She slept until 1pm.
Not the four or five hours that had been her norm for the past month of disrupted nights but a full, architectural sleep the kind that reorganised rather than simply restored, that she woke from feeling like she had been somewhere else entirely and had returned with the specific clarity of a person who had been allowed to finish a thought that had been interrupted repeatedly for weeks.
She lay still for a while after waking, the way she rarely did, looking at the ceiling of her bedroom. The afternoon light was coming through the curtain in the particular way it came through on clear Fridays Lagos in the dry season had a quality of light she had always noticed without examining, a brightness that was neither harsh nor soft but simply present, the way honest things were present.
She thought about nothing specific for approximately four minutes. This was unusual enough to be worth noting.
Then the ordinary world reassembled itself around her in its usual manner the phone on the bedside table with its notifications, the pharmacology assignment due next week, the sound of the neighbour's generator which ran through the afternoon daily regardless of her work schedule or anyone else's preferences. The crack in the tile visible through the open bedroom door, the kitchen light she had left on, the glass of water she had drunk standing up at 7am before going to bed.
She reached for her phone.
Three messages from Musa 9:02am, 9:47am, 12:15pm. The first: you were going to call at 9. You're asleep. The second: still asleep, good. The third, the most recent: I'm going to the market. Call me when you wake up. Don't rush.
She smiled at the ceiling. Then she called him.
He answered from somewhere loud the background noise of the open market near his hospital, which he went to on Fridays for the specific reason that the hospital canteen's Friday offerings were a category of crime he had described, once, in enough detail that she still thought about it on his behalf.
"You slept," he said, without preamble.
"Until 1pm."
"Praise God." He said this sincerely, the way he said everything sincerely, without the reflexive invocation quality the phrase sometimes had. "How do you feel."
"Clear," she said. "Which is strange."
"It's not strange. Your body has been running on emergency reserves for three weeks. You finally gave it what it needed." The sound of him navigating the market the specific density of voices and movement. "Tell me about the shift."
She told him. He listened with the market sounds continuing around him, asking two precise questions at specific moments both about Emeka, both about what he had and hadn't said, both demonstrating that he had already been thinking about the situation since her text the previous evening telling him the shift had produced something they needed to discuss.
"He won't push you," Musa said when she finished, essentially arriving at the same conclusion Femi had. "Not Emeka. He's not that kind of person."
"How do you know what kind of person Emeka is? You've met him twice."
"I have met him at two significant moments and both times he handled the significance with more composure than most people handle things that are not significant at all. This is diagnostic." A pause, the sound of him paying for something. "Also you've been talking about him for two years without meaning to and I have built a reasonable picture."
"I talk about Emeka?"
"You talk about your colleagues the way people talk about colleagues they actually respect, which in medicine is rarer than it should be and therefore notable. Emeka specifically you mention when something difficult happened and was handled well. Which is the highest form of professional praise you give anyone." A pause. "I'm telling you this because I think it's relevant that you trust him, even if you haven't said it to yourself in those terms."
She sat up on the edge of her bed, considering this.
"I trust him professionally," she said.
"Yes. Which in the context of what he saw last night and how he responded is significant. You don't have to do anything about it immediately. But it's not a problem, is what I'm saying. It's a resource, if you ever choose to use it."
She held this. Emeka as resource. The idea was not as strange as it might have been three weeks ago, before she had begun revising her understanding of what resources were available to her and in what forms.
"How's the market," she said, changing registers.
"Expensive," he said. "Everything is more expensive than it was last month. I watched a woman argue with a tomato seller for eight minutes over forty naira and I understood completely why she was doing it."
"Did she win?"
"She won the argument. I'm not certain she won on the tomatoes." A brief pause. "Are you eating today? Actually eating, not the ambulance version."
"I had moin moin at 6am."
"That was seven hours ago."
"I'm going to eat."
"What specifically."
"Musa."
"What specifically, Zara."
She looked at her kitchen through the bedroom door. "I'll make something."
"You will order something," he said, with the precision of someone who knew exactly how much was in her refrigerator based on prior evidence. "Which is fine. Just do it before 3pm."
After the call she sat in her kitchen with jollof rice she had ordered from the woman two streets away who made it on Fridays and sold it from her compound gate in portions that were sufficient for two and cost less than a restaurant would charge for something worse one of the practical Lagos solutions that she had mapped onto her neighbourhood over four years and that constituted a significant portion of her actual survival infrastructure.
She ate slowly, which was itself unusual. Her eating was normally the eating of someone between tasks efficient, fuel focused, conducted while doing something else. Today she sat at the table and ate and looked at the Friday afternoon coming through her kitchen window and did not do anything else simultaneously.
The crack in the tile ran from the cabinet base toward her feet.
She took a photograph of it on her phone. She sent it to her landlord's number with the message: This crack has been growing since March. Please arrange someone to look at it. Thank you.
She had been meaning to do this for eight months. It had taken thirty seconds.
She thought about all the things she had been meaning to do for months that had taken backseats to the constant triage of immediate necessities. The blown bulb in the bathroom that she had been replacing with a torch for six weeks. The curtain rail in the bedroom that hung at a slight angle because one of the brackets had pulled from the wall and she had not had time to get the right tools to fix it. The pharmacology textbook she had been meaning to cover with brown paper since September because her system for preventing cover damage was long established and the uncovered book bothered her slightly every time she looked at it.
Small things. The accumulation of small things that happened when your attention was perpetually allocated elsewhere.
She finished her rice. She washed the container to return it later. She replaced the bathroom bulb with a new one she found in the drawer she kept for exactly this purpose. She straightened the curtain rail using the back of a spoon and significant application of the particular focused force she was still learning the dimensions of.
Then she sat at her kitchen table with the pharmacology textbook covered now, brown paper from a paper bag, tape applied neatly and studied for two hours.
Drug metabolism. The cytochrome P450 enzyme system. Hepatic first pass effect. The specific ways different drugs moved through different bodies at different rates depending on age, genetics, organ function.
She had been finding, in the weeks since her Awakening had accelerated, that the pharmacology was more interesting rather than less. Not because the subject had changed it had not but because she was approaching it with a new question layered beneath the standard questions. How does the body process what enters it. How does the body regulate itself. What happens when the body's regulatory systems operate outside normal parameters.
She was not applying this to were kind specifically that was a separate line of thinking she was not ready to formalize yet. But the underlying curiosity had sharpened and that sharpening was making the study easier, the material arriving with more traction because she was genuinely more interested in it.
She made notes in the margin the way she always did precise, directional, the notations of someone who would use these notes again rather than simply making them for the comfort of having made them.
At 4:30pm her phone rang. A number she did not immediately recognise but that began with the 064 area code for Kano.
She picked up.
"Miss Abdullahi Cole." A woman's voice. Measured, precise, carrying the specific quality she was learning to read in certain voices older than the face behind them. "My name is Fatima Salawu. I am calling because I believe we should speak before the situation you are navigating develops further. I have been given your number by a mutual connection."
Zara put down her pen carefully.
"Ramatu Sule," she said.
A brief pause. "Yes."
"Lady Fatima Salawu," Zara said slowly. "House Salawu. Northern Nigeria. Mane Council."
Another pause this one carrying a different quality. Reassessment, possibly.
"You have been doing your research," Lady Fatima said.
"I've had three weeks and a good library," Zara said. "And access to several well informed people." She paused. "What do you want to tell me?"
"Several things," Lady Fatima said. "None of which are appropriate for a telephone call." Another pause. "Are you available to travel to Kano?"
Zara looked at her pharmacology textbook. At the brown paper cover she had just applied. At the kitchen window and the Friday afternoon light and the crack in the tile that now had a photograph sent to a landlord who had agreed, via text, to send someone next week.
She thought about the ordinary life. About how it was still here, still requiring attention, still mattering regardless of what else was happening.
She thought about the Mane Council calling her directly rather than through formal Conclave channels. The significance of that which Ramatu would not have given Lady Fatima her number without calculating.
"When," she said.
"Next week," Lady Fatima said. "When you are ready. I am not in a hurry and I am not issuing a summons. I am extending an invitation. There is a difference."
"I know the difference," Zara said. "I'll be in touch by Monday."
She ended the call.
She sat for a moment in her Friday kitchen, the pharmacology textbook open in front of her, the curtain rail straight behind her, the bathroom properly lit for the first time in six weeks.
Then she picked up her pen and went back to the cytochrome P450 enzyme system, because the assignment was due next week and the Mane Council's invitation, like all things that required serious decision, was better approached after she had finished what was already in front of her .