strange to me, but gradually I was getting used to them. As much as I could. They had sensation like any other part of my body, so grasping them was like grasping several long fingers. Shuddering, I let go.

I reached down and picked up a handful of the dry red soil and let it sift through my fingers. This planet wasn’t home, but it was a planet. A home. I pressed my palms flat to the ground. Immediately, I felt a little better. My heartbeat slowed, Heru and his shocked face retreated and I sighed.

“Hello? Are you alright?”

I looked up, shielding my eyes with one of my otjize-covered hands. I knew this girl, but I didn’t know her name. I still barely knew anyone’s name at my dorm. Since arriving six earth weeks ago, I’d hidden away from my schoolmates as much as I could. In the dining hall, I collected my food and took it to my room. I didn’t like dining halls.

“I’m fine,” I muttered, trying to get up. Then I remembered Heru’s parents and all my strength left me again. They’d called me yesterday. The holographic image of his mother had simply stared at me, stared so hard that I could practically feel her trying to sift through all that was me to find my memories of her son. She only wanted those glimmers of her son, not the surviving Himba girl to whom they belonged. Then she’d burst into tears, unable to say a word to me.

Heru’s father had shouted at me from behind her, “How does a beggar survive and my son not? What did you trade?! What filthy charms did you work?!” I thought they’d then break the connection, but they didn’t. They’d instead shouted and cried at me for over a half hour. I held my astrolabe, with a shaking hand, listening, gazing back at them into their eyes, quiet, from planets away. When they’d had enough, they finally broke the connection. The whole thing was horrible.

Whimpering, I pressed a hand to my face, wishing the girl whose name I didn’t know would leave me to grovel in the dirt alone.

“Don’t worry,” she said, squatting before me. “I’ll come down to you.”

My eyes flooded with tears that dropped into the soil at my sandaled feet and onto my long orange red skirt. Heru was dying again. The stinger in his chest. White. But his blood spread on it so easily. So red. I grunted, my heart was racing again.

She put a hand on my shoulder. “Breathe,” she whispered.

“Can’t.”

“You are, though,” she chuckled. “If you weren’t you’d have passed out by now.”

I blinked. I am alive, I thought. I just think I’m dead. I looked up at her smiling face. She had eyes green like leaves, skin the color of sand flower. She was dark for a Khoush, probably from spending so much time under Oomza’s suns. Even now she wore the blue jumpsuit I often saw her jogging about wearing. We both laughed.

“Breathe more,” she said, and I did. I felt stronger. The sight of Heru disappeared, for now. She helped me up and for a moment we stood there looking at each other. “My name’s Haifa. You’re Binti.”

“I have nothing to add to that,” I said.

“Everyone’s been wondering how you can be so together,” she said. “You save the university and everyone back home and then turn right around and start the semester without missing a step like some sort of superhero. Today, I think I’m finally convinced you’re actually normal and, well, mostly human.”

I burst out laughing. Oh yes, now I was breathing just fine.

“It’s nearly second sunset, best part of the day,” she said taking my hand. “Come sit and eat some mini apples with me. I’ve had a long day, too.”

“Okay.”

We walked across the dirt to the dorm path and I waited for the question: “Where’s your Okwu?” In these first weeks of registration, moving into my dorm, orientation, then classes, whenever I met anyone, this question was never far behind. I was so glad when Haifa didn’t ask it now.

We sat on the stone steps. Large and uneven, the fifty steps extended down about a half-mile to the first buildings of Math City. They were made for People with legs of various lengths. Nevertheless, the stone steps were tan and smooth and the sunlight warmed them, making them the perfect place for us to sit at this hour. We simply sat there eating sour mini apples, watching the second sunset. It was always a spectacular scene of orange-pink that softly glowed in the swelling darkness. With most classes having ended by this hour, there was no traffic on the steps.

“Why were you grabbing your hair like that?” she asked.

I shrugged. Then I just said it; I wasn’t home anymore. “They’re not hair.”

“Oh I know that,” she said, popping another mini apple into her mouth and rolling it about before biting. “Everyone does.”

“They do?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you like them?”

I shrugged, “They’re mine.” I took an apple. I looked at it. Red and soft in flesh, the apples were delicious after you ate a few and your taste buds adjusted. “I was… I was having a moment. It’s been a lot.”

“I know,” she said. “What’s it been like? You’re part Meduse, now.”

I looked at her, but she seemed genuinely curious, an openness on her face that made it impossible for me to feel annoyed. “I’m… still getting used to it.”

“Of course you are. You don’t adjust to that kind of thing in a day.” She got up and did a graceful dancer’s twirl on one of the stones, her hands out. “Look at me,” she announced. “I’m fantastic.” She sat back down. “It’s not the same as your situation, but I was born physically male and when I was thirteen I transitioned to female.”

My eyebrows rose. “Oh,” I said. Back home, we called people like Haifa eanda oruzo, but they weren’t so open about it. And we didn’t say “transition”, we said “align” and once they align, it was never mentioned again. Amongst the Himba, you “were what you knew you were once you knew what you were and that was that”, to quote my village’s chief Kapika. I wondered if all the people of the Khoush communities were as open about alignment as Haifa.

“All my life, I knew this was who I’d be, but it still took some getting used to after I transitioned,” she said. “Well, more everyone around me, than me.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“Did it hurt for you?”

“Well, yes… I mean… I… it was…”

“I’m joking, Binti,” she said, gazing at the sunset. “You got stabbed in the back with a Meduse stinger, that’s not going to feel good. And you didn’t even have a say in what happened to you. Doesn’t that bother you?”

I looked at my hands.

“No warning, no nothing, just ‘stab’, then you wake up and you’re part-Meduse. That’s really something,” she added, more to herself than me. Her words were making me nauseous and I focused on the deepening pink-orange sky. Haifa didn’t notice. “My goodness. Maybe we can’t really compare.”

“Maybe,” I said, my nausea passing. Still, Haifa had changed, too. And she’d been so clear in what she wanted that she’d done it voluntarily. I certainly would not have chosen to be stung by a Meduse, but would I have gone into that ship and risked everything if I had known what was about to happen? After a moment of thought, I knew I would have. I’d gone in there with the intent to live, but sure that I was going to die.

I can never forget the look on my mother’s face when I finally contacted home. I was sure everyone at home was livid with me, I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d grabbed my astrolabe and messaged home, not knowing who’d respond. Those moments of wait were agony. I’d grasped my edan so tightly that my hand ached. I considered treeing, but I didn’t think it was a good idea for my family after so many weeks to finally see me while I was up in the tree. Then there she was. As the hologram bloomed, I could initially see that she was standing in the kitchen. She was lit by a different sun than the one that would rise where I was in a few hours. She stared at me for a long time and I stared back, my eyes filling with tears.

“Binti.”

“Mama.”

It sounded like we said it at the same time but there probably was some sort of digital lag because of the distance.

“You made it.”

“I did.” I was weeping.

“Good.”

I told her everything. Every detail. Every fear. Every triumph. Everything except about what the sting had done. She listened and gasped with surprise and shock and laughed a few times and listened some more. She told me I was foolish and wise and that I owed her so much because I knew how much I’d hurt her, hurt everyone. Yet my mother still understood. And she reveled in the fact that I was her child. Papa had refused to speak with me this day. And that was like him. I told myself, maybe next time I reach out he’ll be the one to respond. I missed my family.

If I were surrounded by family, these first few weeks on Oomza Uni would have been better. I’d have still been tormented, but not so much. But I was there without any of them and the only family I had was often the source of my terror. During nights, I still relived my time on the ship over and over until all that I focused on was fear and… “What if Okwu…?”.

This night, as I so often did, I eventually rolled over, picked up my edan from the shelf beside my bed and held it to my chest like a talisman. I stayed this way all night. I didn’t sleep.

At second morning, I had individual study with Professor Okpala. This would be our fourth session and I was looking forward to it, despite my lack of sleep. I went to see Okwu first as was my routine. It came out of its dorm as I walked up the path.

“Binti,” Okwu said. “You look tired.”

“I didn’t sleep well. I kept…” I looked directly at it. In the sunlight of the second sun, Okwu’s translucent blue dome shined like something underwater. “I kept thinking about the ship. And what your people did to everyone onboard except me and the pilot.” And the fact that maybe you yourself killed Heru, I thought.

“It was war,” Okwu said. “You should strengthen yourself with that knowledge. In war there’s death.”

I frowned at it, sensing that Okwu felt more than its words. Ever since I’d been stung and changed, it was this way. Okwu thought about what happened, too. It wondered. Things didn’t sit well for Okwu, even if it didn’t feel any guilt or terror over those Third Fish memories.

It began to move and I followed it. “Have you eaten?” it asked.

“I have. Have you?”

“I won’t until after class today. My mind is sharper when I want to eat.”

We were walking toward the shuttle station.

“Have you spoken with your mother, again?” Okwu asked. “You are better when you do.”

“I will,” I said.

“What of Heru’s brother? Has he left you alone?” It thrummed softly.

I looked at my feet. Heru’s younger brother Jabari had contacted me days after that terrible call from Heru’s parents. Talking to Jabari was even worse and still I had not disconnected. He’d demanded I recount every detail of his brother’s death, having not a care for my own feelings. “No,” I said glumly. “Not since that call.”

“That’s good,” it said. “Talking to him is useless.”

We stopped on the walkway and looked over the bridge. This walkway that ran over rushing waters that emptied into a strange sea some miles away was a favorite spot of ours. We came here every morning and we often met here. I inhaled the rush of wind that blew both my and Okwu’s okuoko. Okwu breathed out a burst of gas and I exhaled.

“Whoo!” Grinning, I spread my arms out as I faced the edge of the walkway that dropped down to the rushing water. “I’m awake now!” I exhaled and inhaled again, my eyes closed imagining myself leaping from the walkway toward the water, but then swooping over it as I then flew into the sky, up up into space. My good mood shifted a shade darker. I slowly turned to Okwu and said the first thing on my mind, “Sometimes, I hear you speak and your voice still sounds rough.”

After a moment, Okwu replied, “Sometimes I wonder why your voice sounds so smooth to me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is that bad?”

“I prefer my language.”

I chuckled.

Okwu floated to the edge of the walkway and then hovered in the air over the edge, its okuoko dangling in midair. A strong breeze blew Okwu upward and then it slowly floated back to my level, still hovering over the drop. It returned to the walkway, its dome thrumming with pleasure.

We stayed there for a bit, standing side-by-side watching the water rush by. The air was so fresh; we both loved coming here. There was movement, but the area stayed the same and once in a while, there would be a procession of yellow fishlike creatures who were longer than the Root back home and slender like pipes. In the turquoise blue waters, you could see them perfectly wiggling like giant ribbons with large flat heads and big bulbous red eyes. I really loved them.

“Let’s go to class,” I said.

Okwu had a class in Math City so we walked together most of the way. We came to the building where its class was held and it was there that we parted ways. Professor Okpala’s office was only a few minutes’ walk away, at the center of Math City. I watched Okwu float off toward its building. Then I grasped the strap of my red leather satchel and pulled it closer to me. The straps and other parts of it were already caked with my otjize; no one would ever mistake my things for someone else’s. As I walked, I could feel my edan in the pocket of my long red skirt. “I am Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib,” I whispered to myself.

I walked along the wide street, staying close to the spiraling, coiling, hexagonal glass and cuticle buildings of Math City. A swift transport shuttle zipped through the center of the street, avoiding People who also moved in various ways down the middle of the street. On average, I was quite small compared to most of those around me and I was usually the only humanoid, let alone human. This was why I kept close to the buildings. Haifa had described human walking as “inefficient motion” and compared to almost everyone else, this was fairly accurate. Walking always seemed so slow and graceless compared to all the gliding, zipping, tumbling, creeping, flying, and porting.

Back home, the closest there was to even one of the streets in Math City was the weekend market where everyone was Himba and a few minutes’ walk away was open empty desert. As I walked, People stared at me, some talked about me in various languages I didn’t have to understand to understand. It wasn’t in my head. When I walked down the street, everyone noticed in some way.

“I am Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib,” I repeated to myself. But I refused to tree. No one was going to scare me into the tree. I scurried across the busy street, leaping around what looked like a Night Masquerade… at least this is what I heard they looked like. The Night Masquerade was a mythical creature in Himba culture that only men and boys could see.

“Hello, Himba hero Binti,” it said in Meduse, as it strode past me with its long stick-like body. Every move it made was accompanied by the sound of cracking and snapping.

“Greetings,” I said over my shoulder. I giggled to myself, knowing there was no way it could be a Night Masquerade. I quickly moved on.

Math City was a grid of hexagons and Professor Okpala’s office was at its center in one of the five spiral towers. It was at the very top and I loved going up there. Her office had no walls, so the entire space was open to the elements. It didn’t rain much in Math City and the temperature for this time of the year hovered around ninety degrees and this was ideal for a desert girl like me.

This was my tenth session with Professor Okpala since I’d arrived at Oomza Uni. Thus far, all we’d really done were deep treeing exercises where I’d call up the exact current that I now understood activated the edan’s strange translation technology. It didn’t translate every language, but some of the ones that it did translate surprised me. I’d communicated with a bee-like insect hovering around a flower Okpala had brought in. The insect had been obsessed with the deep orange hue of the flower and the work it planned to do with others of its kind. And it hadn’t been interested in talking to me, so it didn’t respond to anything I said to it except to tell me, “Go away, I’m busy”.

Okpala had later introduced me to one of her graduate students, an Okwu-like Person. It had been angry when it realized I could understand the insults it spoke about me to Professor Okpala. It had been jealous of my closeness to the Meduse and didn’t think I deserved the honor, no matter what I’d done to earn it.

“Sit down,” Okpala said when I stepped out of the elevator. “You’ll need all your strength today… if you do this right.” The astrolabe she wore clipped to her hip vibrated. “Relax yourself for a few minutes while I talk to this student,” she said stepping away.

I slipped my sandals off and stepped onto the densely woven vines that made the floor of her office. I went to the place she called “the classroom”, the area in the middle of the open space that was her office. There was a small grey solid stone table here and nothing else. I dumped my satchel beside it and sat down.

Straightening my long red orange skirt, I stretched my legs in front of me and reached into my satchel. I brought out the tiny capture station that I’d brought from home. I carried it with me everywhere because I liked the taste of the water it pulled and formed in its cup-sized bag and because it was a piece of home.

The cool air the capture station blew at me as it pulled condensation from the clear sky felt refreshing in the hot sun. After a few minutes, the bag was full enough to fill a cup. I held the orange bag of fresh cool water to my forehead and then drank deeply from it. When I finished, I rolled up the bag and put everything back in my satchel. In the heat, the otjize kept my skin comfortable. I smiled turning my face to the sun. All my nightmares, flashbacks, and loneliness retreated. I put my edan on my lap, my astrolabe beside me and waited for Professor Okpala.

She came back to me five minutes later. “Okay, let’s see if it’s willing to open up to you, share what it knows,” she said, clipping her astrolabe back to the cloth hanging from the side of her skintight red and green suit. She sat across from me with a tablet.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s not alive. Is it?” I frowned, remembering a lizard egg I’d once found back home. “Is it?”

I’d found what I thought was a dried dead lizard egg in the desert and kept it in my room because I liked its soft blue color. After I’d had it for over four years, it hatched. I’d come into my bedroom that day just in time to see the tiny blue lizard glance at me and then leap from my open bedroom window. I ran over and looked down. There it was, scampering toward the desert.

“Focus, Binti,” Professor Okpala said. “All edan are different. Settle down. Climb a bit into the tree.” She touched her tablet and it glowed a deep transparent purple. I could see what she was writing through the clear tablet: ‘Binti: First attempt’.

I allowed myself to drop into the tree by grasping the Pythagorean theorem. I sighed, the world around me fragmenting and then both dimming the slightest bit and clarifying. I focused my attention on my edan. Somewhere in the distance my mind still quipped, But maybe it is alive. I pushed the distraction away.

“Good,” Professor Okpala said. “Now, I’m going to ask something of you.”

“Okay,” I said. She could ask me anything; I would know the answer.

“Home,” she said. The word hit me hard in the chest like a stone, but I didn’t feel it. “What do you miss about it?”

“The sand,” I said.

Professor Okpala typed something on her tablet as she looked at me with piercing eyes. “We have sand here.”

“It’s not the same. Different memory.”

“Hold your edan, call up a current… and tell me exactly what you mean by you ‘miss the sand’. Do that as you guide the current into the edan.”

I climbed a little higher into the tree as I thought about it. “In the evening, I would sit outside behind the Root, that’s my family’s home. I’d be wearing my long skirt over my legs, and I would plunge my hands into the sand. It was cool on the surface, but underneath was warm, like the body of a living thing. Inside, my mother would be in the kitchen cooking pumpkin soup and my father would be walking home from his shop because it was a windy evening and he loved the wind. My brother would be on the roof of the Root making sure the storm analyzer he’d built was secure and my little sister wouldn’t be home because she was out with her friends near the lake collecting matured clusterwink snails.”

The current I ran over my edan entered the grooves and crevices and I gasped. It was doing this without me guiding it. “My friends who were more obsessed with marriage than all other things,” I said. “My best friend Dele who always knew the town rules, my classmates laughing about how they didn’t understand any of the math problems. But I understood it all and I just… sometimes I felt lonely.” I don’t know when I did it, but I made the current thicker. Stronger. I stared at the blue current, my eyes unfocusing. I could feel the possibility and I went higher and deeper. I stopped talking at Professor Okpala. I went with it. It was like sliding down a sand dune.

“It… it wasn’t the day I left that I knew I was different. Not really. It was long before that. When I was seven years old. During school. Five, five, five, five. It was only me and I started going into the desert.”

I felt a sting in my chest as I caught my breath. That was the moment I jumped the rails. It didn’t matter that I was treeing. It didn’t matter that I was with my professor, who was watching me closely, typing all that she saw into her tablet. I was far from home. The only Himba on an entire planet. My hair was braided into the tessellating design of my family, and not one person on this planet would be able to decode, read and understand the great weight of its importance. What did I think I was doing?

I was alone. Lost in space. I was in a strange place. So I arrived right back at that moment. Heru’s chest. It was exploding. I was there. I grabbed my edan and held it to my chest, the blue purple current leaving the edan and rotating around my clenching hands now. It held my hand there, the muscles stiffening. I shut my eyes and I prayed to it, I am in your protection. Please protect me. I am in your protection. Please protect me.

The memory opened up and multiplied, a living fractal.

I opened my eyes to my professor. My nostrils flared and I smelled every scent around me—grass, flowers, and I smelled blood. The sky was red, my hands were red. Looking into the eyes of my professor, I opened my mouth wide and screamed so loudly that my throat stung. Professor Okpala jumped, but even this didn’t make her drop her tablet. With all my strength, I bashed the edan against the stone table. I bashed it again.

“Binti!” my professor shouted, horrified. “Stop it!”

Bash! I was still screaming. “Evil thing! I hate you! Die! Let me die!”

“Binti!”

Bash! “Die!”

Professor Okpala was grabbing me. She’d finally put down her tablet. I cried and shrieked, trying to push her away, trying to smash the edan on the stone table some more. But my professor was much stronger than me and she dragged me from the stone table. My hand was bleeding and the sight of the blood made me shriek even louder. She hugged me to her. “Everything is dead!” I screamed, curling up. “Everyone is dead!”

“Then relax, Binti. If everyone is dead, there’s nothing left to do,” she said, hugging me tighter. “Relax.”

I calmed down. Professor Okpala didn’t immediately dismiss me, though she told me I needed to go to the medic and have a nurse look at my hand. She’d picked up her tablet and was typing notes again while I stood near the edge of her office looking out at Math City. Despite all I’d done to it, my edan was unharmed. Not a chip or a scratch. As I gazed at the spiraling sand-colored building across from me, I held it now, tightly in my uninjured hand. My injured right hand throbbed dully.

“Did you feel the edan open even slightly?” my professor asked.

“What?” I asked, still facing the edge of her office. I looked down at the edan in my left hand and quickly said, “I don’t know… I…”

“Were you even trying when… it went wrong?”

“Yes,” I said. “And a part of me was still focused on getting the edan open. How does that happen?”

“Edans are tricky powerful things,” she said getting up. “Their pull can be wildly intense. And you’re a very interesting student. But this was a failure, Binti. Our next session needs to be better.”

She sent me on my way ten minutes later, telling me that I’d be expected at the ANE, the Alien Non-Emergency Medic Building. I left her office with a pounding headache. Once downstairs, in the lobby, I paused, feeling the tears coming like a rainstorm. I started walking when I noticed students were looking at me as they passed. I’d nearly died to get to Oomza Uni and already I was a failure.

The moment I stepped into the sunshine, I felt better. I paused on the steps in front of the tower, students walking in and out of the building. A professor who looked like a large slug, slithered around me and muttered, “Go get drunk on the sun in the fields, student hero. This is a place of study.”

But I needed my moment, so I dropped my satchel beside me, tilted my face up, and let the sunshine roll over me. I sighed, smiling, “Ah, I miss the desert.”

Crack!

I screeched and jumped, stumbling to the side, nearly tripping over my satchel. I smelled smoke, my face prickling with the rush of adrenaline. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my edan with my left hand. Smoke was rising from the hem of my skirt! I jumped again, shoved my edan back into my pocket and dropped down. I smacked at the black smoking circles in the material, ignoring the pain in my right hand. Coughing, I smacked harder until the flames were out, bits of grey ash floating up.

Snickering.

I looked up. Two Khoush boys were looking down at me, grins on their faces. With my peripheral vision I saw someone step up beside me from behind and grab my satchel. I snatched it back and pulled it to me, looking up. It was a girl, and like the boys and most of the humans at Oomza Uni, she was Khoush. She looked down her nose at me, smirking. I frowned. I couldn’t tell who threw the current that singed my skirt, but it was definitely one of these three.

“Stay down,” the taller boy said. His hair was black and shiny, reaching his chest in ringlets and he wore the tight green jumpsuit that weapons majors wore if they had humanoid bodies. “You must be used to that position, doesn’t the word ‘Himba’ mean ‘beggar’?”

I stood up. “Himba” did mean “beggar” in otjihimba. But that was an ancient coinage no one really cared about anymore. “Why would you do that?” I asked, my voice higher than normal.

“I don’t need a reason, traitor,” he spat. “Department heads and students who don’t know any better celebrate you, but plenty of us detest you. Meduse sympathizer. You’re planets away from earth, yet you betray your own homeland. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Should have died on the ship,” the other boy said. “We’d be better off. The pilot would have come up with a better plan.” This boy I knew. He was in two of my math classes and he came from one of the few Khoush villages that existed near Himba country. His name was Abd, which meant “servant” in Khoush.

I grabbed my satchel and tried to walk away, but the two boys stepped in front of me. I groaned, looking at the girl who hadn’t said a word yet. Deeply irritated, I aimed my question at her. “What do you want?”

“What we want,” the tall boy said. “… what many of us who know better want is for you to take that Meduse ingrate you brought here back into space.”

My left eye twitched and my hands shook, the right one throbbing more because of it. Since I’d arrived, most students, professors and staff had been warm and welcoming to me. There’d even been a party thrown for Okwu and me in the walkways outside my dorm. That day, so many had surrounded Okwu, fascinated to meet a “friendly” Meduse, that Okwu had to stay at the party until it ended. Of course, these students and faculty quickly learned that though Okwu was “friendly”, it wasn’t exactly nice. I must say, it was entertaining to watch them realize this fact.

However, there were a few who strongly opposed a Meduse presence on Oomza Uni and they made themselves known. These students (Khoush and otherwise) deeply feared Okwu, so they accosted me. It had happened a few times since my arrival on Oomza Uni. These individuals feared and or hated the Meduse; the Meduse were a powerful and principled yet warlike people and so they had many enemies. Just after orientation, in the halls of my dorm, in passing when I was in Central City, when Okwu was not with me, these particular anti-Meduse students let me know what they thought and it was always the hatred, the rage. To an extent, I understood some of them.

For example, Abd’s family had been deeply affected by the war, as he’d angrily told me on my fourth day on Oomza Uni, during our second day of Math 101 class. Several of his family members had been killed by Meduse moojh-ha ki-bara-style, he’d told me, and how dare I expose him to the presence of one of these monsters. I was a “shameful typical silly foolish lowly Himba girl”, according to him. I didn’t agree with this, of course, but I felt his pain.

My hand ached as I turned again, trying to step around them. I nearly bumped into a crab-like person side-walking into the building. It clicked its claws at me and then, in Meduse, said, “Leave it be, Himba hero. What’s done is done. Stop walking into people.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, cradling my right hand. Through my tear-blurred eyes, I met the Khoush girl’s cold light brown eyes.

“Why didn’t you stop them,” the girl asked.

“What?”

“You could have asked for anything during that meeting, once you got them to listen,” she said. “Why would you ask them to admit a Meduse into Oomza?”

“I didn’t! It wasn’t even my idea. But I…” I blinked and shook my head. “Wait, why am I even talking to you? Get out of my way!” My head throbbed harder and I could have sworn I felt tingling in the tips of my okuoko.

Then the three of them were staring at me with shock, as if I’d roared in the voice of a djinn or sacred snake. They were frozen there like stone. I didn’t know what I’d done, but seeing them like this gave me a deep satisfaction so profound that more tears squeezed from my eyes. When the dark wet spot appeared in the crotch of the tall boy’s jumpsuit and Abd began to hyperventilate, his mouth hanging open, I understood. I straightened up, my satisfaction deepening.

“What are you called, girl?” Okwu asked in Khoush. It was hovering directly behind me. Then it exhaled a great puff of gas. I knew to hold my breath, but the others immediately began coughing.

“Zerlin,” the girl replied in a high-pitched voice when her fit of coughing subsided.

“Zerlin, Abd, Eyad, walk away from the Binti right now,” Okwu said.

The two boys turned and shakily walked off. They didn’t run, they walked because Okwu had said to walk. Zerlin stayed. Tears now in her eyes, she said, “You shouldn’t be at this university! You killed my sister’s best friend on that ship.” She hugged herself, stumbling back. She pointed a finger at Okwu that shook so badly, it was almost comical. “Monster!”

Okwu blew out a puff of gas and said, “It wasn’t me specifically. But we are a hive mind. If need be, we are monstrous.”

She backed away from Okwu as Okwu floated toward her. Then she turned and ran off. When she was gone, I sat down right there on the concrete, bringing my knees to my chest. It didn’t matter if my long skirt got dirty, the hem was already burned.

“What did you do to your hand?” Okwu asked.

“I tried to smash my edan against a stone table,” I said, resting my head on my knees. “I was really angry and it’s more solid than it looks.”

“I will go with you to the medic building,” Okwu said.

Nothing was broken, none of my fingers at least. Just bruised and swollen with one large bleeding cut that required a small flesh knit. The medic building student nurse, who looked like a large flower floating on a cloud of red mist, said I was lucky. I would have been fine with all five fingers broken if I could have smashed my edan, I thought, but I didn’t really feel this way. What happened on Third Fish wasn’t caused by the edan and the edan was why I was alive.

The first sun was setting by the time I got out of the hospital. “Thanks for waiting, Okwu,” I said as we walked to the shuttle.

“There were airborne links in the lobby, so I finished my homework while I waited,” Okwu said.

I had my satchel with my tablet, a capture station, some mini apples, lip oil, a palm-size container of my otjize. I needed my satchel wherever I went. But Okwu and those like it moved about not needing anything, having everything. I envied this. Okwu liked to say, “People like me are always complete.”

I pinched my nose as we approached the shuttle. I was still getting used to these things. The shuttle tracks were made slick with a green oil called “narrow escape” that was secreted from huge black pitcher plants growing near the tracks. The plants stank of fresh blood and that smell triggered my flashbacks. I’d avoided Oomza shuttles for weeks, but swift transport busses weren’t made for 500-mile journeys that needed to be made in minutes, so I had to get over myself.

Once on the shuttle, I was glad to easily find a seat made for someone near my size. Okwu hovered beside me with a group of other Meduse-like People. I gazed out the window as the busy sandstone towers and hive-like edifices of Central City began to retreat within moments. Then, we were zipping past the arid lands of purple grasses that surrounded Central City. I glimpsed the Oomza Station where professors met for professor-only meetings and debates, then it was gone.

I sat back and relaxed. Beside me Okwu was chatting with another Meduse-like creature. Okwu and those who hovered and had jelly-fish like domes, filling up the open areas of the shuttle with their gasses and barely substantial bodies, always became talkative when the shuttle was moving at its fastest. I wondered if this had to do with the fact that such People were most comfortable in space and when the shuttle was zipping forth at over 500 miles per hour, this was the closest they got to that while on Oomza.

I looked at my grimy burned skirt and wished I had a way to feel at home that didn’t require squatting in the dirt beside my dorm. I thought about when my mother would take me to the lake at night to look at the clusterwink snails when they spawned. These were my oldest memories. My mother and I had both stood there looking at the snails, and even back, at the age of four, I agreed with my mother that they looked like a galaxy. We counted the snails until the counting became something else for the both of us, from the water to outer space.

“Wish visiting home didn’t have to include interstellar travel,” I mumbled to myself. Even as I got older everyone pulled back from me, I thought. Even my best friend Dele. I don’t think even he realized he was doing it. We were all falling into our roles, our destiny in the community. We were no longer free… and that was when my musings crossed that toxic boundary I’d crossed in Professor Okpala’s office earlier in the day. It was like treeing, but it was carrying me instead of me carrying it. I couldn’t get off the ship. I’d never been in space before and everyone around me was dead and I was only alive because of an intricate old dead device from a mystery metal.

I gasped and pressed my left hand to the shuttle’s large round window, my bandaged hand to my chest. My heart was punching at my ribcage.

“Why are you so tense?”

I was still not used to the sound and feel of the Meduse language and, thankfully, its vibration cut right through to me.

“Tense?” I asked. “D-d-do I look tense?”

“Yes” Okwu said. “You’ve been tense since we left Math City. That’s how I knew to come find you near your professor’s office.”

“I… was tense… I’m tense… I…” I giggled nervously, but even as the sound escaped me, I was seeing Heru’s chest exploding, yet again. I turned squarely to Okwu and I saw all those Meduse around me only held from killing me because something about my edan was poison to them. I resisted the urge to grab my edan from my pocket and thrust it at Okwu.

“Binti! Hey!”

I looked around, glad for a reason to pull my eyes from Okwu.

“Back here! Behind you!” It was Haifa. She was sitting several seats back with her roommate, a Person who I only knew as the Bear.

I waved, pushing a smile on my face. “No, no,” I said, when I saw her get up to come over to us. “It’s too packed.”

But Haifa was never one to avoid motion just because it was difficult. I think she actually liked the challenge. The Bear got up, too, though I didn’t know why. Over the weeks, I’d run into the Bear several times in the bathroom, in the study room, eating lunch on the steps and not once had she spoken to me. When Haifa got to us, she boldly shoved the two Meduse-like people out of the way to get to my seat. The two People simply floated back to make space for them. I’ll never get over the way Oomza Uni people do that on the shuttle. It’s considered polite behavior. I dreaded the day someone shoved me aside to pass and I went sprawling to the floor.

“Okwu,” Haifa said.

“Haifa,” Okwu said.

“You know each other?” I asked.

“We’re in all the same classes,” Haifa said.

“I find Haifa annoying” Okwu said. “But I suspect she will make great weapons.”

Haifa laughed loudly. “Even a Meduse is threatened by me because I’m just that genius. Everything is right in our universe.”

Okwu blasted out a large cloud of gas and Haifa and I coughed. The adult human-sized giant bail of rough brown hair that was the Bear merely shuddered. “No Meduse would fear you, Haifa,” Okwu said, its dome vibrated with laughter.

I tuned them out for the moment because I was climbing into the tree as I looked out the window. The shuttle was slowing down; we’d reached our stop. My thoughts went inward as I decided. To clear my mind, I worked an equation through my mind, Euler’s identity, e^iπ + 1 = 0, one of the most gorgeous formulas I knew. An equation that showed the connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics. It was the formula that connected all things because everything is mathematics. I slowly turned to Haifa as she said, “Come on, you two, this is our stop. Okwu, we’ll see what’s what when we get to exams. You know at the end of the year, we get to battle each other with the weapons we built?”

Okwu’s dome thrummed harder and the three of them began to move to the front of the train. I didn’t move. It was Okwu who stopped first. “Binti,” Okwu said. “Come.”

“No,” I said. I retreated higher into the tree. And from there, I felt a clarity sharp as brittle crystal.

Okwu returned to me, as did Haifa and the Bear. The shuttle was stopping now. “Binti,” Okwu said, switching to Meduse. “Get up.”

“No.”

“It’s our stop,” Haifa said. “We have to get off. We’ve all got homework. And you know what the next stop is and that’s not even for another hour.”

“No,” I said, again. But even from the tree, my eyes welled up with tears. I gasped, wiped them away, but I didn’t move.

“Is she alright?” Haifa asked, turning to the Bear. The Bear moved to me, but she still said nothing. The closeness of her hairy body made my right arm feel warm.

“What… what are you doing?” I asked. I stared at her.

When she spoke, her voice was muffled because it came through layers of hair. “Red desert is next stop, Himba girl.”

“I know!” I said. And I said this from so deep in the tree that my voice must have resonated with it. Everyone getting off at the front of the shuttle stopped and turned to us.

“Okwu, move aside, I’ll pick her up,” Haifa screeched. “The shuttle’s going to leave soon!”

Haifa took only one step toward me before she stopped. The current I called up zinged an inch from the Bear’s hairs and both the Bear and Haifa moved back. We were the only ones left on the shuttle now. I held up my edan at Okwu, even if Okwu could withstand my current, my edan was poison to it. “I’m-not-getting-up,” I growled. All that was going through my mind at this point was one word over and over, “Go.” I needed to go. Away from my memories, away from my pain, away from my questions, go go go go go. I’d felt this only once in my life, back on the day I found my edan, when I felt my life was being controlled by everything but me. I’d wanted to dance and instead everyone else decided that I was not allowed.

“I’m going into the desert,” I said, more tears falling from my eyes. Pleading. “I have to go to the desert. I have to. I have to go.”

They stayed with me on the shuttle. My friends.

As it pulled off, I looked out the window and it was like I was leaving the planet. I watched us pass the Math City buildings and then our dorms. And then we were on our way, the only ones left on the shuttle. No one went to the red desert except those who were doing research and certainly not at this hour. And the final stop on this line was a small Oomza sterile swamp lab that was only active in the first morning because of the plants that used the evening time to digest everything in the area by the morning; no one went there at night, not even the shuttle, which stopped and returned an hour’s walk away from the swamp.

“Well, what are we going to do in the desert?” Haifa asked.

“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Just stay on the shuttle until it goes back.”

“We’re not leaving you there,” Okwu and Haifa said at the same time.

“You’re really going to do this?” Haifa asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have any water,” Okwu said.

I shrugged. Plus, I did have a capture station and a few mini apples in my satchel.

The shuttle stopped and in several alien languages including Meduse, some that vibrated and lit up the whole cab, it said, “Please exit the Shuttle.” I got off before it got to the three human languages. I walked down the walkway on legs that felt like warm rubber. What am I doing? I thought. But at the same time, it felt so good to do something, to get off the tracks. I paused, flaring my nostrils. One of those pitcher plants that secreted shuttle track oil that smelled like blood was growing on the other side of the tracks. I shuddered, pinching my nose and quickly moving down the red metal walkway. It ended where the sand began. I stopped, looking out at the desert. Behind us, the shuttle zipped away, gone in seconds. The silence it left us in was so complete that it was like wearing noise-cancelling headgear. So much like home.

“This was not how I planned to spend my evening,” Haifa said, walking past me. She broke into a sprint, jumped with her arms stretched in the air and launched into a series of flips.

“This place has no water,” Okwu said, floating past me. “It is a dead place with no goddesses or gods and too many spirits.”

The Bear brushed swiftly past me, seeming to run after Haifa who was still doing flips and laughing. “Come, show me what you can do!” Haifa shouted and the Bear began to spin like a top, flinging sand everywhere. Haifa laughed harder, spreading her arms out and letting the sand the Bear flung up hit her squarely in the face, her eyes and mouth closed.

I turned from them all and started walking into the Oomza Red Desert of Umoya. When I had arrived on Oomza Uni, in that first week when I barely left my room, I’d obsessed over the hologram of the planet Oomza Uni on my astrolabe. I was acclimating myself. When I saw it with my own eyes on that day when Third Fish landed, after all that had happened, I’d wanted to know every detail about the planet.

This desert was not very big, but if you were human you could still die out here if you tried to cross it unprepared. If you didn’t die from the heat, then from the lack of water or the packs of roaming dog-like creatures the size of baby camels called cams, though you had to go in at least fifty miles to get to them.

I removed my sandals and dug my feet into the sand. It was just like home—cool and soft, but beneath the surface, it became warm like the flesh of a great beast. “Oh,” I sighed, closing my eyes. How I missed this. I called up a current and let it wash over my body like a second skin. Then I walked, bits of sand occasionally popping and sparking from my feet. The others followed.

We left the shuttle port behind. I left behind all the stares and gossiping, the People that knew I’d been on a ship where everyone had been killed and I’d been made genetically part of the killers. I left Professor Okpala behind. I left behind the fact that I was further from home that I had ever been. I kept walking.

Behind me, Okwu and Haifa bickered about whether they should grab me and risk getting zapped. The Bear’s hair near the bottom of her body grew full of sand and the sound of her gait got heavier and heavier. Oomza had one large moon and it was lit by the two suns, so the desert had plenty of white purple light. And because all deserts have a certain sameness, no matter the planet, I knew that after walking for what my astrolabe would have measured as a half earth hour, the land was about to change. My astrolabe would have shown this on its map, too, but I didn’t look at that. I didn’t want maps here.

Okwu floated up to me and said, “Remove your current.”

“No,” I said.

“We are here with you,” it said.

“We have no water, though,” Haifa said, walking a few yards away. “At least I don’t. These two will be fine out here, but you and I are gonna die.” I brought out my capture station and tossed it to her. “Oh!” Haifa said. “Well, at least I know you’re not completely suicidal.”

I kept walking.

I stopped walking when I came to a dead and dried bush.

We’d been walking for three hours and I stopped the moment I no longer felt like screaming. I let my current dissipate and then I sat down right there in the sand. “May the Seven keep me sane,” I whispered. And in that moment, they did. Haifa sat on the other side of the dried bush, facing me. The Bear, lowering herself beside her. Okwu hovered nearby me.

I threw my satchel to the side, glad to be rid of the weight. Despite the fact that Haifa had eaten most of my mini apples and was now carrying my capture station, my satchel seemed to have grown heavier by the minute as I’d walked. I looked at my arms, the desert air had dried the otjize on my skin and some of it was flaking off. I had been so focused on go go going that I hadn’t noticed.

I brought out the small washcloth I always carried and my jar of otjize.

“Are you alright now?” Okwu asked, hovering close behind me.

I slowly used the washcloth to rub off the dried otjize from my arms and then I’d get to my face. Back home, I’d never have done this in front of my parents, let alone my friends. “I’ve dragged you all out here,” I muttered. “Sorry.” I touched my okuoko and more otjize flaked off. I could see the blue of them beneath it in the bright moonlight. I frowned.

“A nice walk usually makes me feel better,” Haifa said. Then she laughed loudly and said, “Seriously, though, I hope we don’t die out here.” She laughed again.

“That would not be a respectable death,” Okwu said.

I flaked more otjize off my okuoko. My left eye twitched and I grabbed one of my okuoko. It hurt. “Okwu,” I said. “Why’d you do this to me?” I turned to it. I waited, breathing heavily. In the light of the moon, the smoothness of its blue dome perfectly reflected the sand.

“Our chief demanded it,” Okwu said.

“But it’s my body,” I screamed at it. “I went into the Meduse ship for peace. Your people, you all just… why couldn’t you have just asked?! Let… let me choose?!”

“Not everything can be a choice.”

Five five five five five five. I calmed. I could see it even in the ripples of the sand. Back home, I’d been born able to tree and I’d been born with the skill to call up current, to harmonize. When I honed that skill, it bloomed with ease and joy because I was moving in the direction of the Seven. And so my family, my people decided my fate. Or so they thought.

I got up, my legs shaking. I stared at the dried bush. I broke the number sixty-four in half, broke it again, then again, then again as I called up a current. I held up my left hand, letting the current circulate in my palm like a tiny burning planet. Then I whipped my hand toward the dried bush and let it shoot right into its center. Crack!

“Binti!” Haifa exclaimed, jumping back as the bush burst into flame, lighting the desert around us. Okwu moved away, too. Not far behind Okwu, I saw something skitter away.

“Back home, the Himba view the okuruwo as the gateway to the Seven,” I said, as the fire grew. The warmth it gave off was nice in the cooling desert air. “Okuruwo means ‘sacred fire’ in my language. The council elders keep it burning so that we are always connected to the Seven. Heat, fire, smoke, it all leads to the Seven.” I stepped a few feet to my right so that I was in the path of the smoke as the breeze blew. I let the smoke wash over me. “Centuries ago, Himba women would take smoke baths because they believed it cleaned them more deeply than water,” I said. Yet it’s unbreathable, like Okwu’s gas, I thought.

I brought out my edan and held it in my bandaged hand. I glared at it, the smoke obscuring me from the others for the moment as the desert night breeze blew. I touched the many points of its stellated cube form. It had saved my life and built a bridge of communication between myself and a prideful murderous tribe and I still didn’t know what it was. If I hadn’t found it in the desert back when I was eight years old, would I still be home?

A tiny bit of blood had seeped through my bandage, a tiny red flower. Like the red flower on Heru’s chest. Instead of casting the thing into the fire, I opened my mouth and inhaled the fire’s smoke. My chest felt as if I’d lit it afire and I coughed violently.

“Eeeeeeeeee!!”

I jumped, still coughing, unconsciously putting my edan in my pocket. Okwu, who’d been beside me, suddenly was not. I whirled around. Something near the fire was exploding! Haifa was jumping in the flames and tackling it.

The Bear had caught fire! I ran to Haifa who was rolling the Bear this way and that, trying to put out the Bear’s hair. “Throw sand! Throw sand!” I shouted. Okwu started whirling around like a top. I’d never seen it do that. Its whirling sprayed the Bear with copious amounts of sand. I scuttled about throwing sand, too. And all through, the Bear continued shrieking, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

When the fire was out, the Bear was left with a large patch of her hair burned away, revealing a bald spot of black flesh just above one of her thick legs. I saw that the Bear actually had three thick stumpy brown legs, which explained how she moved so agilely.

I lay on the sand beside the Bear as she sighed softly. Haifa lay where the Bear’s chest would have been had she had a chest. Okwu hovered beside us. “Fire can be an evil spirit,” it said.

“Why’d you have to get so close?” Haifa breathed, looking angrily at the Bear.

“Fire’s the gateway to the Seven,” I said, staring at the sky.

“It beautiful,” the Bear said.

“You should privilege life before beauty,” Okwu said.

I rolled my eyes.

The Bear was okay. It turned out that within an hour, her hair began to grow back over the bald spot and the burned flesh, though still tender, was already healing. Her kind of People were hearty. I realized that her foolish behavior wasn’t as perilous as it looked, just painful and a bit embarrassing. Even more fascinating, in a pouch near her chest, the Bear carried a sheer cloth-like thing that she could stretch into a large tent. The Bear was of a nomadic people who could sleep anywhere in comfort. With the items in my satchel and dragging my friends along, I’d come far more prepared for a night in one of Oomza Uni’s deserts than I could have ever imagined.

It took the Bear minutes to set up what I could only call… a flesh tent. It wasn’t part of her flesh, but it was made of her flesh, at least according to Haifa. The Bear placed the small square on the ground. It might have been a light purple, but in the firelight this was difficult to tell. The Bear stepped on the square and began to tap at different spots on it with her several toes. With each tap, a part of it unfolded and unfurled like the wings of a butterfly, until eventually the Bear stepped back and it was as if the thing had a life of its own… and really did become a delicate creature not so unlike a butterfly.

“What is this?” I asked, laughing, as I stepped up to it. The size of my dorm room, it was oval shaped with a sheer texture like a tinted bubble. I poked at it. “It feels like silk. Do you spin silk? That’s beautiful!”

The Bear walked around it and then entered through an opening I hadn’t noticed before.

“The Bear isn’t going to know what silk is, Binti,” Haifa said, following the Bear inside.

“Ancient Meduse used to carry these,” Okwu said, following Haifa. “We called them tinana, ‘in-body outside-home’.”

I stood there for a moment, then grabbed my satchel and went inside. The tent’s ground was spongy and I paused, immediately reminded of the Meduse ship. I put my satchel down beside me and sat down. I looked up at the sky, which I could see right through the membrane more clearly than with my naked eye.

“Some sleep then we head back to the shuttle before the sun comes up,” Haifa said. “Binti, no arguing.”

“I’m not.” I turned to gaze at the fire, which was still raging.

“Well, just in case, you better start treeing or something, because if you freak out again, we will all definitely die out here,” Haifa said.

Okwu was hovering before my satchel. “What are you doing,” I asked, twisting to look up at it. Then my satchel twitched and right before my eyes, not four feet from my face, Okwu brought out its stinger. Now I was screaming for a second time in less than 24 earth hours, and I did it so loudly that I tasted blood in my throat. I stared at its stinger in horror as I rolled over and scrambled on my hands and knees to the other side of the tent. The Bear joined me there, hairs on her body shuddering against my arm. Haifa was on her feet, fists raised.

“I am protecting you, Binti,” Okwu said. Its stinger was still out. White as a giant tooth, sharp because it was not only stinger, but also giant knife. My satchel kept twitching and Okwu leaned toward it.

“Maybe something crawled into it from outside,” Okwu said.

“Do you have to have that… that thing out?” I asked. I let myself climb into the tree, grasping at the soothing equation of f(x) = f(-x).

My satchel twitched again, this time enough to move the entire thing. “Binti,” Haifa said. “You saw Zerlin, correct?”

“And two of her friends, yes… I did,” I said. “In Math City, just outside the building my professor’s office is in.”

“Were any of them near your satchel? At any time? Even for a second?”

I thought about it. The clarity of the tree made it easy to play it all back. “Yes, sort of. Zerlin. She came up next to me, when I was trying to put out my skirt. Come to think of it, I thought she was trying to steal my satchel.”

Suddenly, Haifa raised her voice in a battle cry. She ran at my satchel, grabbed it and ran then leaped out of the tent. She tumbled and threw the satchel toward the fire. It landed just far enough to not burst into flame.

I ran out. “My otjize’s in there.” Still treeing, I was calm enough to take it all in. Okwu and the Bear came out, too.

“Yeah, well, I still should have thrown it right in the fire because something else is in there, too,” Haifa said, still breathing hard. “Alghaza… invaders. Burrowing Oomza insects who when they get in your dorm room will turn everything upside down when they can’t find a way out of the room immediately. Zerlin probably put them in there. It’s something students like to do to new students. She deserves to be hit with many shoes.”

I blinked with surprise. Then I burst out laughing. Back home, “deserving to be hit with many shoes” was an expression I only heard the elders use.

My satchel twitched violently and then in the firelight, a rip appeared in the side. They were large like scarab beetles and even in the firelight I could see that they were a bright metallic green with golden legs. Six of them emerged from my satchel, all in a line. They moved, then stopped, moved then stopped, all in unison, as if hearing and dancing to some sort of music. Their insectile feet ground on the sand loudly enough to hear from where I stood as they emerged from my satchel one by one.

Crunch crunch crunch… crunch crunch crunch… crunch crunch crunch. When the last insect came out, on the third crunch, it hooked its leg to my satchel and with incredible strength for an insect of this size, flipped my satchel over a yard away.

“What’ll they do now?” Haifa said. “I saw someone’s dorm room infested with these and they went right to turning the place upside down. What if there’s nothing to turn upside down?”

The bugs began to trudge around the fire in a strange procession. For over five minutes, they crunch crunch crunch stopped crunch crunch crunch stopped. Okwu lost interest and went back into the tent where it hovered low, resting.

“Are they going to do that all night?” Haifa groaned. Then eventually she went back into the tent, too. The Bear and I stayed and watched. The Bear, like me, was a mathematics student and I knew she saw it, too. The insects walked and stopped in a series of three walks to one stop. They stayed an exact distance from each other. And they moved around the fire that was so precise that after a while there was a deepening groove of circular perfection.

Then, just like that one of them opened its wings and slowly, very very noisily flew off into the darkness beyond the firelight. The noise was so loud that I could still hear it when another decided to do the same thing. “Haifa, Okwu, look!” Then another one slowly flew off. And another. The last one walked a full circle around the fire and then it too flew off. Judging from the buzzing noise, the others had waited for the last one to join them. Then gradually, their noise faded into the darkness along with their shiny bodies.

“So that’s what alghaza do when out in the open!” Haifa said, looking up off into the darkness of the desert.

“A bird can’t fly in a cage?” I said. It was one of my ex-best friend Dele’s favorite quotes. The Bear and I looked at the night sky for a little longer and when nothing else buzzed or glinted in the firelight, we went into the tent. I fell asleep minutes after drinking a cup of capture station water. I slept deep and I slept well. The desert always has the answers.

I woke to the sound of my astrolabe buzzing softly from inside my satchel. I opened my eyes to the first sun shining through the sheer material of the Bear’s tent. I was resting my head on my satchel and the sound was annoying. “Quiet,” I whispered. “I’m up.” My astrolabe stopped buzzing.

Feet away, the Bear stood, snoring softly and beside her Haifa was sprawled out, also deep in sleep. I wiped my eyes and rolled onto my back and stretched. Something was on my toe. I gasped when I looked. A sand-colored small bat-like creature with a wide head that reminded me of a camel was looking back at me. In its strange mouth, it carried a golden alghaza eggshell it must have fished from my satchel. It snapped it up as it eyed me, its furry body warm on my toe. I grinned, slowly sitting up. “You’re an usu ogu!”

Taking care not to move my leg, I slowly reached into my satchel and brought out my jar of otjize. The creature cocked its head; it didn’t seem to fear me at all, which was no surprise. Usu ogu were said to be quite intelligent and this one clearly understood that none of us were a threat… or maybe that eggshell was just that delicious. I opened the jar and dipped a finger inside. I brought my edan from my pocket and rubbed the bit of otjize on the point of the edan with the spiral that always reminded me of a fingerprint. Slow circular motions. I dropped into mathematical trance, a cold stone in cold water; I climbed into the tree, splitting and multiplying. I aimed my blue current into the edan and on its own, it connected with the usu ogu.

It turned to me. “You smell of smoke. You must be a spirit.”

“I’m Binti,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Usu ogu are usu ogu,” it said. “It only matters what I do.”

“And what do you do?” I asked.

“I fly.”

And with that, it flew into the air, circled the tent once, turned sideways and zipped through the closed tent flap. My current broke from the usu ogu the moment it was outside. The flap opened again, this time wide. “Simple-minded foolish thing,” Okwu said, as it entered. “Of course, it matters who you are.”

I laughed, got up and shook the rest of the alghaza eggshells from my satchel. I gathered them up and took them outside. They glinted beautifully in the sunshine; even the eggs of alghaza hinted that the creatures were supposed to be outdoors. No wonder they were so destructive when they hatched in dorm rooms. I paused and looked at the ash of last night’s makeshift sacred fire.

Back home on Earth, the sacred fire was never allowed to burn out. It was the burning path to the Seven. Here on the university planet known as Oomza Uni, my path to the Seven had to be different. I touched the tip of my sandal to the ashes. My sacred fire will be this desert, I thought. It never stops burning, even at night the sand is warm beneath the surface. I can always come here when I need to. And my community will be my friends. Who else would come into the desert with me? That is love.

I dropped the eggshells onto the ash and brought out my edan. “Are you alive? Will you hatch and then make trouble for me like an alghaza?” I asked it. Then I chuckled and put it back in my pocket. I didn’t think about those two questions for a long time.