The gods who feed

The compound in Abuja's Wuse district where the Five kept their base of operations was, on the surface, nothing unusual. A rented property with high walls and a gate that the neighbors assumed housed either a politician's relatives or a small church's administrative offices. Neither assumption was wrong in the way they thought they were right.

Inside, the central room was large enough to pace in, which was what Adisa Babatunde was doing when the report came in.

He was not a pacing man by nature. Adisa had been forged, not raised, forged, the way iron is forged, through repeated heat and pressure until what remains is something that no longer bends, in the image of three war deities whose gifts lived in his blood like a separate heartbeat. Ogun's gift made him feel every metal object within a forty meter radius as an extension of his own body. He could feel the nails in the walls, the pipes under the floor, the rings on his teammates' fingers. Amadioha's gift was subtler: a knowledge of where violence was about to happen, a pre echo of conflict that registered in his chest as a low hum. Sarkin Aljanu's gift he thought of as the armor, not physical, but a spirit reinforcement that made his body harder to damage than the flesh it was made of should allow.

He was twenty nine years old. He had been a vessel since he was fourteen. He did not remember a time before the gods lived in him, which meant he was not sure, anymore, whether he remembered a time before Adisa existed at all.

"Run it again," he said.

Obiala, seated at the table with her hands flat on the wood, kept her eyes closed. The Vision Vessel's abilities worked better in stillness, but she had long since learned to function through movement. It was only precision she needed stillness for. "Onitsha buka, forty minutes ago. He evaded Ifechi's team. One stumble caused by what she's describing as localized probability disruption. Nothing visible, nothing cast. It just happened around him."

"Probability disruption." Adisa stopped pacing.

"Kuro's been laughing about it for the past twenty minutes," Obiala said, without opening her eyes.

"Where is Kuro?"

"Somewhere being annoying."

As if summoned, and with Kuro, this was always a possibility, the third of them arrived through a door that Adisa was fairly certain hadn't been there before. Kuro Babatomiwa moved through space the way water moved around obstacles: not fighting the architecture but not respecting it either. He was lean, dark skinned, with an expression of permanent amusement that Adisa had learned did not mean he found things funny. It meant he found things interesting. These were not the same.

Esu's gift had given Kuro an understanding of all possible outcomes simultaneously, a maddening ability that manifested as a kind of playfulness with reality, a sense that the current moment was merely one option among thousands, and most of the other options were more entertaining. Agwu's madness insight made him the most reliably accurate analyst of any situation and simultaneously the least reliable person in a room to give a straight answer. Dodo's chaos gift meant that sometimes, standing near Kuro, things broke. Not dramatically. Quietly. Glasses developed hairline cracks. Locks decided they were done working. Probability shifted.

"He made Ifechi's best tracker trip over nothing," Kuro said, sitting on the table rather than at it. "On a flat, clean floor. That's beautiful."

"That is not the appropriate response to a mission failure," Adisa said.

"That's why you're in charge of missions and I'm in charge of other things."

"You're not in charge of anything."

"I'm in charge of perspective." Kuro grinned. It was the grin of a man who had already seen seventeen versions of this conversation and found all of them tiresome except the one where Adisa eventually gave up. "He's not suppressing the field around him, Adisa. He's not trained. He doesn't know what he is. The disruption is passive. It comes from his existence, not his intention. Do you understand what that means?"

"It means he's more dangerous than the gods told us."

"It means he is something the gods have not successfully described to us yet." Kuro looked at Obiala. "Did your vision show you what he did after he ran?"

"He hid. He held a stone he doesn't remember picking up. He felt calm." Obiala finally opened her eyes. They were a shade darker than they'd been this morning. Her ability left marks when she pushed it hard. The Vision Vessel always looked like she was aging slightly, in both directions at once. "He should have been afraid. I ran the read three times. No trace of fear. Which means either he has exceptional emotional suppression, or his nervous system is registering the situation differently than a normal human would."

"Not fear," Kuro said. "That's correct. What does fear feel like to a crop? It feels like fate signal. It feeds the gods. He doesn't signal. The danger reads as information to him, not as threat." He tilted his head. "I wonder what other things read differently for him."

"Where is Sadiq?" Adisa asked.

"Already in Onitsha," Obiala said. "He went the moment the report came in. He's tracking."

Adisa nodded. Sadiq was the right choice for tracking. The Possession Vessel's predator instinct enhancement made him the best hunter among them, and his wind phase movement meant he could cover ground in ways that didn't show up on CCTV. But Adisa had reservations. Not about Sadiq's ability. About the briefing they'd been given.

"The gods told us he was an error," he said. It came out flat. Not a question. A statement being held up for examination.

"Yes," Obiala said.

"They said he was an unintended consequence of three pantheons reaching for the same soul. That there was no specific intent behind his existence."

"That's what they said."

"And now he is exhibiting passive field probability disruption that caused a trained operative to stumble on a flat surface. And he showed calm under conditions that should produce terror. And three pantheons cannot read him." Adisa looked between them. "Does that sound like an accident to either of you?"

Silence.

Kuro was smiling. Not his usual amused smile. Something quieter. "It sounds like something the gods wouldn't want to admit was deliberate."

"Or something they don't understand themselves," Obiala said.

Adisa walked to the window. Outside, the compound wall was pale in the afternoon light. On the other side of that wall, Abuja carried on, full of crops, full of fates, full of the dense human energy that fed the invisible hierarchy above them. He had been part of that hierarchy his whole life. He was an instrument of it. He had been told, clearly and repeatedly, that his purpose was to maintain the system, to ensure that nothing disrupted the cultivation and harvest that kept the divine world fed and functioning.

He had never questioned it. Not seriously. He was a War Vessel. He was built for execution, not philosophy.

But he was also a man who had learned, through fourteen years of fighting and following orders from entities that did not think of him as a person, that when a question started bothering him he should pay attention.

The question that was bothering him now: if Obinna Chukwuemeka was merely an error to be corrected, why had all five of them been sent to handle one unarmed, untrained, unemployed twenty two year old in a roadside buka?

Errors did not need five divine weapons.

Errors were corrected with something much smaller.

He was still thinking about this when Sadiq called.