Then I saw him. Tunde.
He didn’t look at the Orishas. He ran straight for the vault, towards the light of my dying sacrifice. He held his market knife—the small, sharp one—an unlikely saviour.
“Your life no be only thing wey dey strong!” he yelled.
He plunged the knife into the crack.
The knife was a physical thing. A human item. The vault was pure spirit. The two should not have touched.
The sound was not an explosion. It was a shatter. Like a million phones hitting the ground at once. The crack exploded outwards, a web of broken light.
The Orisha of Water screamed again, this time in true agony. The vault didn’t just crack open. It burst.
A wave of souls poured out. Not a stream anymore. A flood. A river of light and freedom, so bright it hurt to look at. They washed over the Orishas, not attacking, just passing through, and where they passed, the gods flickered and dimmed, their power scattering.
A single soul broke from the river. It floated to me. It was my mother. Her form was faint, but her eyes were open. They were her own.
“Ada.”
It was just my name. But it was her voice. Oh, how I’d missed it .
Strong hands grabbed me. Uzo and Tunde. They hauled me up, my body old and broken.
“We must go! Now!” Uzo shouted. The hall was collapsing, the spirit realm screaming in protest.
We stumbled back into the tunnels. I don’t remember much. Just the darkness, the sound of Tunde breathing hard, Uzo pulling us through ways only he knew. We were not followed. The Orishas were too wounded.
We fell through a dissolving wall and landed hard.
Not into spirit water or marble but on wet, hard ground. The air smelled of rain, sewage, and roasted corn. Lagos, at last
I was lying in a flooded Yaba alley. The Third Mainland Bridge groaned above us. It was night.
I was alive. But I was old. My skin was paper, my bones felt hollow. I tried to sit up and couldn’t.
My mother was lying beside me. She was solid. Alive. She was coughing, her eyes wide with confusion and fear. The ghost of the vault was still in them. She was free, but she was broken.
Tunde helped me sit up. Uzo kept watch, his melted face looking towards the city.
“My family…” Tunde said. “I go check them.” He looked at me. “We don try.”
Uzo nodded. “The balance has shifted. Small, but it has shifted.” He looked at his hands, and for the first time, the melting seemed less severe, like a curse weakening.
We hadn’t won a war. We had started a fight. The Orishas were still there. The loans were still there. But we had cracked their perfect machine. We had let the light in.
My mother found my hand. Her grip was weak, but it was there. She held my wrinkled fingers tight.
Lagos chews up dreams and spits them out, laughing.
But it hadn’t swallowed us yet. We were still here.
And for now, that was everything.