Chapter Fifteen
As soon as the meeting was over, I rushed over to the gymnasium. I didn’t really want to speak to anyone, I just wanted be alone. I also wanted to prepare for fighting the Inimicus. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt me like Niyol did, with Valeska. No one was going to deceive me…
After a quick swim in the pool, I practised my hand to hand combat on another training dummy. I mainly boxed, but I also threw in some roundhouse kicks. I liked working up a decent sweat while exercising, because it made my entire body warm and moist- and this helped me to boost the strength and capability of my powers. Sometimes, whilst boxing, I would create a sheet of steam around my fists so that I could scorch my opponent. Of course I had never actually tried this on a real person, because I didn’t want to hurt anyone I lived or trained with, but I knew that when the time came, it would be an excellent ability to use against a foe.
Just as I was thinking of inviting Ngozi to spar with me, the door to the wood panelled hall clunked open. I span around to discover Niyol walking towards me.
“Hi!” He called out, his voice hollowly echoing in the huge space.
I grunted and nodded at him, then returned to my training dummy, punching it as hard as I could. I didn’t want another ‘conversation’ with him. The last one had stirred something within me, and I didn’t want my mind to be somewhere else the day before our first real mission.
“Do you mind if I join you?” He asked politely, with a strong English accent.
I shrugged, and grunted again, then went back to landing fearsome blows on my inanimate companion. Every single time my fist hit against the squidgy plastic surface, my mind raced to a new thought. Smack: being angry all the time. Bang: being stuck on this island. Crunch: Shasa bursting into tears after admitting that she had killed someone. That was the thought that haunted me ever since I had first heard it. For years all I had focused on was being a strong and ferocious warrior, but I hadn’t really thought about the reality of what that really meant. In my mind, the victims of my attacks were just like the training dummy: unreal figures that were there to take the hits. But after seeing Shasa’s tears, it dawned on me that I would actually be hurting someone. A human being. A person that could have a wife, a child, a family. A person who was once an innocent kid. A person who was angry all the time: just like me.
It was getting to me. My mind was cloudy and I couldn’t concentrate. I stopped punching my lifeless foe and allowed my body to rest. My chest heaved from my heavy breathing, and my heart rapped loudly under my ribs. Sweat poured out of me, and made my body damp, which I found comforting.
I turned to see what Niyol was doing. I could hear him grunting with effort, and when I finally laid eyes on him, I saw him practising some defensive blocks. I wasn’t sure what style of martial arts he was trying to replicate, because his technique was pretty weak. As he span his entire body around, planted his feet on the floor and held his arms up to shield himself, he looked over at me. He was concentrating hard, but as soon as we locked eyes, his face dropped.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
I nodded. He sighed, angry with himself. “Shit!”
“What are you trying to do?” I asked him.
“I’m just… I’m just trying to get back into it. I haven’t been able to train for weeks now, since the… you know…”
I glanced down at his stomach, and then back up to his eyes.
“What did it feel like?” I enquired.
“Like a knife being pushed into my gut.” His frown turned into a smile, and I realised that he was joking. At least, I thought he was…
“Did it hurt?”
He nodded as he walked towards me. “Yeah, it hurt a lot. But I think the worse thing was how scary it was. The way she looked at me when she stabbed me… I still have nightmares. I really thought I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t think or feel and I couldn’t use my powers. I felt so helpless.”
His emotional outpouring made me feel sad. To be betrayed by someone you thought you could trust… For someone you care about to hurt you so badly…
I thought about my parents. They had betrayed us. Even though I knew that life in the Equatorial Guinea wasn’t easy, I still wished that we had grown up… normal. Gone to school. Had friends. Been around other people. In some ways, I was happy that I had lived an easy life, but in other ways I resented it. Why should I be so lucky? Why should I have to dedicate my entire existence to someone else’s cause? Why couldn’t I do what I chose to do?
Even though I agreed with Shasa and Madzimoyo, because I too wanted to dedicate my life to helping others, I wanted to do it on my terms, not theirs. I just wanted to know that all of this hard work and training wasn’t a waste, and that my parents had done the right thing by bringing us here.
Niyol looked at me awkwardly. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t responded to what he had told me.
“Do you feel like you’re doing what you should be doing with your life?”
His head swivelled backwards and his face scrunched up in shock. Clearly the question wasn’t very well timed.
“Um… I guess. Before I got these powers, all I wanted to do was to play football…”
“No way!” I exclaimed happily, “You like football?”
“Of course I do! We did invent it, after all…”
“I’ve always wanted to see a real football match. I’ve seen them on the television, but never in real life, even though the Equatorial Guinea recently co-hosted the Africa Cup of Nations. They built two new stadiums and everything… I asked Babajide if I could leave the island, just for one day, to see the match against the Côte d'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast in English, but he forbad it. I even thought about sneaking off the island, but I didn’t… I wish I had…”
Niyol smiled at me. But behind his pleasantness there was a deep pity in his eyes. I could see it. And I hated it.
“We’re going to Malabo tomorrow; you might get to see the stadium…”
The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I smiled, really smiled, for the first time in a long time. A real football stadium… I would finally get to see one, and not through a television screen…
“When this is all over, Gamba, why don’t you come and visit us in England and I’ll take you to see a football game? There are loads of teams in London, and there’s a few near to the Ventus base. I’m sure you’d enjoy it!”
I continued to smile as I thought about not only being at a real game, but also leaving the country, and leaving the island. This was the moment that we had been waiting for: the day when our lives really began.
“I would like that,” I told him, “and if you want any help with your fighting…”
“Yes please!” He interrupted, “Even though Malik came with us, it’d be cool to train with someone else.”
“Don’t you fight your sisters?”
“Oh yeah, we fight all the time…” He laughed and then realised my real intent. “Oh, you mean physically? Well yeah, sure, but I can’t really fight with them can I? Without using their powers they’re okay, but not great…”
“Me and Visola spar all the time. And I don’t hold back. It makes us both stronger.”
“What about Madzimoyo?”
“He’d rather read than fight.”
“Oh. He’s that type of guy…”
“What do you mean?”
“The type of guy who would prefer to watch a historical documentary about the Roman Empire than watch a football match…”
I grinned. “Yes, that’s right. He’d rather use his brain than his brawn.”
“That must be annoying for you,” he said pointedly.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a very physical, athletic sort of person, like me, and your brother isn’t. I’ve always wanted a brother because then we would be similar, you know? Play sports together, watch action movies together, talk about girls…”
“Madzim
oyo isn’t that bad. We’re just different people.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And there aren’t many girls here for us to talk about. Being stuck on the island, the only women here are our sisters, our mother, and all the other women who work here, who are much older than us. The only attractive woman ever to come here was…” I stopped myself, and shifted my gaze away from him.
“Valeska,” he answered, “yeah: she was beautiful.”
I agreed. It wasn’t just her physical features that made her attractive, it was the way she spoke, the way she moved and the way she was. She exuded some kind of energy that was hard to dislike. I had always been secretly jealous of Madzimoyo, because he had got to spend lots of time with her, by himself. I knew for a fact that he felt the same way about her as I did.
“Does it get easier?” I asked him seriously.
He shook his head in confusion. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“The fire. The anger. Does it get easier to control?”
Niyol nodded. “Yes, of course it does. But what you’re experiencing is probably a lot less potent than what I went through. I’m a Secondus, so fire became my primary power. You’re not, so…”
“But it still hurts,” I interrupted, “every single day. I just feel so angry. Mainly towards my older sister, Shasa. She really pisses me off.”
Niyol laughed. “Seems like we have the same problem.”
“With Aura?” I guessed.
He nodded. “Of course. She can be… difficult.”
“I know,” I chuckled, “I’ve seen. But she seems cool.”
“She is. But that doesn’t stop her from being a bitch sometimes!”
We both laughed loudly, our voices bellowing through the cavernous silence.
“What about Shasa? She seems okay to me.”
I shook my head. “She’s fine. Her problem is that she’s too nice. She just wants to heal the world, but without violence.”
He nodded understandingly. “Oh. I see. And you just want to fight.”
“Yep. She’s the good guy, and I’m the bad guy. But I’m fine with that. We’re the warriors, me and Visola, and they’re the thinkers. It’s good to be a team with different strengths.”
Niyol didn’t look convinced. “Just because you’re good at fighting, doesn’t make you a fighter.”
“Then what am I?”
“You can be whatever you want to be.”
“But Babajide…”
“Who cares what Babajide says? We’re the Elementals, not them. They’re here to help us, and they have, but it’s up to us to make our own choices and decide what kind of team we want to be. Valeska taught me that.”
“The enemy?”
“She might have been bad, but at one point, she must have been good. Not everything she said was a lie.”
I was annoyed. Who did Niyol think he was to come in here and tell me what I could and couldn’t be? He may be a Primus, but he was younger than me and less experienced. I knew my role in my team, and I was happy with it.
Or was I…?
“If you want to be warrior, be a warrior. As long as it’s your choice, and no one else’s. Luckily for us, we have the ability to choose what we want to do with our powers. A lot of people in the world are stuck in a situation they can’t escape. But we aren’t. I’m determined that we’re going to be the best group of Elementals the world has ever seen. And we’re going to do it our way.”
What he said made a lot of sense, and made me feel empowered. He was right. We were the ones with the God given gifts, and it was up to us how we used them. It finally dawned on me that that was exactly what Shasa had been trying to tell me this whole time. She knew that we had to stay together as a group to be most effective, but she wanted us to do something that we all agreed on.
Maybe I didn’t want to be a warrior after all. Maybe we could all travel across Africa, helping the poor and vulnerable, just like Shasa and Madzimoyo wanted. And I’m sure Visola wouldn’t mind. Maybe we really could make a difference in the world, without resorting to violence.
“Thanks,” I told Niyol, “you’re pretty smart.”
“No I’m not,” he shook his head demoralizingly; “I’m pretty thick.”
There was an awkward silence, but it felt strangely comfortable. I suddenly felt as if I had known Niyol for a very long time, and that we were friends. I had always wanted a friend.
“It’s crazy to think that just over a year ago, I discovered what we were. And now here I am, in Africa, with another group of superheroes!”
“You think we’re superheroes?” I pondered seriously.
“What else are we?”
“Protectors. Guardians. Warriors.”
Niyol shrugged. “I guess we’re all of those things.”
“What’s it like being Primus?”
“I dunno. I don’t think that it really makes much difference…”
“Of course it does!” I snapped angrily, not intending to reply with such ferocity. Niyol stared at me, his hazel eyes moving slowly, reading my face carefully.
“Do you wish you were Primus?” He wondered.
I shook my head. “It’s not that,” I replied, turning away from him. “Well maybe it is. I don’t know…”
Niyol put his hand on my shoulder, gently. “Maybe once you get off this island you’ll see things differently.”
I shrugged his hand off and turned back to face him. “What do you mean?”
“As soon as things get going, you’ll know what to do. Everything will just click into place. It’ll feel right.”
“What will?”
“Your powers. Who you are… I never thought in a million years that I could not only get along with Aura, but also work alongside her! But as soon as we started fighting the Inimicus…”
“But what if Shasa’s right? What if we don’t need to fight?”
Niyol looked at the floor, darkening. “I wish that we didn’t. But that’s not how the Inimicus operate.”
“Well I’m not scared of them!” I rationalised, “I’m not afraid to fight against them!”
“You should be.”
Niyol eyes once again locked onto mine, and I saw a deep anger within him. An anger I instantly recognised as mirroring my own.
“They can’t hurt us,” I determined factually.
“They hurt me!”
“You were inexperienced. You were weak. I’m not.”
Niyol winced, as if he had shot himself with his own lightning. He looked hurt and betrayed.
“I think I’m going to go. It was nice talking to you.”
And with that he turned and left, leaving me alone in the huge space all by myself.
I quickly went back to punching the training dummy furiously. I grunted and groaned, and then when I could no longer resist the cries of my aching muscles, dropped my arms to my side and cried out in agony.
I couldn’t be normal because I wasn’t normal and I never would be. For the first time in my life, I thought I had made a friend. But the way that Niyol looked at me… He didn’t like me at all. But why should he? I was rude to him and did nothing but attack him and his sisters. The first people my age to ever visit the island, and they hated me.
Everything I thought was wrong. In the real world I wouldn’t be popular. I wouldn’t be cool. No one was supposed to like me. I shook my head. It didn’t matter if people liked me. That wasn’t what I was here for. That wasn’t my role. They should fear me.
I was a warrior. I was a grunt, designed to do what I was told to do and never ask questions or answer back. Babajide had drilled that into my head for so long now; I supposed it had to be true. I wasn’t good at anything else, so I should just accept my fate and stop struggling against it.
The world was never going to change. There would always be someone to fight against. The bad guy would continue to use violence as his only weapon. And that is why the Elementals needed me. I had to do the things they co
uldn’t.
Emotions just made you weak, and giving into them let your guard down. Look at Niyol. He opened up to someone, cared about her, and she stabbed him in the gut. You couldn’t trust anyone…
But I wanted to. I wanted to so much. I wanted to have friends, to laugh: to smile. I wanted to be normal. I didn’t want to be the man that everyone was afraid of.
I just wanted to be me.