The satellite phone died at dawn. Kofi woke to the sound of it vibrating weakly against his chest, a final shudder of exhausted electronics, and when he pulled it from his pocket the screen was black and unresponsive. The battery was gone. The photographs, the recording of Okello's confession, the evidence that could bring down an empire of blood—all of it was trapped inside a dead piece of metal and plastic, as useless as a stone. Kofi stared at the blank screen for a long moment, his mind struggling to process this new catastrophe. Then he closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. Panic was a luxury he could not afford. The photographs existed. They were on the phone's memory card, which meant they could be retrieved as long as the card itself was not damaged. But retrieving them required a computer, and the only computer he had access to was in Dr. Nkechi's office, behind a locked door, in a house that was now crawling with guards who were looking for him.
He sat up in his bed and surveyed the dormitory. The other boys were stirring, their faces groggy with sleep, their movements slow and mechanical as they prepared for another day of moral education and physical conditioning and the slow, steady erosion of their humanity. None of them knew what had happened during the night. None of them knew that the philanthropist who called himself their savior was nursing a knife wound in his study, or that five of their fellow residents were stumbling through the forest toward a logging road and a chance at freedom, or that the boy in the bed next to theirs had broken into the main house and stolen the secrets that could bring the whole estate crashing down. They were innocent, Kofi thought, and their innocence was the most tragic thing about this place. They had been saved from the streets only to be fattened for the slaughter, and they did not even know it.
He dressed quickly, tucking the dead phone into the lining of his mattress alongside the knife, and walked out into the courtyard. The morning air was cold and sharp, carrying the lingering smell of smoke from the burned fuel shed. The guards were still on high alert, their rifles slung across their chests, their eyes scanning the compound with a vigilance that had been absent before the fire. Kofi kept his head down and his movements casual, the posture of a boy who had nothing to hide. He was supposed to be in the dining hall for breakfast. He was supposed to be following the routine, blending in, disappearing into the sea of numbered tunics and obedient faces. But the routine was a trap now, a cage that would hold him in place until Okello's men came to collect him. He needed to act before that happened.
He found Efua in the laundry room, as he had known he would. She was folding sheets again, her hands moving with the same mechanical precision, but there was something different about her this morning. A tension in her shoulders, a tightness around her eyes, the barely perceptible signs of someone who had not slept. She looked up when he entered, and her expression was not surprise but resignation, as if she had been expecting him and dreading his arrival in equal measure.
"The phone is dead," Kofi said, keeping his voice low. "The battery died at dawn. The photographs are still on the memory card, but I cannot retrieve them without a computer. Dr. Nkechi's computer. I need to get into her office."
Efua set down the sheet she was folding and wiped her hands on her apron. "That will be difficult. Dr. Nkechi is in her office now. She has been there since sunrise. Something happened last night—the guards are talking about a break-in at the main house. Okello is saying it was an attempted robbery, but no one believes him. The guards are frightened. Frightened guards are dangerous."
"It was not a robbery," Kofi said. "It was me. I broke into Okello's study. I found the ledgers—the names of the clients, the payments, the records of every hunt. I photographed everything. And then Okello came in, and we fought, and I wounded him. He has a cut on his wrist. The guards have probably seen it."
Efua stared at him, her eyes wide with something that might have been awe or might have been horror. "You fought Okello," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "You fought him and you won."
"I did not win. I escaped. There is a difference. He is still in the main house, and he still has an army of guards, and he still has the power to make all of us disappear. The only thing that can stop him is the evidence on that phone. If I can get it to the doctor, she can use it to bring him down. But the phone is dead, and I am trapped, and the guards are looking for someone to blame for last night. It is only a matter of time before they come for me."
Efua was silent for a long moment, her hands resting on the folded sheets. Then she said, very quietly, "There is another computer. In the chapel. It is old, from before the renovations, but it still works. The priest used it before he died. I found it when I was cleaning the vestry last year. It is hidden behind the organ, in a little alcove that no one ever goes into. There is a power outlet there, and the computer still boots up. I do not know if it has an internet connection, but it might have a memory card reader. If you can get the card into the computer, you can at least transfer the files."
Kofi felt a surge of hope so intense it was almost painful. "The chapel. Of course. The one place no one would think to look." He was already moving toward the door, but Efua grabbed his arm, her grip surprisingly strong.
"Wait. There is something else you need to know." Her voice was urgent now, stripped of its usual careful neutrality. "The guards are doing a search this morning. Every dormitory, every storage room, every corner of the estate. They are looking for the person who broke into the main house. They have not said it is you, but they are checking everyone's belongings. If they find the phone or the knife in your mattress, they will know. You need to move them. You need to hide them somewhere they will not think to search."
"The chapel," Kofi said again. "I will take them there. I will transfer the files, and then I will hide the phone and the knife in the vestry until I can figure out how to get them off the estate."
Efua nodded, her grip loosening. "Be careful. The chapel is not safe. Okello knows about the trophy room—he thinks no one else does, but he knows it is there. If he suspects that you have been inside, he will check it. You need to be fast."
Kofi left the laundry room and walked across the courtyard, his pace casual but his mind racing. The chapel was at the far end of the compound, a small stone building half-hidden by the jacaranda trees. It was early enough that the compound was still quiet, the morning routine not yet fully underway. A few guards patrolled the perimeter, but they were focused on the gates and the walls, not on a boy walking toward the place of worship. Kofi reached the chapel door without being stopped and slipped inside.
The interior was dark and cool, the air heavy with the smell of old incense and dust. The stained-glass windows cast fractured patterns of blue and red across the pews, and the altar was draped in white cloth, the candle in its red glass holder long since burned out. Kofi walked past the pews, past the altar, past the velvet curtain that hid the door to the trophy room. The organ was at the back of the chapel, a massive wooden instrument with pipes that reached almost to the ceiling. Behind it, exactly where Efua had said it would be, was a small alcove. And in the alcove, covered in a layer of dust, was a computer.
It was ancient, a desktop model from at least a decade ago, its monitor a bulky CRT screen that took up most of the small desk. But when Kofi pressed the power button, it hummed to life, the screen flickering through a series of startup messages. The operating system was old, and the internet connection was nonexistent—the ethernet cable had been cut, probably when the priest died and the room was abandoned—but there was a memory card slot on the front of the tower. Kofi pulled the satellite phone from his pocket, removed the memory card, and inserted it into the slot. The computer recognized it immediately, and a folder full of image files appeared on the screen.
He worked quickly, copying the files to the computer's hard drive, organizing them into folders by category: the jars in the trophy room, the ledgers from Okello's safe, the recording of the confrontation in the study. The recording was the most damning piece of evidence—Okello's voice, clear and unmistakable, admitting to the hunts, threatening to kill Kofi, revealing the predator beneath the mask of the philanthropist. Kofi listened to a few seconds of it, just enough to confirm that the audio was intact, and then he saved it with the rest of the files.
But saving the files was not enough. He needed to get them off the estate. The chapel computer had no internet, but it had a CD burner. It was ancient technology, obsolete and forgotten, but it worked. Kofi found a stack of blank CDs in a drawer beneath the desk, relics of the dead priest's administrative duties, and he began burning the files onto them. One disc for the photographs. Another for the ledgers. A third for the recording. He made two copies of each, slipping one set into a plain paper envelope he found in the desk, and hiding the other set behind the organ, wedged between the pipes and the wall.
When he was finished, he removed the memory card from the computer and slipped it into his pocket. Then he took the knife from his belt and the dead phone from his pocket and hid them both behind the organ, beside the CDs. The search of the dormitory would find nothing. He was clean.
He was about to leave the chapel when he heard the door open. Footsteps echoed on the stone floor, slow and deliberate, accompanied by the tap of a cane. Kofi's blood ran cold. He pressed himself into the alcove, hidden behind the organ, and held his breath. The footsteps came closer, past the pews, past the altar, stopping directly in front of the velvet curtain.
"Check the trophy room," Okello's voice said, cold and commanding. "Make sure nothing has been disturbed."
There were other footsteps now, heavier, the boots of guards. The velvet curtain rustled, and the door to the trophy room creaked open. Kofi could hear the guards moving inside, their voices low and indistinct. Then one of them spoke clearly: "Everything is in order, sir. The jars are all here. Nothing has been touched."
"Good," Okello said. "Now search the rest of the chapel. The boy knows something. I want him found."
Kofi pressed himself deeper into the alcove, his heart hammering so loudly he was certain the guards would hear it. The footsteps spread out through the chapel, boots clumping on the stone floor, voices calling to one another as they searched the pews and the vestry and the confessionals. They were getting closer. In a few seconds, they would reach the organ. They would find the alcove. They would find him.
Then, from somewhere outside the chapel, a shout went up. "Fire! There is a fire in the kitchen! Everyone to the kitchen!"
The footsteps stopped. The guards hesitated, their voices rising in confusion. Okello cursed, his cane tapping angrily on the stone. "Go," he snarled. "Put it out. I will deal with the boy later." The footsteps retreated, boots running toward the door, and then the chapel was silent again.
Kofi waited in the alcove, counting his heartbeats, until he was certain that everyone was gone. Then he emerged, his legs shaking, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The kitchen fire—he knew immediately who had set it. Auntie Efua, with her wooden spoon and her righteous fury and her unshakeable commitment to protecting the children who passed through her kitchen. She had seen the guards heading for the chapel and had created a diversion, knowing it would draw them away. She had risked her life to save his.
He could not let her sacrifice be in vain. He slipped out of the chapel, the envelope of CDs tucked inside his shirt, and walked quickly toward the kitchen. The courtyard was chaos again, guards running with buckets and hoses, smoke billowing from the kitchen windows. Auntie Efua was standing in the middle of the chaos, her wooden spoon raised, her voice thundering commands at the guards as if she were the one in charge. When she saw Kofi, her eyes met his for a fraction of a second, and she gave the slightest of nods. The fire was contained. The CDs were safe. The plan was still in motion.
Kofi kept walking, past the kitchen, past the dormitory, toward the delivery gate where the supply trucks came and went. He had one chance to get the envelope off the estate. The morning delivery was due in thirty minutes, a truck bringing vegetables and meat from the city. The driver was a man named Kofi Mensah—no relation—who had been making the run for years and who, according to Auntie Efua, could be trusted. If Kofi could get the envelope into the truck, hidden among the crates of produce, it would reach the city by noon. And if Auntie Efua had sent word to Owusu, the printer in the harbor district, someone would be waiting at the market to collect it.
He reached the delivery gate just as the truck rumbled through. The driver, a heavyset man with a friendly face and eyes that missed nothing, climbed down from the cab and began unloading crates of yams and plantains. Kofi approached him, the envelope in his hand, and said, "Excuse me, sir. Auntie Efua asked me to give you this. She said it is very important."
The driver looked at the envelope, then at Kofi, then toward the kitchen where smoke was still rising. He did not ask any questions. He took the envelope and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket, nodding once. "Tell Auntie Efua I will deliver it personally," he said. And then he climbed back into the cab and drove away.
Kofi stood at the gate and watched the truck disappear down the road, carrying the evidence that would end Elias Okello's reign of terror. The photographs. The ledgers. The recording. All of it was on its way to the doctor, to the journalist, to the world outside the walls. Whatever happened to him now, the truth was out.
But the truth was not enough. He still had to survive. And Okello was still hunting him.
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