CHAPTER TWO:

You are Yasiin Baako. You are his rage. You are his delusion. You are his hunger—starved for what cannot be consumed or contained. Another rasping inhale from her—less urgent now—more like a reminder to him that life's countdown timer hasn't quite wound down yet. She still possessed a voice after all.

It was unclear if she was listening anymore. Eyes fluttering shut between spasms. Still, he continued, undeterred by her fading interest.

Now the noises from the monitors were growing louder; the sounds of fists hitting flesh punctuated his sentences.

The woman gurgled. He'd forgotten about her. Blood had pooled around her head in a pattern that looked almost like continents drifting apart.

Her breathing grew shallower still; her eyelids fluttered shut. A tear trickled down her cheekbone as he leaned forward once more to address her directly:

He paused then as if considering whether he should continue speaking aloud those thoughts which had consumed his waking moments these past months. After a few moments passed without interruption (the woman's breath scarcely detectable), he resumed narrating:

He stopped short at this realization, struck by its implications. The blonde's face contorted with pain; she groaned weakly—too quietly even to draw attention amidst the surrounding carnage—and then fell silent once again as life slipped from her body like sand through an hourglass whose neck had widened considerably under duress.

The woman's trachea performed liquid percussion. Death rattle or agreement—the distinction was as relevant as asking a tsunami its pronouns. Yasiin started every morning wrestling the verisimilitude of anoesis and the cacoepy of being. What truth was there left in the invisible negro? He held his father's steel twin-mouthed colt, pointing its barrel towards his life-sized Barbie. Cum-stained lips like lollipops smeared to her cherry cheeks. Her hair stuck in uncombed clumps. Mascara running and eyeliner smudged—the look of regrettable anonymous sex written all over her face. He squirmed around childlike, still mulling over the question she had asked him.

Yasiin couldn't remember a time where he was the author of his own life. He was never behind the wheel. Rather strapped into his baby seat and given something to suck on to keep him content. There were days where he didn't like himself. Where he saw no value in vanity's mirror. Just shit. Meat sizzles where the woman's thigh meets concrete. Not cooking—the reverse. Flesh surrenders to concrete's alkaline kiss. Molecular bonds dissolve into grey slurry that used to be quadriceps. Yasiin counts the bubbles rising through this broth—seventeen per minute. Each marks another increment in her unstitching from the world.

The blade finds purchase in her remaining clavicle. Not cutting—scoring.

Her breathing apparatus wheezes like an accordion left in swamp water. He knows the exact count: thirty-seven perforations in the trachea courtesy of Sungara's favorite acupuncture needles. Oxygen starved eyes roll white-ward.

As the woman's lungs collapsed with a sound of crushed balloons, her mouth opens. She is trying to speak.

The vowels croaked from a larynx long since sliced apart and glued back together by Yasiin's trembling hands. Her mouth: a punctuation wound. Vowels crawling like maggots.

She blinked. Or attempted to. The third eyelids drooping over the corneas failed.

A thin line of scarlet appeared at the seam of the incision near her ear.

Yasiin wiped a splatter of blood from his cheek. He rolled the bone saw between his fingers. Thirty-seven notches. Thirty-seven bodies. The YAKUB woman gurgled something between a plea and a death rattle. Her lungs were collapsing like wet paper bags. Yasiin ignored her.

He gestured around the blood-slicked bunker. Her eyes. Wide. Searching. Finding nothing. He sighed, a sound too deep and weary for a body barely through its third decade.

He picked up the saw again, his thumb brushing across its teeth.

Yasiin moved to the bunker entrance, resting his forehead against the cold metal door, eyes closing.

He turned, back against the door, sliding down until he sat on the floor, knees drawn to his chest like a child.

The bunker fell silent except for the distant hum of ventilation systems and the sound of Yasiin's measured breathing in the darkness.

he said boyishly, kicking his feet together in excitement. He was a peculiar, narcissistic, charming, self-pitying, violent, confident, shallow and intelligent man. He was a killer, but a killer with a flourish. Yasiin waited on pins and needles for her response, unable to keep eye contact for more than a few seconds at a time. Even with black eyes and a split lip, he confessed his sins to her.

[silence.]

Her body became a wireframe model, vital signs cycling in decreasing numbers along the right margin of his view. He blinked twice to expand the personal data packet that hovered above her head.

As he spoke, a small alert blinked in the corner of his vision: SUBJECT BLOOD PRESSURE DECREASING. ESTIMATED CONSCIOUSNESS: 17 MINUTES. He stored the information for later use and closed the interface with a long blink, returning his attention to Chase's face, which now held a new significance beyond the anonymous violence of moments before. Sliding his fingers against his lap he patted it twice, hoping the invitation of sex would rile her. But she sat stiffly with those Betty Davis eyes, staring without saying one word. Yasiin knew she was judging him, poking holes in his story and shutting him out like all the others. His face burned red, unable to contain his ignominy.

The door crashed against the frame with the sudden violence of history interrupting itself.

Chase startled, a reflex of prey. Yasiin merely turned his head, his flinch controlled to near invisibility. In the doorway stood a woman who made the dim light reconsider its obligations.

Yasiin started, trailing off as Sungara entered the space.

Tonight, she wore her Valentino haute couture jacket, Fall 3004 collection, immaculately tailored to accentuate her shoulders—shoulders that had carried weight since before her birth. Her dress beneath was Oscar de la Renta, midnight blue with gold thread that caught the bunker's unforgiving light. Louboutin heels clicked against concrete with the rhythm of fate advancing.

She reached down with nimble fingers and wiped the splatter of red on Yasiin's forehead. Lovingly, or so she thought. But what really took place was more an act of obsession masked as tenderness.

Yasiin said. The word "NOWHERE" expanded beyond its letters, becoming location, condition, mathematical proof of absence. Oya stepped between them, her body becoming a living threshold. A liminal space holding both urgency and patience—the bridge between necessity and desire.

She spoke with the practical fatigue of someone who'd accepted long ago that revolutions were built on paperwork and dinner reservations, not manifestos and bloodshed.

Tonight, Oya wore what looked like vintage oversized Balenciaga in aggressive pink that made the bunker's fluorescent lighting seem even more sickly. Destroyed Chrome Hearts jeans, probably eight thousand dollars, hung perfectly imperfectly from her hips. Off-White sneakers, still box-fresh despite the concrete dust. Her numerous earrings—silver, industrial, almost weaponized—caught the light when she moved.

Yasiin said. The thing inside of him slouched down his rib cage. Its anger satiated momentarily by his admission. He wanted it gone but not enough. Not enough to return to their charade. Sungara inhaled slowly, oxygen passing through the narrow channel of her controlled rage.

The space between the trio stilled with Sungara's unspoken proclamation. I am tired of your voice. If you speak it shall not be heard. This is my domain and you trespass.

Yasiin's pupils dilated slightly. His first instinct was to resist, but Sungara had turned from him, refocusing her attention on Oya, and the words died in his mouth.

Yasiin countered. Sungara rolled her eyes dramatically in retort. Her patience thinning by the second.

Yasiin stared through narrowed eyes at her for a beat longer than comfortable before responding. His anger was a force of nature, uncontained and cataclysmic. He pressed forward, drove himself to within inches of Sungara, until the heat of their rage threatened to melt the air between them. Sungara held her ground, unflinching, unwavering.

He fired back with the quickness of a seasoned soldier.

Sungara, in a flash, cut in.

Before Oya could finish, Yasiin interjected.

The bunker's ventilation system cycled on, a mechanical exhalation that underscored his accusation.

His palm pressed flat against his chest, pushing as if to contain every tired muscle Icarus regrets, every echo of an echo, every echo containing another, and every echo spoke, and every echo said in his ribcage.

He muttered, peeling a strip of scalp from the dying YAKUBS occipital ridge. The hair comes away like rotten lace. Sungara's nostrils flared, the only visible breach in her composed exterior.

Yasiin's restraint shattered. His voice exploded into the confined space, bouncing off concrete walls and returning with alien resonance.

Blood spattering his hand as it slammed against concrete. A sickly splatter painting.

The veins in his neck stood prominently beneath his skin. He gestured toward the dying woman on the floor, a dismissive sweep that encompassed all their failed strategies. Twelve minutes since coherent speech. Eight since bladder release.

And, in this moment the body was a theatre, a head; an arrival of fire, not a church.

Sungara's body transformed—the elegant couture figure becoming suddenly predatory. She crossed the remaining distance between them with the coiled swiftness of something eoanthropic and terrible. Her finger jabbed the air inches from his face, the gesture as violent as any physical blow.

Her eyes—those deep brown pools of ancestral judgment—fixed on him with unwavering intensity. For three heartbeats, neither blinked.

Her hand dropped, the gesture somehow both surrender and recalibration.

She glanced toward the door, as if already projecting herself beyond this moment of conflict.

The dying woman on the floor exhaled a ragged breath that none of them acknowledged—a punctuation mark in a conversation to which she was no longer relevant. Oya towered above her, axe in hand, posture stiffening, her breathing measured and calm. A resolve settled over her face like winter frost; as she brought down her axe with finality into the back of the woman's skull. She then withdrew the ax with a wet, sucking sound and placed it back on the tray of tools. Blood dripped from its edge, forming a small puddle on the metal surface. Oya watched it spread, fascinated by its movement, the way it sought the path of least resistance. The coppery scent mixed with the lingering smell of burnt flesh from earlier procedures. It was an odor unique to their work—an olfactory testament to their commitment to the cause. Yasiin lept to his feet, his chair clattering to the concrete floor behind him. He stared at Oya, at the blood freckling her dark skin like inverse stars, and beneath his anger was the hollow recognition of a pattern repeating itself—his wives and their perpetual interruptions, their casual theft of what he considered his.

Oya wiped blood from her cheek, smearing it like war paint.

The nickname—usually a salve—fell flat between them. Sungara leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching them with the detached interest of someone observing weather patterns. She wore her usual expression—half-amused, half-calculating, as if everyone else's emotions were variables in an equation only she could see. Both women knew every nerve in Yasiin's body by heart and could pluck them like guitar strings. The corpse of the YAKUB woman sat between them, already an irrelevant prop in their domestic drama. The tension between them was an old and familiar enemy, before it swallowed them whole, Sungara stepped between, her body becoming a physical conjunction—the living embodiment of "and" rather than "versus."

There was a momentary pause before Oya added:

She reached up to cup Yasiin's face between her palms, tracing his cheekbones with a lover's touch.

Yasiin tried to pull himself out of his anger just enough to listen to them. Oya pulled both Sungara, and Yasiin closer until their bodies pressed together, a familiar warmth that grounded her despite the chaos.

The words landed with impact.

There was an urgency in her tone that belied a deeper emotion—a neediness beneath the facade of control. Oya ran a hand through her short-cropped hair, leaving a faint smear of blood at her temple. Yasiin's hand found her waist, warm against the cool fabric of her pants.

Oya let out a shaky breath, but Yasiin cut through their moment with a scoff.

The confession created new silence.

That brief thirty-three minutes hung between them—Sungara's blood on white sheets, Oya's mental breakdown, Yasiin's helpless rage.

Sungara said, moving to a small cabinet. Inside sat a small leather-bound book, its spine cracked with use. The Medou Ntjer—the holy book of Amexem.

Sungara opened the book to a page marked with red cloth. Symbols crawled across the parchment.

She reached into her pocket and withdrew a folded page.

Sungara explained calmly to both Oya & Yasiin. Oya then reads aloud from The Medou Ntjer:

Fear rose in him like bile. Fear of fatherhood, of time, of insignificance. How could an Unfinished-Character raise a child? When he couldn't even catch his Inciting-Incident? Sungara placed a finger against his lips. Her other hand moved between his legs.

She pulled Oya closer until all three were nose to nose, breath mingling.

Sungara's smile is radiant, triumphant. Oya's was relieved, grateful. Together, they form a circuit of intention, of purpose, of power. Whatever doubts Yasiin still harbors are subsumed in this moment of connection, this reaffirmation of their trinity. Whether it's love or revolution or simply the magnetism of Sungara's vision that binds them, the result is the same—they are committed now to this new path, this new attempt, this new hope.