The Devil Wears Gold

CHAPTER THREE

— Adaeze's POV —

I must have slept.

I didn't mean to. I meant to sit beside him until he was strong enough to be left, and then I meant to stand up, and brush the red dirt from my wrapper, and walk the road to Onitsha as I had planned. I had a plan. I had been so careful with the plan.

But the night was warm and I had been afraid for so long, and something about the current that had moved through me had left me emptied out and heavy the way you feel after weeping, after you have given everything the body has to give and there is nothing left but exhaustion and a strange, hollow peace.

I slept.

The birds wake me.

The Idu birds are merciless in their punctuality. The moment the sky begins to grey not dawn, only the suggestion of dawn, the rumour of it they begin, and they do not stop. I open my eyes to the sound of them and to the light and to the knowledge, immediate and flooding, that I have made a terrible mistake.

I sit up.

The road is empty.

He is gone.

I scramble to my feet and turn in a full circle, slow, disbelieving. The stretch of laterite road in both directions holds nothing no figure, no dark cloth, no obsidian mask catching the early light. The bush on either side is still and unbroken. There is no sound of footsteps, no trail of disturbed undergrowth, no evidence that a man of that size moved through this space at any point in the last hour.

Only the blood remains.

A dark smear of it in the laterite, already drying, already beginning to look like nothing more than a stain the earth made itself. And my compress , the torn hem of my wrapper discarded at the road's edge. Folded, I realize with a lurch. Someone took the time to fold it.

I stand there and I stare at that folded strip of cloth and I feel something I cannot name move through my chest. Not the current from last night something quieter. Something that does not have a name in any language I know.

Then I hear the dogs.

Uncle Tunde's compound dogs have one purpose and they are extraordinary at it. They can track a person by the particular fear scent of their sweat, and I have been afraid and sweating for the better part of six hours, and so it takes them no time at all.

I run.

I am fast. I have always been fast, another of my mother's gifts but the road is open and the dogs are not alone and when I look behind me I can see the torches, four of them, and the compound guards in their brown uniforms, and at the centre of them, not hurrying, because he has never needed to hurry in his life, Uncle Tunde.

He is still in his evening clothes. He did not sleep. He has been searching since he found my room empty, which means he found it early, which means one of the house girls reported me, which means...

A hand catches my arm.

The guard is young and apologetic and completely immovable.

"Nne, biko." Miss, please. His grip is careful but absolute. "Come quietly."

I stop fighting.

Not because I have given up. Because I am looking at my uncle's face as he approaches, and I am learning something new about how afraid I have always been of him learning it by measuring how afraid I am right now, at the maximum, and realising this is what it has always been.

He stops in front of me.

He looks at my wrapper the torn hem, the red dirt ground into the fabric, the dried blood on my hands that has nothing to do with my own body.

'Adaeze,' he says. My name in his mouth has always sounded like a door closing.

I say nothing.

'Where did you go?'

Still nothing.

His jaw tightens. He is not a man who raises his voice, he has never needed to, which has always made him more frightening than the men who shout. He simply looks at me with those flat, flat eyes and then he looks at the guard holding my arm and says, very quietly:

"Take her home."

The compound is awake when they bring me back. Every face in every doorway, the house girls with their wraps half tied, old Chukwu at the gate with his head bowed, all of them watching me cross the compound in my dirt stained wrapper with my hands still marked by a stranger's blood.

I look at none of them.

I look at the udara tree instead. The one Chisom and I used to climb. It is just a tree now , it was always just a tree but looking at it gives me something to do with my eyes that is not looking at my uncle, who walks behind me close enough that I can hear his breathing.

He puts me in my room. Locks the door from the outside. Does not speak.

The new lock is heavy. I heard them fitting it last month and told myself it was for security. I understand now that it was for this, for the eventuality that I would try to leave, and they would need to ensure I did not try again.

Six days, I think.

I sit on my mat and I look at my hands. The blood is drying into the creases of my palm, into the lines a dibia would read if I ever sat before one. My mother's hands. What do you carry now? I think at them. What did you do last night?

The hands don't answer. But they feel different, warmer than they should be, humming faintly at the centre of the palm, like something was poured into them and has not yet finished settling.

I close my fingers.

Outside, the birds have not stopped singing.

I had run toward freedom and returned with nothing but a stranger's blood on my hands and a feeling in my chest I did not yet have the courage to call hope.