The Courier's Code

CHAPTER 1-STATIC COMFORT

Tola's POV

The morning sun slipped through the gaps in my threadbare curtains, painting long, uneven stripes across my apartment. It caught the corner of my dented desk, glinted against the chipped edge of my laptop, and made the dust floating in the air look like it was dancing.

The laptop hummed its usual tired whir, steady and faithful, like an old friend who complained but never left.

Outside, Lagos was already awake. I could hear it- the sharp bleat of keke horns, bus conductors slapping the sides of danfos as if they could beat passengers into existence, vendors singing out their prices like the world’s most chaotic choir.

Someone nearby had a speaker turned up too loud, playing a song that cut in and out with static, while the generator across the road coughed and groaned. None of it startled me anymore. It was just the constant soundtrack of living here, the background music to my days.

I adjusted my headset and leaned toward the screen. Another email stared at me, this one laced with that special brand of Nigerian politeness that’s actually an insult.

I sighed and began typing my response, careful, deliberate. My fingers tapped out apologies that weren’t really mine, explanations I didn’t fully believe, promises I couldn’t control.

Dear Mr. Adebayo, we’re very sorry for the delay…

The trick was in the words. A careless adjective could set someone off. A gentle phrase, though, could soothe them enough to wait a little longer. That was the part I was good at. Not the job itself—anyone could type apologies—but the part where I read what they weren’t saying.

That was something my father drilled into me when I was little.

“The world hides its messages, Toluwani,” he used to say, his voice so deep it carried through walls. “If you want to survive it, you must learn to find them.”

Back then, I thought he was just being dramatic, trying to make everything sound like a spy movie.

Breakfast wasn’t just Golden Morn; it came with an anagram scrawled on paper and hidden under my bowl. My lunch box didn’t just have sandwiches; it had riddles tucked inside. Sometimes he’d hand me a note where every third letter spelled something new.

At the time, it was annoying. Who wanted to solve puzzles before eating? I remember once telling him it wasn’t fair, that my friends didn’t have to play detective just to get to their food. He’d smiled at me, eyes dark and tired in a way I didn’t understand then, and said, “Life won’t be fair either. Better you practice now, while the consequences are small.”

By the time I hit secondary school, the puzzles weren’t games anymore. They were just how I saw the world. I couldn’t switch it off. I’d glance at a billboard and spot the missing comma that flipped its meaning.

I would read a price list and instantly know the one figure that was off. I would watch two people chatting and tell, from the way one of them kept their feet angled toward the exit, who was lying.

It was useful, sure. But sometimes it was exhausting too, like my brain wouldn’t let me rest. I couldn’t just see things. I had to see through them.

After work hours, I tried to find pockets of escape.

Recently, that pocket was a small gallery in Surulere. An old colonial house with cracked white paint, wide open windows that did nothing against the heat, and wooden floors that creaked when too many people stood in one spot. Every Thursday, they hosted “open studio” night. No tickets, no pomp—just artists doing their thing while the rest of us pretended to understand.

The gallery had its own atmosphere, its own rhythm. Charcoal dust clung to the air. Paint fumes mixed with the smell of akara frying from the stall across the road.

Students hunched over easels, their shirts smudged with colour. A guitarist might be testing a new riff in the corner, while some poet reads a half-finished piece to whoever would listen. It was chaotic, imperfect, but it made me feel alive in a way that customer service emails never could.

And then there was him.

The others called him Storyteller. I never heard anyone use his real name, and maybe that was the point. He carried it—this nickname—with the ease of someone who didn’t mind mystery.

He was tall, not in the clumsy way tall people sometimes are, but in that deliberate, steady way that makes you notice when he walks into a room. An old film camera always hung around his neck, black and worn at the edges, like it had lived a hundred lives before him.

He had a way of moving through crowds without rushing, yet always catching the best angles, the best moments. His photographs weren’t pretty. They were… alive. Street vendors frozen mid-shout, children leaping over flooded gutters, sweat glistening on a mechanic’s brow. Ordinary things, but not ordinary at all, because if you looked closely, there was always something else.

A shadow shaped like a number. Objects arranged by accident to spell a word.

The first time one of his photographs stopped me cold, it was a boy balancing a basket of onions on his head. In the blurry background, a woman poured groundnut oil into a pot. I thought nothing of it until I saw another photo: a neat row of spice jars labeled with single letters. At first, random. Then I noticed the way their shadows bent across the counter, spelling out 1 and 0.

And then another shot: the wrinkled palm of an old man, cloves resting in the center, nails stained orange. Beside it, a market stall with a jar of paprika glowing dead-center in the frame, like a spotlight had chosen it.

Onions. Oil. Cloves. Paprika.

At first, I told myself I was imagining it. My father’s training was making me see patterns where there were none. But then I overheard him once, explaining to someone else: “Every picture is a sentence. Some people just read the words. Others… notice the secret.”

He had said it casually, like it was nothing. But I couldn’t shake it. The phrase clung to me, lingering in my thoughts long after the night ended. And once I noticed those ingredients, I saw them everywhere in his work, like breadcrumbs dropped across his photographs.

Always separate. Always just out of reach.

It was infuriating. It was fascinating. It felt like a challenge meant only for me.

So maybe that’s why, a few days later, when a strange email landed in my inbox—one that looked like a recipe but wasn’t—I didn’t just delete it.