Unease lined the elder sister’s face, so much so that everything about her drooped. “You are much too headstrong.”
“And you are much too safe. Like Father. Let your fears keep you here, sister,” the younger sister quipped, two tiny canines barely peeking out as she smirked.
She was about to resume walking when her sister told her to wait. Impatiently, her weight switching from one foot to the other, she played with the strands covering her chest. Her whole vibe said,Well?
“We must obscure the safoas that permit us reentry through the gates. Should something happen and they get into the wrong hands…” The elder sister trailed off, blinking away sudden tears, unable to continue. She let out a breath. “At least let us listen to Father in that regard.”
The younger twin wasn’t buying it, but she humored her sister anyway. Anything to stop her worry.
The elder twin placed her hands over the blue gem at the middle of her sister’s chains. The younger twin intertwined her sister’s arms so each hand rested on the opposite cuff. Together they bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and waited.
Three tiny specks of light like fireflies appeared beneath their hands and began to grow until they were the size of orbs. I could barely understand what I was seeing. Their hands glowed as they eased down, like when the sun’s rays moved throughout the day, shrouding the cuffs and the amulet in its yellowish-white glow. I could hear a tiny sizzle as wisps of smoke rose from the jewelry.
The twins absorbed the pain of their jewelry being branded into their skin. I felt the pain with them, my own face a mask of grimaces. I hissed through my teeth imagining how the burn must be feeling. Then, as quickly as it had started, the whole thing was done. The cuffs and the amulet had been absorbed into their skin, becoming a part of them, looking like masterful art. A network of designs etched into their skin, and the blue gems, no longer brilliant, were now dulled and branded on them.
The younger sister was the first to open her eyes. “There. Are you satisfied? Can we go or would you rather stay here? We don’t have to do everything together. You certainly didn’t marry like I did or make a child.” She rubbed her barely there belly.
The elder sister slowly opened her eyes. “I didn’t fall in love like you did, sister.”
“Stay. I will not mind.” The younger sister turned heel and made a break for it, running straight through me.
My body fragmented from the disturbance of her energy with mine. I reassembled as she shivered, muttered something about the chill, and charged forward, her arms pumping at her sides, into the woods on the trail to the Asase.
The concern was so evident in the elder twin’s face that I reached out. Her fear was palpable. She grimaced, and when she spoke, there was a whole lot of resentment packed behind her words. “Where you go, Effie, I go.”
Her words froze my incoming hand in midair, the confirmation of who she was making its way to me.
Ama, my grandmother, moved through me like a ghost, our energies merging, then separating when she went through. But unlike her younger sister, she slowed until she stopped. Ama turned back, her face full of wonder and question as she looked back at where I stood. She stared hard at where I was, putting myself back together again. But unlike before, when it was like they couldn’t see me, this time it was as if she did. Not only was she staring where I was, it was like she was looking directly at me. Like we were looking at each other.
“Who is there?” she asked, squinting.
I tried to answer, to tell her to stop and to stop Effie from going down the trail, but no words came out. In this world Above—or in the memory of it—I was the voiceless.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Like a flick of a light switch, I wasn’t in the forest where I’d started out. I was deposited at the end of the path that wound in the steep curves of one continuous S up the mountain and deep into the realm of the Above. In front of me were two massive, ornate closed gates.
They were also made of gold with luscious, thick vines of ivy and moss winding through and on top of each of the closely placed golden pillars, which were as thick as small tree trunks. I realized each of the pillars were spears, the tops of them pointing dangerously in the sky. I couldn’t help thinking about if something fell from the sky and was impaled on one of the many sharp-edged tips. Tiny, cupped flowers of every color imaginable dotted the vines.
There were no levers or latches to open or close the gates. Carefully, because I didn’t want to damage any of the delicate petals or smudge the shiny gold, I placed my palm against the metal, finding it cold to the touch, cold to the point of burning. Reflexively, I pulled my hand back, not expecting the sensation.But I could hear commotion on the other side, could see a mass of people who looked like me and the backs of the twin sisters as they approached them.
“Wait,” I called after them. I’d seen scenes like this before me in history books, on countless movies. Scenes of masses of people being lined up. Having their hands bound. Being tethered together by rope, one after the other, by the waist, or in the cases of these people, by the neck.
But seeing it in person was a completely different experience.
I watched as the men on horses holding rifles and handguns corralled the people as if they weren’t… people. Screaming curses at them, spit flying as they looked down at the dazed and shocked African people as if they were nothing. My heart and my body ached at the sight of it.
I knew where they were going. I knew what would become of this hundred, as it had so many before them and so many after. I’d seen plenty renditions of it, but it was nothing like seeing it with my own eyes. It was something that would stay with me forever.
I pushed and pushed against the gate, but it wouldn’t give.
“Wait!” I yelled after the sisters. “Come back. Don’t go down there.”
But they couldn’t hear me. I still had no words. And I wasn’t really there. This had already happened and I hadn’t been there.
They got farther away from me, but even as they got farther and farther, they grew closer and closer toward the people and what I now saw was a gray shoreline lined with tiny boats being filled with people to be carted off to the tall, dark, massive shipsbobbing ominously in the whitecaps, their stained sails fluttering in the wind.
It was as if I were seeing Effie and Ama through a mirror, as if they were right there. But they were not. They had gone well beyond their realm. They were not as close as I thought, even though it felt like they were right there and I could touch them, feel them, as I did when they ran through me back in the clearing.
