“Can you get around their car?” Orlu asked.

“I’ll try,” Chukwu said, driving onto the red dirt pathway near the center of the road. There was already a line of cars stuck there and Chukwu opened his window. “Excuse me, sir. Will you . . .”

The man in the passenger seat pinched his face and said, “Na no see way we dey hook here like person wey dey inside rat cage?”

The driver ducked down to see Chukwu. “You think I am fool?” he snapped. The man was old enough to be their father. “I let you in and the whole world will be squeezing.”

“The people in the car in front of me have left it,” Chukwu said. “Just let . . .”

The driver closed his window.

“What is wrong with the people here?” Orlu asked, disgusted.

“It’s not them,” Sunny said. “Chukwu, remember when we all came through here?”

Chukwu nodded.

“It wasn’t this bad, but it was bad,” Sunny told Orlu. “People know that, so they are mean. It’s faster when you don’t let anyone else in.”

In front of them a large truck carrying about fifty people and a great pile of oranges belched out exhaust, and the people in the back coughed and waved at the polluted air. The exhaust soon reached them, and they coughed as Chukwu turned the Jeep on and closed the windows. When the air cleared, he opened them again. Best to save gas by not using the air conditioner.

“If this were a funky train, we wouldn’t be here,” Chichi whispered.

“Yeah, we wouldn’t be here,” Sunny said in a low voice so Chukwu wouldn’t hear. “We’d still be at home because my parents wouldn’t let me travel for so many days without Chukwu.”

Chichi sucked her teeth and opened the door to stretch her legs. Sasha got out and leaned against the car with her.

It was hot and humid, and the shanties that housed a small market were booming with business, selling pure water, plantain chips, and cell phone car chargers. Sunny was looking at the cloudy sky, glad that a few of the puffier clouds were covering the sun, when the idea popped into her head. She had asked Sugar Cream about this very possibility, so she knew a little about it.

“Can Leopard People control the weather?” she’d questioned Sugar Cream one horribly hot day. The entire library had felt as if it would melt back into the earth from which it came. “Or even just temperature? I’d have thought there’d be some juju to at least cool it down in here.”

Sugar Cream had laughed and said, “Can you imagine the world we would live in if we could do that? The entire Earth would be in chaos.”

“Oh,” Sunny’d said, leaning back on her elbows. As usual, she had been sitting on the floor of Sugar Cream’s office. She’d tried her best to ignore the red spider scuttling across the floor a few feet away.