POV: Seren Adaeze
My mother doesn't answer my question directly.
She says the name of the family who sent the boat and I don't recognise it and I write it on the back of my hand with a pencil stub from my jacket pocket because I need it somewhere I won't lose it, and then I ask her how she knows them and she goes quiet in the way she goes quiet when the answer is longer than a phone call should hold.
"How long have you known about them," I say.
"Since before you were born," she says.
I look at Lucian. He looks at the name on my hand.
"Tell me about the box," I say, because the box is the thing I need to understand first and my mother mentioned it and then went quiet about it the same way she went quiet about my drawings when I was seven, the quiet that means she's been holding something and is deciding how much to release at once.
"I'll tell you about the family and the box," she says. "They're connected." A pause. "Let me start at the beginning."
She starts at the beginning.
My grandmother came to Lagos in 1971. Not for any reason my mother was ever told precisely, just a decision that seemed to her at the time like a practical one, a new city, affordable rent, a community she could build herself into. She found the building and she took the top floor flat and she stayed for thirty-one years until she died.
My mother was born in that flat. I was born in that flat. Three generations of women in the same rooms above the same foundation, and my mother tells me now that she always knew her mother chose the building for a reason she never fully explained, that there was something deliberate in the choosing that felt larger than rent or community.
"She used to sit in your bedroom," my mother says. "Before you were born. For hours. Just sitting." She pauses. "I thought she was strange about it. Elderly and strange."
"She was watching the anchor point," I say.
"I didn't know that then." A pause. "I know it now."
She tells me about my drawings. This is the part I need to hear and the part that is hardest to hear at the same time. She says she noticed them when I was very small, before I could explain what I was drawing, before I had language for the specific shapes that came out of my hand when I held a pencil. She says she took one of them to my grandmother and my grandmother looked at it for a long time and then told my mother two things.
First: do not ask Seren about the drawings. Let them come without attention or direction. The Sight, her grandmother said, needed to develop in its own direction. Questions from outside would shape it toward the questioner's understanding rather than the child's instinct.
Second: watch the drawings. Keep them. They will matter.
"I kept them all," my mother says. "From the first one at age two. I have boxes of them."
I press my free hand flat against the stone floor of the ruins and I breathe carefully and I think about thirty years of not asking, my mother sitting across from me at breakfast while I talked about visions I couldn't explain, watching and keeping and saying nothing because her mother told her not to, because her mother understood something about the Sight that I'm only now beginning to understand myself.
She was protecting the signal. Keeping it clean.
I think about all the times I wanted her to ask. All the times I brought a new canvas into the room and waited for her to say something and she didn't, and I decided she wasn't curious, that she didn't understand me, that the gap between us was temperament or generation, and it was neither of those things.
It was thirty years of a very specific, very costly love.
My throat does something I don't have time for.
"The family," I say, because I need to keep moving. "The one who sent the boat. How do they connect to the orbs."
"They know about the curse," she says. "They've known for two generations. Their interest is not in destroying the pieces. They want to consolidate them." She pauses. "All four together in the right hands, according to whoever told them this, is not a destruction. It's an amplification. The curse doesn't end. It becomes something else entirely."
"A weapon," I say.
She doesn't correct me.
I look at Lucian and his face has gone into the working version, processing the implications quickly, and I watch him work and I think about the boat that came to the shore and turned back and the fact that it turned back doesn't mean the people on it gave up, it means they changed approach.
"Mum," I say. "The box under the floorboard. Tell me now."
A small pause. Shorter than the others. She was waiting for me to come back to it.
"I found it when you were three," she says. "I was replacing a board that had warped in the rains. I lifted the old one and it was there. Small wooden box, no lock, just a latch." She pauses. "Inside were things I didn't understand at the time. Papers. A small object I couldn't identify. Handwriting I didn't recognise."
"Whose handwriting," I say.
"I didn't know then." Another pause. "But I kept the box because your grandmother told me once that the flat would hold things that needed to be kept until the right time. And I thought this was one of those things."
"And now," I say. "Whose handwriting do you think it is."
She is quiet for a moment, and when she speaks her voice has the weight of thirty years of keeping a promise and knowing what it cost.
"I think it might be yours," she says quietly. "The way you make your letters. Not exactly. But close."
The map wall pulses behind me, all three outer points at once.
"There is one more thing," my mother says. "The box. I looked inside it last week for the first time since I found it." She pauses. "Seren, it was empty when I found it. It has always been empty." Another pause. "Last week, when I opened it, there was something inside. Something that wasn't there before."
The satellite phone bar flickers.
"What was inside it," I say.
The bar drops.
The call cuts.