The Weight of Salt

Bight of Benin, 1788

Adaeze had been reading the land since she was old enough to walk.

Her grandmother called it "listening to the soil." The elders called it a gift from the ancestors. Adaeze called it the only thing that had ever made sense to her, this ability to feel what places held, to draw from the accumulated experiences of generations who had lived and loved and died on this ground.

She was nineteen years old and the strongest practitioner her village had seen in living memory. The red earth beneath her feet hummed with centuries of her people's joy and grief and ordinary days. She could reach into that well whenever she needed strength. Could wrap herself in the protection of everyone who had come before.

It should have been enough.

The traders came in the dry season.

Not the ones from the north, who had been coming for generations with cloth and metal and salt. These were different. They came with men from the coast who spoke languages Adaeze half-recognized, and they came with chains.

Her father was the village chief. He met with them because that was his duty, and because refusing to meet with armed men was a good way to become a dead man. Adaeze stood behind him, reading the traders the way she read places.

What she felt made her want to vomit.

The lead trader was a white man with pale eyes and a smile that never reached them. His saturation was a horror. Layered with the terror of hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Every person he'd ever taken had left a mark on him, and he carried those marks like trophies. Like they meant nothing at all.

Behind him stood his local partners. African men who had made a different kind of bargain. Their saturation was almost worse. Guilt and greed and the particular weight of people who had convinced themselves that what they were doing was necessary.

"We're not here to trade," the white man said through his interpreter. "We're here to collect a debt."

Adaeze's father kept his voice steady. "We owe no debts."

"Your neighbors to the east disagree. They say you raided their grain stores last season. They've sold us the right to collect compensation." The smile again, empty and terrible. "Twenty souls. That's the price they've set."

It was a lie. Everyone knew it was a lie. The village to the east had been struggling since their chief died, and someone had clearly decided to trade their neighbors' lives for their own safety. It was the way this worked now. The traders had learned that they didn't need to raid villages themselves. They just needed to set Africans against Africans and collect the broken pieces.

"We will not give you our people," Adaeze's father said.

The white man's smile didn't change. "Then we'll take them."

They attacked at dawn.

Adaeze had spent the night preparing. She'd drawn from every saturated place she could reach. The ancient baobab where her ancestors had held council for twelve generations. The river where her grandmother had taught her to feel the current of accumulated life. The burial ground where the weight of honored dead pressed against the boundary between worlds.

She was full to bursting with the strength of her people. It should have been enough.

It wasn't.

The traders had practitioners of their own. Men who had learned to weaponize what they felt, to turn saturation into something violent and sharp. They cut through her defenses like they were nothing, and Adaeze learned the terrible truth that power meant nothing against people who had more of it and fewer scruples about how they used it.

By midday, it was over.

Twenty-three people knelt in the village center, wrists bound with rope that had been soaked in so much despair it seemed to writhe against the skin. Adaeze was one of them. Her father was another. Her younger brother, only fourteen, knelt beside her, trying not to cry.

The white trader walked down the line, examining his merchandise. When he reached Adaeze, he stopped.

"This one's different," he said to his interpreter. "I can feel it. She's like the ones we sometimes find. The special ones." He crouched down to look her in the eye. "You're going to be worth a fortune, girl. The buyers across the water pay extra for your kind."

Adaeze spat in his face.

He laughed, wiped his cheek, and moved on.

The march to the coast took seventeen days.

Adaeze tried to keep track of where they were, tried to maintain some connection to the land she knew. But each step took her further from the saturation that had sustained her entire life. The places here were foreign. They held experiences she didn't recognize, couldn't draw from, couldn't understand.

By the fifth day, she felt hollow.

By the tenth day, she understood what the traders had known all along. A practitioner separated from their land was just a person. Weaker, even, because they had grown dependent on something that could be taken away.

Her brother walked beside her. His name was Chukwuemeka, and he had always been the gentle one. The one who cried when animals died. The one who brought home injured birds and nursed them back to health. He had no practitioner abilities at all, and in their village that had seemed like a small sadness. Here, watching Adaeze's strength drain away day by day, he was the one who kept her moving.

"Tell me about home," he whispered at night, when the guards weren't listening. "Tell me about the baobab tree."

So she did. She described every branch, every root, every story their grandmother had told them about the spirits who lived in its bark. She described it until her voice gave out, and then she described it in her mind, holding onto the memory like it was the only real thing left in the world.

The fort on the coast was the worst place Adaeze had ever felt.

It squatted on the shoreline like a wound, built from stone that had absorbed so much suffering it practically screamed. Thousands of people had passed through these walls. Tens of thousands. The saturation was so thick with terror and grief and hopeless rage that Adaeze collapsed the moment she crossed the threshold.

When she woke, she was in a cell with thirty other people. The air was thick and hot and smelled like despair. Her brother's hand was in hers.

"I thought you were dead," he said. His voice was steady, but she could feel him shaking.

"Not yet."

Through the walls, she could hear the ocean. She had never seen it before. Had never imagined water that went on forever, that could carry you away from everything you knew and deposit you somewhere you would never find your way back from.

The white trader came to see her that evening. He brought a man she hadn't seen before, another white man in finer clothes, with a saturation that felt like cold calculation.

"This is her," the trader said. "I told you. Special."

The new man studied Adaeze the way she'd seen farmers study livestock. "Can she still work? I've bought ones like her before and they burn out on the crossing. Useless by the time they arrive."

"She's strong. Look at her. She'll survive."

"And the boy?"

"Her brother. They're more compliant when you keep families together. Learned that years ago."

The calculating man nodded slowly. "I'll take them both. Standard price for him. Triple for her, if she survives the crossing."

Money changed hands. Adaeze watched the transaction that turned her and her brother into property, and something inside her went very quiet.

She made her decision the night before they were to board the ship.

The cell was crowded with bodies, some sleeping, some weeping, some already empty-eyed with shock. Her brother had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep, his head on her shoulder, his hand still clutching hers.

Adaeze had spent the last three days doing something she'd never attempted before. Instead of drawing from places, she had been reaching toward them. Sending pieces of herself back along the path they'd traveled, leaving fragments of her saturation in every place she could remember clearly.

The river where she'd learned to swim. A piece of herself there, caught in the current.

The burial ground. A piece there too, resting among ancestors who would keep it safe.

The baobab tree. The biggest piece. The most important.

She was emptying herself on purpose. Hollowing her own core so that when they took her body across the water, the most essential parts of her would stay behind.

It was a kind of death. She understood that. The person who arrived on the other side would have her face, her memories, her name. But the saturation that made her Adaeze, the accumulated self she had built over nineteen years, would be scattered across the land she loved.

They couldn't take that from her if she gave it away first.

But she couldn't save her brother the same way. Chukwuemeka had no practitioner abilities. He couldn't send himself home in pieces. He would cross the water whole, and whatever happened to him over there would happen to all of him.

Unless she gave him something to carry.

Adaeze gathered what was left of herself. The final scraps of saturation she hadn't yet sent home. It wasn't much. Hollow practitioners were weak, and she had made herself deliberately hollow, had carved out her own core and sent it somewhere safe.

But there was enough left for one more gift.

She placed her hand over her brother's heart and pushed everything she had left into him. Every memory of home. Every story their grandmother had told. Every moment of joy she had ever felt on the red soil of their village.

It wasn't enough to make him a practitioner. It was just enough to give him something to hold onto. A warmth in his chest that would remind him who he was, where he came from, what he was worth.

Chukwuemeka stirred but didn't wake. Adaeze felt the transfer complete, felt the last of herself leave her body and settle into his.

She was empty now. Truly empty. The kind of hollow that couldn't be filled again.

But her brother would survive. Would carry her home inside him wherever they took him. Would remember, even when everything else tried to make him forget.

That was enough.

It had to be enough.

They came for them at sunrise.

The walk to the ship was short but brutal. People cried out, tried to run, were beaten back into line. The ocean stretched out ahead of them, endless and indifferent.

Chukwuemeka gripped her hand. "Adaeze. Something's wrong. You feel different. You feel like..." He trailed off, unable to name it.

"I know."

"What did you do?"

She looked at him. Her little brother, who had never hurt anything in his life, who had brought her flowers when she was sad, who had believed, somehow, that the world was fundamentally good despite all evidence to the contrary.

"I gave you something to keep," she said. "Promise me you'll hold onto it. No matter what happens over there. No matter what they do to you. Promise me you'll remember where you came from."

"I promise." Tears were streaming down his face now. "But Adaeze, what about you? What will you hold onto?"

She didn't answer. Couldn't answer. Because the truth was that she had nothing left to hold, and hollow practitioners didn't survive long. The crossing would kill her. She had known that when she made her choice.

But Chukwuemeka would live. Would carry their home inside him. Would maybe, someday, find a way to pass it on to children who would never see the village but would feel it in their bones anyway.

That was the only kind of victory available to her now.

The ship was called the Esperanza. Hope, in a language Adaeze didn't speak.

She died on the nineteenth day of the crossing.

The sailors threw her body overboard without ceremony. She was just cargo that had spoiled, a loss to be noted in a ledger and forgotten. They didn't know what she had been. Didn't know what she had given up. Didn't know that the hollow woman they dumped into the Atlantic had already sent herself home in pieces, had scattered her spirit across a land they would never see.

Chukwuemeka watched them take her body. He didn't cry. Something had closed inside him the moment she stopped breathing, a door that would never fully open again.

But he felt the warmth in his chest. The gift she had given him. The village he would never see again but would carry inside him for the rest of his life.

He survived the crossing.

He survived the auction block in Charleston, where a man bought him for a rice plantation because he looked strong despite his youth.

He survived thirty-one years of slavery, until a war finally broke the chains that had held him.

He survived long enough to have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And he told them stories. About a village with red soil. About a baobab tree where the ancestors held council. About a sister who had given everything she had so that he could carry their home across the water.

Some of them were practitioners, those children and grandchildren. The ability cropped up every few generations, unpredictable and precious. And when it did, they found that they could feel something strange in the land beneath their feet. A layer underneath the American soil that didn't quite belong there.

Home, pressed into them like a fingerprint.

Adaeze, still giving gifts two hundred years later.

The baobab tree still stands.

The village is gone now. Absorbed into a city that grew up around it, its boundaries erased by time and development. But the tree remains, protected by people who don't quite know why they feel compelled to protect it.

Practitioners who visit the city sometimes stop beneath its branches and feel something unexpected. A warmth. A welcome. A sense of being held by someone who loved very fiercely a very long time ago.

They don't know whose saturation they're feeling. Don't know the name of the girl who left herself there rather than be taken whole.

But they feel her anyway.

And somewhere, scattered across two continents, the pieces of Adaeze continue to hold onto what she loved.

It is the only kind of immortality she could give herself.

It is enough.