They had nothing. No mother who stayed, no father who claimed them, no name worth keeping. All Adaeze, Chisom and Nneka had was

The night we robbed Igwe Ochie's palace, I was not afraid. That is the part I think about most when I look back. Not the running, not the blood, not the sound Nneka made when she hit the ground. I think about the fact that my hands were steady. That my breath was even. That somewhere between hunger and desperation, fear had stopped being something I could afford, and I had simply put it down the way you put down a bag that is too heavy for the road ahead. I was eighteen years old. I did not know that was the night that would cut my life into two halves. The before, and everything after. The palace compound was louder than I expected when it broke apart. I had imagined, in all the times we planned it, that it would be clean. Precise. In and out before anyone knew what was missing. Chisom had laughed when I said that. She always laughed at the parts I was most serious about. “Ada,” she had said, wiping her eyes, “When has anything we have ever done been clean?” She was twelve years old and she was right. She was almost always right about those things. It started falling apart before we even had the diamonds in our hands. One moment the courtyard was still, the guards standing at their posts like sleeping trees, the torchlight steady against the red earth walls. Then the doors opened and they dragged me through them, and I watched from across the compound as Nneka's face went pale. I was not supposed to be inside. None of us were supposed to be inside beyond the plan we had already agreed on. But I had been caught outside the wall, ear pressed to a gap in the clay where two men were speaking about the girls in the courtyard and what they were truly gathered for. A guard had found me before I could move. And now I was standing in the middle of Igwe Ochie's compound with my hands held behind my back and every part of the plan dissolving around me. Igwe Ochie turned from the line of girls to look at me. And that was when Nneka moved. I did not expect it from her. Nneka was the quiet one, the careful one, the one who thought twice before she breathed. But she moved, and Chisom moved with her, because that was what those two did when it mattered. They did not wait for me to tell them what to do. They ran toward the table where the diamonds sat on their leopard skin cloth and they grabbed what they could carry and the compound came apart all at once into noise and fire and running feet. The guard holding me loosened his grip for half a second. That was enough. I pulled free and ran toward the back wall. Behind me the courtyard was chaos, girls scattering in every direction, guards shouting over each other, the Dibia's thin voice cutting above everything like smoke. I climbed the wall with bleeding palms, the dried acacia thorns opening small mouths across my skin, and I dropped to the other side and turned with my hand outstretched. Chisom came over first. She landed beside me and immediately looked back up at the wall, breathing hard, diamonds pressed against her chest. We waited. Nneka did not come. What came instead was the sound of her. A sharp cry that stopped too quickly. The sound of something hitting the ground on the other side of the wall. Then voices closing in and the orange rise of torchlight above the wall's edge. Chisom grabbed my arm so hard I felt it in the bone. “Ada,” she whispered. She only ever called me Ada when she was frightened enough to forget herself. “Ada, we have to……” “I know,” I said. I looked at my hand. Still outstretched. Still waiting. I pulled it back. That is the other thing I think about. The pulling back of my hand. How long it took. How it felt like closing a door I did not know was the last time I would stand in that doorway. How Chisom made a sound beside me that was not quite a word and not quite a cry and I grabbed her and I ran, and I did not look back, because looking back would have finished me. We ran until the trees swallowed us. Until the torchlight was gone and the shouting dissolved into distance and there was nothing around us but dark and the smell of river water somewhere ahead and the sound of our own feet finding the ground. I held my sister's hand and I did not let go. Three of us went in that night. Two of us came out. And I have been running ever since. ---