“Asiko ye fo!” Aja slammed her oxygen tank against the embassy door.
“No answer,” said Obuya. “That’s a sign that we shouldn’t—”
“Bang!” Victoria ducked between her mother’s legs and rammed her own o-tank against the oily yellow glass. “Bang! Bang!”
“M’omola, no!” Obuya caught her around the waist. He hauled her thrashing body away before her legs could tangle the tube and tear out the nosepiece. “Aj, can you help me here?”
“Can somebody help us?” Aja rapped her knuckles, leaving clean marks in the grime where her glove wiped away a coating of filth. “American exceptionalism this, American exceptionalism that, but no one can work a doorknob. Fu ye fena? It’s been half an hour.”
“Let’s go. If they don’t respect us enough to show up, we shouldn’t give them the satisfaction of groveling,” he said. Victoria corkscrewed herself out of his grip.
Sirens yowled in the distance. Obuya subdued Victoria long enough to tighten her bowtie and scoop the mercury-brown snow from her hair; he hesitated to touch it even with gloves, knowing it had been white before it passed through the sludge that people here breathed. It was bad enough tasting the sour air whenever he spoke.
“Is it frizzing?” Aja asked.
“Of course it’s frizzing, and she should be proud of the frizz. What you’ve done to her hair is unnatural.” Her hair had been oiled up and buttered down, washed and pressed, the curls raked out, the kinks ironed away. She winced at his touch where the hot comb had blistered her temples. “Sorry, m’omola,” he whispered.
Clunk! Aja wielded her tank against the door again. Obuya spun. “For the love of—! Are you trying to attract every soldier on the mountain?”
As if in reply, an engine wheezed behind them; the armored scrap slowed as it passed, huffing its way up the ice-slicked relic of a mountain road. Obuya tensed. Soldiers clung off its sides, balancing compressing rods over their shoulders like swords, and one man perched cross-legged on the carbon composite tank belted to the roof, tuning his whistling air quality monitor with more tenderness than a guitar. These sharks would harvest what little breathable air remained in this region then hightail it over the border to auction it on the star-spangled side. Obuya pulled his daughter closer.
“Apai!” Victoria bounced. “I want to drive the tank! Just like in—”
“You don’t need to drive, m’omola. That’s why Du Bois has the maglev rail. And American Ox is propaganda trash.”
“Actually.” Aja pinched Victoria’s cheek as if the child were a doll. “Learning to drive is a great idea, darling. We might not always have the rail. Or Du Bois.” She shot Obuya a pointed look. “Who knows what’s going to happen?”
Headlights flashed. “You fellas lost?” the cross-legged soldier called. His voice was creaky, but whether that was from a lifetime breathing in salt-mercury or a lifetime sucking down canned air, Obuya couldn’t say. “You must be awfully far from home.”
“I don’t believe we are.” Obuya tried and failed to maneuver his clenched teeth into a smile. Yes, they were so close to the border that brown air slopped over from the American side, but technically, they were still on Du Bois soil. His land.
The soldier stretched his mouth into a fanged grin as he untied the haze gun looped to his shoulder.“Then do you fellas need help?”
Obuya sprang in front of his daughter. “Put that thing down!”
[his mother’s body]
[contorted on the kitchen tile]
[hands frozen around her own throat]
“You’re telling us what to do?” The driver’s o-mask dangled off one ear, revealing chemical-charred white lips. “You think you’re in charge?”
Obuya stepped forward. “I said, drop the gun—”
“Not at all!” Aja brightened her voice. “Of course, we don’t think we’re in charge.”
They all locked eyes: Aja and the driver, Obuya and the shooter.
Finally, a freckled soldier flung a fist in the air. “One Land!” he whooped, and his comrades joined in a drunken chorus: “One Land! One Land!” The driver leaned on the horn as the scrap pulled off.
Aja rounded on her husband. “Obuya, don’t you ever—”
“Nle, I know, I know.” He checked and rechecked the flowmeter on Victoria’s oxygen tank and fought the urge to fling the entire clunky, inhuman device at the retreating soldiers.
“Barbarians.” Aja slammed her o-tank against the glass again. The metal doorknob popped free and sank into the snow. “Christ.”
A second scrap zig-zagged into the parking lot, but this one was small and white. Its chained tires skidded, and jazzpop music leaked through the duct tape patching up the windows. Coughs punctuated the song like a second beat.
Aja snapped a glittering smile into place. “Finally.”
The machine whizzed past the dented American Embassy sign and scratched to a stop beside their own rented scrap; the rail didn’t run this deep into the hinterlands, so they had to drive analog. Behind her smile, Aja winced. “Did I remember to lock it?”
“Twice.”
The driver grunted. “Heard y’all from halfway down the mountain! You think banging and carrying on is gonna help your case?”
Aja extended a hand. “You must be the interviewer,” she said. “We had an appointment for—”
“Blasted roadblocks all along I-80, up, down and sideways.” The interviewer slammed her car door, knocking snow from a nearby tree. “I swear, we’d be better off sweeping all your insurgents into jail at once, like a spring cleaning. I’ve had it up to here with checkpoints and teargas turned against me of all people.”
“Insurgents?” Obuya stopped himself from correcting it: defenders. All the same, Aja trod on his foot.
The interviewer crouched in front of an oxygen cistern, hooked her tank to the hose and cranked the tap. It hissed, went dead. The second cistern’s tap was rusted shut. Yellow sludge dripped from the third. She shook her head as she disconnected the o-tank that, judging by her coughs, must have still been mostly empty. “Must be agitators,” she muttered, although Obuya would wager that it was budget cuts and neglect on the side of the Americans. “Doesn’t bode well for your appointment, I must say.”
When she straightened, the interviewer looked them up and down. “Well, aren’t y’all a sight?”
They’d had to rummage through a thrift store to piece together their best approximation of what contemporary Americans would wear. They were a few decades off, perhaps. Obuya removed his top hat.
“Thank you,” said Aja.
The woman pushed past Aja and reached for the door. Stopped. “What happened here?”
Aja glanced at her husband sheepishly before surrendering the doorknob.
The interviewer sucked her teeth. “First yelling, now breaking property.” She kicked the bottom of the glass door, which somehow popped open with a splintered, wooden thunk.
Victoria grinned. “Zuri masa!”
“English, darling,” Aja said.
“Good afternoon!”
“Good afternoon to you too, sugar.” The interviewer ruffled the child’s hair, glanced at her oily palm, wiped it on her sweatshirt.
Obuya shuddered as they followed her inside the embassy, where the soupy air oozed down his skin like the medical-grade waste that it was. Victoria clutched her buttercup backpack in front of herself. “Ke ensomi,” she grumbled.
“English,” said Aja.
“No,” said Obuya, “I agree.” As he helped Victoria unbutton her coat, he sniffed, smelling mold in the walls, and squinted into the darkness. The interviewer bent over something in the corner.
“Take a seat, folks. Just gotta get this thing working again.” An old generator hiccupped, and the room’s brown haze thinned into a sour yellow fog.
The interviewer plunked herself down at the room’s sole remaining desk and inspected a pot of shriveled fern leaves. The embassy had clearly been busy, once: There was enough space for a dozen more desks and a waiting room, but all that remained was a sal/mer monitor and a kid’s table stacked with dismembered plastic marines.
“I wanna play!” Victoria raced toward the toys, but her mother steered her toward the mismatched chairs that sat in front of the desk. Victoria clambered onto the tallest stool. Obuya inspected a chipped nameplate: Missus Margaret Ward.
Victoria rocked back and forth on the stool’s squeaky, uneven legs and pointed to a flag on the wall. “Apai, what’s that?”
“It’s the flag of oppress—”
“The American flag,” Aja cut in.
Squeak, squeak, went the stool.
“Why does it look weird?” Victoria asked.
Was he imagining it, or was Missus Ward’s smile strangely mechanical as she brushed dust from the red and white stripes? “Because it’s a classic,” she said. “From the days when the United States was a single country, under one flag and one land, with the sovereign right to rule the totality of that land, as entrusted to us by God.”
At one land Obuya reached for Victoria’s foot. The squeaking halted.
The generator’s hiccups relaxed into one long sigh, and the air paled from yellow to grey. The interviewer unhooked her o-tank, threw her head back and sucked up the putrid smoke. “Ahh.” Her tongue traveled the perimeter of her lips. “You folks don’t need your tanks now. Air’s good.”
He and Aja exchanged glances. Obuya shook his head no, but his wife closed her valve anyway and, with stumbling fingers, dislodged her nosepiece. He stopped Victoria before she could do the same.
Beep! Barely stifling a cough, Aja projected Victoria’s file onto the wall. “So. We’re here about naturalization.”
“Hold on, sugar.” Missus Ward wound a timer on her desk.
Aja froze. “I…I wasn’t aware this would be timed.”
Missus Ward adjusted her glasses. “You’ve got about twenty minutes before that generator dies. And us along with it.”
“Okay. Fine.” Aja nodded. “We’re here to—”
“What is the purpose of your visit?” Missus Ward read off a sheet.
“We want to—”
“In fifty words or less.” She clicked her pen.
Obuya said, “My wife insists on making our daughter a US citizen.”
“Why the hell would she want to do that?” Missus Ward looked up so sharply that Obuya jerked his chair back. “I mean…” She coughed into her elbow, despite the so-called good air, and the mechanical smile clicked back into place. “That would be a wise choice, of course.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Aja.
“You’re aware that your daughter would have to surrender her Du Boisian passport. She’d have to leave once she’s eighteen.”
“She’s aware,” Obuya said.
“Well then. Well.” Missus Ward nodded, but her foot was tapping now, tapping fast and anxious. “Reason for naturalization? You have forty-nine more words. Thereasonbetterbedamngood.”
“Ooh! She said the d-word!” Victoria squealed.
Another cough, and Missus Ward’s sleeve came away wet. She scurried to close the blinds. Once they rolled shut, her voice sharpened to a hiss. “‘Hell’ is a bad word too, sugar! And it sounds like your mama wants you living there with the rest of us.”
Aja touched his daughter’s knee. “Perhaps you should go play.”
“No,” said Obuya, “she should hear this.”
But she’d already dashed to the mountain of grimy toys. “Apai, look! They have the Ox Squad!” She whacked two plastic soldiers against each other. “Clean air is only for the strong, and you’ve taken your last breath!”
“Quit quoting trash and read a book. One of the books we brought.” Obuya rubbed his temples, wishing Victoria had never unearthed that old propaganda film from among her grandmother’s belongings.
Aja scrolled through digital projections of birth certificates and family photographs. “Her grandmother was born in Alabama before Du Bois was founded, and she never left. That makes Victoria eligible for US citizenship. She’s even named after her.”
and you want our daughter
to die like her too
in a cloud of haze gas
opening her own throat with her hands
just to breathe
He shook his head until the thoughts stopped.
Missus Ward sat on her nervous leg, but now the other one tapped instead. “Your story smells fishy. Why would y’all give up a place like Du Bois for…well.” She didn’t even glance at the projections. “Seems suspicious. Or just foolish.”
“Foolish,” said Obuya. Aja pinched his calf.
“So I’m supposed to believe that y’all want to renounce it just like that? After all the fighting you folks did to get yourselves a country?”
Obuya crossed his legs, feeling the weight of his embossed Du Bois ID pressing against his thigh. How much blood had been shed for that ink?
“To create a country?” Aja narrowed her eyes. “Or to run an experiment?”
The interviewer narrowed hers back. “I’m not sure I follow, sugar.”
“One Land. Right?” Aja refreshed the faded image of Obuya’s mother’s birth certificate. “Even your president is backtracking now, saying, Oh, Du Bois was a grand experiment. Oh, that treaty wasn’t valid anyway. Oh, the US has the right to reclaim its original territory and the air that comes with it. One Land, One Land, One Land!”
“The United States of America does not explicitly endorse the One Land movement,” said Missus Ward. “The official position is merely that the United States was once a single country under one flag, with the sovereign right to rule the totality of that land, as entrusted to us by God.”
“That’s the same thing!” said Aja. “Which is why your soldiers can shoot our citizens and claim they were insurgents.”
Obuya nodded. “When actually, they’re defenders.”
“They’re not even defenders!” Aja threw up her hands. “They’re the neighborhood watch!”
Missus Ward leaned her chair so far forward that the wheels squeaked and rose off the ground. “Let’s say the American military does invade to reclaim Du Bois—which, officially, they won’t—”
“Let’s say,” said Aja.
“But let’s say they lose in Du Bois—which, officially, they can’t.” Missus Ward glanced at the blinds. “Even though they lost in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico and Turkey. If your daughter already forfeited her Du Bois papers, then she—”
“Will be stranded in a wasteland with no oxygen,” Obuya cut in.
“But if they win,” said Aja, replacing her nosepiece, “then she’ll have all the oxygen in the world.”
The interviewer flicked through Victoria’s ivory Du Boisian passport. “And you think that if troops do storm Du Bois, they’ll go easy on your daughter just because she trades her white passport for a blue one?”
“Yes,” said Aja.
Obuya snorted.
“Yes,” she said.
Missus Ward fixed her with a long look. “Well, the US military never shoots members of its own population, officially.” When Aja didn’t blink, she turned to him. “I can’t process the application without both parents’ signatures. Do you plan to sign?”
“I don’t plan to do anything.” He watched his daughter stack up blocks and ram action figures into them. “I only promised to come hear the embassy out, in case things had actually changed since…”
“Since?”
When he didn’t continue, Aja leaned over to straighten his collar. “Your mother didn’t die because she chose the States over Du Bois, darling. She died because of that damn—”
“I don’t think about my mother.”
“Well, I do.” Her breath was uncomfortably warm on his neck. “And I’m giving our daughter a future.”
“You’re teaching her to surrender.”
“I’m teaching her to survive. That’s my duty as a mother.”
“I want her to live. That’s her duty as a Du Boisian. Hiding away in America isn’t a life.” He pushed up the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket and rubbed his forehead and did not think about his mother, his mother who’d been too scared to leave the US, too scared to even visit Du Bois, who’d insisted the safest place to hide from the beast was inside the belly of the beast itself. Who’d been cremated with sixteen stitches across her throat.
Aja reached for Obuya’s hand and massaged it until he came back down to earth. Then: “Greenwood, 1921.”
“Not this again, Aj.”
“Seneca Village, 1857. Rondo, 1968. Missus Ward, Du Bois isn’t the first experiment the US government will dismantle for getting too successful.”
The timer ticked like a gunshot. Ten minutes left.
“When the end comes—and it will come—I want to give my daughter the best chance of surviving this mess.” Aja clamped his wrist when he tried to pull away. “The US steals to give to its own citizens. She deserves to be one of those citizens. She deserves to be on the winning side.”
“She will be on the winning side,” Obuya said, “as a Du Bois defend—”
Pop! Something torpedoed through the air and detonated against his temple. “Hey!”
Victoria goose-stepped with a plastic haze gun. “Hands where I can see them!”
“Victoria!” He sprung up. “Drop that! You drop that right now!”
“You’ve taken your last breath!” She tiger-pounced onto a table and shelled the wall of flags. The US one held fast, but the sun-faded diagram of Guam knocked free from its hook and crumpled to the ground. “Miye te oda!”
He pried the firearm away from her. “Victoria!”
Aja stepped between them. “Let her play!”
“Not with this.” He spun the chamber open; pellets bounced out like marbles and skittered across the dusty floor.
“It’s just a toy.”
“Just a toy?” He swiped a leaking pellet beneath his nose. The sulfuric stench sizzled in his nostrils, and his blood ran cold at how naturally his daughter’s small fingers had curved around the gun’s grip.
Aja snatched the hazer. “So you’re fine if soldiers storm the border and stick a real haze gun in her face, but a piece of plastic—that’s where you draw the line? At least with this, it’s her finger on the trigger.” She crammed in a handful of pellets. “Would you rather she be the person launching the gas or the person choking on it?”
“That’s not—”
“The one shooting or the one getting shot?”
“That’s not fair!”
“But that’s the choice! That’s the choice we have to make.” Click! She snapped the chamber shut. He winced.
“Haba! Fine! You want the gun? Give her the gun!” He grabbed it and all but flung it to Victoria. “You want the passport? Give her the passport!”
“Great! It’s settled. Let’s get this process moving.” Aja plopped herself down at the desk. “Where were we?”
Obuya snatched up the frayed Guam flag. It was the same size as the Du Bois flag that he’d sent his—
if he hadn’t insisted
she fly it proudly
from the deck of her cherry-white Alabama home
would police still have raided
with haze guns drawn?
Missus Ward fidgeted with the paperwork. “Are y’all sure? Are y’all both sure?”
Finally, he growled. “Let her do what she wants.”
“Well then, under reason, I’ll write… Preemptive refugee.” Missus Ward scribbled it on the sheet. “We’ll need to take her picture.”
She taped a white sheet to one wall and tinkered with a lightbulb. Victoria climbed onto the stool and grinned.
“Don’t smile,” said Aja.
She scowled.
“Spine straight.”
“Aye, aye!”
The camera shuddered. The photos chugged out of the printer.
Aja’s face fell. “There must be a mistake.”
Obuya squinted at the images. Victoria was as dark as a shadow. Only the whites of her eyes flashed out.
“You can hardly see her,” said Aja. “How is she supposed to put this on a passport?”
Missus Ward looked a little regretful. “I’m sorry, but the machinery just isn’t equipped to photograph dark skin.”
“But this is Du Bois.”
“Yes, and darn near everyone who used to come in here was white. My whole job used to be to help white folks migrate out of Du Bois. Remember those days?” She wrestled a corroded stapler open.
“This is unacceptable. We need new photos, and we need a bit more light. Do you have a lamp? We can make this work. Victoria, get back on the—”
The generator shut off. The room plunged into smoky darkness.
“Well, that concludes the interview.” Missus Ward prodded her nosepiece into the hollows of her nostrils; he heard the flowmeter’s shy hum. She cut out the photos with rusty-sounding scissors. “I’ll submit Victoria’s application to Citizenship and Immigration Services in D.C.”
“Wait. Submit it?” Aja said. “Your website promised same-day approval.”
“That’s before the whole budget went to fighting insurg…” Missus Ward glanced at them. “Into fighting Du Boisians.” She opened the blinds, and the mechanical smile returned. “Thank you for your interest in the American Embassy. You’ll receive an answer in eight to ten weeks.”
“But—”
She scribbled a bill. “How would you like to pay?”
Victoria picked up the extra photos. “Ooh, can I keep these?”
“Yes, you can.”
“Do I look like American Ox?”
“You will in eight to ten weeks.”
Aja scrawled her signature across the form and passed Obuya the pen. But his eyes kept traveling to the photos Victoria clutched in her tiny hand, to the casket black squares where his daughter’s image should be. He pressed the nib against the yellowing paper, lifted it again.
“I said, time’s up, sugar.”
Aja gritted her teeth. “What’s the problem now, darling?”
He ran a hand over Victoria’s hair. It wasn’t straight anymore; the frizzy coils tickled his palm. He liked it that way.
“Look, I have to go.” Missus Ward tucked the dead fern beneath one arm and kicked the broken door open. “If you’re unsure, why don’t you schedule another appointment a year from now?”
“No!” Aja hurried after her. “Who knows if Du Bois will still exist?”
“I really—” Missus Ward hunched into a coughing fit. Aja offered her water, but she waved it away and eventually caught her breath. “Water makes it worse. Once you get the chemicals wet, they fill your lungs like paint. Look, folks, sign it or don’t sign it. Three.”
He picked up the paper again. The letters floated by in a haze.
“Two.”
Aja pinched his o-tube. “What are you doing? Sign!”
“One.”
“I need—” He tried to loosen his tie, accidentally pulled it tighter. “Air. I need air.”
He shoved past them all and into the parking lot and sat on the curb and stood up again and wrenched open the door of their rented scrap and cranked up the levels on his o-tank and breathed and breathed and thought about that damn flag and Alabama and pushed the thoughts away.
Aja threw open the scrap door. “Misumeko kunga!”
“I know you’re upset, but I just didn’t feel comfortable—”
“So humiliating!” She unclipped her tie, kicked off her heels.
“I’m not ready to give up on Du Bois.”
“Who does that woman think she is?”
“I’m not saying never. I’m just saying, not yet. “
“‘Come back next year, sugar.’ ‘Eight to ten weeks, sugar.’ Sugar, sugar, sugar! She’s awfully smug for someone whose country is going down the toilet. ”
He paused while tightening Victoria’s seatbelt. “Wait.”
“And the smell!”
“So you’re not mad at—”
“Of course I’m mad at you, but I’m mad at them more. All of them.” Aja whipped her hair into a scarf. “Showing up late, lying about processing time. Giving us the land and taking it away!”
Obuya gently touched her shoulder. “You’re in no condition to drive.”
“Try me.” The engine whistled to life. “I’m getting us out of the hellhole right now. Nejo!”
Aja tore out of the icy parking lot, tires squealing. Obuya flicked on the ancient radio.
“…Gallup poll, sixty-four percent of Americans are in favor of the re-annexing the independent territory of—”
She snatched the receipt and ripped it in half, lifting her hands from the steering wheel.
“Hei, Aja, stop.”
“What if I did this to their country? How would they feel?” She tore and she tore and she tore, and flung the pieces out of the window. “One Land, huh? One Land, One Land!”
“Stop!”
Blue lights flashed in the rearview.
Obuya’s heart dropped into his stomach.
Aja’s eyes widened. “Oh, God.”
“Amai? Apai?” Victoria twisted around in her seat as a siren began to wail. “What’s that?”
“Nothing, darling. It’s going to be okay.” Aja pulled the car over.
Obuya rubbed his thumb across his daughter’s knuckles and noticed she was shaking. “Just like we practiced, Victoria. Deko iyoku te. Quiet and obedient.”
An officer sauntered up. “Evening, Ma’am.”
“Evening, Officer.”
“That’d be ‘sheriff,’ thank you.” He dragged his eyes up and down her body, pushing his hips forward as he spoke. “Saw you throwing something out of your window. The sky’s on fire, you really want to be littering at a time like this?”
“Sorry, Sheriff,” said Obuya. “We won’t do it again.”
He drummed his fingers. “You folks don’t sound like you’re from around here. Why’s that?”
“We are, actually,” Aja snapped. “This land is still in Du—”
“Just passing through, Sheriff.” Obuya smiled.
The sheriff leaned in through the window, reeking of whiskey and motor oil. “We received a complaint about insurgents. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
Obuya thought of the scowling soldiers and knew exactly who’d filed that complaint. “No, Sheriff. We’re just out…getting some air.”
“Clean air is only for the strong!” Victoria said.
“Shh, m’omola,” said Obuya.
But to his surprise, the sheriff chuckled. “Did I hear correctly? It sounds like somebody’s an American Oxygen fan. That was my favorite when I was a boy.” He glanced into the backseat. “I didn’t even see you back there, little lady. And how are you this eve—”
He stopped talking. His hand flew to his belt. “They’ve got a gun!”
“What?” said Aja. “No, we don’t!”
“Everybody out!” The sheriff drew his weapon. “They have a gun!”
“No, we don’t!”
“I said, out!”
He tore Aja from her seat. Another officer twisted Obuya’s arm behind his back, and a third hauled Victoria by the collar. They kneeled on the ice, shivering, as the sheriff extracted the toy gun from their car. He held it away from his body like a bomb about to detonate.
“You let her keep that?” Obuya hissed to Aja.
“I didn’t know!”
He cleared his throat. “Sheriff, it’s just plastic.”
“Shut up, boy.”
“We got it from your embassy!”
“Shut up!” The sheriff yanked out Obuya’s nosepiece.
“Wait!” He covered his face, but it was too late. Sludgy, soupy air oozed itself into his nostrils. The viscous salt-mercury scorched like magma down the back of his throat, and flaming coals ignited in his chest.
Two officers ransacked the car. “What other ‘toys’ are you hiding?”
Obuya gasped for breath as the air itself hardened in his nose. “I p-promise, officers—”
“Keep your hands up!” The barrel of a haze gun smoldered against the back of his neck.
A man with a trainee badge prowled the scene. “Which one had the gun?”
The sheriff pointed, and the trainee swung his hazer toward Victoria.
“No!” Obuya staggered to his feet. Another officer wrestled him back into the snow.
the last memory of his mother
the american flag
covering her casket
because she’d served her country
once
in the days before haze
“Don’t shoot!” Obuya screamed with the last air in his chest. “She’s—she’s American!”
A pause. The trainee lowered his hazer. Just an inch. “She is?”
It was…working?
Obuya nodded.
Victoria’s eyes lit up. “I can prove it!” She unzipped her backpack.
The gun snapped back up. “Hands where I can see them!”
“Victoria!” Aja shouted. “Listen to him!”
“But—”
“Grab that bag, trainee!” the sheriff barked.
“What if there’s a bomb!”
A second officer took aim. “Hands up!”
“Stop!” Obuya wheezed.
“Obey him, Victoria!” Aja shouted.
“But Apai’s right!” She kept digging. “I can prove I’m American!”
“Victoria!” Obuya stumbled forward.
She whipped something out.
“Vic—!”
Her body hit the ground before Obuya heard the gunshot.
The sound came an eternity later, echoing through the mountains. Haze hissed out of the pellet.
“Victoria!” Aja shouted. “Victoria!”
“Cover!” called the sheriff. The officers strapped on gas masks.
Chemical fog thickened around the place where his daughter had just been standing. Obuya charged toward her, but a policewoman hooked him in a chokehold. “Do you want to die, boy?”
“L-let me go!”
“That haze could kill you!” The more he struggled, the tighter she squeezed. “Stop resisting!”
“Victoria! Don’t breathe!” Aja tried to escape the officer pinning her down. “Don’t breathe!”
The sheriff shoved the trainee. “Jesus! I didn’t tell you to shoot.”
“She was armed!”
The sheriff picked up the photographs that Victoria had pulled from her backpack. “Does this look like a weapon to you?”
“It—it happened too fast—I couldn’t tell—”
Aja finally broke free. She wrapped her scarf over her face and dissolved into the toxic mist.
Obuya kicked and thrashed and clawed. The policewoman clamped harder around his throat. “I said, stop resisting!”
“Let him go,” said the sheriff.
“But—”
He rammed Obuya’s nosepiece back in. “For the love of God, look at him! Somebody call his kid an ambulance. But lose the footage first.”
The policewoman pushed Obuya to the frozen asphalt as Aja emerged from the fog, cradling a convulsing shadow. He scrambled for his daughter. Acted in automatic. He dialed up her flowmeter, monitored the gauge and secured the tubing. He scrubbed haze residue from her mouth with snow and stopped Aja from peppering her face with desperate kisses until he wiped down Victoria’s skin. He held her hands as she thrashed to keep her from clawing at her own throat. He did everything he should have done for his mother. Somewhere, far off, there was the sound of crying. He recognized it as his own.
“M’omola.” He prayed the words. “M’omola.”
The trainee’s hazer was still drawn, still trembling. “Sheriff! What—what’s that guy saying?”
M’omola. It meant my child. But Obuya wasn’t going to tell them that.
He pulled his daughter closer against his chest. The twitching slowed.
And he looked straight down the barrel of the gun.
Note: The language in the text is Afrihili, a language constructed by Ghanaian historian K. A. Kumi Attobrah in the 1970s; it was meant to become a Pan-African lingua franca.
