A week passed, then two, and Tangeni learned the rhythms of survival in Windhoek the same way he'd learned the rhythms of survival at Omafo, by watching and listening and making as few mistakes as possible.
He worked odd jobs in the markets during the day, hauling boxes and cleaning stalls and doing whatever people would pay him to do, and the work was hard and the pay was bad but it was honest and nobody tried to hurt him for no reason.
He slept under the overpass at night with the other people who had nowhere else to go, and slowly he started to learn their names and their stories and the unwritten rules of their little community.
The money situation was tight but manageable, enough for food and occasional necessities like soap and clean water but not much else, and he started to understand that this was probably going to be his life for a while unless something changed.
There was an older woman named Mrs. Kaura who ran a small food stall in the market, selling grilled meat and vegetables to workers during their lunch breaks, and she'd taken a liking to Tangeni for reasons he couldn't quite figure out.
Maybe it was because he was polite and worked hard and never complained, or maybe it was because he reminded her of someone she used to know, or maybe she was just a kind person who saw someone struggling and wanted to help.
"You're too smart to be hauling boxes," she told him one afternoon while he helped her pack up for the day, wrapping leftover food in plastic and stacking the chairs on top of the tables, "you should be doing something with your brain instead of your back."
"Nobody's hiring for brains around here."
"Nobody's hiring for anything around here." She handed him a container of leftover food, same as she did every day at closing time. "But that doesn't mean you stop looking for something better."
He took the food and thanked her and walked back to his sleeping spot, eating as he went because there was no point in saving it when it would go bad by morning anyway, and he thought about what she'd said and wondered if she was right.
The overpass community had accepted him by now, not as a friend exactly but as a familiar presence, someone who showed up and did his part and didn't cause problems for anyone else or bring attention to the group.
There was a man named Johannes who'd been homeless for ten years and knew everything about surviving in the city, and he'd taken it upon himself to teach Tangeni the important things that kept people alive on the streets.
Which alleys were safe and which ones belonged to gangs or worse, which charities gave out the best food and which ones asked too many questions, how to tell when the police were doing a sweep and where to go when they were.
"You're different from the others," Johannes said one night while they sat around a small fire made from scrap wood and cardboard, "most people who end up here are broken in some way, either by drugs or drink or just by life itself, but you're not broken, you're just waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"That's the question, isn't it?" Johannes poked at the fire with a stick, sending sparks up into the dark sky. "When you figure out what you're waiting for, you'll know what to do next."
Tangeni thought about that a lot over the following days, turning it over in his head while he worked and walked and tried to stay alive, and he realized that Johannes was right in a way he couldn't quite put into words.
He was waiting for something, some opportunity or moment or piece of luck that would change everything, and until it came he was just surviving one day at a time.
A month after arriving in Windhoek, he found a better sleeping spot behind a hardware store in a quieter part of the industrial district, a little alcove that was sheltered from the rain and mostly hidden from view and big enough for one person to sleep comfortably.
The spot was perfect, protected from the wind and the rain and far enough from the main streets that nobody would stumble across it by accident.
The first night he tried to sleep there, a man came out of the darkness and told him to leave because that was his spot and he'd been sleeping there for two years and he wasn't going to give it up to some kid who'd just arrived in the city.
Tangeni looked at the man and thought about all the times he'd backed down at the academy, all the times he'd been a good target and let people push him around because fighting back just made things worse.
"No," he said, and his voice was steady even though his heart was pounding in his chest hard enough that he could feel it in his throat.
The man was bigger than him and older and probably more experienced in the kind of fighting that happened on the streets, but Tangeni had spent years learning how to take a beating without breaking, and that had to count for something.
They stared at each other for a long moment, the man trying to decide if this skinny teenager was serious or just stupid, and Tangeni made sure his eyes didn't waver because he'd learned at Omafo that predators could smell weakness and the only way to survive was to not show any.
The man took a step forward and Tangeni didn't move, didn't flinch, didn't do anything except stand there and wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.
"You've got some nerve," the man said, and there was something in his voice that might have been respect or might have just been surprise.
"I've got nothing to lose."
That was the truth in a way that Tangeni hadn't fully understood until he said it out loud, because when you had nothing and expected nothing and nobody was coming to save you, there was a kind of freedom in that.
The man looked at him for another long moment, reading something in his face or his posture or the way he was holding himself, and then he laughed, a short harsh sound that echoed off the walls of the alley.
"Fine," he said, "you can have it, but if you cause me any trouble I'll break your legs."
He turned and walked away into the darkness, and Tangeni let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and felt his hands start to shake now that the danger had passed.
He'd won something, finally, even if it was just a patch of concrete behind a hardware store in a city where nobody cared if he lived or died.
It wasn't much, but it was his, and right now that was enough.
He set up his blanket and lay down in his new spot, looking up at the stars through a gap in the overhang, and thought about what Johannes had said about waiting for something.
Maybe the something wasn't going to come to him, Tangeni thought, maybe he had to go out and find it himself.
He fell asleep thinking about what that might look like.