Chapter Five: The Woman in the Flames
438 Words
Zera didn’t remember walking back to Kwame’s.
Her legs moved on their own, like her body wanted distance from Malik faster than her mind could process it. Rain had soaked her clothes, but her skin felt numb. The word alive echoed over and over in her head.
Her mother was alive.
And she’d been lied to for seven years.
---
Kwame opened the door before she knocked.
“Are you okay?” he asked quickly. He pulled her in, wrapped a towel around her, but she didn’t answer.
Instead, she sat by the edge of his table and whispered, “She’s alive.”
His eyes widened. “Your mum?”
Zera nodded, barely breathing. “Malik told me. She was working against a hidden network. They came after her. She left clues. Clues for me.”
Kwame was silent for a long moment.
Then he said, “If that’s true, you’re not safe. We need to go to the police.”
“No,” Zera said instantly. “That’s what they expect me to do. If this thing is really as deep as Malik says, the police might already be part of it.”
Kwame opened his mouth to argue, but she cut him off.
“I need to find her. Myself.”
---
That night, Zera didn’t sleep.
She dug through her mother’s old box of belongings—books, diary pages, scratched CDs, dusty photo albums. She read every page, listened to every clip, stared into every memory like it might speak.
And then, just before dawn, she found it.
A burned notebook. Half the pages gone. But on the last surviving one, her mother had written something strange in red ink:
“The woman in the flames sings only when the mirror breaks.”
Zera read it twice. Then a third time.
What did it mean?
She stared at the broken mirror on her desk, the one with the scar running through it. Her hand reached out, almost without thinking.
And then—she saw it.
A second triangle. This one smaller. Etched deep into the back of the mirror, behind the glass. Not drawn. Burned.
She grabbed a flashlight and leaned closer.
There were more words below it—so faint she almost missed them.
“Follow the voice in Mombasa.”
Zera sat back, her breath catching in her chest.
Her mother had been born in Mombasa.
The city where it all began.
---
She picked up her phone and called Kwame.
“Pack your things,” she said, voice steady for the first time in days. “We’re going to the coast.”
- Writer
