Ajegunle had seen gods fall, their divine light choked by rust and the ceaseless crawl of the city. But none ever rose for a boy like him.

  They said the portals only opened for the dead, or those marked by à?? (ah-sheh) – the raw essence of creation. So why did one bloom for him, vibrant and alive?

  The air over Neo-Ajegunle tasted of rust and ozone, thick enough to chew, yet it carried a faint undercurrent of something sweeter—the promise of a world beyond the grime. Below Afobi’s perch, the slum-city groaned – a colossal beast stirring under the relentless 2067 sun. Sor panels, some scarred and patched with scavenged circuitry, others sleek and efficient, clung to sweating zinc rooftops like metallic limpets, their edges catching the light in fractured rainbows. Higher still, wind turbines, their forms both ancient and hyper-efficient, sliced the hazy sky, their bdes tagged with aerosol prayers to Orisha lost in the static-screech of failing grids. This wasn't just heat; it was pressure, squeezing the hope from the air, leaving only the ghost-stench of burning circuit boards and desperation. Yet, even here, defiance bloomed. Tomato vines, impossibly green, wove through the guts of a shattered data-terminal near Afobi’s bare feet, their leaves brushing against glowing glyphs etched into the crumbling psteel. Further down, he could hear the rhythmic thwack of Mama Kemi beating utility pstic into roofing sheets, her work song punctuated by the distorted chime of a street vendor hawking synth-yam and the insistent whine of a sanitation drone, its cleaning sers tracing glowing patterns on a nearby wall. Above, sleek sky-cars, their repulsor fields shimmering, zipped along designated air-nes, a stark contrast to the chaos below.

  Afobi knelt, fingers buried to the knuckles in the cool, dark compost of his rooftop garden. Seventeen. Lean muscle coiled beneath sun-weathered skin. Old scars, pale against the brown, tticed his forearms – a roadmap of years spent scavenging for parts in the Scrap Quarter and navigating the half-colpsed zones where the city’s bones showed through. His gaze, sharp and restless, swept the horizon, searching for… something. A flicker in the monotonous grey. A break in the haze. From up here, above the immediate crush, the city didn’t look broken – it looked defiant. Beating with a stubborn pulse beneath the weight of forgotten gods and corporate amnesia. But he knew the truth. The city was a wound, festering between the glittering sky-cities of the elite and the forgotten depths where people clung to life.

  But deep down, he wasn’t looking for defiance. He was looking for a sign. A whisper on the wind that wasn’t the city’s endless compint. A moment of crity in the static of his grief.

  He came up here when the city screamed too loud, its noise a constant reminder of all that was lost. When the silence felt like her voice, echoing in the hollow spaces of his chest. The garden was his sanctuary, a small patch of life wrested from the metal and decay. He tended the stubborn tomato vines, their leaves glossy with recycled water, the clumps of efirin (scent leaf) whose sharp fragrance momentarily masked the city’s stench, and the single iroko sapling he’d coaxed from a discarded seed, its leaves a vibrant green against the grey, their growth accelerated by carefully calibrated UV mps. It was routine. It was connection. It was a way to remember.

  His fingers closed around the worn leather string at his neck, drawing it up.

  The mask.

  The only thing his mother had left behind in the smoke.

  Smooth, carved wood. Heavy in his palm. Shaped like the face of an Orisha, its features stylized and powerful. Faint carvings spiraled across its surface, catching the light in fleeting patterns. It pulsed softly against his chest, a steady thrum of warmth that resonated deep in his bones. Not just warm. Alive. A heartbeat against his own. A memory given form.

  Like her hand on his cheek.

  Whenever it pulsed like this, a strange restlessness stirred within him, a sense of anticipation mixed with dread. The world seemed to… thin. As if a veil was being pulled back, revealing the hidden machinery beneath the surface of reality.

  He closed his eyes, the city’s cmor fading slightly as the mask’s pulse drew him inward.

  And the scent changed.

  Pstic and heat gave way to rich earth and the sharp tang of obe ata (pepper stew) simmering on a cy stove. The drone of the city receded, repced by the gentle drum of rain on a zinc roof. Her scent. Her arms. Her voice, warm and strong, a melody against the storm:

  "?m? mi, maa gbagbe èni tí ìw? j?..."

  My child, never forget who you are.

  He could almost feel her breath on his face, the weight of her hand as she fastened the mask around his neck with trembling fingers. The dim light of their room, flickering from a cluster of hastily lit candles when the power grid failed yet again. The soft hum of a lulby under cracked windows while sirens wailed in the distance, a lulby punctuated by the rhythmic thump of his own heart.

  “You must keep this close, Fo.”

  “Why, Mama?” His seven-year-old voice, small and uncertain.

  “One day, it will recognize you. And you must be ready.” Her eyes, dark and intense, held a knowledge he couldn’t grasp. A sadness that clung to him even now.

  He hadn’t understood. He’d only been seven. More concerned with the warmth of her embrace and the promise of the stew.

  That night, their small room filled with smoke. Not the familiar haze of the city, but something thick and acrid, burning his throat and stinging his eyes. No fire. No expnation. Just the choking grey tendrils that seemed to seep from the very walls.

  By morning, she was gone.

  No body. No goodbye. Just the lingering scent of smoke, the cold space beside him on the thin mattress, and the mask, heavy and silent against his chest.

  Grief hadn’t broken him all at once. It hollowed him slowly, a persistent ache that never quite faded. Like termites chewing at the edges of something sacred, leaving him with a fragile core.

  “Oi! Dreaming again?”

  Taiwo’s voice crackled through his comm-bead, sharp and tinny. Blunt. Familiar. Annoyed, but with an underlying current of affection.

  Afobi blinked, the memory dissolving like mist in the morning sun. He pushed himself upright, the mask settling back against his chest. The scent of obe ata was gone, repced by the ever-present tang of burning pstic and the low hum of the city.

  He smirked, gncing down at Taiwo’s avatar on his wrist-comp – a holographic projection of his friend, all sharp angles and glowing cybernetic enhancements. “Some of us still touch soil, Tai. Feel the àiyé (Earth) beneath our fingers. Not everyone survives on packet jollof and subscription blessings from the sky-cities.”

  “Guilty,” Taiwo replied, his tone lightening slightly. Then, it shifted, the humor draining away. “MoDA swept Mushin st night. Left something behind. If you hear talk about Divine Portals again... ping me. Please.”

  The line cut, leaving a hollow buzz in Afobi’s ear. He frowned at the wrist-comp. Taiwo rarely sounded this serious. Usually, it was jokes and tech-babble, a constant stream of invention ideas and coded insults aimed with brotherly precision.

  Afobi hovered over the reply chip. But what would he say? That the dreams were bleeding into sunlight, the memories sharper, more vivid? That the mask pulsed with a heat that felt less like wood and more like a living ember, its carvings shifting in subtle ways? That he felt a strange humming beneath his skin, a vibration that seemed to resonate with the city’s groan, a subtle à?? (ah-sheh) he couldn't expin?

  Taiwo had saved his life once. Not with weapons or fancy gadgets. With belief. When grief threatened to drown Afobi in the Scrap Quarter, when the gangs circled like vultures and the silence of his mother’s absence was a deafening roar, Taiwo had pulled him out, offering friendship and a shared purpose. A purpose that didn't involve looking back.

  The chill stayed, clinging to him like the smoke that never truly left Neo-Ajegunle.

  Divine Portals.

  The phrase settled like ash over Afobi’s skin, each word a grain of unease. Soft. Inescapable. He’d heard whispers, rumors traded in the coded nguage of the streets. Tales of shimmering tears in reality, gateways to other realms, or perhaps, to the realms of the Orisha themselves.

  He turned east, the city stretching before him in a chaotic sprawl of metal and life. Above the smog, the sky-cities of the elite shimmered, their towers piercing the clouds like golden needles. A reminder of the world he was excluded from.

  Faint blue fire spiraled up from the far skyline – curling like ghost-smoke against the bruised purple of the morning. It pulsed with an unnatural rhythm, a silent beacon in the urban chaos.

  Another rupture.

  The government called them spatial distortions, anomalies in the fabric of reality. Scientists, those who still dared to speak freely, theorized about quantum decay and dimensional bleed-through. But the streets had older, more resonant names, whispered with a mixture of fear and reverence:

  àw??n il?? ?run. Cracks in the skin of the world. Gates to the gods.

  He’d never seen one up close. Not yet. Only the distant glow, the unsettling ripple in the air that preceded them.

  He remembered the girl from Bariga – Aisha, with her infectious ugh and intricate braids woven with copper wire. The one who walked into a portal that bloomed in the middle of the market and never came back.

  Some said she returned, weeks ter, with eyes like polished obsidian, devoid of warmth or recognition. Silent. Changed. Others whispered she burned from the inside out, her screams echoing with the names of Orisha she had no right to know. That her flesh sloughed off like snakeskin, leaving behind a husk animated by something ancient and hungry.

  Most agreed: she never truly returned at all.

  A strange stillness settled over the city. Generators that always hummed their discordant song… fell silent. Street vendors stopped shouting their wares. Even the coded market drums, their complex rhythms usually a constant backdrop, froze mid-beat, leaving an unnerving quiet in their absence.

  Afobi ducked low behind a cluster of sor panels as a surveilnce drone, sleek and predatory, buzzed overhead, its rotors a high-pitched whine that cut through the silence. Its red lens, gleaming like a polished Ajogun eye, blinked with predatory intensity.

  MoDA – the Ministry of Divine Affairs – never officially said the words “martial w.” But the curfews tightened, the checkpoints multiplied, and people still disappeared into the night. Especially those rumored to be marked by à??. The kind of mark you didn’t see – but felt, humming beneath your skin like a forgotten name, a vibration that resonated with the mask’s pulse. A faint shimmer in the air around them, visible only in the corner of your eye, or in the reflection of polished metal.

  His thoughts jumped to Kehinde. His sister in spirit, her ughter a bright spark in the city’s gloom. Probably at the shelter-school in the flooded district, cursing out the inefficiency of the sor grid with her usual fiery passion, her fingers sparking as she rerouted power lines. She didn’t bend, didn’t break. He once saw her sp a street officer across the face with her school tablet to shield a younger kid from their brutality, her voice ringing out with righteous fury. That’s why she anchors me, he thought. She reminds me that fire still burns in this city.

  And Taiwo – his brother in everything but blood. The tech-wizard, the inventor, the one who hacked a drone swarm to save him back in the Scrap Quarter when he’d been cornered by the Bone Breakers. Made exploding toasters rain from the sky while Afobi slipped past the gates, his ughter echoing through the chaos. He sees the world in code, in systems, Afobi mused. I see it in the soil, in the wind, in the pulse of the mask.

  Even they didn’t know about the dreams. The masked warriors with eyes like burning coals. The gates of fme carved into the swirling tapestry of stars. The voice, ancient and powerful, whispering his name in a nguage he didn’t understand yet somehow knew.

  He thought they were echoes. Leftovers of grief, the mind’s way of filling the silence. Hallucinations born from too much time spent alone with the ghosts of memory.

  But now… the mask’s insistent thrum, the strange vibrations under his skin, the growing intensity of the visions…

  A hum passed through the air.

  Low. Deep. Resonant. Not through speakers. Not through drones. Not through anything he could identify. A sound that seemed to bypass his ears entirely, vibrating directly through his bones. A sound his bones remembered before his mind could grasp its meaning.

  à??. The word formed unbidden in his mind, a whisper of recognition.

  Afobi stood slowly, the mask pulsing against his chest in time with the resonant hum. The hairs on his arms rose. A strange energy crackled in the air, making the fine hairs on the tomato vines sway despite the ck of wind. A small, iridescent beetle, its carapace shimmering with glyph-like patterns, crawled out from beneath a sor panel and froze, its antennae twitching.

  Below, a matte-bck van, its chassis hovering inches above the ground, emerged silently from the shadows of a crumbling hab-block. No ptes. No markings. Too smooth. Too quiet. It moved with an unsettling grace, like a predator stalking its prey.

  His pulse spiked, a jolt of adrenaline cutting through the lingering haze of memory.

  Traffickers.

  The thought hit him with instinctive certainty. He’d heard the rumors, the hushed whispers in the market, the coded warnings passed between scrap-runners. Bck bs hidden in the abandoned zones. Ritualists seeking power from forbidden sources. Organ harvesters preying on the desperate and the vulnerable.

  Emeka had vanished st year. Bright smile. Clever hands. Gone without a trace, swallowed by the city’s underbelly. The memory of Emeka’s ughter, abruptly silenced, fueled Afobi’s rage.

  He moved before he could think, driven by a surge of protective fury.

  Over the ledge. Rust screeched under his worn boots as he unched himself into the air. He caught the tank dder with calloused hands, the impact jarring his shoulders. He dropped the remaining distance, nding hard on the rusted zinc roof of the next building, rolling to disperse the force. He scrambled up, ignoring the sharp pain in his ankle, and sprinted across the uneven surface. Every rooftop step a prayer, a desperate plea for speed and silence.

  Below, the van hissed open with a pneumatic sigh. A sleek bck orb rose smoothly from its base, hovering silently. MoDA-grade scout tech. Sleek. Ominous. Whispering with the faint hum of à??. Alive. Its multifaceted lens swiveled, scanning the rooftops with chilling efficiency.

  He risked a gnce behind him. The orb was gaining, its movements too precise, too relentless. He turned towards the fire-escape stairwell – his only escape route.

  Blocked.

  A man stood there, silhouetted against the dim light of the stairwell. Tall. Imposing. Military stillness radiating from him like a palpable force. Civilian skin stretched taut over sharp cheekbones. Mirrored impnts where his eyes should be, reflecting the city’s grime and the scout orb’s glow with unsettling uniformity.

  Afobi's mind fumbled for reason, for an expnation that made sense. Why wasn’t he attacking? Why wasn’t he shouting orders? Why wasn’t he moving at all? He simply stood there, an impassable barrier.

  Adrenaline surged. He grabbed a rusted pipe lying nearby, its surface rough and cold in his sweaty grip. He swung wide, putting all his weight behind the blow. A desperate act of defiance against the unknown.

  The man didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even seem to register the attack.

  Then time hesitated. Like the city itself was holding its breath, listening. The hum in the air intensified, vibrating through the soles of Afobi’s feet.

  Above them, the flickering streetlights lining the rooftop garden flickered again.

  Once. Twice. Three times in quick succession. Each pulse a surge of blue light that made the glyphs on the nearby wall glow with an eerie intensity.

  Then his mask pulsed.

  Hard.

  A jolt of pure energy, like a lightning strike contained within the wood, smmed into his chest. The world around him blurred, the edges of reality dissolving into a kaleidoscope of colors he’d never seen before.

  The air bent.

  Not wind. Not gravity. Something fundamental, something ancient and powerful, warping the space around him. The ws of physics seemed to fray, the solid rooftop rippling like water.

  Reality shifted.

  Something was remembering him. Something vast and unknowable recognizing a long-lost piece of itself.

  Golden spirals unfurled beside him, twisting and turning like cy folding into fme. The air crackled with energy, the scent of ozone repced by the rich, earthy smell of wet soil and something akin to incense.

  A hole opened.

  A tear in the world, shimmering and unstable. Not a rupture. Not decay. Not the sickly

  The mask’s pulse had shattered reality, and Afobi had plunged into the unknown. But the echoes of the moment lingered: the mask's recognition, the city's stillness, the burning question of why?

  What do you think it all means?