Everyone was quiet.
Ayim was still looking at his palms. Sena had not moved her hand from his arm. They could not understand what had just happened.
Elder Segun cleared his throat.
"You are tired," he said, "You have been flying all around Befa aimlessly, why won't you be tired and begin going into false trances, your mind is—"
"I know what I saw."
"You know what you think you saw."
"Segun." That was Elder Kwarteng. He did not say anything else. Just the name. Elder Segun adjusted his robes and said nothing further, but his expression said everything.
Elder Womegah stood, straightening. "We are done with what we came here to do, the matter of Ore's Dambe—"
"Forgotten," said a voice.
Everyone turned.
Elder Lamisi had not moved from her seat. She was the oldest of the four, the one who had said nothing the entire session, and she was looking at the gang, her gaze very sharp.
"Sit," she said. "All of you."
They sat.
She looked at the Adinkra and Nsibidi carved glass walls for a long moment, at the dark water beyond them, at the creatures moving through it in their slow unbothered way. When she spoke, her voice was low and even, and very peaceful.
"Before there was Befa," she said, "there was a ship."
No one moved. "Lamisi, should you be telling them this?" asked Elder Kwarteng.
"The people on that ship had names. They had farms, and songs, and children who were waiting for them. They had gods they prayed to and debts they were owed and morning routines and favourite foods and lots of things they had not yet finished doing." She used her stick to hit the ground. "And then men with no souls came, and all those did not matter anymore."
Idowu had stopped fidgeting, and Joojo was very still.
"The ocean received them," Lamisi continued, "because something much more powerful than the ocean itself had been listening. Because one woman on one ship, in the dark of the hold, pressed her face against the wood and called on her ancestors. And the ancestors heard."
She looked at each of them in turn.
"Her name was Adwoa. She sang for kings and queens. Her voice was like none anyone had ever heard. The ones that came before us said her voice could calm a storm, and she used that voice to pray, and that prayer opened a door that had never been opened before. Every soul the ocean received after that came through the same door. Every person who built this island, every child born into Befa, every one of you — you are here because of what Adwoa asked for in the dark."
"She asked for sanctuary," Lamisi said. "Not power. Not revenge. Sanctuary. A place apart. A place the soulless ones could never reach, could never touch, could never find." She finally looked away from them, back at the water. "The prayer is still active. It is in the walls of this island. It is in the water around it. It is in you, in your blood, in the abilities your bodies carry. Adwoa's prayer is the reason you are breathing."
The stool room was very quiet.
"There is a world out there," she said, "but to expose our world to them is to step outside this reason. The prayer asks one thing in return for everything it gives. Stay apart. Stay hidden. Stay ours." She turned back to Ayim then, her eyes very serious. "Whatever you saw in that vision, Ayim — whatever is happening in that world, it is not our concern. It cannot be. The moment we make it our concern, we break the terms of the only thing standing between us and everything that was done to our ancestors."
She stood.
"That is all."
They filed out in silence. The four elders first, then the gang. Nobody spoke until they were back in the corridor, the elevator rising slowly, the underwater chamber disappearing below them.
Ayim did not come with them immediately.
He stood at the glass wall for a moment, alone, looking out at the water. The same water that had received Kofi. That had received Adwoa. That had kept them, changed them, built something from the worst thing ever done. He pressed one hand flat against the glass and felt the cold of it, the pressure of the ocean beyond it, four hundred years of it, all that weight, all that history, all that prayer still holding them up.
He stood there a long time.
By evening they were under the mango tree.
The light in the Odum district at evening was blue-green and soft, the bioluminescence in the ground itself beginning to throb gently as the sun pulled back, and the island made its slow shift from day to night.
Nobody had spoken much on the way there.
Idowu broke it first. "She wasn't wrong ooo," he said, staring at the sky. "About Adwoa. About the prayer." He paused. "But those people in the vision were screaming. Ayim, they were calling you by name. You said that. They were calling for help and they know your name." He sat up. "How is staying hidden holy when people are dying up there? How is it not just fear wearing a holy name?"
"It's not fear," Sena said. "Lamisi is not afraid. She's protecting something real."
"She's protecting something real by doing nothing."
"Idowu—"
"I'm not saying she's wrong!" He put his hands up. "I'm saying maybe this prayer has room for more than she thinks. Maybe Adwoa didn't ask to hide forever. Maybe she asked for long enough."
Joojo said nothing. He was looking at the roots of the mango tree.
Ayim too had not spoken. He was thinking about the hand rising from the ocean. The way it felt ancient and familiar at the same time. The way the figures in the vision had faces from Befa but two of them didn't, two of them were from somewhere he could not place, and all the wailing and looking up and calling his name. He did not know what to do, but it troubled him.
"I know someone."
They all looked at Ore.
She was sitting apart from the rest, back against the trunk, knees pulled up. She had been quiet so long they had almost forgotten she was there.
"My great grandmother," she said. "She lives in Irunmole. She is the oldest living person in Befa, and she was alive closer to the beginning than anyone else here. She is an Ìyánífá." She looked at Ayim. "If anyone knows what the prayer actually covers, what it allows and what it doesn't, what that vision means — it is her."
Idowu opened his mouth.
"I already know what you're going to say," Ore said. "Yes. Let's go."
Irunmole at night was different from the rest of Befa. It was way quieter, but market noises of the evening drifted in from other districts, the ground had the same glow of bioluminescence as the other districts. There were many carved bone pillars lining the main path, older than anything in the rest of Befa, older than the palace in the Odum district, older than almost anything on the island. On the bone pillars were various ancient symbols none of them really understood.
Ore walked ahead of them.
They turned off the main path into a smaller one, then a smaller one again, until they were in front of a house that sat slightly apart from the others, at the end of the lane. It was small. Much smaller than Ayim expected for the oldest living person in Befa. It looked like it had been there since the island itself, like the island had grown up around it instead of the other way.
Ore stopped in front of the door.
She raised her hand to knock. "Ago ilé, Agoo," she called.