CHAPTER 5 - FIRST STEPS
1062 Words
TOLA'S POV
The first week didn’t feel like espionage.
Not really.
It felt like errands—complicated errands, yes, but errands all the same. My life had been filled with them before: rushing across Lagos to pay NEPA bills before the office closed, queuing for hours at the bank only to be told the network was down, fetching vegetables at the market when my mother insisted the ones in the fridge had “lost their strength.” Those things had always drained me, left me grumbling under my breath about how nothing ever worked the way it should.
Now, though, every task carried an extra layer, an invisible thread binding me to something far larger. I wasn’t just processing receipts anymore. I was embedding encrypted GPS coordinates into refund slips, camouflaging information in plain sight.
I wasn’t just taking photographs of busy street corners—random snapshots like a bored tourist. I was watching the way shadows tilted against walls, then inverting them later to reveal coded messages. I wasn’t just handing over bags of okra to strangers at Ajala or Balogun Market; I was sliding folded notes between the vegetables, praying the intended recipient would find them and no one else.
To the world, I was invisible. Just another young woman weaving through Lagos traffic, sweating under the sun, sighing at danfo conductors who refused to give change. Ordinary. Forgettable.
But beneath the ordinariness, I was part of something far more dangerous.
I had become Courier Seventeen.
The Couriers weren’t what I had imagined—not like spies in Nollywood thrillers or the Hollywood ones I half-watched when I couldn’t sleep. They weren’t people in leather jackets with guns strapped beneath their shirts. They were a network. A lifeline. A bloodstream running beneath the surface of Lagos, carrying truths too fragile to survive on their own.
I was beginning to understand that now.
The fragments we carried weren’t gossip or petty secrets. They were heavy. A journalist’s final notes before he was silenced. A whistleblower’s safehouse coordinates. A list of stolen funds hidden in an accountant’s ledger. Names, places, times—bits of information that, if they fell into the wrong hands or simply vanished into the city’s chaos, could mean lives erased, stories buried, futures lost.
“We move information in plain sight.”
That was the first message I ever received from the Network. At the time, I thought it sounded noble, almost poetic. Like something you could frame on a poster and hang in a university hallway.
But after the first handful of assignments, I realized just how delicate it all was. A missed code. A receipt misplaced. A photograph taken from the wrong angle. A note dropped into the wrong bag of vegetables. One slip, and someone could lose everything.
Sometimes I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, and think about how much of this world’s survival depended on such tiny, breakable details. The thought made me nauseous. And yet, it was also the first time in years that I woke up in the mornings already alert, my pulse racing—not from dread at another day of answering emails for faceless customers, but from the knowledge that I was carrying something that mattered.
Still, no one could ever know.
Not my mother, who already complained that I seemed distracted on our phone calls. Not my friends, who only saw me when I mustered enough energy to drag myself out of the house for drinks. Not the neighbors who nodded at me when I returned from my evening walks. To all of them, I was still just Tola Ede, the tired customer support rep with a stubborn laptop and a job too boring to describe.
But in the shadows of another world, I was Courier Seventeen.
And yet… it wasn’t without cost.
The stress lived in my body, pressing into me like an old, unwanted tenant. My abdomen bloated unpredictably; fatigue dragged at my limbs no matter how much I slept. Sometimes there was a stabbing ache in my side that came and went like a warning bell. I told myself I would rest after the next mission. And the one after that. And after the one where I nearly tripped leaving a note behind a bench in Marina, my heart hammering as if every passerby could see what I had done.
But the truth was, I didn’t rest. I couldn’t. The missions were small, but they kept me sharp. Restless. Afraid in ways I didn’t yet have language for.
And underneath the fear was something I hated to admit—something sharp, quick, alive. Excitement.
I remembered Ajala Market constantly. The clamor of voices, the smell of roasted corn and exhaust fumes, the way Storyteller had slipped the folded Ankara into my hand like it was nothing. But what I remembered most wasn’t even him—it was the moment before. The instant when I had been threading through the crowd and felt a shift.
Another pair of eyes.
Not Storyteller’s. Not the Couriers’.
Someone else.
I had dismissed it at first, chalked it up to my nerves. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew it hadn’t been my imagination. Someone had followed me that day. Close enough to make the hairs on my arms prickle. Silent enough to vanish when I turned my head.
The Couriers hadn’t mentioned it again, but the thought gnawed at me.
What if the people watching weren’t allies? What if they weren’t impressed by my pattern-seeing, puzzle-solving curiosity, but threatened by it?
What if my name was already on a list somewhere, waiting for me to make a mistake?
Late at night, when the hum of my laptop fan was the only sound in my apartment, I’d close my eyes and replay the market in my mind. The press of bodies. The weight of Storyteller’s gaze. And the ghost of that other presence—like a current at my back, unseen but undeniable.
I wasn’t just carrying secrets anymore.
I was being watched.
And whether I liked it or not, that made me something else entirely.
Not just Tola. Not just Courier Seventeen.
Something in between.
Someone living in the shadow space where ordinary life blurred into something dangerous.
And the terrifying thing was… a part of me wanted to keep going.
- Writer
