"Check Yourself"

The prayer group voice note came in at 5:14 AM. Forty-three minutes long. His mother's doing---she'd added him eighteen months ago without asking, and he'd never found a way to leave the group that didn't also involve a conversation he didn't have the energy for.

He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. The fan turned. The room was the particular dark that existed only in Trans Ekulu before the city remembered it was alive---the dark where the generators had gone off, and the nightguards had stopped walking, and even the dogs had given up barking at whatever dogs barked at in the small hours.

He got up.

Didn't shower yet. Pulled on his grey sports vest and the navy shorts with the drawstring thinning at the edge. Socks. Sneakers---the New Balance he'd bought three years ago that Chizaram kept saying made him look like someone's retired uncle. He put in his wireless earbuds and scrolled past the prayer group without playing it. Put on the playlist instead. Soft guitar. A woman singing low, careful with it. Chizaram made it two Christmases ago. Said he needed options. He hadn't argued.

He locked the door behind him. Checked it. Waited. Checked it again.

Outside, Trans Ekulu was exactly as quiet as he needed it to be.

• • •

The route was the same every morning: out of the compound, left on the main road, past the vulcanizer's that didn't open until seven, past the RCCG church with the cracked signboard that had been cracked for two years, past the junction where someone had once left a motorcycle at 9 PM and it was gone by 9:04. He ran toward GRA. Five kilometers, give or take. His knees had opinions about this that he ignored. The music helped. The dark helped. The fact that absolutely nothing was expected of him for the next fifty minutes helped most of all.

He passed two other runners. Neither looked at him. He didn't look at them. That was the understanding.

By the time he looped around the ShopRite parking lot and started back, the sky had gone from black to the grey-purple that meant the city was thinking about waking up. A woman was already setting up an okpa stand near the road, arranging her aromatic bambara bean cakes with the focus of someone who had done this eleven thousand times and would do it eleven thousand more. He ran past her and the smell followed him for half a block.

He was back inside the compound by 6:32. Locked the door. Checked it. Went to shower.

• • •

Chizaram was at the kitchen table when he came out, her uniform only partly done---shirt tucked, skirt on, tie hanging loose like she hadn't decided yet. She was reading something on her phone and eating an orange she'd clearly peeled herself because the skin was in a single unbroken spiral on the table beside her, which was either impressive or infuriating depending on the morning.

"Good morning, madam."

She blinked, like she'd just returned from somewhere else. "Good morning, Okopops. Sorry."

She'd picked that name herself. Refused to drop it.

"You could have woken me," he said, opening the cabinet.

"I literally woke up three minutes ago."

"You have school in forty minutes."

She set the phone face-down. "I've never been late."

"There's a first time for everything."

She looked at him. "Is that a proverb or you're just trying something new? Because my head is not in the mood."

"You're sick?"

"I took paracetamol."

"When last did you treat malaria?"

"A month ago. Okopops, I'm fine."

He cracked eggs into the pan. Left it there. No follow-up. She watched him cook the way she always had: quiet, steady, like she was storing the details for later. He'd learned not to mistake it for disinterest.

"There's bread," he said.

"I can see it."

"You should eat it."

"I have an orange."

"That's not breakfast."

"It's fruit. It came from the ground. That should count for something."

He plated the eggs and set them in front of her. She looked at it. Looked at him. Tied her tie with three efficient movements and picked up a fork.

"Thank you," she said, and somehow made it sound like she'd won.

He made his own eggs standing at the counter, watching her eat and scroll and occasionally scribble something in the small notebook she kept beside her plate in the mornings. He'd stopped asking what she wrote in it. She'd stopped offering to show him. That was a negotiated peace they'd arrived at sometime around her fourteenth birthday, and it held.

"Waist belt," he said.

She reached into her bag without looking and brought it out.

"ID card."

She tapped her chest pocket.

"Your---"

"Okopops." She finally looked at him. Her eyes. Ifeoma's. Not Akunna's. It had never made sense, and he had stopped trying to make sense of it. "I have everything. I have had everything every morning for six years. The day I forget something, you will be the first to know."

He finished his eggs.

• • •

He drove her. He knew she hated this. He knew sixteen was old enough to take a keke, to join the school bus, to exist in the world without a police detective trailing her like a shadow. He also knew that Iva Valley Road at 7 AM had precisely three corners where a car could slow down, and he knew because he'd clocked them the first week she started at that school and had not forgotten.

She sat in the passenger seat with her bag on her lap and her headphones around her neck and looked out the window at Enugu coming to life: hawkers stepping into traffic, kekes sliding through gaps that didn't exist, women in Chosen vests already moving with purpose.

Halfway there, she turned to him.

Opened her mouth.

He kept his eyes on the road but he noticed.

She closed her mouth again. Looked back out the window. Something crossed her face---not quite trouble, not quite calculation. Something sitting between the two.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing."

"Ogini?" Then, quieter: "What?"

"It's nothing. I was going to say something and then I didn't. That's allowed."

He didn't push. He had learned: slowly, badly, over many failed attempts, that Chizaram was a person you could not push. The harder you pushed, the further she went. So he drove, and he kept the moment.

He pulled up outside the school gate. She was already half-out before the car stopped.

"Call me when you get to---"

"Last period. I know." She shouldered her bag. Then, almost reluctantly: "Your earpiece is still in. Left ear."

He reached up. It was there.

"Sharp eye," he said.

"Runs in the family." She was gone.

He watched her through the gate until the uniform disappeared into the crowd of other uniforms, and then he sat there four more minutes in the car outside her school like the retired uncle her shoes made him look like, and then he drove to work.

As the school gates receded in the rearview, the "Okopops" persona shed away like old skin. He adjusted the rearview mirror, not to check for his daughter, but to scan the traffic for tails.

By the time he reached the station, the domestic warmth of the morning was gone, replaced by the cold, analytical hum he needed to survive the 4th Floor. He didn't just walk into the building; he re-entered the grid.

• • •

The briefing didn't waste time. Coal Camp. Three kidnappings in two weeks. All victims recovered. None reported it. The information had surfaced the usual way---through whispers, informants, that low, constant hum of street knowledge that outran anything official. Men, forty to fifty-eight. Returned alive. Not talking.

Deputy Commissioner Adewale perched on the edge of the table like a man who didn't need furniture to feel in control of a room. Fifty-five, silver threading his temples, a face built for trust. Emeka had known him long enough to know the difference between the face and what it was doing.

"It's yours," Adewale said. "I want you on it personally."

"You have three other detectives in---"

"I want you." His hand landed on Emeka's shoulder: firm, assured. The kind of touch that carried expectation without asking permission. "Best I have, Em. You know that."

He did. He let the thought exist for exactly a second before locking it away.

"I'll need the informant reports."

"Already on your desk."

• • •

It was late afternoon before he found the thing he hadn't been looking for.

He was scrolling through his messages for a building access code Sergeant Duru insisted he'd sent. Duru was loose with things like that. Messages, details, anything that couldn't be held in the hand.

Emeka's thumb moved with quiet precision, backtracking, checking, moving again.

In this job, a single wrong digit wasn't small. It was the difference between getting in clean and not getting in at all. He didn't like that kind of error. He liked it even less when it came from Duru.

His thumb swiped past a thumbnail, and his brain caught it a half-second after his hand did.

He scrolled back.

A photo. Ifeoma at a wedding... some friend's wedding he couldn't even name now, maybe 2016, maybe 2017. She was laughing at something off-camera, her head tilted back, wearing a blue aso-ebi that he'd always thought made her look like she'd stolen the color from somewhere it wasn't supposed to leave. Chizaram was six in this photo, also in blue, her face doing that thing children's faces did when something was genuinely, uncalculatedly funny.

He looked at it.

For a moment, something in him shifted. It wasn't grief. That had worn itself into something else over the years. This was quieter than that. The way a room felt after music stopped. Chizaram was six in the photo, laughing with her whole body. Ifeoma's head was tilted back, caught in the middle of it, neither of them looking at the camera.

That was the problem with photographs. They caught people mid-life and held them there, like nothing could touch them.

His thumb moved. Found Duru's message. Found the code. He went back to work.

• • •

She was still awake when he checked in at 10 PM.

The light under her door was the blue-white of a laptop screen, not yellow---not reading, not watching something on her phone. Working. She was always working on something she didn't fully explain, and lately he'd started to suspect it mattered more than he was comfortable with.

He knocked twice. Heard the small sounds of a person minimizing windows.

"Come in."

She was cross-legged on the bed, laptop in front of her, wearing an oversized hoodie that he was fairly certain had once been his. The notebook was beside her. Her expression was the composed one, not the natural one. He knew the difference.

"You eat?"

"I made indomie."

"That's not---"

"I added an egg."

He looked at her. She looked back at him. She had dark circles under her eyes she was too young to carry, and a stillness that had never belonged to a child. She was only sixteen years old and in SS3 and the smartest person he personally knew, and most nights the combined weight of those facts sat on his chest when he stood in her doorway.

"Sleep soon," he said.

"Mm."

He should have left. He stood there one more moment.

"Zaram."

She looked up properly.

"Asa m." My beauty. He said it the way he said it to Ifeoma. "Check yourself."

It was theirs. Since she was eight. Since the day she'd come home tight and quiet and he'd said the wrong thing and she'd told him, Dad you're so bad at this, and he'd agreed. Check yourself and let me know if you need me. Somewhere along the line, it had hardened into code for everything he couldn't quite say.

She almost smiled. "Check yourself back."

He eased the door mostly shut.

Checked the locks on his way to bed. All three of them: front door, back door, the sliding gate to the compound that the security guard sometimes left on the latch. Checked them, and checked them, and stood in the hallway for a moment afterward.

The house settled. The generator hummed outside. Somewhere down the street, a dog started barking and thought better of it.

He went to bed.

Behind Chizaram's door, the blue-white light didn't go out.