I made a mistake with the scar-faced one.
I should have cried. I should have looked away. I should have done what every other child in this room did: shrink, submit, become invisible. That's what survival looks like when you're powerless. You make the powerful forget you exist.
Instead, I looked at him. The fast, clinical look that reads threat level, weapon placement, escape routes. In Lagos, that look was survival. Here, in a baby's eyes, it was provocation.
Stupid. The dead man in me made a mistake the street boy would never have made, because the dead man forgot for just a moment that this body was small, and weak, and owned.
* * *
From that day forward, the boy cried when the cold water hit him. Not real crying. Performance crying, the kind perfected as a child in Lagos when sympathy was needed from market women. He let his lip tremble when the Handlers shouted. He dropped his eyes when anyone looked at him. He became exactly what they expected: a frightened, obedient child. Nothing special. Nothing worth watching.
The scar-faced man relaxed. Slowly. Over weeks. The active hostility faded into general disdain. Just another sniveling child. Beneath his notice.
That was the boy's first lesson in this new world. Not about magic, or aura, or the system that still hadn't spoken to him. About power.
When you are weak, the most dangerous thing you can do is let the strong know you are watching.
* * *
Eki noticed the change.
The boy had been unsettlingly calm in his first week. Then, after Handler Udo's visit, he began crying. Normal crying. Appropriate crying. It was so perfectly normal that it made Eki uneasy, because the shift had been too sudden. One day, stone-faced. The next, weeping. As if someone had flipped a switch.
But she was old, and tired, and her knees ached, and there were twenty-three other children to manage, and the thought slipped away like water through cracked clay.
What she could not dismiss was how fast the boy was learning.
When Eki said 'food,' the boy's eyes moved to the bowl before she lifted it. When she said 'sleep,' he lay down on his mat. When she said 'come,' he crawled toward her. Not with the delayed, uncertain response of a child learning cause and effect. With the immediate compliance of someone who already knew the words and was simply waiting for the instruction.
* * *
"You understand me, don't you?" Eki whispered to him one evening, after the other children had fallen asleep. The nursery was dark except for the single oil lamp in the corner. She was holding him in her lap, not because he needed holding, but because she needed to hold someone.
"Most children your age, they hear noise," she continued softly. "They hear sound without meaning. But you hear the meaning, don't you? You hear the words."
The boy did not nod. Did not smile. He simply listened, with that terrible, patient attention.
Eki rocked him gently. She hummed the old song, the one from the village, the one about the river that carries all things to the sea. She had hummed it to hundreds of children. Thousands, maybe.
"Whoever you are," she said, and she wasn't sure why she said it, "be careful. This place does not reward cleverness. It punishes it."
She kissed the top of his head. She shouldn't have. Attachment to stock was unprofessional. But she kissed him anyway. Because some things in the world are stronger than sense.
* * *
She kissed my head, and something cracked inside me.
Not broke. Cracked. A hairline fracture in the wall I'd built around myself. The wall that the Lagos streets had made necessary and the Lagos streets had made permanent. The wall that said: trust no one, need no one, owe no one. The wall that kept me alive for twenty-three years and kept me hollow for just as long.
This woman was a slave. She had nothing, no power, no freedom, no future beyond this room. She hummed songs from a home she'd been taken from decades ago. She held babies that weren't hers and would never be hers. She kissed the heads of children she knew she'd never see again.
And she did it anyway.
I didn't understand it. I'm not sure I understand it now.
But I memorized her song. Every note. Every hum. Every breath between the phrases.
The wall inside me didn't fall. It cracked. And sometimes, in the years to come, light would slip through the crack.
Her light.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR