What comes after death?
I can tell you. It's not paradise. It's not hellfire. It's not the white light the pastors promise or the darkness the atheists expect.
It's silence.
A silence so complete it has weight. It presses on you from every direction. Not painful, not comforting, just absolute. Like being at the bottom of the ocean, if the ocean had no water and no bottom and no sides and no up or down.
I floated in it. Or I didn't float. I existed in it. Maybe. Just awareness. A small, stubborn flame of awareness that refused to go out.
And then light.
Not gentle. Not gradual. A searing, violent eruption of light that felt like being turned inside out and shaken. Every part of me was suddenly compressed, crushed, forced into something small and tight and unbearably physical.
I felt a heartbeat. Not mine, or maybe mine. Small and frantic, like a bird trapped in a fist.
I felt lungs. Tiny lungs drawing tiny breaths.
I felt skin. Soft. New. Wrong.
* * *
He tried to open his eyes. The world was blurry. Too bright. Shapes moved above him. Brown skin, dark eyes, rough cloth. Someone was holding him. He was small enough to be held in two hands.
A baby. He was a baby.
And somewhere deep inside this tiny, fragile body, a second presence stirred. Something that was not him but was also not entirely separate from him. A consciousness. A flicker. An infant soul that had been here first, that was too new and too small to resist the weight of the mind that had just crashed into its body.
Two souls. One body.
The woman holding him stared with an expression he couldn't read. Not tenderness, not love, not disgust. Just assessment. The way a trader looks at merchandise.
* * *
She was not his mother. She was Eki, and she was sixty-one years old, and she was a slave in the House of Chains in the trade city of Ughoton, and her job was to keep the young ones alive long enough to be sold.
This one was different.
He was small. Barely past his first year of life. Dark-skinned, darker than most in Ughoton, with large, watchful eyes that tracked movement in a way that made Eki's skin prickle. Babies his age stared at nothing. They reached for things. They put their fingers in their mouths. They cried.
This one watched.
He watched the other children in the holding room, twenty or so, ranging from infants to toddlers, sleeping on straw mats in a stone-walled chamber that smelled of mildew and sweat. He watched the Handlers when they came through to inspect the stock. He watched Eki herself when she fed him, his dark eyes fixed on her face with an intensity that made her look away.
"You are a strange one," she murmured in the old tongue, rocking him against her chest. "What are you looking at? What do you see that the rest of us don't?"
His eyes moved from her face to the doorway behind her, then to the high window where dusty light fell across the room, then back to her, and Eki had the sudden, irrational feeling that he had just assessed the entire room, its exits, its dimensions, its occupants, in three seconds.
She shivered despite the heat.
* * *
Eki hummed an old song, a lullaby she'd learned from a mother she barely remembered, in a village she'd been taken from forty years ago.
It was the look of someone who had been here before.
* * *
The old woman held me and hummed, and for a moment, just a moment, I let myself feel it. The warmth. The vibration of her voice in her chest. The smell of her skin, which was sweat and woodsmoke and something faintly sweet, like shea butter.
In Lagos, nobody held me like that. Not Mama Buki. Not anyone.
The dead man inside the baby's body wanted to weep. Not from sadness. From something worse. From the realization that this, this crumbling room, this slave house, this old woman's arms, was the safest he had ever been.
* * *
But the air in this world was different. Heavier. Charged with something he could feel in his chest like a second heartbeat. Something alive. Something vast. He didn't have a name for it yet. He wouldn't have a name for it for years.
But he could feel it. Even then. Even as a baby.
Two souls in one body. Two rivers in one channel.
Lagos taught him to survive.
This world would teach him to live.
END OF CHAPTER TWO