Akata Warrior Read online

  When she reached the patch, she gathered two nice red ones and put them in her heat-resistant basket. The small patch of tainted peppers glowed like a little galaxy. The yellow-green flash of fireflies was like the occasional alien ship. Beyond the glowing peppers was a field of purple flowers with white centers, which would be picked, dried, and crushed to make many types of the common juju powders. Sunny admired the sight of the field in the late night.

  She had been paying attention; she even noticed a tungwa lazily floating yards away just above some of the flowers. Round and large as a basketball, its thin brown skin grazed the tip of a flower. “Ridiculous thing,” she muttered as it exploded with a soft pop, quietly showering tufts of black hair, bits of raw meat, white teeth, and bones on the pepper plants. She knelt down to look for the third pepper she wanted to pick. Two minutes later, she looked up again. All she could do was blink and stare.

  “What . . . the . . . hell?” she whispered.

  She clutched her basket of tainted peppers. She had a sinking feeling that she needed all her senses right now. She was light-headed from the intensity of her confusion . . . and her fear.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  Where the field of purple flowers had been was a lake. Its waters were calm, reflecting the bright half moon like a mirror. Did the peppers exude some sort of fume that caused hallucinations? She wouldn’t be surprised. When they were overly ripe, they softly smoked and sometimes even sizzled. But she was not only seeing a lake, she smelled it, too—jungly, with the tang of brine, wet. She could even hear frogs singing.

  Sunny considered turning tail and running back to the Obi Library. Best to pretend you don’t see anything, a little voice in her head warned. Go back! In Leopard Knocks, sometimes the smartest thing to do when you were a kid who stumbled across some unexplainable weirdness was to turn a blind eye and walk away.

  Plus, she had her parents to consider. She was out late on a Saturday evening and she was in Leopard Knocks, a place non-Leopard folk including her parents weren’t allowed to know about, let alone set foot on. Her parents couldn’t know about anything Leopard related. All they knew was that Sunny was not home, and it was due to something similar to what Sunny’s mother’s mother used to do while she was alive.

  Sunny’s mother was probably worried sick but wouldn’t ask a thing when Sunny returned home. And her father would angrily open the door and then wordlessly go back to his room where he, too, would finally be able to sleep. Regardless of the tension between her and her parents, Sunny quietly promised them in her mind that she would remain safe and sound.

  But Sunny’s dreams had been crazy lately. If she started having them while awake and on her feet, this would be a new type of problem. She had to make sure this wasn’t that. She brought out her house key and clicked on the tiny flashlight she kept on the ring. Then she crept to the lip of the lake for a better look, pushing aside damp, thick green plants that were not tainted peppers or purple flowers. The ground stayed dry until she reached the edge of the water where it was spongy and waterlogged.

  She picked up and threw a small stone. Plunk. The water looked deep. At least seven feet. She flashed her tiny weak beam across it just in time to see the tentacle shoot out and try to slap around her leg. It missed, grabbing and pulling up some of the tall plants instead. Sunny shrieked, stumbling away from the water. More of the squishy, large tentacles shot out.

  She whirled around and took off, managing seven strides before tripping over a vine and then falling onto some flowers, yards from the lake. She looked back, relieved to be a safe distance from whatever was in the water. She shuddered and scrambled to her feet, horrified. She couldn’t believe it. But not believing didn’t make it any less true. The lake was now less than two feet from her, its waters creeping closer by the second. It moved fast like a rolling wave in the ocean, the land, flowers and all, quietly tumbling into it.

  The tentacles slipped around her right ankle before she could move away. They yanked her off her feet, as two then three more tentacles slapped around her left ankle, torso, and thigh. Grass ground into her jeans and T-shirt and then bare skin on her back as it dragged her toward the water. Sunny had never been a great swimmer. When she was a young child, swimming was always something done in the sun, so she avoided it. It was nighttime, but she definitely wanted to avoid swimming now.

  She thrashed and twisted, fighting terror; panic would get her nowhere. This was one of the first things Sugar Cream had taught her on the first day of her mentorship. Sugar Cream. She’d be wondering where Sunny was. She was almost to the water now.

  Suddenly, one of the tentacles let go. Then another. And another. She was . . . free. She scrambled back from the water, feeling the mud and soggy leaves and flowers mash beneath her. She stared at the water, dizzy with adrenaline-fueled fright. For a moment, she bizarrely saw through two sets of eyes, those of her spirit face and her mortal one. Through them, she simultaneously saw water and somewhere else. The double vision made her stomach lurch. She held her belly, blinking several times. “But I’m okay, I’m okay,” she whispered.

  When she looked again, in the moonlight, bobbing at the surface of the lake was a black-skinned woman with what looked like bushy long, long dreadlocks. She laughed a guttural laugh and dove back into the deep. She has a fin, Sunny thought. She giggled. “Lake monsters are real and Mami Wata is real.” Sunny leaned back on her elbows for a moment, shut her eyes, and took a deep breath. Orlu would know about the lake beast; he’d probably know every detail about it from its scientific name to its mating patterns. She giggled some more. Then she froze because there was loud splashing coming from behind her, and the land beneath her was growing wetter and wetter. Sunny dared a look back.

  Roiling in the water was what looked like a ball of tentacles filling the lake. The beginnings of a bulbous wet head emerged. Octopus! A massive octopus. It tilted its head back, exposing a car-sized powerful beak. The monster loudly chomped down and opened it several times and then made a strong hacking sound that was more terrifying than if it had roared.

  The woman bobbed between her and the monster, her back to Sunny. The beast paused, but Sunny could see it still eyeing her. Sunny jumped up, turned, and ran. She heard the flap of wings and looked up just in time to see a huge dark winged figure zip by overhead. “What?” she breathed. “Is that . . .” But she had to save her breath for running. She reached the dirt road and, without a look back or up, kept running.

  The pepper soup smelled like the nectar of life. Strong. It was made with tainted peppers and goat meat. There was fish in it, too. Mackerel? The room was warm. She was alive. The pattering of rain came from outside through the window. The sound drew her to wakefulness. She opened her eyes to hundreds of ceremonial masks hanging on the wall—some smiling, some snarling, some staring. Big eyes, bulging eyes, narrow eyes. Gods and spirits of many colors, shapes, and attitudes. Sugar Cream had told her to shut up and sit down for ten minutes. When Sugar Cream left the office to “go get some things,” Sunny must have dozed off.

  Now the old woman knelt beside her, carrying a bowl of what Sunny assumed was pepper soup. She was hunched forward, her twisted spine making it difficult for her to kneel. “Since you had such a hard time getting the peppers, I went and bought them myself,” she said. She slowly got up, looking pleased. “I met Miknikstic on the way to the all-night market.”

  “He . . . he was here?” So that was him I saw fly by, she thought.

  “Sit up,” Sugar Cream said.

  She handed Sunny the bowl of soup. Sunny began to eat, and the soup warmed her body nicely. Sunny had been lying on a mat. She glanced around the floor for the tiny red spiders Sugar Cream always had lurking about in her office. She spotted one a few feet away and shivered. But she didn’t get up. Sugar Cream said the spiders were poisonous, but if she didn’t bother them, they would not bother her. They also didn’t take well to rude treatment,
so she wasn’t allowed to move away from them immediately.

  “There was a lake,” Sunny said. “Where the tainted peppers and those purple flowers grow. I know it sounds crazy but . . .” She touched her hair and frowned. She was sporting a medium-length Afro these days, and something was in it. Her irrational mind told her it was a giant red spider, and her entire body seized up.

  “You’re fine,” Sugar Cream said with a wave of a hand. “You met the lake beast, cousin of the river beast. I don’t know why it tried to eat you, though.”

  Sunny felt dizzy as her attention split between trying to figure out what was on her head and processing the fact that the river beast had relatives. “The river beast has family?” Sunny asked.

  “Doesn’t everything?”

  Sunny rubbed her face. The river beast dwelled beneath the narrow bridge that led to Leopard Knocks. The first time she’d crossed the bridge it had tried to trick her to her death. If Sasha hadn’t grabbed her by her necklace, it would have succeeded. To think that that thing had family did not set her mind at ease.

  “And then it was Ogbuide who saved you from it,” Sugar Cream continued.

  Sunny blinked, looking up. “You mean Mami Wata? The water spirit?” Sunny asked, her temples starting to throb. She reached up to touch her head, but then brought her hands down. “My mom always talks about her because she was terrified of being kidnapped by her as a child.”

  “Nonsense stories,” Sugar Cream said. “Ogbuide doesn’t kidnap anyone. When Lambs don’t understand something or they forget the real story of things, they replace it with fear. Anyway, you’re still fresh. Most Leopard People know to walk away when they see a lake that should not be where it is.”

  “Is there something on my head?” Sunny whispered, working hard not to drop her bowl. She wanted to ask if it was a spider, but she didn’t want to irritate her mentor any more than she already had by nearly dying.

  “It’s a comb,” Sugar Cream said.

  Relieved, Sunny reached up and pulled it out. “Oooh,” she quietly crooned. “Pretty.” It looked like the inside of an oyster shell, shining iridescent blue and pink, but it was heavy and solid like metal. She looked at Sugar Cream for an explanation.

  “She saved you,” she said. “Then she gave you a gift.”

  Sunny had been attacked by an octopus monster that roamed around using a giant lake like a spider uses its web. Then she’d been saved by Ogbuide, the renowned deity of the water. Then she’d seen Miknikstic, a Zuma Wrestling Champion killed in a match and turned guardian angel, fly by. Sunny was speechless.

  “Keep it well,” Sugar Cream said. “And if I were you, I’d not cut my hair anytime soon, either. Ogbuide probably expects you to have hair that can hold that comb. Also, buy something nice and shiny and go to a real lake or pond or the beach and throw it in. She’ll catch it.”

  Sunny finished her pepper soup. Then she endured another thirty minutes of Sugar Cream lecturing her about being a more cautious rational Leopard girl. As Sugar Cream walked Sunny out of the building into the rain, she handed Sunny a black umbrella very much like the one Sunny used to use a little more than a year ago. “Are you all right with crossing the bridge alone?”

  Sunny bit her lip, paused, and then nodded. “I’ll glide across.” To glide was to drop her spirit into the wilderness (Leopard slang for the “spirit world”) and shift her physical body into invisibility. She would make an agreement with the air and then zip through it as a swift-moving breeze.

  She had first glided by instinct when crossing the Leopard Knocks Bridge for the third time, hoping to avoid the river beast. With Sugar Cream’s subsequent instruction, Sunny had now perfected the skill so expertly that she didn’t emit even the usual puff of warm air when she passed people by. With the help of juju powder, all Leopard People could glide, but Sunny’s natural ability allowed her to glide powder-free. To do it this way was to dangerously step partially into the wilderness. However, Sunny did it so often and enjoyed it so much that she didn’t fret over it.

  “You have money for the funky train?”

  “I do,” Sunny said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “I expect you to prepare a nice batch of tainted pepper soup for me by next week.”

  Sunny fought hard not to groan. She’d buy the tainted peppers this time. There was no way she was going back to the field down the road. Not for a while. Sunny held the umbrella over her head and stepped into the warm, rainy early morning. On the way home, she saw plenty of puddles and one rushing river, but thankfully no more lakes.

  NSIBIDI FOR “NSIBIDI”

  This book will never be a bestseller. The language in which it is written is much like that of the highest level of academia. It is selfishly exclusive by definition. It is self-indulgent. This is the nature of anything written in the mystic juju-rooted script known as Nsibidi.

  You can hear me. You are special. You are in that exclusive group. You can do something most Leopard People cannot. So shut it down, turn it off, power down, log off. You feel the breeze; it is warm and fresh. It smells like palm and iroko leaves, damp red soil; they have not started drilling for oil here. There are few roads, so leaded fuel has not poisoned the air. There is a dove in the palm tree on your right, and it looks down at you with its soft, cautious black eyes. A mosquito tries to bite you and you slap your arm. Now you scratch your arm because you were too slow.

  Walk with me . . .

  —from Nsibidi: The Magical Language of the Spirits

  2

  YAAAAWN

  “In social studies we learn about history, geography, and economics. We put it all together so that we can study how we live with one another,” Mrs. Oluwatosin said as she sat in her chair at the front of the class. “But in many ways, social studies class is all about you. It should help you look at yourself and ask, ‘Who am I? And who do I want to be when I am an adult?’ So today, I want to ask you all: Who do you want to be? What do you want to do when you grow up?”

  She paused, waiting. No one in the class raised a hand. Sunny yawned, pushing up her glasses for the millionth time. She was too busy navigating an intense magical world to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up. She’d only managed two hours of sleep after she’d returned home. And those two hours were plagued by thoughts of the giant lake-dwelling octopus that had tried to grab her. What the hell was its problem? she wondered for the millionth time. She’d been too sluggish to bother with breakfast, and though she’d finished all her homework, she could barely remember what she’d done. Beside her, Precious Agu raised a hand. Mrs. Oluwatosin smiled with relief and nodded for her to speak.

  “I want to be president,” Precious said with a grand smile.

  There was a pause, and then the entire class burst out laughing.

  “You can’t be president when you are not rich,” Periwinkle said from the other side of the room.

  “What will your husband think?” a boy beside him asked. They slapped hands.

  Precious cut her eyes at them and turned away, hissing. “You people are still living in the Dark Ages,” she muttered.

  “Because we live on the Dark Continent,” Periwinkle retorted, and the class laughed harder.

  “Quiet!” Mrs. Oluwatosin snapped. “Precious, that is a fine idea. Nigeria could use its first female president. Hold on to your dream and study hard, and you may be the one to make it come true.”

  Precious seemed to swell with pride, despite the snickering of the boys. Sunny watched all this through her groggy haze. She liked Mrs. Oluwatosin. She had just joined the faculty at Sunny’s exclusive secondary school, and she was a welcome addition; she was the type of teacher who truly believed in the potential of her students.

  Periwinkle raised his hand. When Mrs. Oluwatosin called on him, he said, “I want to be chief of the police force.”

  “So that people can be dashing you money all
over the place?” Jibaku asked.

  More laughter.

  Periwinkle nodded. “I plan to have many, many wives, so I’ll need to make extra money to keep them all happy.” He winked at Jibaku, and she sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes.

  “You’ll be lucky to even have one wife,” she retorted. “With your fat head.”

  Sunny chuckled, resting her chin on her hands. Jibaku’s meanness was certainly funnier when it wasn’t aimed at her. She shut her eyes for a moment, feeling sleep try to take her. In the darkness behind her eyes she felt that thing again, like something was pulling her to the left and something else was pulling her to the right. It was unsettling, but for a moment she tried to analyze it. Doing so made her stomach lurch. She felt her body sway and was about to open her eyes when she heard snoring.

  Oh no! I’m asleep, she thought, quickly opening her eyes, sure people would be staring at her. No one was, thank goodness. Apparently her snoring had been in her head.

  “Orlu,” Mrs. Oluwatosin said. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Sunny perked up. Orlu was at the front of the class so she couldn’t see his face. She’d barely had a chance to say hello to him this morning, but it seemed Orlu had gotten a fine night’s sleep. She wondered what his mentor, Taiwo, had him doing last night and how he’d been able to return early enough to sleep well.

  “A zoologist, I think,” he said. “I love studying animals.”

  “Very nice,” Mrs. Oluwatosin said. “That’s an excellent career. And an exciting one, too.”

  Sunny agreed. Plus, Orlu was already like a walking encyclopedia when it came to creatures and beasts, magical or non-magical.