Caleb's mother lived in an apartment he had paid the rent on for six years and had only started visiting months ago. When he came in the morning after Lagos she was already awake, sitting at her table with her hands flat on it.
It was as if she had known the question was coming and had decided where she would be sitting when it did.
"You found something," Iris said, and it was not a guess. She had run the apparatus that watched the city for a long time, and the apparatus was gone now, the screens dark, but the instinct that had built it was not.
"You came at this hour, and you came alone, and you have the look your father used to get when he'd learned a thing he couldn't un-learn. Sit."
"Tell me what you found, and I'll tell you whether I already knew it, because I'm done deciding for you which true things you're allowed to carry."
He sat. He told her. The tower, the builder, the small one with his face and his voice, how it had taken Sefa whole without asking and it had worked.
