Page 94 of The Merciless Ones
I look up at him again. “I made you this way, didn’t I?” Another low whisper. Another hesitant confession.
Keita nods. “Yes.”
The words settle heavy as a mountain on my shoulders. “The jatu in the Oyomosin and in the alley, that was me too?” Another question – another answer I haven’t been able to admit to myself.
So I let Keita do it.
“Yes,” he says.
“How are you certain?”
“Because when I died, your face was the last thing I saw, and when I was called back from the Afterlands, it was your voice calling me here, telling me to use the fire.” He pulls my chin up, looks deep into my eyes. “Maybe that’s the other reason I don’t feel bad about this – because it was you. It’s always been you.”
I nod, not even sure how to respond to that. Still, I force myself to put together the words I’ve been dreading, the words I haven’t wanted to say all this while. “Do you think I’m a god, Keita?” I whisper.
Keita shakes his head. “No.”
I exhale.
“But I think you might become one.”
Any sense of relief I have shatters.
Hands trembling, I display the piece of my robe I wiped the Idugu’s blood on. “I got some of the Idugu’s blood,” I say hurriedly.
“You can probe it for answers as we ride tomorrow. For now, we need to concentrate on what’s in front of us. Eat. Replenish yourself.” He gestures at the food.
I nod, reluctantly bite into a roasted succulent Asha foraged, the juicy plumpness of the desert fruit like ashes in my mouth. My appetite is gone, and the food sits in my stomach like a lump of coal. It’s all I can do not to cry. Then I notice Keita staring at me.
“What?”
“Free will,” he says finally.
When I just stare at him, he explains: “Before, I didn’t have choices. I just had paths to follow. They were prescribed, and they were narrow. Even avenging my family, that was a path – that was what was expected. Then I met you. Everything I’ve done since then, I’ve done of my own volition. You aren’t responsible for my actions, Deka, just as I’m not responsible for yours.
“When I heard you calling, I could have chosen not to come back. But I did. Free will. I’m here because I want to be, Deka, and I love you because I want to. No one’s forcing me; it’s my choice.”
This declaration, it’s almost more than my heart can take. No one’s ever explained it so eloquently, and to think it came from Keita, the boy who only ever speaks when he thinks it’s necessary. I blink back the tears in my eyes. Squeeze his hand.
“I love you too.”
It’s the most important declaration of love I’ve ever made, given that in two days we’ll be back at Abeya, where I’ll have to confront the mothers while also staving off the Idugu’s army. And it’s one that I hope will be enough to sustain Keita if everything goes wrong and the worst befalls us.
Befalls me.
When I touch the cloth containing the Idugu’s blood early the next morning, I’m able to sink into their memories within moments. No hesitation, no waiting – one touch and I’m Okot, Anok’s counterpart. One of the Idugu.
And now I see the fissures in our affinity.
They begin slowly, as these things do. A word here, a flash of emotion there, a lightning storm on an otherwise calm day.
In the time before times, I understood Anok perfectly. She was me and I was her. My counterpart. My perfect equal. But millennia have passed since Anok and I were one. Now we are two different entities, just barely connected, our affinity – the tether that binds us – frayed at the edges. Anok and Okot. Two instead of one. Male and female instead of a collective.
Before we divided ourselves, we did not have names. We did not need them. We only were. Then we became two, and those designated as males took names that started with the same letter as our female siblings. Only I did not. I decided instead on a name that was similar in sound, rhythm and meaning to Anok’s. To show that we would always be one. Anok and Okot. Two sides of one darkness.
But more and more, she has been hiding things from me. I see it in flashes. Green, grey, white. Deception, malice, unease. Colours that once did not exist in us. Now, they’re inside me and they’re inside her. They’re inside all of us, except—
“Creation…” Hyobe hisses, his distress rattling through our affinity. “Do you not feel it, Okot?”