The light in Borno went the color of a struck match before it died, and Emeka Okafor stood in the last of it, watching his American friend give away the final bag of rice.
The two of them had worked it out together over six weeks in the dust — Emeka at his shoulder the whole way, telling him which of the families would take charity and which would rather starve than be seen taking it, teaching him to leave the widow Fanta’s portion by her door at night so no one would watch her stoop for it. And William had learned. The man learned everything. Now the old women called him by a name they had made for him in their own tongue, a soft name, and they laughed when he mangled the words back at them.
He was mangling one now. He crouched in front of a boy no higher than his belt and tried to bless him on his way — a small farewell the mothers said to children, may your path be smooth — except William’s tongue slipped the sounds sideways and turned it into something about a happy goat, and the boy shrieked with laughter, and his mother — Fanta, who had little enough to laugh about — put her hand over her mouth to cover her own smile, and William grinned up at Emeka across the yard like a man who had just been handed the whole world.
“You are terrible,” Emeka called to him in English.
“I’m learning.”
“You are terribly learning,” Emeka said with a warm smile.
Somewhere a generator coughed and caught. Woodsmoke hung low over the compound, cook-fires and dung-fires, and past the mud walls the land ran flat and gray toward the thornbush, one lone hill of granite standing out of the plain like something dropped there and forgotten. A good place. A quiet place, most days. Emeka had told the mission board it was safe enough, and mostly he had believed it, and the part of him that had not believed it he had folded up small and put away, because William had wanted so badly to come, and because the money he brought had built the well and the schoolroom and the clinic that was not yet a clinic, and because it is a hard thing to say no to a man who only wants to give.
An old man came past with his hand pressed to his chest, the way they did, thank you, thank you, and William stood and pressed his own hand to his own chest and bowed his head, and the old man went on toward the gate well pleased. William watched him go. In the failing light his face had the look it got sometimes when he thought no one was watching, a look that was not quite happiness. Something underneath it. Something owed.
“I’m going to pull the truck inside the wall,” Emeka said. “Before it’s full dark.”
“I’ll close up here.”
Emeka lifted a hand and walked toward the gate, toward the dark shape of the mission’s pickup truck — a battered old Hilux, the only vehicle they had — parked against the wall, and he was still ten steps from it when he heard the engines.
Not one engine. Several — a whole column of them, where the only running engine for miles should have been the generator behind him. A sound coming up the road out of the thornbush, low and layered and wrong, and then the headlights, three sets, four, bouncing hard over the ruts and not slowing, and Emeka stood in the open yard with the truck keys in his hand and did not understand what he was seeing until the first gunfire opened the evening apart.
After that it was only pieces.
The gate coming off its hinge under the front bumper of a technical. Men going over the tailgates before the trucks had stopped, men with rifles and the loose black cloth wound around their faces, moving with the awful economy of people who had done this in other places on other peaceful nights. They had not come to take. They had come to the mission because it was a mission — because a rough cross stood over the schoolroom door — and they went through it the way fire goes through dry grass. The generator’s light swinging. The old man who had pressed his hand to his chest at the gate, down in the dirt now and not moving, one sandal gone. Screaming that seemed to come from the walls themselves.
And Will — William — standing in the middle of the yard with his hands half raised, not in surrender, in disbelief, turning toward the people he had spent the last six weeks among, people whose names he had learned one by one.
Emeka’s body moved before his mind did. He was already three strides back into the yard, already opening his mouth to shout the man’s name, when a hand closed on his collar and hauled him down and sideways into the black gap between the storeroom and the wall.
He fought it. He would remember that, after — that he had fought the hand that saved him. A face he knew was beside his in the dark: Bitrus, one of the boys from the schoolroom, taller than his father now and not yet a man. He had gotten there first, and he was not alone. Pressed behind him, small and rigid, was Fanta’s boy — the one who had been laughing not an hour before — and Bitrus had one hand on the boy, keeping him at his back so he would not have to watch. His other arm came across Emeka’s chest like an iron bar, and his voice hissed against Emeka’s ear, over and over, no, no, no, quiet, quiet, while Emeka strained toward the yard and the man he had brought to this place.
He could see it all through the gap. That was the mercy and that was the curse of it. He could see everything and do nothing.
He saw them find William. He saw a fighter raise a rifle to the American’s chest and he saw another knock the barrel down, fast, barking something — not this one, not the white one — and Emeka understood even then, even in the noise, that William’s skin had just bought his life where it bought nothing for anyone else. They knew what a white man could be worth. They did not yet know the half of it.
He saw William go to his knees, not from a blow but to reach a woman who had fallen — and Emeka knew her shape even at that distance, even in that light. Fanta. Down in the open, where the boy could not reach her and William could. He saw William gather her up, saw him put his own body between her and the men, and it was for that — for that and nothing else — that the first rifle stock came down across his back. William folded over her and did not let go. The second blow. The third. He kept his arms around her and turned his face up past the men standing over him, and Emeka could not hear what he said but he could see his mouth moving, and he knew, he knew, that the fool, the beautiful fool, was praying.
It did no good. That was a thing Emeka would carry too — that a good man had covered her with his own body and prayed over her, and it had done her no good at all. When they finally dragged William up under the arms, his feet trailing, and hauled him out through the ruined gate and up over a tailgate, Fanta did not move. She lay where she had fallen. And behind Emeka, against the wall, her son peeked around Bitrus and saw his mother lying lifeless on the ground.
The engines turned over. The lights swung across the walls one last time and were gone, and the sound of them faded out into the thornbush the way it had come, until there was only the generator ticking and the small fires and the sounds people make when the worst has already happened.
Bitrus’s arm came off his chest. Emeka did not move for a long time.
When he finally stood, his legs did not feel like his own. He walked out into the yard. The sacks of rice were trampled into the dirt. The little schoolroom William had built was burning, unhurried, and no one moved to save it, because everyone who might have was dead or gone or holding a body in their arms. Emeka’s hand was still closed around the truck keys, closed so hard the teeth had cut him, and he did not remember doing that.
He got the phone out of his shirt. The screen was cracked; it had been cracked for a month. He stood in the smoke and the settling dust and he found the number he had hoped to God he would never have a reason to call, the daughter, the one who had argued with her father not to go, and he pressed it, and he lifted the broken glass to his ear, and he listened to it ring half a world away in a place where the sun was still up and none of this had happened yet.
A click. A woman’s voice, wary, already braced the way careful people are always braced.
“Yes?”
And Emeka Okafor, who had brought a good man to a bad place because he had not been able to say no, closed his eyes and tried to find the first word.