When he got to the part about my family, I screamed. I jumped up, knocking over my cup of water. I didn’t know where to go, so I just stood there. I just stood there. My chest tight, the heart inside it beating strong again. My legs strong. My flesh naked. My okuoko, which were now past my waist, vibrating. I pressed my hands against the sides of my face. Then I lifted my dress to my knees and did my village’s fire dance, stamping my feet hard to make my anklets jingle. When I looked at my legs, I saw that I didn’t have any anklets. I danced anyway, hearing the jingling in my mind.
“I spoke to the Root,” Mwinyi laughingly explained as I danced and danced with joy. “And it opened up. And we were able to get everyone out.”
“Everyone,” I said, stretching my hands toward the window, toward outer space. “No one was hurt?”
“Everyone was well,” Mwinyi said.
I whirled around, ran to him, threw my arms around him, and kissed him long and hard. And through my okuoko, I threw a blue spark, the size and shape of a large tomato, at Okwu. I jumped back and began to dance again and when I saw Okwu vibrating its dome with laughter, I danced harder. My family was alive! My family was alive! The Root was alive, even if the house built on it had been burned to ash. We survive.
“How?” I asked.
When Mwinyi told me what my mother had said, I stared at him in awe. “She used her mathematical sight?” I whispered. “My mother, she sees the math in the world, she was born with it. That’s where the sharpness of my gift comes from. She was never trained, though. She just used it to protect the family during storms, to fortify the house, sometimes to heal you if you were sick. My mother is so powerful.” I laughed to myself, tears welling up in my eyes. “I can’t believe it! Thank the Seven, praise the Seven, the Seven are great, they make circles in the sand!” That was why I couldn’t see her during my fevered zinariya visions. While everyone else had moved from the walls to get away from the smoke and heat, my mother had gone toward the danger to find the spot that woke the Root’s defenses.
“I’ve contacted my home,” Mwinyi added. “They are sending people to meet with the Himba. Your man Dele will lead the meeting with them.”
I paused at him referring to Dele as my “man,” but quickly moved on. “Dele was there?” I remembered. “Oh! Mwinyi, he was the Night Masquerade! I saw him! I saw him!” I wrapped my arms around myself, tears welling in my eyes.
“The Himba Council did betray you,” Mwinyi said. “But Dele didn’t. He was there as the Night Masquerade to give you hope and strength.”
I listened in silence as Mwinyi explained. This part I had to let sink in. The Night Masquerade was a secret society of men? And Dele was in it? A part of me still rejected this. That first time I’d seen it from my bedroom window, it had looked like a creature, not a man in a costume. And what of my uncle and my father who had also seen it? Did they know of the tradition too?
Regardless, I felt good. About everything. The war had begun again, my home would never be what it was, but this, I understood more than ever now, was inevitable. Change was inevitable and where the Seven were involved, so was growth. My family was alive, the Enyi Zinariya were going to meet them and help Osemba survive and evolve. And if any people knew how to survive and evolve, it was the Enyi Zinariya. Osemba would change and grow.
Dele was not a harmonizer, but he had come of age with me and he had to have learned something about himself after what happened with the Himba Council. He’d just started his apprenticeship to be the next Himba chief and, rigid and traditional as he was, he’d already broken out of the mold when he believed the council had made a mistake. His love and protectiveness of his people was strong enough to push tradition to grow. Dele was ready for what was coming and I felt good about what he’d do.
It was then that I remembered something else and my heart began to pound like crazy because it had already been three days. There was no going back home with ease. I reached into the pocket of my right hip where I had kept it. I wasn’t wearing the same dress, but maybe… my shoulders slumped. The edan pieces and its inner golden ball weren’t there. It was lost.
“New Fish,” I said. “Okay, I am ready to hear your explanation.” I reached into my left front pocket as I sat down. I felt the edge of something sharp. I grinned as I shoved my hand further in and grasped the golden ball. “Thank the Seven,” I whispered. “And thank my family.”
“I am young and there wasn’t much time,” New Fish said to me.
Mwinyi was sitting on the floor, with his chest pressed to it, his arms out as he pressed his palms to the floor. “It’s how I hear her clearest,” he said when I looked at him questioningly.
I nodded at him and looked at Okwu, who just said, “Tell me when she has finished.”
“I don’t know much,” New Fish continued. “Most Miri 12s never do this. We don’t become more. We are ships because we like to travel, that’s what mother said. Until she harbored you. Then she started thinking. Even before Mwinyi called out to her. So she told me about ‘deep Miri’ and how I had to work it. We have breathing chambers.
“My mother said that before I was born, my chambers were seeded from her inner plants. Those plants not only produce the gases for us to breathe when we leave planets with breathable atmospheres, but they also carry bacteria, good viruses, and other microorganisms, and these microbes go on to populate every part of my body. But they populate the breathing chamber most passionately when a Miri 12 is new born like me.
“When your body was placed in my chamber, my microbes went to work. You are probably more microbes than human now.”
I frowned. “What does that mean? I look and feel like myself. I remember who I am. I was dead, right?”
“That is the ‘deep Miri’ my mother said would happen. I don’t understand it, myself. But they blended with your genes and repaired you, regrew your arm and legs, then pulled you back. There is one thing, though.” She stopped talking for a moment and I was relieved. I needed to think.
I was dead. This fact echoed through my brain, ricocheting off the walls and slamming back again and again. I was dead, I was dead, I was dead. I remembered joining the Seven. Was I even me now? I was physically more Miri 12 than human. I touched the okuoko on my head and my temples throbbed. I raised my hands and typed and pushed the message to Mwinyi with more ease than I’d experienced while on Earth. “Am I still Enyi Zinariya?” I asked. My world stayed steady and there were no voices. I didn’t look toward the window to see if there was a tunnel in space or a strange planet bouncing beside Saturn.
“You will always be Enyi Zinariya,” he responded, his green words appearing before me in crisp letters. I touched them and they faded away like incense smoke.
“What is Enyi Zinariya?” New Fish’s words floated at me in bright pink and I gasped.
Mwinyi gasped too.
“Did she send it to you, too?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’ve absorbed some of you, too, Binti,” she said. And again, the room lit up with the orange-pink color.
“The Enyi Zinariya are my tribe, our tribe,” Mwinyi said. “We got our name from the Zinariya people who visited and changed us long ago.” He cut his eyes at me and added, “You might know us as ‘the Desert People.’”