They came into Lagos at night, on a cargo flight Iharu's cousin arranged, in the hold of a plane that officially carried machine parts and unofficially carried six suspended operators and their bags.
Caleb had braced for a hard landing in every sense. He had spent the whole flight running the ways this could go wrong, a wanted man on another continent with no Guild, no sanction, no cover but a teammate's word. What he had not braced for was how cleanly the wrongness stopped at the edge of Iharu's world.
The cousin met them on the tarmac, not a checkpoint in sight, and embraced Iharu hard and long. Then he looked at the five strangers his cousin had brought across an ocean and said something to Iharu in a language Caleb didn't have.
Iharu answered, and whatever he said made the cousin look at all of them differently, with a kind of weight. The cousin nodded once, and the question of whether they belonged here was closed.
