Bola’s face squeezed with pain and she stumbled back. She rubbed her eyes, opened her mouth, and hacked loudly. “Sunny,” she gasped. “Both Leopards and Lambs in this world have jobs to do. It is not just you, but you have a job. You four, really. Ekwensu is getting her rest. She will strike soon. Gather yourselves. Sunny, you need Anyanwu. That old one is like an ogbanje. Tempt her back to you with love.” She hacked again and sat down hard. Sunny then saw it, a periwinkle haze rising delicately from Bola’s mouth and then dissipating into the air.

Slowly Bola stood up, straightening her skirt. She cleared her throat. “Temitope!” she gasped. She coughed and this time shouted, “Temitope!” The little girl came walking in with her professional walk.

“Yes, ma,” she said in her tiny voice.

“We’re done here,” Bola said. “Send in the next client.”

Once Sunny and Orlu were outside the gate, it was like stepping into another world. One that was not so full of water.

They walked in silence for several minutes. Then Orlu finally asked, “She’s just . . . gone?”

Sunny nodded.

Silence for several more minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Orlu finally said. “I can’t even . . .”

“I’ll get her back,” Sunny said. Though she had no idea how. As she walked, she clenched and unclenched her fists. Doing so made her feel a little stronger. She kicked a large stone down the dirt road with her sandal and watched it sail far ahead. “I know her best.”

“Yeah,” Orlu said. But he sounded doubtful and . . . disturbed. As if Sunny had an unsightly gash in her cheek.

“What’s Osisi?” Sunny immediately asked.

“You know how the living world and the wilderness are two places but they coexist?”

Sunny nodded. “Wait,” she said, remembering. “I’ve read about full places. In Sugar Cream’s Nsibidi book, she talks about how she and the baboons who raised her lived in a patch of forest that was full. Lambs were terrified of it because they saw it as a bit of forest they’d just never come out of.”

Orlu nodded. “That can happen, yes. Osisi isn’t just a patch of land, though. It’s big. It’s a town that is miles wide and long. It’s somewhere between Igboland and Yorubaland and Hausaland . . . No one really knows exactly where but . . . wherever it is, you need to go there.”

“Why?”

“Your dreams apparently are telling you to . . . probably yourself, somehow. Sunny, Osisi looks like a city made of smoke.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how Sasha, Chichi, and I didn’t put two and two together. I guess we all just assumed . . .”

“The worst,” Sunny said. So she wasn’t dreaming of the world’s end this time. She was seeing a world that was full.

“Yeah,” Orlu said. “The only way to get there, for us to get there—you’re not going alone—is by having a beast called a flying grasscutter take us. I’ve studied these before because they’re fascinating. There was one living in Night Runner Forest some decades ago, and there’s information about it in the book I have.” He shook his head. “You’ll have to just see it to understand it. Fact is, we have to get to Lagos somehow.”