The world returned to Onwuka like scattered cowries cast by a diviner—each piece a prophecy he could not read, each fragment holding a truth that slipped through his fingers like water.

Light pierced his closed eyelids, nothing like the gentle benediction of sunlight that had once blessed him through dancing palm fronds. This light spoke of distant stars, captured and bent to strange purposes.

His breath came shallow as a dying fish's, his body a map of pain drawn in salt and bruises. He felt himself stretched across two worlds, like a fishing net trying to catch both the sea and sky, every fiber of his being groaning under the weight of an impossible survival.

The air that filled his lungs was wrong. Gone was the sacred mixture of brine and wet wood, the lingering ghost of lightning-split sky. In its place dwelled something that spoke of neither earth nor ocean—a scent sharp, sterile. Strange.

It carried whispers of sickness and its cures, but none of the healing wisdom his mother had pressed into his palms with crushed herbs and ancient words. The walls around him, when he managed to pry open his eyes, were not the earthen embrace of home, not the sky's endless blue, not even the restless, shifting tides of the ocean. They were rigid, cold, and unnervingly smooth, holding neither warmth nor history.

Above him stretched a ceiling that might have been carved from the belly of a cloud, so pale and featureless it seemed to deny the very existence of color. The bed beneath him—if this stiff, unyielding thing could be called a bed—was nothing like the woven mats of his youth or even the damp wooden planks of the ship's lower deck. This was foreign. Smooth, too smooth, draped in a cloth so white it pained his eyes.

Where was he?

Memory offered only fragments: the storm, the wreckage, the deep pull of the sea as it tried to claim him. And her—the one whose song had woven itself between heartbeats, whose touch had been both anchor and wings. In that last moment, as the world dissolved into darkness, had he reached for her, or had she reached for him? The answer lay somewhere in the depths he had escaped, or perhaps had never truly left.

Could this sterile purgatory be the afterlife the missionaries had promised? Or was it something else entirely, a place between stories, where lost souls waited to be claimed?

A soft sound pulled him back—something shifting nearby, the scrape of wood on stone. He turned his head, though even that small movement extracting its price in pain. The room stretched before him like a farm field, beds arranged with unnatural precision, many like his own, occupied by figures barely moving, some so still they might have already crossed into the spirit world.

And moving between them, figures dressed in strange wrappings, their movements precise and purposeful as priests performing rites he did not recognize.

Their hands held no cowries for divination, no kola nuts for blessing, no herbs for healing. Instead, they wielded instruments that gleamed like fish scales under moonlight, speaking in voices that carried no echoes of home.

Their presence felt unnatural in its order, their movements too practiced, too purposeful. No one wailed. No one prayed. No incense burned for the dead. If this was healing, it bore no resemblance to his mother's sacred space, where broken bones were mended with proverbs as old as pain itself, where hands spoke the language of comfort through oils pressed from seeds that knew the taste of red earth.

A woman approached, her garments white as fresh palm wine, though lacking its warmth and life. Her hair was bound and hidden as though freedom itself was a disease to be contained. She carried something in her hands—an object that clinked, glass and metal reflecting the strange, artificial light that hung above them.

She spoke. 

The words might as well have been the clicking of stones against each other, strange sounds that held no meaning, no place in his ears. She was waiting for a response.

Onwuka's mouth opened, but his throat—still raw from swallowing death's bitter water—could produce nothing but pain.

Frustration darkened her face, and she tried again, stretching her strange words like cassava dough, as if slowness alone could bridge the gap between their worlds. He felt the heat of shame rise in his chest, hot as fever.

"Where..." His voice was a whisper, barely a ghost of sound. He licked his lips and tasted salt—his salt, his survival. "Where am I?" 

The woman hesitated, then called out in that strange tongue, her voice rising like a bird startled from a tree. Others turned toward her, and soon another figure appeared. A man this time, his hands tucked behind his back, his eyes sharp and assessing. He spoke in a measured tone, his lips shaping words with clear intention. But it was still nothing, just a song in a language his ears had never been taught to follow. 

Onwuka closed his eyes, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. His body was nothing but exhaustion, a collection of weary bones and bruised flesh, but his mind raced. Where had the siren taken him? Had she taken him at all? Or had the ocean cast him up like refuse, another piece of wreckage to be picked over by those who found him? 

When they brought water, it was held in a vessel clear as air itself, not the familiar roughness of a calabash gourd. That first sip was pure blessing, sweet as the moment between sleeping and waking. He drank with the desperation of parched earth receiving first rain, and they allowed this small mercy. After, he sank into the foreign softness beneath him, his heart finally slowing its frantic dance against his ribs, like a trapped bird accepting its cage.

They touched him then, pressing firm hands against his skin, fingers probing at his ribs, his arms, his face. Something cold and sharp brushed against his wounds, sending pain flaring anew, but he did not flinch. He had known pain before. This was different. This was methodical, not cruel. They were ...fixing him. 

Yet his thoughts drifted, always returning to the sea's embrace. To her. Had she been real, that creature who had moved through water as though it were air, whose song had woven itself between his heartbeats? Had she pulled him from the abyss and left him here, in this strange place of white walls and voices he could not understand? 

Or was she merely a dream born of desperation, a story his drowning mind had written to make sense of survival? 

His head spun with the thought, his grip on reality shifting like the tide. The ocean had never been kind. Why would it have saved him? Unless... unless it had sent something else to do it. Unless it had sent— 

The door opened again. 

He barely turned his head, too lost in thought, too caught between exhaustion and the quiet pull of sleep. But then he saw her. 

His breath became a prisoner in his chest.

She entered like a story coming to life, wrapped in white that seemed to flow around her like foam on waves. Her hair was cropped close to her skull, her movements carried the quiet assurance of someone who knew their place in the world. But that jaw, those lips, those eyes that had watched him from beneath the surface of his memories—they were the same. Impossibly, undeniably the same.

His heart threw itself against his ribs like a trapped bird, disbelief wrapping around him tight as fishing line.

No. This could not be.

The being who had guided him through storm-dark waters, whose song had kept him breathing when his body wanted to surrender—she could not be this woman in white clothing, this healer whose feet walked on solid ground. This had to be a stranger.

And yet—

She turned to him, her gaze meeting his. For a heartbeat, less time than it takes to speak a prayer, something flickered in her gaze. Recognition. Faint, fleeting, like the last echo of a song carried by the wind. 

Then it was gone. 

She adjusted the cloth at his side, pressing gently against the wound there. Her fingers were warm against his skin. They carried no trace of salt, no memory of the ocean. They were human hands, nothing more.

"Você está bem?" The words flowed from her lips like a familiar song in an unknown language, beautiful even in their strangeness.

Onwuka remained silent, caught in the undertow between what he knew and what he believed, between the siren who had saved him and the stranger who now healed him. Perhaps, he thought, they were the same thing—myth and reality braided together like rope, each strand strengthening the other, neither more true than its twin.

She did not recognize him. Her eyes passed over his face, seeing only what was before her—a patient, a stranger washed up from the sea's mercy.

He felt something unravel inside him. 

As she turned to leave, he found his voice, barely more than a whisper, yet heavy with something he was only beginning to understand.

"Thank you." 

Her step caught, brief as a heartbeat between beats. Just enough to make him wonder. Just enough to make him doubt.

And then she was gone. 

Onwuka lay against the foreign softness of the bed, his pulse singing beneath his skin, his thoughts tangled as nets after storm.

Had the ocean given her back to him, stripped of memories like shells stripped of color by salt and sun? Or had it claimed something essential, something that made her who she had been beneath the waves?

The truth floated just beyond his reach, like seafoam at the edge of sight.

But he would grasp it. Even if he had to dive back into those depths to find it.

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