A ghost walked among them. It was the ghost of the boy with the slit throat, and it had taken up residence in the training compound, its presence a chill that no sun could warm. The air itself felt different—heavier, thicker, tainted with the memory of iron-scented blood and the sound of a life gurgling to its end. The vibrant, brutal energy of the place had been leeched away, replaced by a hollow, mechanical silence.
The recruits moved through their drills like sleepwalkers. The fire was gone from Zevi's eyes, replaced by a glassy, distant sheen. Her movements, once sharp and ambitious, were now just precise, empty of the desperate need to excel. She performed perfectly, but it was the perfection of an automaton, a beautifully crafted doll with nothing inside. Mosi's cruelty had turned inward, manifesting as a sullen, brooding violence. She sparred with a reckless fury, as if trying to punish the training posts, the dust, the very air for what she had been forced to do.
But it was Asu who broke.
It happened during a routine session of spear drills. They were practicing the thrust-and-retreat, a simple, repetitive motion. Lunge, twist, pull. Lunge, twist, pull. The rhythm was meant to be meditative, to engrave the movement into muscle memory. But for Asu, the motion of thrusting the spear, the feel of the shaft in her hands, became a trigger. On the fifth repetition, her hands began to shake. On the seventh, a low, broken sob escaped her lips. On the ninth, she froze, the spear tip quivering in the air, her whole body trembling.
"Asu!" Adesuwa's voice cracked like a whip. "Complete the sequence!"
But Asu couldn't. She stood frozen, her eyes wide and unseeing, fixed on some internal horror. The spear fell from her nerveless fingers, clattering on the hard-packed earth. Then her legs gave way, and she crumpled to the ground, curling into a tight ball. The sobs that wracked her body were not the graceful, silent tears she had shed before. These were raw, ragged, tearing things, the sound of a soul being shredded from the inside out. She was a dam that had finally, catastrophically, burst.
"Get up," Adesuwa commanded, her voice hard, but a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes betrayed her. This was not simple weakness; this was a fundamental collapse.
Asu didn't move. She just wept, her face pressed into the dust, her shoulders heaving.
The other recruits stood frozen, their own drills forgotten. They watched, a shared, helpless agony in their eyes. They all felt it—the same black chasm of horror yawned inside each of them. Asu was just the one who had fallen in.
Then, something unexpected happened.
Zevi, who stood nearest to Asu, broke from the line. Her face, usually a mask of focused ambition, was contorted with a different emotion—a fierce, protective anguish. She didn't look at Adesuwa. She didn't ask for permission. She simply knelt beside the weeping girl.
"Asu," she said, her voice low and surprisingly gentle, stripped of all its usual sharp edges. She didn't touch her at first. "Asu, look at me."
Asu's sobs continued, muffled by the earth.
"Look at me," Zevi insisted, her voice gaining a soft steel. "He is gone. What you did is done. It is a weight we all now carry. But you do not carry it alone."
Slowly, hesitantly, Zevi placed a hand on Asu's shaking back. It was not a gesture of pity, but of solidarity. A connection.
"We are still here," Zevi whispered, her words meant only for Asu, but carrying through the dead air to every recruit. "Your sisters are still here. Breathe. Just breathe."
Adesuwa watched, her lips a thin, tight line. She could have ordered Zevi back in line, could have caned them both for the disruption. But she didn't. She recognized something happening that was more important than drill sequence. She saw the first, fragile threads of the sisterhood the Mino depended upon for survival being spun in the crucible of shared trauma.
After a long moment, Asu's sobs began to subside into shaky, hiccupping breaths. Zevi helped her to her feet, supporting her weight. Asu leaned into her, her face streaked with tears and dust, her body limp with exhaustion. Zevi, the proud, ambitious one, didn't shrug her off. She held her up.
Nawi watched it all from a few feet away, a strange, cold knot in her chest. The hollow emptiness left by the execution was still there, a void where her innocence had been. But watching Zevi and Asu, she felt a faint, unfamiliar pang. It was not empathy—she was too frozen for that. It was more like recognition. They were bound together by this horror, all of them. They were the only ones in the world who could possibly understand the stain on their souls. Her isolation, which had once felt like a shield, now felt like a cage of ice.
The incident with Asu seemed to be a turning point. The instructors, perhaps sensing they had pushed them to the very brink, shifted their tactics. The relentless, individual focus on obedience and brutality was supplemented with new, team-based exercises. The message was clear: your individual strength is worthless if it cannot be woven into the strength of the whole.
A few days later, the test came. It was a grey, oppressive morning, the sky the color of bruised flesh, the air heavy with the promise of rain. They were marched out of the city, beyond the cultivated fields, to a place where the land turned rough and wild, cut through by a deep, fast-moving ravine. A recently felled iroko tree, massive and rough-barked, had been laid across the chasm, forming a precarious bridge over the roaring, brown water thirty feet below.
The sound of the river was a constant, thunderous roar, filling the air, making speech difficult. The spray from the churning water misted the air, coating everything in a fine, cold dampness. The scent was of wet stone, crushed fern, and the raw, powerful smell of moving water.
Standing before the log bridge was Commander Nanika, her expression unreadable. Beside her lay a single, massive sandbag, easily the weight of two men, and a long, heavy coil of rope.
"War is not a series of duels," Nanika's voice cut through the roar of the river, sharp and clear. "It is the work of a single body with many limbs. You fail together, or you succeed together. Today, you succeed."
She pointed to the sandbag. "This is your wounded sister. You will carry her across the bridge. The entire unit. If she touches the log, you fail. If she falls, you fail. If any one of you falls, you all fail. There is no time limit. There is only the other side."
A collective sense of dread settled over the group. The log was slick with spray. It was wide, but the drop was dizzying. The roar of the water was disorienting. To cross it alone would be a test of nerve. To cross it as a group, carrying a massive, unwieldy weight, seemed impossible.
They stood there for a long moment, staring at the chasm, no one moving. The individualists—Zevi, Mosi, even Nawi—were paralyzed by the sheer scale of the collective task.
It was Asu, her face still pale but her eyes clear with a new, hard-won resolve, who spoke first. Her voice was soft, but it carried a core of iron they hadn't heard before.
"We need a plan," she said, her practical farmer's mind cutting through the panic. "The strongest need to bear the main weight. The most sure-footed need to guide from the front and back. We need to move as one."
Zevi, snapping out of her stupor, nodded. The ambition in her eyes had been tempered into a sharp, commandeering focus. "Right. Mosi, you and I will take the front left and right. Nawi, you're agile, you take the front center, guide our path. Asu, you're steady, you're directly behind us, support the center. The rest, form a chain along the sides, brace us, take the weight when we shift."
It was the first time they had truly collaborated. There was no arguing. Mosi, for once, didn't protest or try to dominate. The task was too big for her ego. They lifted the crushing weight of the sandbag. The coarse, gritty fabric dug into their shoulders. The sheer mass of it was a shock, a palpable expression of their shared burden.
With a collective grunt of effort, they stepped onto the log.
The world instantly narrowed to the slick, rounded surface beneath their feet and the terrifying drop to either side. The roar of the river became a physical force, pounding at them, trying to disrupt their balance. The cold spray was a constant, distracting assault. The log, alive with the vibration of their steps and the power of the water below, felt treacherously unstable.
"Slowly!" Zevi shouted over the din. "Short steps! Feel for grip!"
Nawi, at the front, her body tense, was forced to rely on the others. She couldn't see the path clearly; she had to trust that Zevi and Mosi were maintaining the edges. Her own balance, usually so sure, felt precarious. The memory of the still oil lamp flashed in her mind, and she tried to find that center, but the chaos was too great.
Halfway across, disaster struck. One of the younger recruits on the flank, her foot slipping on a patch of damp moss, let out a terrified shriek and stumbled, pulling the entire formation off balance. The sandbag lurched violently to the right.
"Hold it!" Mosi roared, her muscles bulging as she fought to correct the shift.
Nawi, caught off guard, felt her own feet skid. For a heart-stopping second, she was falling. The churning, brown water rushed up to meet her.
Then, a strong, steadying hand grabbed the back of her wrap, and another clamped onto her arm, hauling her back onto the center of the log. It was Asu, her face set in a grimace of effort, her feet planted wide and solid. "I have you," she grunted, her voice a rock in the tumult.
In that moment of shared peril, something shifted in Nawi. The ice around her heart cracked. The help wasn't asked for; it was given. It was instinctual. Asu hadn't thought; she had acted to save a sister.
They regained their balance, panting, the sandbag secure. The stumble had cost them. Fear was a cold sweat on all their skin. They were stuck, paralyzed in the middle of the abyss.
"We can't stop!" Zevi yelled, her voice strained. "The longer we stand, the more we tremble! On my count! One… two… STEP!"
They moved as a single, multi-limbed creature. They stopped being individuals named Zevi, Mosi, Nawi, and Asu. They became a single entity with one purpose: to get the weight across. They communicated in grunts, in shifts of pressure, in shared glances. Nawi found herself anticipating Mosi's movements, bracing for Zevi's shifts, relying utterly on Asu's unwavering stability behind her. The defiant hatred that had defined her was still there, but it was no longer the only thing inside her. It was now woven into this new, desperate need to not let these women down.
Step by agonizing step, they inched forward. The rain began to fall, a cold, drenching downpour that made the log even more treacherous. But they were committed now, bound together by effort and shared fear. The world was the log, the rain, the roar, and the sisters whose strength was her strength.
Finally, after an eternity, Nawi's foot touched solid ground on the far side. Then Zevi's, then Mosi's. With a final, collective heave, they stumbled onto the safe, muddy bank, collapsing in a heap, the sandbag thudding beside them.
For a long time, no one spoke. They lay in the mud and the rain, gasping for air, their bodies trembling with exhaustion and spent adrenaline. The roar of the river was still there, but it was behind them now. They had conquered it. Together.
Nawi pushed herself up onto her elbows, rainwater streaming down her face, mingling with the sweat and spray. She looked at Zevi, who was staring up at the grey sky, a look of exhausted triumph on her face. She looked at Mosi, who was wiping mud from her eyes, her usual sneer replaced by a look of grudging respect. She looked at Asu, who sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, a small, weary smile on her lips.
Their eyes met—Zevi's, Mosi's, Asu's, Nawi's. No words were needed. In that shared glance was an understanding deeper than any oath. They had seen each other's breaking points. They had witnessed each other's strength. They had literally held each other's lives in their hands.
The ghost of the executed boy was still with them. The hollow emptiness in Nawi's chest was still there. But the space was no longer just empty. It was now shared. The unbreakable bond was not one of affection, but of necessity forged in shared trauma and proven in shared survival. They were sisters not by blood, but by the mud, the rain, and the chasm they had crossed together. And as Nawi lay back in the mud, feeling the cold wetness seep into her bones, she knew, with a terrifying and exhilarating certainty, that she was no longer alone.