CHAPTER EIGHT: Broken Rain
"Orí burúkú kí á wá fi oyin sé ewon."
Even a cursed destiny will not sweeten just because you pour honey over it.
---
Zainab couldn't cry anymore.
It wasn't that the tears had dried up. It was that they no longer worked. Whatever sorrow once needed water to speak had gone quiet now, sunken deeper than grief—into something older, something shaped like awe.
She had stopped asking questions out loud.
Not because there were answers, but because even her questions had begun to echo strangely. Sometimes, she'd mutter to herself, and the room would finish her sentence. Not in her voice. Not in any voice that should still exist.
She marked each day by the rhythm of strange happenings:
On Monday, her reflection turned its head a moment before she did.
Tuesday, she saw a child staring at her from the middle of a dried-up fountain, but no one else seemed to see him.
Wednesday, all the writing in her notebook shifted to Yoruba script. She couldn't write anything else until she spoke her true name aloud—then it returned.
But Thursday was different.
Thursday, the sky broke.
Not with lightning, but with a sound like names being torn apart.
She stood outside her hostel, drenched in rain that had no water. It fell in waves of cold air, in memories, in shivers. She opened her palms and felt nothing. But the earth below was wet, rippling like it had been touched by something that wasn't quite weather.
That was when she saw her.
Not Zola. Not anyone she recognized.
Just a woman standing across the street, barefoot, head tilted. Her eyes glowed faintly.
And in her hands was a book. Cloth-bound. Spiral in a circle.
Zainab took a step forward—and the woman vanished.
But the rain stayed broken.
That night, Zainab wrote only one line in her notebook:
> "Even silence is beginning to remember me."
And beneath it, her fingers traced something unbidden:
> Ayéròyá, daughter of wind and dust.
She did not know who had written it.
But she did not erase it.
---
If memory begins to move without permission, can forgetting ever save you?