Ннеди Окорафор - Remote Control

So Alhaja is ok with me using my glow to save her shop, but not with me using it to save my own blood, Sankofa thought. Yes, to her, people were strange. Sankofa may have forgotten her name, but she remembered those early days of malaria, when she’d lain in bed shuddering, her body throbbing with the drum beat of deep aches, where it felt as if lightning were shooting through her legs, where she felt as if she were being repeatedly stung all over her body by giant mosquitoes. Over and over, this disease attacked her body… until the day the tree offered her the box. Let the women of RoboTown gossip, let Alhaja feel mildly uncomfortable; Sankofa’s hatred of mosquitoes was purely justified and she would keep zapping them with her light when she so pleased.

Still, Sankofa was looking forward to going to the mosque. She hadn’t been inside one since the day she’d killed her home. She vividly remembered seeing her father there, dead with all the other men. The silence in a place that had always been filled with the sound of prayer. She’d brought death in there. Always in the back of her mind, though she was still alive and healthy, she’d wondered if Allah was angry with her.

The mosque was a small grey building. There were no flourishes on the outside, and there was no Arabic script anywhere, except above the entrance. The place looked nothing like the mosque back home. It’s still a house of Allah, she reminded herself. Waiting at the entrance was a fat woman with smooth dark brown skin. She wore a grey wide dress that probably was making her look even fatter and a black hijab around her head. Her fatness made it difficult to tell how old she was.

“Sister Kumi,” Alhaja said, giving the woman a hug.

“Alhaja,” she said. Then she turned to Sankofa with a kind smile. “Sankofa,” she breathed. “It’s an honor to meet a legend. Please come in.”

When Alhaja pushed her toward Sister Kumi and then did not follow, she looked at her with question. “I’ll be back for you in an hour,” Alhaja said.

Sister Kumi led Sankofa to a small room in the back of the modest mosque. There were several overlapping oriental rugs covering the floor and a tea set in the corner with hot tea already poured into the tiny cups.

“Sit,” she said. “This is my meeting room. Make yourself comfortable. I can bring chairs if you like, but something told me you’d prefer the floor.”

Sankofa wanted to be offended. Did she think she was some kind of animal or bush girl? But the woman was right, Sankofa did prefer the floor, and she had spent a week in the bush once and loved it so much that she yearned to return to it. So she sat down on the floor and crossed her short legs. With far more effort, Sister Kumi did the same, though she simply sat with her thick legs stretched before her.

They stared at each other, Sister Kumi still breathing heavily from the exertion of sitting down. Sankofa was not afraid to look into people’s eyes, but usually they were afraid to look into hers. Not Sister Kumi, she seemed perfectly fine, gazing into Sankofa’s eyes. They looked into each other’s eyes for so long that Sankofa could see that Sister Kumi’s dark brown eyes curved down at their edges and she had two small discolorations on the white of her right eye.

“I see it, even when you don’t make it happen,” Sister Kumi said after a while.

Sankofa nodded. “Most don’t because they’re afraid to look for too long, but it’s always there.”

“The evil.”

“I don’t know it to be evil. Not what’s in me.”

“It brings death.”

“Only when I want it to. Everything dies, animals, plants, things…” She trailed off because Sister Kumi was just staring at her again.

“Why’d you come to RoboTown?”

Sankofa shrugged. “It was in the opposite direction.”

“From where?”

“Evil.”

“I’ve heard the stories about you and quite frankly, I am shocked to be here sitting with you. A part of me wants to deny it’s really you. Alhaja and several others talked about what they saw two nights ago and I see what I see in your eyes but… my heart is still denying.”

“I could show you if you want.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

“Because of you?”

Sankofa frowned at her.

“Do you believe in Allah?”

“Yes,” Sankofa said.

Sister Kumi smiled glowingly and breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. Because I was about to say that even a djinn can be converted.”

Sankofa frowned, irritably thinking, I’m not a djinn. She pushed away her annoyance because she had questions. “Why did Allah make me this way? What did I do?” She thought of the seed in the box and how her father had sold it off without a thought, how the politician had died soon after buying it, and how the abilities the seed gave her seemed to have corrupted in its absence. For the millionth time, she wondered if Allah had wanted her to fight harder for it. To stand up to the politician and even her father. But who stood up to one’s father?

“Sometimes we have evil inside us and only Allah knows why,” Sister Kumi said. She leaned forward. “So to control your… death light last night, you had to push your emotions down deep? Is that how you control it?” Sister Kumi said, pressing the fingers of her right hand to the center of her chest.

“Maybe,” Sankofa said. “I don’t know if—”

“Maybe if you press the urge to glow down deep and hard enough, you can smother it, put it out.”

“I… I can try,” Sankofa said, unsure. A tantalizing idea crossed her mind like a colorful bird… Maybe I can return to normal . She considered just forgetting about the seed in a box and she felt an immense weight lift from her shoulders. And with that weight went the burden of guilt she felt for the deaths of her family and town. She would not just bury those memories, she would leave that entire grave behind. I’ll stay in RoboTown with Alhaja and be normal. She took in a sharp breath and grinned. Sister Kumi reached forward and took her hand.

“Let us recite the ninety-nine names of Allah,” she said. “Just repeat after me if you don’t know them.”

Sankofa nodded. She’d never heard of such a thing.

“And from today forth, you will wear a hijab. You’re young, but you’ve been through things that put you far beyond your years. You must cover up. We will cure you, yet.”

After naming Allah ninety-nine times, for the next hour, they prayed familiar words that brought Sankofa right back to the mosque in Wulugu. When her parents and her town were still alive. When she and her brother used to fight and play in the house. When she climbed the shea tree and the earth had yet to offer her the box. The more she spoke the words of the Quran, the harder she pushed those memories down within her, imagining them pressing the strange light in her to the ground, smothering it until it went out. When they both looked up, Sankofa hugged Sister Kumi tightly and the woman’s folds of fat were like the embrace of Allah. She’d never forget her family. She loved her family, would always be part of it. But she would be normal; let the seed in the box go. Yes. Here was a chance.

When Alhaja came for her late that afternoon, Sankofa was wearing a grey hijab over her short-haired wig and a smile on her face.

Sankofa quickly learned that the citizens of RoboTown cherished their robocop, and this made it one of very few robocops in Ghana to not be vandalized, stolen or hacked into. The people of RoboTown guarded their street robot with such care that it might as well have been one of their most prized citizens. A crew polished it every week, scrubbing every nook and cranny with a special solution made by one of the town’s old women and thus the robot shined immaculately for most of the week when there wasn’t rain. Sankofa learned that on the day she’d arrived, it had rained for two days before. Otherwise, she’d have been greeted that day by a shining robocop that practically glowed in the dark.