Chapter 28: The Offer
The Athenaeum – Council of Desperation
The transmission arrived not as a voice, but as a clean, data-rich packet that bypassed all our crude encryptions and printed itself directly from Chiamaka's terminal. It was Hacker's calling card. The first page was a schematic. A beautiful, horrifyingly complex design for a device he called a "Causality Anchor." It showed how to weave specific alloys and electromagnetic fields into our walls, creating a bubble that would—theoretically—reinforce local reality, making it "slippery" to the attentions of the Unseen.
For a moment, there was hope. Uche's eyes widened. Adisa stared, muttering equations under his breath. "It's... brilliant. It could work. This could save us."
Then we turned the page.
The terms were listed with the cold, unemotional clarity of a contract.
1. The Athenaeum and its allied Compact settlements will be granted a non-aggression pact and the full schematics for the Causality Anchor.
2. In return, the individual designated as 'Sade,' currently in our custody, will be permanently transferred to our asset roster.
3. This transaction is non-negotiable. You have 48 hours to respond.
The hope in the room curdled, replaced by a sickening dread. The silence was broken by a single, sharp crack as Ade's fist hit the table.
"No," he snarled. "Absolutely not. We are not slavers. We do not trade people for technology. This is what they are? This is their solution? We become their clients? Their customers?"
"He's right," I said, the words feeling like ash in my mouth. "This isn't an alliance. It's a purchase. They're buying her, and we're selling our souls."
"But the Anchor..." Hassan, the mechanic from the Garage, looked torn. "Without it, can we survive? My people... we have children. The thing that happened to Femi... if that happens to a child..."
The room erupted. Gabriel seized on the fear. "It is one life for hundreds! It is a tragic choice, but it is a choice! This girl, this Sade, she is already with them! We are not dragging her from her home. We are simply... not standing in the way of a transaction that already exists!"
"It is a moral abyss, Gabriel!" Uche thundered, his face flushed with anger. "If we step over this line, what is left of us? We are no better than the beasts outside!"
"We are already in the abyss!" Gabriel screamed back. "We are clinging to the edge by our fingernails! Your principles will be the death of us all!"
The meeting dissolved into chaos. The Compact, our fragile dream of a united front, was tearing itself apart over the price of survival.
I found Mama later, in the small garden she tended under UV lights. She was not tending to the plants. She was just staring at them.
"They are asking us to sell a daughter we have never met," she said softly, without looking at me. "To save our own."
"What would Papa have done?" I asked, the question feeling both childish and essential.
She was silent for a long time. "Your father would have fought. He would have said there is always another way." She finally turned to me, her eyes filled with a deep, weary sorrow. "But your father died fighting a enemy he could see. He never had to face one that could unmake the world around his children while he watched."
Her words struck me to the core. This was the true horror of the Unseen. It wasn't just the physical threat. It was the moral corrosion. It was forcing us to choose between who we were and whether we would get to keep being anyone at all.
Later, Ade found me on the roof. The distant Comms Tower was a dark spike against the starry sky, a monument to cold, pragmatic survival.
"We can't do it, Emeka," he said, his voice low and fierce. "If we do this, we become them. We start seeing people as things to be used. We lose the war before the first shot is fired."
"I know," I said, the weight of leadership feeling like a physical chain. "But if we don't, and more people die like Femi... if Ngozi..." I couldn't finish the sentence.
We stood in silence, two brothers trapped between a monster and a moral quagmire. The Akudama had not sent an army. They had sent a choice. A simple, terrible equation.
The 48-hour clock was ticking. The future of the Athenaeum, of the Compact, of our very souls, hung on the answer to a question we never thought we'd have to ask.