It does not arrive so much as it gathers — a slow, impossible accretion that makes the air taste metallic and the silk of the curtains feel like skin. I am already inside Father's office before the dream decides to show me where it will take me: a room of ceremonial blues and gilded edges, of geography and diplomacy that never quite pins down its own borders. The flags on their poles ripple in a wind that does not exist here, colors shading and reshaping themselves as if the paint were breathing. I have the odd, certain knowledge that I cannot name the city, the country; the embassy's location slides like a coin across a table and falls into shadow. Only Father's desk is precise — a carved horizon that insists on order — until the desk begins to yawn and lengthen and then contract, as if it remembers a different scale of events.
The lights change. Not blink, not dim: they multiply and layer, folding into a slow strobe that leaves afterimages on the varnished floor. Every surface seems to hold a slight smear of time, as though someone has dragged a soft brush across the world and left the bristles of the moment behind. The carpet breathes — inhale, exhale — and the walls answer in a low hum that crawls under my skin. Sound is no longer linear: footsteps echo before a foot lifts; voices arrive with a delay that belongs to a different hemisphere of the mind. I know, with a childish conviction, that if I try to pin a single memory to a single frame it will slip like oil.
The door gives way like film spooling: a frame, a skip, and then a sequence. Figures slip through that stuttering aperture — men in white. Not the ceremonial white of uniforms; not bright and clean, but luminous in a way that matters to the eye more than the object. They are overexposed, edges bleeding into the air. Their faces are obscured in the way a reflection refuses to sit still: features smear like wet paint, any attempt to focus on a nose, a mouth, a jaw dissolves into suggestion. I try to see them and my eyes fail me kindly, as if reality has decided that some things are too fragile to be observed directly.
They do not move like people in a rush. They circle with the pace of tidewater. Feet make small indifferent sounds. When one of them speaks, the words are neither contained by the mouth nor committed to the room; language tangles with light and becomes texture. Threads of speech braid into the air: "debt," "border," "inheritance," "fire," and then a syntax of grief that belongs to statues. Their monologue fragments into mantras, then into riddles, then into the cadence of lullabies gone wrong. I can feel their sentences in the bones of my hands. Meaning comes as a pressure, a tide that lifts and then drains.
And in a shadowed alcove, where the varnish of the wall feels like a skin drawn tight, there is a person slumped — a suggestion of him at first, a dark note in the dream's score. Timi is a silhouette that the room has chosen to fold around. He is not what I remember, not quite the boy I touch in waking life; he is a shape that has been weathered. The blood at his side washes against gravity as if the physics of the world are willing to accommodate the dream's rhetoric: it crawls and pools and retreats, more a motif than an injury. He looks older — not merely in years but in the manner of someone who has been worn into a new shape by repetition. His eyelids are thin curtains that let in and let out light; when they part, they reveal not recognition but a weird recognition of the room's cadence. My voice finds him — "Timi" — but the name fractures and returns as small glass chimes that scatter across the ceiling.
The white men begin to speak in a choir that has no conductor. Sentences braid into one another, languages swap syllables like coins, threats wobble into elegies. It is as if history is reading itself aloud and misplacing the punctuation: "Children pay," the chorus intones. "Children pay for the debts of fathers." "Blood remembers things that paper forgets." I clamp my hands over my ears, but sound slips through my fingers. The words nestle inside my skull like unwelcome seeds. One of the masked men nudges Timi with the toe of his shoe, a small, obscene punctuation mark.
Then — without preamble and yet entirely preordained — Timi becomes motion.
He does not rise so much as a direction opens and he becomes the path. The shift is not linear: it is an accumulation of afterimages, three or four Timis phasing into the space where one should be. For an instant I see him multiplied, as if the dream has split him to show his various histories at once. The first movement is a private thunder: the air tenses, and with it the room fractures into slices of slow time and fast time that can exist simultaneously. The white figures do not have the luxury of astonishment; their mouths form into surprised O's that the dream immediately dissolves. Motion in the dream is not noise so much as a rearrangement of light and memory; limbs become poetry and violence becomes a syntax that erases itself on contact.
I will not, in this telling, describe the mechanics of harm. Instead: the white dissolves into a bloom of color that the vocabulary refuses to pin down — a red that moves like ink in water, a red that sometimes calves into black and then into a neon that is not neon but memory. The men fall as if books closed mid-sentence; their scripts end and the pages fold over. The air is full of the soft sounds of cessation, not cruelly loud but intimate as whispered goodbyes. The dream's lens moves in close and then in wide, showing hands and then the entire room, refusing to let me fix on how flesh meets shadow. There is urgency and an almost ceremonial hush: this is not a brawl; it is a rite enacted to the metronome of something older.
Fire births itself as if obeying a logic of its own invention. It is not the brute orange of a kitchen flame but an anthology of hues that reads like a memory made visible. Blue tongues lick the edges of paper, green embers bloom in the gramophone of the carpet, and the ceiling drips a light like soft wax. The flames do not merely consume; they annotate. As the smoke rises it turns into calligraphy, intentional curls that spell nothing in any known alphabet but feel terribly articulate. Heat frames us in a thin, shimmering halo — danger and warmth at once, like a memory that both comforts and betrays.
In the silence that follows the collapse of sound, we are left — he and I — in the confluence of ruin and miracle. Timi sways not because the dream demands it but because his human center reasserts itself. The fight within him drains away as if someone closes the valve to a spring. He is suddenly smaller in the way that people become small after carrying what they cannot own. He lurches toward me with a grab that is urgent and bewildered, as though afraid that if he loosens his fingers I will evaporate into the charred wallpaper.
We clasp each other in the middle of a room that is being rewritten by flame and shadow. The embrace is a book held tightly between two palms; it contains a hundred sentences that we do not voice. His hands shake — the tremor of someone who has just used his whole body to translate violence into a moment of strange, terrible peace. My fingers press into his shoulder and I feel the prints of fatigue there, the angles of a man who has been folded too many times. Our faces are inches apart and in his eyes I see a mirror of my own fragmentation: reflected shards of the embassy, of the flags, of the white men sprawled as if the carpet had swallowed them.
There is a suspended eternity in that closeness. Time slackens to let us memorize each other: the tiny crease at the corner of his mouth, the faint scar that runs like a riverbed along his jaw, the way his breath fogs between us. The flame's reflections tattoo our skin with grotesque calligraphy; the smoke smells like old paper and citrus and the heat of a remembered kitchen.
And then the dream inverts.
The cathedral of fire folds inward like a camera lens closing. Light rushes toward the center with the sound of a tide pulling from a shore, and the edges of the world — the flags, the desk, the men in white — thin into translucent tissue paper. Timi's face blurs, the features pulling apart as if they were made of someone else's memories. My hands grip him and there is a pulling, a sensation like being unstitched at the seams. The air gives way.
I wake up as though I had been unmade in the dark and hastily reassembled. My chest is a bell that will not stop ringing. The room I wake to is too still: the curtains do not ripple, the lamp's light is a single honest circle, and Father's desk — miles and worlds away — is reduced to the tidy furniture of the waking world. The hum in my ears has the same tone as the embassy's wall-hum in the dream, and that continuity is the most unsettling thing of all: part of me believes the dream has left residue, a smear on the glass of the day.
Reality returns in fragments.
Darkness first. Thick and warm, like a blanket pulled too high.
Then sound.
A soft, uneven snore rises from somewhere to my left, pauses, resumes—almost polite in its persistence. Another breath answers it from the far corner of the room, deeper, slower, the kind that belongs to someone already lost to sleep. The world hasn't ended. It's just night.
I blink, and the outline of the guest room assembles itself slowly, piece by piece. The power is out, so the only light comes from the moon pressing faintly through the curtains, turning everything into silhouettes and silver edges. The room is prettier than it has any right to be—resort-pretty, curated but not cold. The walls are a soft cream, textured in a way that suggests age, like they've absorbed decades of laughter and footsteps and conversations meant to stay private. There's a faint floral scent in the air—polish, maybe, or old wood warmed by the day.
The furniture is solid, dark-stained wood: wardrobes with clean lines but carved handles that feel almost old-fashioned, beds arranged neatly to a design. Someone left their slippers by the foot of one bed, toes pointing inward. A phone screen lights up briefly across the room—someone turning in their sleep—and then goes dark again.
The ceiling fan is still, frozen mid-spin, its shadow spread across the ceiling like a quiet starfish. Without electricity, the room feels closer, more intimate, as if the walls have leaned in to listen. Somewhere outside, a night insect chirps once, then stops, as though reconsidering.
Around me, my friends sleep on, unaware, their breathing anchoring the room in something solid and real. The resort creaks softly, an old sound for a modern place, like it's settling into itself for the night.
I close my eyes.
The room holds.
******
The room smelled of diesel and stale smoke, the sort of close, metallic air that settles where men and money linger. Low lamps threw the circle of faces into a warm, orange basin; maps fanned like tired birds across a table; cigarette ash gathered in a tray like pale confetti. At the center, on an overturned crate that did duty for a chair, she sat with the careful posture of someone who had learned to carry authority as one learns a heavy bag — planted, deliberate, but not immovable.
The pile of cash on the trunk between them looked obscene under the lamp: neat bricks of notes, bundled with elastic, edges crisp as a new lie. Opposite her, the businessman lounged as if in a club, suit cut to hide the world's edges. He was too clean for the place and smiled with the practiced warmth of someone ordering outcomes rather than asking for them. His accent clipped the air — very British, very practiced — and when he spoke the syllables landed like coins on wood.
"Finish what I started with your brother," he said, the words polished to a pistol-shot calm.
For a moment her jaw tightened. Her hand closed on the crate so hard the knuckles whitened. Behind that measured exterior something like hunger flickered — a small animal hoping to be fed revenge.
"No," she said at first, but pidgin shaped it differently when it came back to her mouth. "No do like so. You no go dey carry my brother matter come me do play."
An older man at her left— Obi— reached across and placed his palm, heavy and steady, on her knee. He spoke in slow pidgin, each word like a brick set to shore up an argument. "Oga, make we hear wetin the man talk. Bar dey. Dem send men. Make we finish am fast fast. No waste time.". Some of her men nod in agreement.
She looked at them as if weighing whether to throw them from the table. Her voice was level but the pidgin had an edge now, a careful blade. "Una dey talk like say dis thing na job wey man go chase for morning. My brother no be only brother. E be family. I no fit let anyone dey—" She stopped, the last word clipped off by something she refused to say.
The businessman did not miss a beat. He folded his hands, the gesture practiced. "Look, I appreciate sentiment; I do. But this is business. It's efficient. I've invested. I have representatives who will guarantee compliance and they will remain with you until the operation is concluded."
At his signal, a neat procession of men in dark uniforms filed in, rifles hanging with a casual, lethal geometry. Across their brows, headbands in white cloth bore Farsi script — جوانان ترقیخواه آزادستان — "Progressive Azadistani Youth." The headbands looked tidy in a way the rest of the room could not be: an absurd, bureaucratic touch sewn into the face of raw force. They stood in formation like punctuation marks at the edge of a sentence.
The businessman's English slipped back into the room like oil. "They are here to ensure things go as planned. They will coordinate with you, advise where necessary. Pay will not be an issue. I've arranged advances." He let his fingers brush the stack of notes. "We expect completion in two days."
Two days. The words landed heavy and immediate.
Obi leaned forward. "Boss, the man don talk. Him don put raba. Dis people go run the technical nonsense. We go reason the remaining. If you stand dey jogo, we go lost for here. Make we reason am sharp."
Another aide, younger and blunt, pushed harder: "Make we no let this one jump men pass. If we wait, the man go change mind or bring more men. You know how dem outsideman dey do."
She closed her eyes for a second. The lamp's light rimed her lashes. When she opened them again the room saw the line in her face, a scar, long healed, twitch in concern. "I no like wetin this man dey ask," she said finally, pidgin softer but certain. "But I sabi run am. We go do small-small. Nobody go make noise. E go clean."
The businessman's smile widened as if the world had split the way he preferred — into those who could be bought and those who would be used. "Perfect. My people will be here to support you," he said. "And one more thing — a request. Do not harm the first bus."
A ripple moved through the room like wind through dry grass.
She frowned. "Which bus you dey cap about?"
He looked at her with a fox's patience. "The first bus on the route when the convoy begins its — complications. My son will be on it." He let the sentence hang. "I prefer he remains untouched."
Her fingers tightened around the crate and she felt the pressure go up her arm as if she'd taken a fistful of the act itself and squeezed. The aides shuffled. Obi's voice stayed steady, a soft tide. "We go reason am, no wam"
She breathed through the negotiation. In pidgin, quieter, she said, "No touch the first bus. Dem say him son dey inside. We go do our thing but we no go reason that one."
The businessman inclined his head, satisfied. "Exactly. You follow the plan. Leave the security detail — my representatives — to coordinate. Two days."
He rose then, smoothly, as if the entire theatre had been a script and he merely completed his line. His entourage moved with him: representatives, suit-clad aides, drivers. Outside, the low rumble of engines answered like a beast waking.
Before he left, the woman's eyes met his, a silence that said more than her earlier acceptance. She was not pleased, but she had agreed; the ledger required currency. "You come with money, you go collect result," she said, pidgin sharpened to the point. "But remember, we no be stone."
He smiled, indulgent and final. "I do remember," he said in his clipped English. "Goodbye."
They filed out, the headbanded representatives last, their rifles a quiet punctuation. In the doorway the businessman paused and looked back as if to make sure the terms would stick. Then he and his men left in two black AMG GT63s that purred like caged predators — glossy machines that ate dust and light. The cars rolled away in a practiced line, taillights bleeding through the compound like a dry wound closing.
Obi rubbed his hands together. "We must plan. Two days no be play."
She watched them for a long time, the pile of cash a strange altar that made everything possible and obscene at once. The aides' plans came in waves — practical suggestions, compromises, contingencies. Each one felt like a bandage for something bleeding deeper. They wanted to protect their people and do the job. She wanted to do the job and not lose herself to it.
At last she stood. The crate squealed. She brushed her hands on her trouser legs as if to remove dust that wasn't there. "Make una no slogodo," she said, voice quiet but final. "We do this clean, we do this quick. We keep the rules. If man ask make first bus dey, make first bus dey. But tell my people: no foolishness. We no dey kpai men for fun."
Obi nodded. "We go move, boys."
They bent back over maps until the lamps burned low and the room grew small with plans. Outside, the headbanded men stood in a patient cluster, their neat strips of white catching the light. The two AMG GT63s cut the road beyond like knives. The pile of cash sat in the center of the table, ridiculous and absolute — a promise that would buy motion, bring strangers into their midst, tilt lines on a map, and put a deadline on mercy.
When at last the meeting dissolved into a tactful silence, the woman walked to the window and watched the road the cars had taken. The sky was a raw bruise. She put both hands on the sill and felt the wood like a confession. For all her reasoning, for all the maps and counter-maps, the thing that sat heavy in her chest was not the cash.
It was the name that had not been said aloud. One who scarred her that much.