The pirate leader jerked his chin at Amara, then nodded to the others. They pulled the passenger boat behind the metal hull with a rough rope, and the engine of the larger boat growled to life. Ebi was made to sit at the stern with his hands still tied, a boy no older than twenty watching him with a rifle across his knees. The other passengers were pushed down on the floorboards, told to keep their heads low. Amara remained where she knelt, the leader’s eyes still on her.
“Stand,” he said. “You ride with me. You will point the way.”
She rose slowly, gathering her wrapper about her, and stepped across to the metal boat. The leader sat her on a rusted fuel can near the bow and took the wheel himself. The others fell in behind, towing the silent wooden vessel like a caught fish.
For an hour they moved through cuts Amara half recognized, the mangroves closing overhead so the water ran green and dim. The leader asked her names of villages, where the military post at Brass kept its patrols, which sandbars hid a boat at low tide. Amara answered with the truth where it cost nothing, and where it might save them, she bent the truth like palm fronds in wind.
“The soldiers ride the main channel to Twon every morning,” she said, though she knew the patrol had changed to evenings since the rains. “If we stay inside the small islands, past the broken jetty, they will not see us.”
He grunted, satisfied, and lit a cigarette with a shaky lighter. “You are smart for an old trader. Maybe you live to sell your fish.”
Amara said nothing. She watched the bends, counted the turns, and marked the place where a fallen tree made a narrow gate. When they stopped at a hidden camp on a mudflat, a cluster of tents and a rusted speedboat, the passengers were dragged ashore and made to sit under a mango tree. A second man, heavier, came out and spoke rapidly to the leader in Ijaw she only partly caught. Money, ransom, a phone call to someone’s family.
Amara was taken to the tents and given a plastic cup of water. She drank, then asked to see the injured one among the passengers, claiming she was a midwife who knew herbs. The leader laughed but let her go. She moved among the captives, whispering to Ebi: “When the sun turns, the patrol comes from the west, not the river. Watch the trees.”
That night, as the pirates drank and argued over a small radio, Amara slipped the rope from Ebi’s wrists using a piece of broken comb she had hidden in her cloth. She woke the nearest passenger with a touch, then another, and pointed to the path she had seen earlier, the one that ran behind the camp through the reeds to a village she named only as “home.”
“Go quiet,” she breathed. “Do not run until the mangroves take you.”
They went, one by one, while she stayed to tilt the heavy man’s rifle against the tent so it looked placed, not dropped. Then she followed last, bending low, the memory of every turn she had named now a map in her head, leading not the pirates, but herself and hers, away from black water into the long green dark.
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