JONAH
Salt. The first taste was salt, sharp and crystalline on his tongue, gritty against his teeth. Then came the silence, a thick, muffling blanket heavier than any Lagos go-slow. It pressed against his eardrums, a physical weight. Jonah’s eyes fluttered open, then squeezed shut against a sky the colour of bruised plums, bleeding into an impossible twilight. Where…?
He tried to sit up. Pain, white-hot and blinding, shot through his left shoulder, radiating down his arm. He gasped, collapsing back onto sand that wasn’t soft beach sand, but coarse, dark grit that crunched under his weight like shattered obsidian. Obsidian?
“The ground remembers blood spilled carelessly, Jonah,” Mama Nkechi’s voice echoed in his skull, not a memory but a fresh wound. “This venture… it smells of hubris. The ancestors frown when a man builds his house on shifting sand.”
He’d waved her off, hadn’t he? Smiled that placating smile he reserved for investors and superstitious old women. “Mama, it’s tech, not juju. Servers, not shrines.” His own voice sounded hollow now, mocking.
He forced his eyes open again, blinking away the grit. Wreckage. Twisted metal, shards of composite material, the ghost of blue airline paint – all scattered along the dark shore like the discarded toys of a careless god. Smoke, thin and acrid, curled from a larger piece of fuselage half-submerged in the unnervingly still water. The sea itself was wrong, too dark, too calm, barely whispering against the shore.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to claw its way up his throat. The flight. Lagos to London. The pitch, the screams, the sudden, violent rending sound…
He pushed the memory down, hard. Survival first. Assess. He flexed his fingers on his right hand. Good. Rotated his right ankle. Stiff, but functional. The left arm was a disaster, hanging limp, the shoulder screaming agony. Head… pounding, but clear enough. He tasted blood, coppery and thick, alongside the salt.
He wasn’t alone. Fifty yards down the beach, a figure was stirring. Female, slight build, dark hair plastered to her skull. She pushed herself up slowly, clutching her head.
Jonah tried to call out, but only a dry croak emerged. He swallowed, the salt rasping his throat raw. He tried again. “Hello? Are you… alright?”
The sound, thin as it was, seemed unnaturally loud in the crushing silence. The woman’s head snapped towards him. Her eyes, wide and dark, fixed on him with an unnerving intensity.
