CHAPTER TWO: THE GIRL WHO WANTED WHAT THE MOON GUARDED
The first lie Emma Adebayo told herself was that she only wanted to see the Moonstone again.
Not take it. Not touch it. Just see it—close enough to understand why it kept visiting her dreams like an unanswered question.
She told this lie the way people told prayers: softly, repeatedly, and with the hope that repetition alone could make it true.
By morning, Lagos had shaken off the night like a restless sleeper. The lagoon glittered innocently. Traffic swelled. Street vendors argued cheerfully with fate and change. If the Moonstone had pulsed in warning hours earlier, the city gave no sign of it now.
Emma moved through the Mainland with practiced ease, her body still humming from the run the night before. She cut through Yaba, hopped a danfo at Obalende, and crossed into Ikoyi like someone stepping into a different country.
The air felt quieter there. Heavier. As if sound itself had learned better manners.
She hated that she noticed these things.
The Balogun compound sat behind tall walls softened by age and flowering vines. A place that pretended it had always been meant to survive the future. Emma stood across the street longer than necessary, watching the gate as if it might open on its own.
It didn't.
Emma exhaled and laughed under her breath. Of course it didn't. The world didn't bend just because you stared at it hard enough.
"Unless," said a voice behind her, "you know which way to lean."
Emma turned sharply.
The woman who stood there looked wrong in the way mirrors sometimes did. She was tall and thin, wrapped in a faded wrapper that changed pattern when Emma wasn't looking directly at it. Her headscarf sat too neatly, her smile too wide.
"I didn't hear you walk up," Emma said.
The woman clicked her tongue. "That's because I wasn't walking."
Emma took a step back. Ikoyi or not, Lagos had taught her caution early.
"I'm just passing through," Emma said.
"So is everyone," the woman replied. "Some people just pass through other people's things."
The woman's eyes flicked—just briefly—to the Balogun gate.
Emma's pulse jumped.
"I don't know what you mean," she said.
The woman smiled again, this time with something like pity. "You've been dreaming of a stone that isn't yours. That usually means it's already noticed you."
Cold slid down Emma's spine.
"Who are you?"
The woman adjusted her wrapper. "Some call me Alájọbí. Some call me nothing at all. Names are doors. I don't always want to be followed."
Emma swallowed. "You're not human."
Alájọbí laughed, delighted. "Neither is the thing you want."
Silence stretched between them, thick and listening.
"I don't want to steal anything," Emma said finally. The lie tasted thin even to her.
"No," Alájọbí agreed. "You want to borrow fate."
Before Emma could respond, the Balogun gate creaked open.
Sophia stepped out.
She wore a simple dress, her hair pulled back, her posture composed in a way that suggested she had grown up being watched—and trusted—with important things. The Moonstone rested against her chest, bright even in daylight, its glow muted but unmistakable.
Emma forgot how to breathe.
The stone was stronger in person. Not louder—deeper. Like standing near water that looked calm but hid a current capable of pulling you under.
Sophia glanced up and met Emma's eyes.
Recognition sparked.
"Emma?"
Emma nodded, too quickly. "Hi. I was just—"
She stopped. There was no good ending to that sentence.
Sophia's gaze slid briefly to Alájọbí, her expression tightening.
"Who is this?" Sophia asked.
"A concerned neighbor," Alájọbí said smoothly. "Very concerned."
Sophia's fingers rose instinctively to the Moonstone. The stone dimmed slightly, like an eye narrowing.
"You shouldn't be here," Sophia said—not unkindly, but firmly.
Emma felt heat rise to her face. "I know. I just wanted to talk."
"To me," Sophia said. Then, sharper: "Or to the stone?"
The question landed like a slap.
Emma opened her mouth, closed it, then laughed—a brittle sound. "Does it matter?"
It did.
The Moonstone warmed.
Sophia hissed softly and stepped back, shock flashing across her usually steady features. "It's reacting," she murmured.
Alájọbí clapped once, pleased. "There it is. The choosing itch."
Sophia rounded on her. "You—leave."
Alájọbí raised both hands. "Ah-ah. I haven't broken any rules yet."
Emma's head spun. "Rules?"
Sophia's eyes never left Alájọbí. "The Moonstone binds itself to blood and consent. It does not respond to hunger alone."
Alájọbí tilted her head. "Not officially."
The air shifted.
Something unseen brushed past Emma's ankle, like a cat made of smoke. She gasped and stumbled forward—straight into Sophia.
For half a second, Emma's hand pressed against the Moonstone.
The world fractured.
Heat. Light. Water rushing upward instead of down. Voices speaking backward. Emma screamed, or thought she did, as images flooded her mind: the lagoon before Lagos had a name; shrines burning; a woman bargaining with the moon and losing more than she offered.
The Moonstone flared.
Sophia cried out and tore herself free. Emma fell back onto the pavement, gasping, her palm blazing with pain.
On her skin, a mark bloomed—pale and crescent-shaped.
The first violation.
The Moonstone dimmed, then steadied, its glow colder now.
Alájọbí's smile vanished.
"Well," she said quietly. "That's new."
Sophia stared at Emma, fear and something like sorrow warring in her eyes. "You touched it," she whispered.
Emma looked at her burning hand, tears blurring her vision. "I didn't mean to."
The Moonstone pulsed once.
Somewhere, deep beneath the lagoon, something answered.
And the moon, high above Lagos, turned its face away.
---
The mark did not fade.
By evening, Emma learned this the hard way.
It began as heat—deep, bone-deep, as if her blood had learned a new temperature and refused to let go of it. The crescent on her palm glowed faintly beneath her skin, pale and insistent, like moonlight trapped under flesh. When she closed her hand, pain shot up her arm, sharp enough to steal her breath.
She told herself it would pass.
Lagos punished that optimism quickly.
By nightfall, the mark had spread. Fine white lines crept from her palm along her wrist, branching like tributaries of a river only she could see. Wherever the lines touched, sensation dulled—then sharpened again, wrong and exaggerated. The brush of fabric felt like sandpaper. Sound arrived too loud, too close. Every horn blast felt personal.
Emma stumbled through the Mainland as if the city itself had shifted slightly out of alignment with her body.
Worse were the moments when her legs failed her.
Her speed—her one reliable gift—betrayed her. When she tried to run, her muscles locked mid-stride, seized by a pressure that felt like invisible hands gripping her ankles, holding her in place. The harder she fought it, the hotter the mark burned.
She collapsed once near a roadside gutter, gasping, vision tunneling as water shimmered where concrete should have been. For a terrifying second, she smelled salt and old leaves instead of diesel.
The lagoon was learning her name.
Sleep offered no mercy.
When Emma finally drifted off, she dreamed of standing knee-deep in water that climbed higher no matter how still she remained. The Moonstone hovered just out of reach, cold now, judging. Each time she tried to move toward it, the crescent on her palm flared, and her body sank heavier into the flood.
She woke screaming, her sheets soaked—not with sweat, but with water that tasted faintly of brine.
By the third day, the mark had begun to take payment.
Food turned to ash in her mouth. Mirrors betrayed her: sometimes her reflection lagged a second behind her movements, sometimes it showed her standing underwater, hair floating gently as if she were already dead. People brushed past her on the street and shivered, muttering prayers without knowing why.
Most terrifying of all were the whispers.
They came when she was alone, sliding into her thoughts like borrowed memories. Voices layered atop one another—women bargaining, men warning, something older laughing softly beneath it all.
Borrowed things must be returned.
Emma pressed her marked hand against her chest and sobbed.
She had not stolen the Moonstone.
But it was claiming her anyway.
Somewhere across the water, Sophia woke with the taste of salt on her tongue and the unbearable certainty that the Moonstone had started a countdown.
And beneath the lagoon, ancient and patient, a debt stirred.
CHAPTER THREE: WHAT THE MOON TAKES FIRST
Sophia woke choking.
Salt burned the back of her throat, sharp and unmistakable, as if she had swallowed lagoon water in her sleep. She bolted upright in bed, heart hammering, one hand flying instinctively to her chest.
The Moonstone was cold.
Not cool—cold. The kind of cold that sank past skin and bone and settled into memory. It lay against her collarbone like a verdict.
Sophia swung her legs off the bed and steadied herself against the nightstand. Her room was unchanged: pale curtains stirring in the breeze, the distant hum of generators, the lagoon reflecting the moon in fractured silver. But something inside her had shifted, like a door left ajar.
She knew, with a certainty that made her knees weak, that Emma was suffering.
The Moonstone pulsed once, faintly, as if acknowledging the thought.
"No," Sophia whispered.
She had grown up with rules the way other children grew up with bedtime stories. Some were spoken aloud, repeated until they lodged in the bones. Others were learned by watching what adults refused to say.
The Moonstone binds itself to blood.
The Moonstone does not tolerate theft.
The Moonstone takes before it gives.
But the rule that haunted her now—the one her grandmother had only ever hinted at—was this:
The Moonstone punishes love first.
Sophia pressed her forehead to the cool glass of the window and breathed through the ache rising in her chest. Loving someone marked by the stone was not forbidden. It was worse.
It was expensive.
She had felt it the moment Emma's hand touched the Moonstone. The flare of pain had not belonged to her alone. Something had ripped across the bond she shared with the stone, tearing open a pathway that should never have existed.
Now it hummed with чужой presence. Not hers. Not fully Emma's either.
"Grandma," Sophia called softly.
The house answered with silence.
Iya Morẹnikẹ had left before dawn, walking stick in hand, expression carved into something grim and knowing. She had not needed explanations. The Moonstone had woken her too.
Sophia straightened and reached for the stone.
The moment her fingers closed around it, pain bloomed behind her eyes. Images flooded her mind unbidden—Emma gasping on concrete, white lines crawling up brown skin, water soaking bedsheets where no water should be.
Sophia cried out and dropped the stone.
It hit the floor without a sound.
Tears streamed down her face, hot and helpless. The Moonstone had always shared warnings before. Never this. Never consequences already in motion.
"She didn't mean to," Sophia said aloud, as if the house—or the moon—might be persuaded by intent.
The Moonstone did not respond.
Instead, Sophia felt something else begin to fray.
Her strength.
It was subtle at first. A tremor in her hands. A heaviness behind her eyes, as though she had not slept in days. When she stood, the room tilted slightly, correcting itself only when she leaned closer to the stone.
Understanding crept in, slow and merciless.
The Moonstone was redistributing weight.
Emma bore the mark.
Sophia bore the cost.
By afternoon, Sophia's shadow lagged behind her movements, stretching toward the lagoon even when the sun stood overhead. Servants glanced at her and looked away too quickly. Plants near her window wilted despite careful watering.
She tried to eat and could not finish. Tried to read and forgot words halfway through sentences.
Every thread of affection she felt for Emma—every remembered smile, every shared silence—tightened the invisible tether between them.
The Moonstone fed on that connection.
Sophia understood then what it truly guarded.
Not power.
Not legacy.
Balance.
And balance, once tipped, demanded payment in flesh, in breath, in love.
As dusk fell, Sophia sank to the floor beside her bed, the Moonstone cradled in shaking hands.
"If I let go," she whispered, voice breaking, "will you spare her?"
For the first time since childhood, the Moonstone answered her clearly.
Not in words—but in certainty.
There are debts only the beloved can pay.
Sophia closed her eyes.
She loved Emma.
And the Moonstone had noticed.
Somewhere across the city, Emma screamed as the mark flared brighter than it ever had before.
And the moon, having taken its first true offering, watched Lagos without blinking.