Noor(11)

He was yelling again. Then he lowered his voice and was speaking. Rapidly, as if rushing to get the words out before they escaped him. I opened my eyes and we just stared at each other. I moved my eyes from his mouth to his eyes, and he stopped shoving his gun at me.

“What are you doing to my cows,” he growled. He spoke English like someone who had been taught in school and enjoyed the teaching.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was . . . I was just resting.”

“What kind of woman are you?”

I blinked, irritation so intense flooding into me that I lost my fear for my life and resignation to my death. I dropped my hands and he flinched. Even then I wasn’t bothered. I slapped his gun to the side. “Why do you all keep asking me that?” I said. I stepped back and fell over the rump of the resting cow behind me. “Ahhh!” I exclaimed, then I just lay there, as he ran around the cow and pointed his gun at me.

“You’re an abomination,” he growled. “Maybe that’s why you are going toward one.”

“You’re an abomination!” I screamed back. I rolled to the side and couldn’t hold it in anymore.

He stood there and watched me cry. Then he sat down and just kept watching. My brain was finally processing the last twenty-four hours. I saw my hand smash the beautiful man’s face. I was grabbing my purse as I left my apartment for the market. I was driving in the night. The men were staring at me. I was getting into my car. Time seemed to have both stopped and was happening all at once. I wept harder, my cheek pressed to the dirt. I covered my face with my hands and the cool of my cybernetic hand in the heat of the growing day was soothing. But I couldn’t fully raise my left arm.

“Are you . . . alive? Like a human being?” he whispered. He put his gun down.

I glared at him. I could move faster than him. I could have smashed his face as I’d done to three of the men at the market yesterday. His face gave me pause and I stopped crying as I studied it. He couldn’t have been much older than me, if he weren’t actually younger. His skin was weathered and deeply bronzed by the sun, but he didn’t look like one of those northerners who needed water. There was no worry or helplessness on his face. Instead, there was a freshness to him. And he had large dark brown eyes that were wide and observant in a way that made me think of an owl. He had sharp high cheek bones and a large scar running up the side of his left cheek. I knew what his question meant, so I answered it. “I am alive,” I said.

A bull nearby awakened and stood up, mooing loudly. “How?” he asked.

“Science,” I said.

He picked up his thick cattle-herding stick instead. I stared hard at it. It had no glowing tip; it wasn’t a Liquid Sword, the infamous and very illegal sword-shaped Taser-like weapon that all the herdsman-turned-terrorists carried and used to kill people. It was just a stick. Phew. We stood eye-to-eye, we were both tall people. I considered sending a mental signal to my legs, making them extend so I’d be taller. “Only bad Fulani herdsman carry Liquid Swords . . . or guns,” I said. “Or so I’ve heard.”

“Times aren’t what they used to be,” he said. Now he picked up his gun. He slung it over his shoulder as he added, “And I don’t carry a Liquid Sword, those are torture devices. But a good Fulani stays alive. Now go away. Leave me and my cattle in peace.” He started walking away and that was when the strange thing happened that had happened to me a few times over the years.

Years ago, not long after I’d had my bionic legs attached, I was sitting in my mother’s yard and a swarm of dragonflies had zoomed around me like wasps and then landed on my arms, head, shoulders, and become still as if someone had hit pause. I loved dragonflies and this was both a terrifying and a delightful moment. After about a minute, they’d zipped off and were gone.

Something similar happened again with hens last year. I’d been walking home with two friends, and we’d cut through someone’s yard. There were five chickens there and they’d blocked my way to the point that my friends both started laughing. They wouldn’t move, rushing at my feet every time I tried to take a step. Then they just surrounded me and stopped. My two friends got scared and ran to get help. But by the time they’d returned, the chickens had gone about their business.

And now here it was happening again. With a white cow and a bull with horns as long as and thicker than my arms, which was scarier. They both stepped in front of me. “What are you doing?” the man asked, turning around.

“I’m not doing anything!” I snapped, backing away from the large bull directly in front of me. The man started speaking in his language at the two cattle, but neither animal responded. “What is happening?” he asked.

The cattle seemed to relax, the bull mooing and the cow backing away from me a bit. But not enough where I could leave. “Fine,” the man said. “You come with us.”

“Huh? Where?”

“Where were you trying to go?”

I paused. Then I just grinned sheepishly at him knowing how I sounded when I spoke. “I have no idea . . . I was . . . I don’t know.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “So close to the Red Eye, with no anti-aejej, nothing, and you . . .” He clucked his tongue and nodded. “Is this suicide?”

“No,” I said.

“So why are you going north without any guide or supplies or plan?”