Baba had frowned down at her. Then he sighed and asked, “Akai-ma?”
Ajany had looked back at Nyipir, as unworried as a favorite cat, while Odidi made throat-cutting gestures at her behind his father’s back.
“What do I do?” Nyipir’s brow had gone up.
Nothing, she hoped.
Nyipir contemplated her.
He nodded.
They resumed their trek. Odidi moved close to pull her hair. “Olwenda,” he hissed.
So what if she was a cockroach? She stuck her tongue out at him. “Baba,” Odidi announced, “everyone does their share of work.”
Nyipir looked over his shoulder at Ajany.
She smiled at him. He laughed, stooped so she could ride on his shoulders in their northward journey.
“Olwenda!” mouthed Odidi.
She stuck fingers into her mouth, stretched it, and crossed her eyes at him.
Ajany learned from Galgalu how to bind the camels’ feet; she milked the camels and mimicked him as he murmured to the animals’ secret anxieties. At night, under the stars, Odidi, whose stomach served as her pillow, showed her Kormamaddo, the camel of the skies, and as he did, she knew she was as safe as a seed enclosed in a warm, thick pod.
The Turbi market. Even now she remembered the smell of moneymaking, life’s tensions abandoned to bargaining in an exchange of wit and energy. Trust extended. Wall Street heated up, and the commodities bleated. They left with a well-bred Boran bull, probably rustled off someone’s farm, five top-grade cows, two Somali camels, and four Rendille camels, placed on a lorry and driven to Wuoth Ogik. When they returned to the ranch fifteen days later, Akai-ma did not scold. She seemed not to have noticed that Ajany had gone. They quarantined the new animals. Later, the men branded them with the 
family sign before introducing the newcomers to the family herd.
Memory of bare feet squishing the boma earth. Intoxicating smells of life. Peering through holes in the thorny fence at a horizon that spilled into a shimmering dome. The longing for her people is a sudden sizzling ache. What if I had stayed? Damp eyes blink at the thought. Ajany walks and imagines Odidi’s water songs. They should have gone together Far Away.
In the middle of her first year at the University of Nairobi, into which she had scraped with the lowest grade allowed, she had hidden in the design lab, reading design magazines from other corners of the globe. There she had spotted a small advertisement. A Nova Scotia — based center of fine arts sought candidates from all over the world to infuse soul into a two-year art, design-in-landscape, and new-technology experiment. The only African applicant, Ajany was accepted by default. She fit the exotic indigenous-person profile.
Odidi had scrutinized the document before screwing up his face. “The shags of Canada — nothing there that you can’t do here.” Odidi added, “Here, we belong.” Ajany had stared at the black of the road next to which they stood. “Us. We stay here, ’Jany.”
She waited a moment. Stammered, “ ’Didi, don’t see it. Can’t see it here.” She tapped her chest.
He had said, “Not about seeing.”
Teardrops in lashes. She thought a little about that, her face contorting under doubt. With fright in her eyes, she whispered, “Let’s go, Odi.” Heart pounding: “Let’s go, Odi.… Thh-th-this …” She grunted to a stop.
“This,” emphasized Odidi, his hand up in the air, “this is home.” Tears in his gaze, voice firm. “Home.”
“How?” She would do anything to feel as he felt.
Odidi watched her, rocking on his heels.
She pleaded, “You p-promised, ’Didi.” She coughed, stared at the concrete pavement. A frown creased her face. Was it possible that two separate feelings of place could exist between them? What if she stayed? Instant nausea. So she had shivered, turned, and watched the confident braggadocio of other students, those who had been given coordinates to destinations to which she would never be invited. The noisy weight of a hundred silent terrors that she could escape — here was her chance. Odidi. She saw his rootedness, compared it with her floundering. A panicked question had burst through her lips: “Why does Obarogo need eyes? What’s he looking for inside darkness?”
Shadows crisscrossed her brother’s face. He almost said something, uttered a plea. But shutters fell, and instead he barked, “Choose.”
Ajany saw herself inside Odidi’s eyes, paused before she tore at the convoluted cords that entwined their lives, felt every cut in her bones and being. She had stood close to him, almost on his shoes. Not touching him, but keeping her face close to his chest. Realizing this was how death happened, this loneliness. She had closed her eyes, and murmured Odidi, while inside her heart a cool breeze floated. She had held on to her brother, memorized the sensation of his securing arms; she pulled down his head and kissed the leaf scar on his forehead. He’ll find me, she had told herself. He always did. She had said, “You said we’d go Far Away. You said ‘together.’ ”
He waited.
She waited.
Nothing.
She let him go and drifted into Elsewhere alone.
The funereal silence of her departure was colored by a tinge of shame, of giving up. Impulse of flight, its red-eye rimmed guilt, like she was a haunted bird. “Peace,” she thought. That is how she soothed herself. “Peace.” Except it wasn’t.
She did not know then of the riddles Odidi had discovered in a book off a shelf in Wuoth Ogik until now.
Three children ambling home with family goats and sheep, the sun against the mountains, and white birds singing as they circle a destination. A yellow van hurtles across the landscape. The same potholed sliver of road that had rattled Ajany’s body almost twenty years ago does so again, the same kind of policeman manning inconvenient roadblocks, waylaying wayfarers. Travel companions still reek of rancid butter, the desert’s special sweat. Pulse of language — Kiswahili for trade, English spots, and fifteen murmured dialects — this was how they crossed worlds. The bus sways. View from a dust-dotted window. Stunted flame trees, yellow-blooming cassias, and giant milkweed with white, purple, and pink flower clusters. A child cries; the bus stops. Qhat and livestock traders gather.
The bus conductor is squat, round-shouldered, and bouncy-haired, like a French pop star. The bus is his stage. He pleads for passengers to board in the voice of a frustrated muezzin. “Waabiria wapenzi …” Beloved passengers. A woman screeches last-second instructions laden with “don’t”s—Msi … Usi—and heaves herself into the bus. Her translucent buibui shimmers, slips off her caramel shoulders with their henna patterns of whorls and flowers. She targets a stern red-bearded passenger immersed in an intricately scripted book of wisdom, and says she is menopausal and must have a window seat. The red-bearded man dives for the back of the bus, squashes himself next to baskets of live chickens. Goats are secured to the roof of the bus.
They are on their way.
And then it is 4:50 a.m.
Welcome to the City of Nairobi. A scarred sign hangs lopsided. The morning leaches multicolored chill. The bus conductor, now a fussy grandmother, tells passengers about Nairobi’s breed of majambazi, wahuni. Wait for the eye of the sun, he suggests.