The fever hit on a Tuesday night.
One moment Aighon was his usual self: loud, physical, gravitating toward the quiet boy beside him. The next, he was shivering on his mat, his skin burning to the touch, his bright eyes dulled to a glassy stare.
Eki checked him at the dawn wash. She pressed her palm to his forehead and felt the heat radiating like a coal. His breathing was shallow and fast. His limbs had gone limp.
"Fever," she told the Handler on morning duty, a thin man named Iro who had the singular talent of caring about nothing. "This one needs herbs. Bitter leaf at minimum. He's burning."
Iro looked at the child. Looked at his clipboard. "What tier?"
"He hasn't been assessed yet."
"Then he doesn't get assessed-tier medicine. Bottom-tier protocol. Water and rest. If he survives, he was worth keeping. If he doesn't, he wasn't."
Iro walked away. Eki stared after him with an expression that, in a woman with more power and less sense, might have preceded violence.
* * *
The quiet boy had been watching from his mat. His dark eyes moved from the retreating Handler to the shivering child beside him, and something shifted in his expression. Something cold and focused, like a lens adjusting.
Then he moved.
He crawled carefully to Aighon's mat. He pressed his small body against Aighon's burning side and wrapped an arm across his chest. Not a hug. Something more functional, the way a person who understands fever positions themselves to monitor changes.
* * *
The fever was bad. I could feel it through his skin. Not just hot, but wrong-hot. The kind of heat that means the body is fighting something it might not beat.
In Lagos, I'd seen fever take children. A boy named Segun caught malaria during the rains and was dead in three days. No hospital. No medicine. His mother wailed for a week and then went back to selling groundnuts because grief doesn't pay rent.
Aighon was losing.
The thin Handler had refused medicine. Nobody in this building cared whether one unassessed child lived or died, because children were inventory, and inventory was replaceable.
I held him. There was nothing else I could do. My body was a year old and useless. All I had was a body that was slightly cooler than his, and the ability to lie beside him through the night and listen to his breathing and will it to keep going.
* * *
Why did I care?
He was nothing to me. A stranger. A child I'd known for four weeks who communicated primarily through screaming, ear-grabbing, and an unearned devotion that I had done nothing to deserve. He was a liability. An attachment. The exact kind of weakness that the streets of Lagos had trained me to avoid.
And I cared.
I cared because he had looked at me, at the real me, the thing hiding behind a baby's eyes, and he hadn't flinched. He hadn't been afraid. He had simply decided, with a certainty that bordered on delusion, that I was worth following.
Nobody had ever thought I was worth following. In twenty-three years. Not once.
His breathing stuttered. Caught. Resumed. I tightened my arm across his chest.
Don't die, I thought. I didn't survive Lagos and death and transmigration to watch the first person who chose me stop breathing on a straw mat in a slave house.
* * *
Eki found them at dawn.
The quiet boy was curled against the sick one, his arm across Aighon's chest. Both were asleep. Aighon's breathing had steadied overnight. His fever had dropped. Not broken, but retreated. From catastrophic to manageable.
She looked at the quiet boy. His eyes were open. Rimmed with the faint purple of exhaustion. He had been awake all night.
"You strange boy," Eki murmured. "What are you?"
She walked to the kitchen. She found the jar of bitter leaf she kept hidden behind the water pots, her own personal supply. She brewed a tea and poured it between Aighon's lips.
The fever broke by midday. Aighon woke up hungry and furious about it. He ate three portions of porridge, tried to crawl off his mat, fell over, and screamed.
The quiet boy opened one eye. Closed it. Slept on.
* * *
He lived. And when he woke up screaming, of course, he reached for me. Not for the old woman. Not for food. For me.
I want to tell you that I made a rational decision. That I weighed the costs and benefits of attachment.
That's not what happened.
He smiled at me, and the wall cracked a little more, and I let it. I let it because I was tired. Tired in the way that a man who has been alone for twenty-three years is tired.
Aighon was not a reason. He was a liability, a noise hazard, and an ear-grabbing menace who had the strategic instincts of a fruit fly.
But he was mine. He had decided it, and somewhere in the night, holding his burning body against mine and daring the universe to take him, I had decided it too.
In Lagos, nobody chose me. This loud, impossible boy chose me anyway.
Fine.
If the world wanted to give me something to protect, I'd protect it. And anything that tried to take it from me would learn what twenty-three years of Lagos survival instincts looked like when they had something to fight for.
END OF CHAPTER SIX