That night, they each went to their homes separately.
Ayim flew. Rising above Irunmole's bone pillars and letting the night air of Befa hold him. Below, the island glowed in its blue-green colors, the districts laid out like a map of everything he had ever known, Odum's market quiet now, the Abissa channel catching starlight, the palace of the Nananom dark and wide. He had flown over this island over ten thousand times. It had never looked like something he was already leaving.
Sena flew too, but in a different direction. She did not look back.
Joojo, Idowu and Ore walked. Three people on foot through Irunmole's ancient ruins. Idowu, for once, had nothing to say. Joojo walked with complete, unhurried attention. Ore walked slightly ahead, her wrapped hands loose at her sides, her silver earrings catching the glow of the districts lights. None of them said goodnight when the paths separated. They just went.
Already moving in the pattern of the vision. None of them knew it yet.
The Asafo came before dawn.
The Asafo of Befa, an institution drawn from every district, trained in the traditions of the Akan Asafo companies that had protected the coasts long before the slave ships came. In Befa they wore deep indigo Kaftans with ocean silver at the chest, and they moved in groups, finding the path of least resistance, and arriving exactly where they intended. Each of the five woke up to a handful of them at their door.
They knew what was happening, they were being summoned.
By the Nananom Mpanyinfo
They met in the palace of the Nananom, in the capital district, Gana. This palace was where Befa had always brought its most difficult situations, and made the hardest decisions for the people, it was also where Befa's ruler resided.
Twelve council members sat in a wide arc. They were dressed in their full regalia, ready to make their pronouncements.
The gang filed in and found their places. Ayim saw Ìyá Àṣàbì immediately, where the council members were. She sat third from the left, her walking stick across her knees, her expression giving nothing. When Ore's eyes found hers, something passed between them. A look that said: I know. I know. I did this. Stand up straight.
Then Ayim saw the man at the center.
Nana Osei was not tall, at all, His robes were the deep blue of the ocean at depth, trimmed in the hammered silver and kente fabric that only the ruling lineage of Befa wore. His face was the face of a man who had made difficult decisions for a very long time, he looked tired as well. And on his back, folded against his shoulders, were wings.
Ayim almost gasped, the same as his, just smaller.
He stared. He could not help it. He had never seen anyone else with the same type of wings. He had never thought to ask why.
Nana Osei looked at Ayim and said nothing with his expression. Then he looked at all five of them.
"You know why you are here," he said. "Word has reached the Nananom Mpanyinfo that the five of you have been seeking counsel outside of this council. That you are considering an act that has not been committed in the four hundred years of Befa's existence."
The chamber was very still.
"We do not come to punish you," Nana Osei said. "We come to make the cost clear." He paused. "Befa exists because of one law. The law exists because of one prayer. The prayer is the only thing standing between this island and everything that was done to our ancestors. To leave Befa, to surface, to cross into the world above is to step outside the prayer's protection. It is to become something that Befa cannot claim." He looked at each of them in turn, slowly. "If you leave, you leave as Àjòjì. Strangers. And when you seek to return, this council will not guarantee your place."
He was not angry. That was the worst part. He was the saddest Ayim had ever seen anyone be while speaking officially.
"This is not a punishment," Nana Osei repeated. "It is a warning. The Nananom Mpanyinfo asks that you think carefully. You are dismissed."
The others filed out.
Ayim did not move.
Nana Osei held his gaze for a moment. Then: "Fly with me."
They rose above the palace into the pre-dawn dark of Befa, the island spread below them, the Atlantic surrounding it in every direction like the world's oldest embrace. Nana Osei flew without effort, and Ayim flew beside him and tried not to think about the wings.
He failed.
"Your wings," Ayim said finally. "They're-"
"Similar." Nana Osei did not look at him. "I know."
Silence. They banked south over the Abissa channel, the water below them dark and enormous.
"How?" Ayim asked.
Nana Osei was quiet for a long time. "Your mother was my sister," he said. Ayim was shook, his uncle was the ruler of Befa and he did not know?
"Her name was Abena. She was-" Nana Osei paused. "She was like you. Loud about the wrong things. Convinced she was right before she had all the information. Impossible to argue with." He forced a smile. "She was the best person I have ever known."
"What happened to her?" Ayim said.
"She found someone. A man who was not from Befa. A man who got lost at sea — in the outside world, on a journey, and was pulled by the currents to our waters." Nana Osei's voice was steady and careful. "He washed up on the Abissa shore. He should not have survived. He did. Abena found him before anyone else did, and instead of bringing him to the council-" he paused. "She hid him."
Ayim said nothing.
"She hid him for two years. In that time-" Nana Osei looked at Ayim directly for the first time since they started flying. "You were born. You were not supposed to be born. A child of Befa and the outside world. The first. The only." He looked away again. "When the council found out, the law was the law. Abena and the man - your father, whose name I never learned, whose people I never knew- were banished together. They went into the ocean. They did not surface on our shores again."
The Atlantic below them. The same water. Always the same water.
"No one knows where they are," Nana Osei said quietly. "I have wondered every day."
Ayim flew and said nothing.
"Your wings way different from all of ours, they are bigger than all ours most likely because of him," Nana Osei said. "Whoever your father was, wherever he came from- he carried something in his blood that Befa has no category for. And it mixed with your mother's lineage and became you." He paused. "I am not surprised the ancestors chose you. You were born between worlds. You have always been Àjòjì." He turned to look at his nephew one last time. "Make the right decision."
Ayim looked at him.
Then he flew away without saying a word.
He found the gang under the mango tree, even though the sun had not yet risen. They were already there, which meant none of them had slept.
"We leave at sunrise," Ayim said. He did not sit down. "If you stay, that's not my problem."
They read his face and nobody asked what had happened. Idowu opened his mouth and closed it again, which was remarkable, because Idowu...he was supposed to fool. Joojo nodded once. Ore was already looking at the horizon.
Sena looked at Ayim for a long time. "I'm not going," she said.
Nobody argued with her.
It was already decided.
The ship was at the Abissa channel before sunrise, which meant Idowu and Joojo had not slept either.
It was not large. The hull was deep-sea timber, black from centuries at the ocean floor, cut and shaped into the wide-bellied form of the old ships from the memories of the drowned. A single mast rose from the center, rigged with material that was not rope in any surface sense- woven from the same deep-sea fiber as Ore's wraps. The deck was broad enough for five people to move freely. At the prow, Idowu had carved something a symbol. The Sankofa bird, head turned back. Go back and fetch it.
Ìyá Àṣàbì was waiting on the shore.
She did not say much. She looked at Ore for a moment, then reached into the folds of her cloth and produced a map. Flattened skin of a deep-sea creature, the coastlines of the outside world drawn in ink. The lines were sure and confident, drawn by someone who had seen these places, who had stood on those shores or dreamed them with enough precision to record them. At the top, in Nsibidi script, three words that Ore could read and the others could not.
Ore read them and folded the map carefully and said nothing about what they said.
Ìyá Àṣàbì put one hand briefly on Ore's wrapped hands. Then she stepped back.
Befa had gathered.
The Abissa shore was full of people facing the water, watching. The old women from Odum were there. The children who had cheered Ayim in the market two days ago were there, held back by parents who had brought them anyway because some things should be witnessed even by children. The vendors, the sailors, the craftspeople of the Akan, Fon and Yoruba and Igbo quarters. All of Befa, or as close to all as it matters.
The Nananom Mpanyinfo stood apart, elevated, watching.
As the gang boarded, Nana Osei raised one hand. The formal gesture. The one that meant: the council has spoken.
Idowu was the first to step off the ship. Into the water. He went in feet first without ceremony, took one breath, and went under. From below the surface, in the dark of the Abissa channel, a shape moved fast, deliberate, joyful. Idowu had waited twenty-three years to do this. He was not going to waste time being solemn about it.
The ship moved.
Ayim rose from the deck and spread his wings and went up. High. Higher than he usually flew, higher than was necessary, high enough that the island below became a shape in the Atlantic, a green thing surrounded by impossible water. He could feel it differently now, knowing what he knew, knowing whose blood made him the way he was, knowing that he had always been between worlds and had spent twenty-three years thinking it was something wrong with him.
He soared and felt, for the first time in his life, exactly like himself.
And then from one of Befa's southern mountains- a figure.
Standing at the edge, looking down at the water, looking at the ship, looking at the space where Ayim was.
Sena.
She stood there for a long moment. She would either jump or she wouldn't, and Sena made her own decisions.
She jumped.
Wings spread wide and red- and they caught the dawn exactly right as she arched away from the mountain and fell forward into flight. She did not call out. She did not explain herself. She flew to where the ship was moving and came to land on the deck and stood there breathing.
Joojo handed her a piece of bofrot he bought from Wofa Nii.
She took it.
On the shore, Ìyá Àṣàbì watched. She did not cheer. She simply watched, and when the ship was distant enough that she could no longer distinguish one face from another, she said, quietly, to no one in particular:
"Agoro bɛ sɔ a, ɛfiri anɔpa."
The barrier reached them before they expected it.
One moment the water was the water of Befa, Then the colour changed.
Then the memories came.
A village on the coast. Night. Torches. Running.
Hands that were supposed to be known, belonging to men who were supposed to be neighbours, and they were not doing neighbourly things.
A child pulled from a mother. The specific sound of that.
The smell of the hold. Bodies.
Chains at the ankle. Chains at the wrist.
The ocean. Seen from above a rail. The ocean looking up.
Falling.
The cold.
The dark.
The ship moved on its own through the barrier, and Idowu, below the surface, felt it differently - not memories but feeling, the accumulated grief of the water itself, and he pushed through it with his body with force.
It took as long as it took.
When it ended, the water was a different colour again. Lighter. Befa was gone.
Ayim landed on the deck and held onto the mast. Joojo sat down on the boards. Sena stood at the prow with her arms around herself. Ore was at the stern, her wraps tight, her eyes dry- she had felt it differently too, through the shadows, through the dark between, the ancestors' voices coming in clear and full and devastating for exactly the duration of the crossing, and then going quiet again as suddenly as they had come.
Idowu jumped onto the ship. He put his arms on the rail and rested looking at the horizon.
Then Joojo said: "Land."
Ahead of them, rising from the morning, stone walls. An old doorway. A place that had a name that the whole world knew and that their blood knew differently, personally, specifically, as the last thing seen before the water.
The Door of No Return.
From the ocean side.
Ayim looked at it. He thought about his mother, who he had never known. He thought about his father, whose name he still did not know. He thought about Kofi and Adwoa and little Femi, who had only seen three rains. He thought about the prayer that had held all of them for four hundred years, the foundation that Ìyá Àṣàbì said had to be built upon.
He thought about what it meant to return.
"Sankofa,".
"Ah wait, you people, now that we are here, what next? Do we even have a plan?" And then, a boom.