He picked up the pinkish-yellow kola nut and broke it into four parts. “Four lobes,” he said. “Very good.”

He took a piece, scooped up some peanut paste with it, then some alligator pepper, and handed the plate back to Sunny as he ate it. Sunny next offered the plate to her father who did the same. When she served Ugonna, she refused to look at his smirking face. If he had been younger than her, she’d still have had to serve him, for maleness outdid age in Igbo culture. Ridiculous, Sunny thought as she always did when she got stuck serving the kola nut when her father had visitors.

She took her piece, dipped it into the peanut paste and then the pepper, and angrily crunched the combination. The bitter taste came from the fact that kola was full of caffeine. It used to be the ingredient in Coca-Cola that gave it its flavor and caffeine. The bitterness, the heat of the pepper, and the peanut flavor was always an explosion to her taste buds. She focused on that instead of her irritation.

Sunny studied well into the night, riding the caffeine wave of that one piece of kola nut. When she finished, she brought out the box from beneath her bed and opened it. Her kola nut buzz gave a kick to her curiosity. I wonder, she thought, bringing out the sheet of Nsibidi. She put it down, turned off by the idea of vomiting kola nut if she tried to read it. Then she picked it up again. She took a deep breath and then quickly unfolded it.

She looked at the symbols and nothing happened. She sighed, irritated. Nothing happening was even worse than feeling the nasty nausea. “Great,” she muttered, still straining to “read” the Nsibidi. “Now I don’t even—” The symbols started shifting. Her belly flipped with surprise; she grasped the sheet more tightly. “They’re looking back at me,” she whispered, feeling her lips go numb and her ears begin to plug up. She was being thrust high into the air or deep into the water. There was a strange smell, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The smell was sweet and grassy—oily, too. Her belly rumbled and roiled.

Then Sunny heard the voice of her only Leopard relative, who’d been so powerful and loved and secretive and then brutally slain by her best student Black Hat Otokoto. Sunny’s belly stopped rioting, the rising nausea disappearing. Her grandmother sounded almost exactly like Sunny’s mother. The same high voice and rapid way of speaking. Then a strange place opened before Sunny—a city with beautiful stone buildings all etched with intricate designs. Mosaics, engravings, stone that contained mineral veins in natural, colorful, fractal patterns. Tall buildings that stretched high into the sky, but the buildings were rivaled by equally ambitious and strong trees, some palm, some more like fat baobab trees and hefty ebony trees. The roads were red packed dirt. And there was a small sunflower-yellow stone house with a stone roof . . .