It grunted and huffed and puffed out water at her, nearly blowing her from the bridge. The briny flower smell invaded her nostrils.

“Sunny!” she heard Orlu call. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she called back, still looking it in the eye.

None of them could come and get her. Only one person could be on the bridge at a time. Sunny was alone here. But she’d asked for this. Anyanwu had. A green seaweed-covered tentacle reached for her, and she danced back.

“You missed,” she said. Then, without a thought, she leaped. This was Anyanwu’s impulsiveness, but it felt great to Sunny. She wasn’t a super-fast thinker like Sasha and Chichi, but there was a joy she experienced when she acted impulsively, and she felt it now. In mid-leap over the tentacle, she glanced down at the raging river below. She remembered how cold its waters had been when she’d moved through it during her initiation. With its wild, churning gray-white currents, no one would hear if she fell in and they would certainly spirit her away within seconds.

She landed gracefully on the side of the narrow bridge where she’d entered, the river beast’s tentacle on the wood behind her; she was steps away from where Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha stood waiting to cross. She looked back and laughed, her voice Anyanwu’s deep baritone that made her sound like an arrogant middle-aged chain-smoking woman. The river beast grunted wetly. Then it shivered with surprise and the crescent-shaped pupils of its silver eyes widened. Sunny stopped and nearly fell to her knees. The images that burst into her mind stung sharply like angry attacking bees behind her eyes. Then she could have sworn she heard the river beast laughing, or maybe it was shrieking because it, too, was experiencing the vision that moved through it to reach Sunny.

It flooded in like river water. There was haunted music. The flute and the talking drum filled Sunny’s mind. Even the water below vibrated to the beat of the masquerade’s tune. Then she was looking at Ekwensu, the terrifying spirit she’d faced here last year. She grabbed the sides of her head and shook it; she shut her eyes. “No, no, no, no.” She was already so weak. The vision kept coming, though. Ekwensu looked the same; a house-sized mound of packed palm fronds standing in a place of green grass. The only difference was that she seemed to be constantly spilling out red beads from between her dry fronds, some tiny as ants, some big as horseflies. And she was rising from the grass now. Two of the red beads seemed to fly at Sunny, and she flinched, snapping from her vision.

One of the bigger beads hit Sunny square between the eyes, and for a moment there was a strange sensation of her drifting to the side when she wasn’t. The bead bounced on the bridge’s wood and rolled into the river. The second bead flew into the water, plunging in feet away from the river beast. This seemed to wake it and when it did, it fled back into the deep. Sunny stared at where the river beast had been, where the bead had flown, because the bead was real, a physical thing. Then she turned and ran off the bridge. Chichi screamed with relief as Sunny emerged from the bridge. “What happened?!” Chichi shouted. “We thought the river beast took you!”