Chapter 25: THE CANKERWORMS

Karim leaned back in his chair, elbows on his knees, eyes locked on the two women before him. The rain outside had slowed to a whisper against the window, and the room was dim — the kind of dim that lets stories breathe, where silence feels heavier than sound. Aisha’s words had begun to waver, her voice a mixture of defiance and tremor. Jemima sat beside her, her gaze distant but sharp, as if each memory

played out in real time before her eyes. Karim didn’t interrupt. Not yet. He simply nodded once, inviting her to continue.

The visit to prison had changed Aisha. There was a stillness to her now — the kind born from

confronting ghosts you once swore you’d buried. When they had left the prison gates that day, she’d stood motionless, eyes fixed forward, her breath shallow and trembling. The air smelled of dust and iron, and the walls behind her seemed to hum with the echoes of men who had long forgotten what freedom felt like.

She took a long, unsteady breath. Tears welled, and before Jemima could speak, Aisha turned and pulled her into a fierce embrace. It wasn’t the polite, brittle hug of strangers anymore. It was raw, collapsing, desperate. A sound escaped her — half-sob, half-

breath — and Jemima’s arms closed around her in

return.

They stood like that for a long time, the city around them a blur of noise and motion. One was a young woman who had been forced to grow too fast; the other, a woman who had lived too long in the shadow of guilt. When Aisha finally spoke, her voice was small but steady.

“We should see someone,” she said. “We can’t leave him there. We should get your testimony in court… something that can get my father free.”

Jemima nodded without hesitation. There was a

conviction in her now that hadn’t existed before the

visit — a quiet defiance that even Aisha found

unfamiliar. The next morning, they set out for the police headquarters.

The officer they met was old — one of those men who carried his authority in the tilt of his chin and the slowness of his speech. He barely looked at them at first, flipping through a faded file as if searching for an excuse to be done with them.

“Jemima Onabanjo,” he murmured, eyes scanning

the paper. “You say you witnessed the incident when

you were what — twelve?”

“Fourteen,” Jemima corrected softly.

He looked up then, finally meeting her gaze. “At

fourteen, miss, the mind is… impressionable. You saw something tragic, yes. But trauma does strange things to memory. It bends facts, rearranges events. We cannot, after twenty years, reopen a case on a child’s recollection.”

Aisha’s jaw tightened. “So because she was young, her truth doesn’t count?”

“Because she was young,” the man said evenly, “her truth cannot stand in court. And because the officers involved were men of record — respected — we

tread carefully. Very carefully.”

He leaned back, lacing his fingers together, his tone soft but final. “If I were you, I would let sleeping dogs lie.”

Aisha’s laugh was short and humorless. “Those dogs never slept,” she said. “They ate.”

The man’s eyes hardened. “You’d do well to watch your words, young lady.”

They left before Aisha could reply — Jemima dragging her out by the wrist, her face pale, her hands shaking. Outside, the sun was too bright, cruelly bright. Aisha stood for a long moment, her fists clenched. “He’s like the rest,” she said. “They

all knew. They all turned away.”

Jemima said nothing. She simply looked at the sky, her throat tight.

When they visited the courthouse days later, they met with a judge who had once handled part of the investigation. He welcomed them politely, even offered tea, but there was a tension in his smile — the kind that comes with conversations that should never happen.

“Ladies,” he said after they had laid out their case, “I understand your pain. I do. But revisiting a matter tied to certain names…” He paused, weighing his words. “…would mean accusing pillars of our legal

history of negligence. Men who built their

reputations on this very case. To question that ruling

is to question the foundation of our justice system.”

Karim exhaled softly from his seat, his voice cutting

gently into the memory. “And did he really say that?”

Aisha’s eyes flicked to him — tired but alive. “Almost exactly that,” she said. “He looked at us like we were children asking for miracles.”

Jemima nodded faintly. “He said reopening the case

would mean tearing open the belly of the system. And the system,” she murmured, “doesn’t bleed quietly.”

A hush fell again. The weight of the words settled.

Back in the story’s rhythm, Aisha’s tone deepened, her voice like gravel. “We walked out of that office in silence. No one said a word. I remember thinking how small we looked against the courthouse pillars

— two women, carrying a truth no one wanted.”

They sat in Jemima’s car afterward, the engine off, the heat pressing down. Neither cried this time. The tears had burned out somewhere between disappointment and fury.

Jemima finally turned to her. “Then we do it our way.”

Aisha looked up slowly. “What do you mean?”

Jemima’s eyes were steady now, her voice cold and deliberate. “If the law won’t free him, we will.”

Aisha blinked, unsure she’d heard right. “You

mean—”

“I mean,” Jemima said, cutting her off gently, “we break Samuel out.”

The air went still.

It was madness — the kind of thought born not from

impulse but exhaustion. Aisha’s chest tightened. The

world had refused them truth, refused them

redemption. Perhaps it was time they stopped asking politely.

She nodded once. “We’ll need a plan.”

The resolve in her voice startled even Jemima.

Over the next few days, they met in secret — cafes, empty lots, a dim apartment Jemima rented under a false name. They whispered names, contacts, routes. Jemima mentioned having contacts from her endless days searching for Aisha.

Aisha smiled faintly, the first smile in days. For a moment, she imagined having her father back, free

from the prison, from captivity.

Karim shifted slightly, his fingers steepled under his chin. “You two really thought you could break into a federal prison,” he murmured, almost to himself.

Aisha’s eyes flicked to him again, a glint of old

defiance there. “We didn’t think, Karim,” she said. “Thinking is what had us begging. This time, we acted.”

He nodded slowly, as though weighing the words.

“And Samuel?”

Jemima exhaled, a small, sad smile touching her lips.

“He didn’t agree at first. He thought we’d lost our minds.”

In her memory, she could still see him — sitting on the cold visitation bench, staring at them through the smeared glass.

“You think it’s a movie?” he’d said, his voice a rasp. “You think you can walk into this place and walk out again?”

Jemima had leaned forward, her hands pressed against the glass. “You said you wanted to live again,” she whispered. “This is your chance.”

For a long while, he said nothing. His eyes were dark, unreadable. Then finally, quietly:

“If we do this…” he said, “…then we finish it. All of

it.”

Aisha frowned. “Finish what?”

He looked at her then, a slow, haunted smile crossing his face. “The ones who did this. The men who turned truth into rot. You want justice? Justice

doesn’t knock on doors — it breaks them down.”

The silence that followed was thick with the birth of something dangerous.

Back in the dim room, Karim’s face froze mid expression. The rain had stopped. He looked from one woman to the other, a muscle twitching in his jaw. For a moment, the detective mask slipped —

just enough to show the man beneath, one who had

seen vengeance before and knew the cost it demanded.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

And Aisha did — her voice calm now, steady, as though reliving not a nightmare, but a calling. “That,” she said, “was when everything changed