Ннеди Окорафор - Remote Control

Then they left the strange remarkable child there on death’s doorway. Death knew the moment they left her because the smell of all things in Death’s household changed. The colors of marigold and periwinkle began to appear in corners. And of course the crickets, grasshoppers and spiders started singing.

Nonetheless, Death did not open the door. Death left the baby there. For six days. When the baby did not die, Death grew curious. When Death opened the door and saw the child, even she had to admit that the child was unique. Death took the child in and raised her until the child was seven years old.

Death named her Sankofa because by the time the child was of age, Sankofa had the ability to send people back to their past, back to The Essence. Sankofa is The Adopted Daughter of Death. And now she goes from town to town snatching lives, sending them to her adoptive mother. You see her face and you will soon see no more. She looks nine years old because she is petite, but she is actually thirteen.

Sankofa had once sat in a circle of young children and listened as a woman told this exact version of her own story. No one there had any idea that she was The Adopted Daughter of Death and she was glad. She’d once watched a naked mad man in a market frantically tell the story to himself. His telling made her seventeen years old. Another time, two teenage thieves told her the story as they tried to convince her that they could protect her from the powerful “remote control” of Death’s Adopted Daughter… if she agreed to be their girlfriend. In their version of the story, they tried to scare Sankofa by exaggerating Death’s Adopted Daughter’s methods of killing. They said Sankofa carried a rusty machete that magically cut deep with the slightest pressure. The real Sankofa only rolled her eyes and walked off.

Some people said Death’s Adopted Daughter was riddled with leprosy. Others said she was pretty, “like an American.” Some said she was ugly like a girl raised in the bush. Some marked her as a bloodthirsty bald-headed adze, mythical vampires of the oldest stories who resulted from life’s ugliest moments. Others said she wasn’t human at all, that her blood had been tainted with radioactive gas by aliens who’d come to Earth through a black hole one night; that this was why she shined green. What they all agreed on was that wherever she went, she brought death. The only part of the shifting story that Sankofa hated was when people added the idea that her parents left her. Her parents never ever would have left her. She’d had the best parents in the world. Now, in her fourteenth year on earth, if there was one rule she lived by it was the fact that Stories were soothsayers, truth-tellers and liars.

She knew where she was going now. As New Year approached, she moved faster and more directly. When she needed rest, she stopped in towns and villages along the way. She accepted gifts. And though asked many times, only twice did she ease people into soft deaths. And only once did she kill in defense, days before, on Christmas night—a gateman whose mind was poisoned by the wild rumors that preceded her. She met more farmers and they were almost always kind, and when they weren’t, they at least knew to stay out of her way. She had no other trouble. And Movenpick had finally decided she was worthy of his full trust, coming close to sleep beside her at night, finally, and always following from a slight distance when they travelled during the day. No one gave Movenpick any trouble, either.

Sankofa arrived at the border on New Year’s morning. She was wearing her long yellow skirt, matching top embroidered with expensive lace and a purple and yellow headband made of twisted cloth. She’d acquired another simpler green wrapper and top and had worn that all week, saving this one from Christmas for the day she entered Wulugu. She wanted to arrive in style.

The trees looked different. So did the road. It was so black that it looked like it led to another dimension. The stripes on it were so yellow that they looked like the paths of shooting stars. But this was the road that led into the town of Wulugu. At least what used to be Wulugu. Who knew what Sankofa would find here? Even at this hour, the road was busy with autonomous delivery and transport trucks and personal vehicles. She stood to the side of the road remembering. Not a mile away was the place where her normal life had ended.

“We’re back,” she said to Movenpick, who stood right beside her. She could see the top of the mosque in the distance up the road, so there was still something left. “Let’s go home.”

Her stomach was growling, but she was too excited to care. As she walked, old darkened memories tried to sneak into her mind, her mother’s face, her father’s voice, her brother’s laugh. Her heart fluttered and she shut her eyes as she walked. The feeling passed and she was happy again. Movenpick trotted at her heels like a dog.

There were still ghosts in Wulugu and Sankofa was relieved. She felt them as she strolled into town, lingering in shadows, between buildings, on front steps. Reminders that everything that had happened truly happened, no matter how much had been covered up, rebuilt, replaced, reorganized. As she came up the road and approached the mosque, she passed several people leaving it. She recognized no one and she was glad when no one recognized her. And she was glad Movenpick stuck close.

She passed a small and very empty market area. This place looked the same, though it wasn’t. The old table outside a closed restaurant where in the evening men would sit outside and play cards and smoke cigarettes was still there. She wondered if it still had the same purpose. The narrow dirt road that ran through town was now paved with fresh asphalt and used by people on foot and on bicycles instead of cars.

There was joy in the air. And beyond the homes and buildings on the right were the shea tree farms, Sankofa knew. A few years wouldn’t matter much to trees; if anywhere looked the same, it would be the shea farms. She stopped at one of the random shea trees that grew in the town square. She stepped closer. Carved into its trunk was “#AfricansAreNotLabRats”. She ran her hand over it, wondering who’d taken the time to carve it. Probably someone who’s long moved on, she thought.

She passed Wulugu’s biggest hotel and, now twice the size as it had been, it was much nicer than she remembered. It even looked like it now had running water and more generators. And there was a very new-looking pharmacy attached, a big advertisement for LifeGen nasal spray in the window. Sankofa stopped at this, frowning. She glanced up, surveying the sky.

Two dark-skinned tall women dressed in stylish western jeans, T-shirts and gym shoes and with long perfectly coiffed dreadlocks came out of the hotel entrance, giggling as they looked at their mobile phones. When they noticed Sankofa they grinned. “Good morning,” they said to Sankofa, walking in the direction she’d come from. They had American accents. Why were Americans here?

“Good morning,” Sankofa said, smiling back.

“Cute dog,” one of them said. She held up her phone, took a photo of Movenpick and then they both were on their way. Sankofa watched them go for a moment and then she moved on.

When she reached her home and knocked on the door, no one answered. Instead, the door swung open and the smell of dust and abandonment wafted out. She stood there looking inside, Movenpick beside her. If she’d needed even one hint of what had transpired in Wulugu six years ago, here it was. Every single home she’d passed up to this point, every single building, every booth in the women’s market, the bicycle shop, everything was occupied. Different faces, different families, but people. Except this house.