She saw another bead, but it was too far to grab. “Damn it,” Sunny hissed, out of breath. “Can’t get it!” Ekwensu was spinning faster now, and the beads were flinging this way and that. Sunny decided to ignore them and keep climbing.

Ekwensu had always been arrogant, Sunny knew. She had expected and assumed Sunny, naked and so young without Anyanwu, would run away from her, not to her. Ekwensu’s dried-up leaves were wet, making them easier to climb. And they were tightly packed, so as long as Sunny grabbed the right leaf, she found purchase and hauled herself higher. Sunny felt all her muscles flex. She was made for this. She was like an Idiok baboon in a forbidden forest. She focused on the wet leaves to avoid dizziness. She was almost there. She had to move faster!

Suddenly, Ekwensu stopped spinning, red beads clicking and clacking as they hit the walls and floor. Sunny held on with all her strength and managed not to go flying. When she looked up, one of Ekwensu’s faces was looking right at her. The smiling one. Its angry smile widened as the blank wooden eyes glared at her.

Ekwensu roared and Sunny felt the powerful masquerade’s warm body flex in a way that nothing made of dried leaves ever should flex. For a moment, Sunny nearly lost all her faculties. How could wet dried leaves not only be warm but feel like some kind of . . . flesh? The contradiction made her woozy, but she held on. A black substance began to ooze from between the leaves in millions of hairlike filaments. Wherever they touched Sunny’s body, they stung.

Sunny couldn’t hold on much longer. And she could feel it; Ekwensu was about to fly off. Sunny glanced below. If she let go and landed just right, maybe she would live to face Ekwensu another day? This thought gave her little comfort. And then a swarm of dragonflies was whipping around Sunny’s head. No, not dragonflies. One of them slowed down right before her eyes and she gasped. Nsibidi. Loops, coils, swirls, lines of living yellow script. One of them stopped right before her eyes, and she grasped its meaning: Remember, I never leave you. Read this, it said.

“Anyanwu?” she whispered. “Is this from you?”

Ekwensu’s body swayed and then slowly, she began to spin again. Sunny grunted and hung on tighter, as she fought to focus on the Nsibidi symbols floating before her. They moved with her, and the combination of trying to read them while Ekwensu rotated made her stomach violently lurch. She gagged as she read, then saw, heard, smelled . . .

Forest, silt, craggy waters, all drenched with greasy black ooze. Sunny knew this place. She’d seen it on the news. The bitter smell of dead rotted trees, sulfurous like a thousand farts. The place is silent because everything is dead. Then I saw Ekwensu bubble up from a great pool of black-brown mud surrounded by a ring of dying trees. Mud bubbling and blurping as she rose. Then she began to spin and one of her faces spat out an orange-yellow spark. It arced into the pool of blackened mud and the whole place went up in flames. I pulled back far enough to see the forest burn, then the nearby town, and another town, all as Ekwensu danced in the burning forest.