Hunger is a clock. It doesn't tick; it gnaws.
It had been twenty-four hours since the fish ration. We had eaten the last ball of fufu for breakfast a cold, hard lump of cassava starch that sat in my stomach like a stone, refusing to digest.
The shop was open, but it was a mausoleum. The 11.4 Volts in the resurrected batteries were holding steady, powering the silent fans in the Lab, but there was nothing to cool. No ice. No thread. No customers.
Outside, the sun was bright, mocking us. Down the street, the Bookman's kerosene kiosk was bustling. I could hear the laughter of the crowd queueing for the 150-franc fuel. It was the sound of a city that had moved on.
I sat on an overturned crate in the Lab. My right arm was a heavy, throbbing weight against my chest. The shea butter dressing Liyen had applied had turned translucent with heat and pus. Every time my heart beat, a spike of pain radiated from my wrist to my shoulder.
"Collins," I said.
My apprentice was sitting on the floor, stripping the insulation off a scrap wire with his teeth. He stopped. He didn't look up.
"Yes, Nkem?"
"We need capital," I said. My voice sounded thin, stripped of its usual authority. "We can't sell ice. We can't sell thread. We can't sell light."
Collins spat a piece of red plastic onto the floor.
"Massa, we no get nothing," Collins said, his Pidgin thick with resignation. "We don dry. Even the truck tank empty."
"We have copper," I said.
I looked at the corner of the Lab. The pile of melted jumper cables from the Eclipse the ruins of my ambition.
"We stripped those already," I said. "Maybe two kilos. That's 1,200 francs. Enough for rice. But not enough for the rent."
I stood up. The room spun. The fever from the infection was starting to knock at the door. I steadied myself against the workbench.
"We are going to the Boneyard," I said.
Collins dropped the wire. He looked up, his eyes wide.
"The Municipal Dump?" Collins whispered. "Nkem, you dey craze? That place na for mad people. The Scavenger Kings dem hold that side. They get machete."
"We have no choice," I said. "The Dump is free. It's the only place the Bookman doesn't own."
I reached for my heavy denim overalls. I winced as I pulled the strap over my burned shoulder.
"We aren't going as engineers, Collins. We are going as rats."
We left Tashi sitting in the front shop. He was staring at a three-day-old newspaper, pretending to read. He didn't ask where we were going. He knew. The shame kept him silent.
We walked. We couldn't afford to start the Unimog.
The walk to the Municipal Dump took us off the paved roads of Commercial Avenue, down through the winding dirt tracks of Old Town, and into the valley behind the slaughterhouse.
The smell hit us a kilometer away.
It was a complex, layered stench. Rotting mangoes. Burning plastic. The iron tang of old blood from the abattoir. And underneath it all, the sweet, sickly smell of methane.
We crested the ridge. The Boneyard lay below us.
It was a scar on the earth. A smoking, heaving mountain of refuse that stretched for acres. Smoke rose in lazy black pillars where the trash was smoldering underground. Vultures real ones, with bald, pink heads circled in the thermal currents.
And moving across the surface like ants were the people. Men, women, children. Bent double, poking the earth with iron rods, searching for value in the waste.
"This place get eyes," Collins muttered, pulling his shirt up over his nose. "Make you no look anybody for face."
"Just look for copper," I said, adjusting my goggles. "Motors. Transformers. Stabilizers."
I reached into my pocket. I checked my weapon.
It wasn't the Thunder Stick. The capacitor bank was dead.
It was a small, white plastic bottle. Bleach.
Sodium Hypochlorite.
I had stolen it from the cleaning cupboard. It was a pathetic defense against machetes, but it was all I had.
We descended into the valley. The ground was spongy, composed of layers of compressed plastic and decomposing organic matter. Every step released a puff of warm, fetid gas.
We worked in silence.
Collins was fast. He moved like a dancer, hopping over jagged rusty metal, his eyes scanning the trash.
"Aluminum," he whispered, kicking a crushed soda can. "Too light. Not worth the carry."
I was slow. My arm was a dead weight. I could only use my left hand. I felt useless. A one-armed boy poking at garbage.
< Hazard Analysis: > Gemini flashed, the text struggling to overlay on the chaotic visual field. < Pathogen risk: Extreme. Tetanus, Cholera, Typhoid. Do not breach the skin. >
"Thanks," I muttered.
I saw a shape half-buried in the mud near a pile of burning tires. A grey metal box.
I knelt down. I scraped the mud away with my boot.
It was an old voltage stabilizer—the kind used for fridges in the 80s. Heavy.
"Collins," I hissed.
He scrambled over. "Weti?"
"Open it."
Collins smashed the casing with a rock. CRACK.
Inside, wrapped in oil paper, was the prize. A toroidal transformer. A donut of pure, heavy copper wire.
"E heavy," Collins grinned, his teeth white against the soot on his face. "Maybe three kilo."
He ripped it out and shoved it into his rice sack.
We worked for two hours. The sun beat down, heating the trash until the methane fumes shimmered. My head was pounding. The pain in my arm was a constant, screaming rhythm.
We found a broken ceiling fan (1kg copper).
We found a tangle of house wiring (0.5kg).
We found an alternator from a wrecked truck (4kg).
Our sacks were getting heavy.
"We go now," Collins whispered, wiping sweat from his eyes. "The bag full. If we stay, the Kings go smell us."
"Let's go," I agreed. I was dizzy. I needed water.
We turned to climb back up the ridge.
Three men stepped out from behind the rusted hulk of a bus chassis.
They didn't look like the other scavengers. They weren't bent over. They stood tall. They were shirtless, their skin coated in a mixture of oil and ash that made them look like statues cast in iron.
The leader was a giant. He had a scar that ran through his lip, exposing a gold tooth. He held a machete that had been sharpened so many times the blade was a thin, silver wire.
Big John. The King of the Boneyard.
He blocked our path. He didn't shout. He just stood there, breathing heavy, smelling of raw gin and violence.
"Small meat," Big John rumbled. His voice was deep, a gravel slide. "Who give wuna road?"
Collins froze. He stepped back, putting his body between me and the giant.
"Massa John," Collins said, his voice high and fast. "We just di pass. We beg. We no know say na your side."
"You beg?" Big John laughed. It was a dry, ugly sound. "You enter my farm, you harvest my crop, and you say you beg?"
He pointed the machete at the sack Collins was holding.
"Drop am."
"No," I said.
The word hung in the air.
Big John's eyes flicked to me. He looked at my clean(er) clothes. He looked at my bandaged arm.
"English," Big John sneered. "You speak grammar for dump? You think say grammar go save you?"
"We worked for it," I said, trying to summon the authority of Tashi & Son. But here, in the trash, I wasn't the Engineer. I was just a small, injured boy. "We take the copper. You take the territory."
Big John stepped forward. The other two men fanned out, closing the circle.
"I take the copper," Big John said, raising the machete. "And maybe I take the shoes. And the shirt."
He swung the machete. Not to kill, but to intimidate. It sliced through the air with a swish that ended inches from Collins' face.
Collins fell back, terrified. "Nkem! Give am!"
I looked at the sack. That was 5,000 francs. That was medicine. That was rent.
I looked at the ground.
Next to Big John's foot was a discarded car battery. It was cracked, leaking a dark fluid into the puddle of rainwater. Acid.
I reached into my pocket. My fingers closed around the bleach bottle.
"Gemini," I thought. "Do the math."
< Reaction: Sodium Hypochlorite + Sulfuric Acid = Chlorine Gas. Exothermic. Immediate respiratory distress. >
I didn't speak English. I didn't speak Pidgin. I spoke Chemistry.
I unscrewed the cap with my thumb.
"You want am?" I asked, switching to Pidgin, my voice cracking. "Take am!"
I kicked the car battery. It tipped over, spilling more acid into the puddle.
I threw the bleach bottle.
It hit the puddle.
HISSSSSSS.
It wasn't an explosion. It was an angry, violent fizzing sound.
A cloud of yellow-green gas erupted instantly at Big John's feet. It expanded rapidly in the humid air, heavy and clinging to the ground.
Big John frowned. He breathed in.
Chlorine gas turns to hydrochloric acid when it hits moisture.
It hit the moisture in his lungs.
HACK!
Big John dropped the machete. He clutched his throat. His eyes bulged.
"Weti be... HACK... KOFF!"
He doubled over, retching. The other two men saw the "Juju smoke" and scrambled back, terrified.
"Poison!" one screamed. "Witchcraft!"
"Run!" I yelled at Collins.
We ran.
We scrambled up the slope of trash. My boots slipped on rotting peelings. My lungs burned from the edge of the gas cloud. My injured arm banged against a rusted fridge, sending a shockwave of agony through my body that made me see white.
But we didn't stop.
We ran past the startled scavengers. We ran past the vultures. We ran until the smell of chlorine faded and was replaced by the smell of red dust.
We reached the Nkwen Smelter at 4:00 PM.
We were covered in black slime. My bandage was grey. Collins was shaking, his adrenaline crash hitting him hard.
We dumped the sacks on the scale.
The smelter man, Pa Fonsi, looked at the copper. Then he looked at us.
He chewed his kola nut slowly. He knew. He could smell the dump on us.
"Mixed copper," Fonsi said, spitting red saliva onto the floor. "Dirty. Oxidation plenty."
"It is clean core," I argued, my voice raspy. "Look at the transformer wire. That is Grade A."
"You bring am from Boneyard," Fonsi said. "I no suppose to buy am. If Big John come here, he break my head."
He poked the scale.
"600 francs a kilo. Take am or carry your trash go back."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him about the purity of the copper. I wanted to tell him I nearly died for this.
But I looked at Collins. He was dehydrated. I looked at my arm. It was bleeding through the bandage.
"Pay us," I whispered.
He counted the notes. Grease-stained, tattered bills.
6,500 Francs.
Two weeks of work? No. Two hours of hell.
We walked back to Commercial Avenue as the sun set.
We stopped at the market.
We bought a bag of ndop rice (2,500).
We bought a bottle of oil (800).
We bought dried fish a whole stack (1,500).
We bought Panadol and fresh gauze (500).
Remaining Capital: 1,200 Francs.
We walked into the shop.
The lights were off to save the battery. Tashi was sitting in the dark, exactly where we had left him.
We placed the rice and the fish on the counter. The heavy thump of the bag echoed in the silence.
Tashi stood up. He lit the kerosene lamp. The yellow flame illuminated our faces.
He saw the muck on our clothes. He saw the fresh blood on my bandage. He saw the terror still lingering in Collins' eyes.
"Where did you go?" Tashi asked. His voice was hoarse.
"We went mining," I said, leaning against the counter to keep from falling.
Tashi looked at the food. He looked at the meager pile of change.
He reached out and touched the sleeve of my filthy overalls. He rubbed the soot between his fingers.
He didn't ask if we were engineers.
He didn't ask if we were wizards.
He knew.
Today, we were rats.
"Go wash," Tashi whispered. "I will cook."
I limped toward the back.
I had survived the dump. I had beaten Big John. I had put food on the table.
But as I passed the mirror in the hallway, I saw my reflection.
I didn't look like a child anymore.
I looked like something that had been chewed up and spat out by the city.
The Siege continued.
And tomorrow, the landlord was coming.