The next morning, Harry woke up with an excited expression on his face.
He began to prepare his baggage immediately.
First off, he started with getting enough supplies that could last a few days. Well, if you consider the long period of time he would be gone, a few days was barely an introduction. But it was a start, and Harry being Harry, a start was enough to work with for now.
He was still very much in the middle of this process, somewhere between the first pack and the third repack, when his mother's voice came down the corridor.
"Harry, it's getting late. How long are you going to keep spending in your room? Your sister is done with her preparation and she is a lady for that matter." A brief pause. "You have ten minutes."
"Yes ma."
After all the up and down, thirty minutes later, the two siblings were finally ready to depart.
Their mother came to them and pulled them both into a tight hug, holding them firmly against her for a long moment before slowly releasing them. The hug said everything she had decided words were not big enough for.
Their father sat in his chair in silence.
He did not get up. He did not make a speech, only conveying his intention silently.
The room was quiet.
Harry stood before him with his bag on his shoulder. His father looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached into the side pocket of his chair and held out a small folded envelope without a word.
Harry took it carefully.
"Open it when you need it more than you need it now," his father said quietly.
Harry nodded. He put the envelope in his front pocket where it would not get lost.
Priscilla came and stood beside her brother. Their father looked at her with the particular expression he kept specifically for her. He said nothing. She said nothing. They had always understood each other without much need for the space in between.
Then the two of them were at the door with their bags.
Then they were through it.
The lane outside was exactly as it had always been. The Salaco compound quiet in the early morning. The grass thick and unbothered along the fences. The air carrying the smell of wet earth and something faintly green, the specific smell of Ikorodu that Harry had been breathing his entire life without once thinking to remember it, until now.
He looked back one more time, before continuing onward.
They walked for a while before hailing a cab to the nearest bus stop in that district, far from their home. Settling into the back, Harry looked at his sister with a smile that said we are going to conquer.
The lane fell behind them. Then the neighborhood. Then the familiar boundaries of the only world either of them had ever known, receding quietly behind them like the last page of something that was finished.
Ahead the road was long and open and the morning was bright.
Whatever came next was somewhere along it, waiting with complete indifference to whether they were ready or not.
- - -
The bus stop was loud in the way that Nigerian bus stops were always loud, a specific and practiced chaos that had its own rhythm if you knew how to listen to it.
Conductors hanging out of buses calling destinations with the urgent energy of men who had somewhere to be and needed everyone else to also have somewhere to be.
Hawkers moving through the crowd with trays of groundnuts and pure water balanced on their heads with the casual confidence of people who had been doing this since they could walk. Passengers arguing about change. A man sleeping against his bag in a way that suggested he had made peace with every condition the world cared to offer him.
Harry and Priscilla moved through it.
"Where exactly are we going?" Priscilla asked. Not accusingly. Just the question of someone who had been waiting for the right moment to raise it and had decided the moment had arrived.
Harry adjusted his bag. "North. There have been reports of disturbances around the plateau region. Strange activity. People have been going there."
"Strange activity," Priscilla repeated.
"The kind that started after Williams dropped his resources into the earth." He looked at her.
"That is where we start."
Priscilla considered this. "You think something was embedded there."
"I think something was embedded somewhere around there, yes."
"Based on what."
"Based on the reports. And based on the fact that remote and difficult terrain is exactly where Williams would put something he did not want found easily."
Priscilla was quiet for a moment, turning this over with the focused attention she gave to information she was still deciding whether to trust.
"That is actually reasonable," she said finally, in the tone of someone giving credit they had not originally budgeted for.
Harry chose not to make anything of it and kept moving.
They found a bus heading northeast after twenty minutes of navigating the chaos. A long distance vehicle already half full, hot inside despite the windows being open, smelling of dust and bodies and the particular exhaustion of people who had been traveling since before the morning properly started.
They settled in. Harry by the window. Priscilla beside him, her bag on her lap, already looking at the people around them with the quiet systematic attention she applied to every new environment.
Not all of them were going where the siblings were going.
But several of them had the same quality, a direction, a purpose, the specific energy of people who had heard what Williams said and had decided, each in their own way and for their own reasons, that sitting still was no longer a reasonable position.
A young man two seats ahead had a worn notebook open on his knee, writing something in it with intense concentration. An older woman near the front had a wrapped bundle that she kept close to her, the kind of careful handling that meant whatever was inside mattered more than the bag itself. A man across the aisle was staring out of the window with the expression of someone who had already been somewhere and was going back.
Harry watched all of them quietly.
Priscilla had fallen asleep against her bag within ten minutes of the bus moving, with the complete efficiency of someone who had assessed the situation, found nothing immediately requiring her attention, and allocated her energy accordingly.
Harry looked out of the window.
Lagos fell away behind them. The dense crowded energy of the city thinned and stretched and eventually gave way to open road, long and straight, cutting through a landscape that looked from the surface exactly as it had always looked.
Williams had put things in the earth out there. In the difficult places. In the remote places that most people would not go unless they had a reason strong enough to justify the going.
Harry intended to find them.
He did not know exactly where. He did not have a map with markers on it. What he had was the direction, the reports, the logic of where a being like Williams would choose to hide something he wanted only the right people to reach, and the simple fact that they were already moving.
He looked at Priscilla sleeping against her bag, her face calm and unbothered, already resting so she would be sharp when required.
He looked back out of the window.
The road ahead was long and open and the afternoon sun was turning everything gold and unhelpful.
They were going solo. No institution ahead of them. No center to report to. No structure to fall into.
Just the two of them and the road and whatever Williams had buried in the difficult places, waiting for whoever was willing enough and stubborn enough to come and find it.
Harry settled back in his seat.
That description, he thought, fit them well enough.