Chapter Eight
I lay on my bed, staring through the darkness. My entire body felt numb. I couldn’t sleep because my mind was thumping so hard. All I could hear was the beat of my own heart, and the sound of my shallow breath. As soon as I had rushed back to my bedroom, I had tried my hardest to pray, asking the Lord to give me some sort of peace so that I could fall straight to sleep. But my request had clearly been denied.
I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t thirsty. I just felt sick. Thoughts buzzed around in my head like it was a bustling beehive. There was so much that I had to sort out, and the responsibility fell squarely on my shoulders. I remembered a conversation that I had had with Babajide months before, in which he warned me that being the Primus would be incredibly difficult. At the time I just dismissed his lecture as another ramble, but now the hard truth dug into me like a sharp blade.
It had probably been minutes since I had left my siblings, but it felt like hours. As much as I willed the day to end, I was terrified that it would. I didn’t want to have to deal with the events that were going to unfold tomorrow. Something dreadful was going to happen to us: I could sense it. I now bitterly regretted all those years of wishing that I was no longer trapped in a comfortable cocoon. The reality of my situation was so much worse than I could have imagined. Visola’s words echoed through my eardrums:
We’ve been preparing for this for years, and we know we’re ready…
I didn’t feel ready for a war. I thought that at least, to begin with, things would move slowly, and smoothly. I hadn’t realised before just how lucky we had been.
A knock at my bedroom door cut through the silence like an axe. I twisted my body so that I now lay on my right side, facing away from the entrance to my room. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I just wanted to be left alone.
The rattling of the knock repeated, and I continued to ignore it.
“Shasa?” Visola’s voice was soft and muffled through the metal panel. I didn’t reply, so she continued to tap away. I hoped that she would eventually give up and leave me in peace, but within seconds the door handle turned and blinding light gushed into the blackness. I scrunched up my eyes to stop them from the searing brightness, and heard Visola flick the switch on for the main light and then quietly close the door behind her. She paced gently through the room and was quickly sitting next to me on my bed. I curled up tightly into a ball, so she placed her hands on my back and soothingly stroked my spine.
“Do you want to talk?” she asked, even though my body language clearly told her the answer. I shook my head anyway, but she didn’t leave.
“I know it must be hard for you, having to decide what to do all the time. And having heard about Valeska too… you’ve had a rough day.”
As much as I wanted to tell her to leave me alone, I also wanted comforting. I uncurled my body and turned towards her, opening my eyes and staring up into hers. She looked down at me, her thick black dreads dangling over her cheeks. She smiled, and then brushed my face gently. I flinched from her touch. My flesh was still incredibly sore. Her expression darkened.
“What’s wrong?” she enquired, but then her bright wide eyes opened even wider. “Shasa…” she exclaimed as she started to well up. She ran her right index finger lightly down my face, all the way to the base of my neck.
“There are bruises all over you… What on earth happened to you today??”
I could tell from her countenance that the bruising must have been pretty dense. She looked terrified.
“I swam to the mainland and met some bad people…” I answered.
Her eyes drifted from my neck up to my own eyes, and back down again. Even though she was holding back tears, I could tell that she was angry at me.
“You know we’re not supposed to do that…” she scolded me. But she didn’t seem upset, she seemed… disappointed.
“I know, Vee, I know.”
“You haven’t called me Vee for ages!”
“That’s because we haven’t had a chance to speak for months!”
“We’ve been training… We wanted to show off to the Ventus, but now it looks like we’re going to have to fight them…”
I sat up straight, pulling my knees in to hug against my chest. I took Visola’s hand with my own, and stroked the skin between her index finger and thumb.
“We don’t have to fight them,” I echoed.
She moved her left palm and placed it gently onto my cheek. “Is this what happens when you don’t fight back?” Her words were haunting and hurtful. It pained me to know that she was right.
Visola may have been seventeen, but she was wise beyond her years. She always seemed to know how to win an argument, but in a way that wasn’t aggressive or condescending. She somehow had this knack for winning you over to her side by making you think that it was because you had chosen to, rather than her forcing you to.
As she pulled me into a gentle hug, I thought about how smart and sassy and full of life she was. Like Gamba, she had always been energetic and strong willed, but unlike her brother she never had to worry about the consequences of her actions, because she knew how to manage every single situation she found herself in. I was secretly jealous of her. I wished that I was as socially intelligent as her, and knew how to respond so well to people. Visola was the kind of girl who lit up a whole room as soon as she entered it. Everyone was drawn to her, and everyone wanted to be near her. Her smile was vibrant and her demeanour was one of confidence and congeniality. She would have made a great politician, if things had been different.
“Listen,” she whispered into my ear as she pulled away from me, “Gamba’s outside. I think you should talk to him. He doesn’t want to fight you. He just wants to feel validated. So please, just listen to what he has to say.”
The last person in the world I wanted to see was Gamba, but I nodded in agreement regardless. Visola jumped up and left the room, and in a matter of seconds Gamba had replaced my sister on the bed.
“I really don’t want to hurt anyone”, he began, “but you know that our powers…” he sighed and caught my gaze meaningfully. “They’re different to yours. The only thing that me and Visola are good at is fighting… It’s what our powers are made for! You and Madzimoyo… You’re different. You see the world differently to us. This fire inside… it makes me want to fight!”
He pointed to his chest and then dropped his hand to his side. I found it hard to reply to him. What more could I say? He was right: our powers were different, and they affected us all in unique ways.
“I just want an adventure, Shasa, you know? We’ve been stuck on this island for so long now… I just want to get out there and do something! I just want to feel like I’m doing what I was put on this earth to do! I want to feel like I’m actually doing something worthwhile, something that is changing the world for the better…”
I suddenly felt even more emotional than I had before. He was just like me. He felt the same way. Maybe that is why we sometimes hated one another: because we were so similar.
“You don’t understand,” he exclaimed in defeat as he stood up.
I grabbed his arm and pulled him to a standstill. “You’re wrong,” I told him, “I understand completely. I feel exactly the same. I want to make something of my life- of our lives. I want us to be able to work as a team, doing something that will make us all feel like we are fulfilling our goals. Don’t you see that?”
Understanding filled his eyes, and he nodded silently. I unwrapped my body and knelt up onto the springy mattress, and hugged him.
“We’re meeting the Ventus tomorrow,” I began as I released him from my grip, “and the first thing we will do is find out exactly what is going on. We will get to the bottom of this.”
He smiled and then turned to leave. I grabbed his arm again, and he spun around to catch my gaze.
“Just keep in mind that I won’t let anyone hurt you or Visola or Madzimoyo. No one is going to hurt any member of my family. So if I think th
at, even for a second, any of us are in danger, then we must do everything it takes to stop that from happening.”
“So you’re saying…?”
“I’m saying that if the Ventus Trio really are a threat to us, then we must stop them.”
I thought back to Zeina and the men who I had killed as they tried to take her away from her mother. My face became rigid, and my stare turned cold. I realised now that to be a leader, you had to make hard choices.
“I’m saying that sometimes,” I continued, “You must fight fire with fire. Or water with wind.”
Gamba held my gaze, and I knew he understood what I was saying.
“If we find out tomorrow that the Ventus did in fact kill Valeska, then we must do everything we can to stop them. We must eliminate our enemy.”
Part Two:
Gamba