Chapter 29: CROSSROADS

Karim heaved as the story closed around them. The weight of it sat on his chest like a wet blanket; the room seemed smaller, as though the air itself had been pressed thin by too many confessions. He looked from Aisha to Jemima, searching their faces as if they might offer him a map back to the world he once believed in.

“I suppose you’ll have to silence me now,” he said finally, keeping his eyes fixed on the duo the entire time. His voice was low but carried a cold edge. “Make it easier to finish off your last worm.”

They exchanged glances, both looking as gloomy as ever. Where once there had been the brittle performance of strangers, now there was only the tiredness of people who had been doing damage for too long.

“Karim…” Jemima started, the sound small and urgent. She fumbled for the right words and found none. Her fingers, bare at the table, kept tracing an invisible ring. She had aged a little since he first met her — not in years, but in something harder: the way her shoulders carried regret.

Aisha cleared her throat, rising from her chair. “I’ll leave you two to sort this out,” she said, folding her

hands behind her back. Before she stepped for the

door she leaned in toward Jemima and whispered in a voice only she could hear, “I will be around.” Then she was gone.

Left alone, the silence filled the space between them. The hum of the fan sounded louder; the light above the table fractured in the glass of Karim’s water. He watched Jemima for a long minute, searching for the woman who had once been an accomplice and perhaps something else.

“Karim,” she began again, and this time her voice steadied. She took a deep breath, as though pulling courage up from some difficult place. “I approached you to see who you were. To get a feel.” Her eyes

met his, honest now in a way that made him flinch.

“Aisha told me about you after she was questioned. She told me how you asked, what you noticed. I needed to know what type of person was on the other side of the law.”

Karim’s expression did not change. He had read confessions before; sympathy had no place in his work. Still, something in that admission unsettled him. “So you came to test me,” he said. The words were flat, the accusation plain.

“At first,” she conceded. “But then…” Her throat

tightened. “Everything else I told you — the laughter

, the small gestures, the things we’ve done — they

were real. I didn’t plan for you to matter.”

He swallowed, the motion visible in the hollow of his throat. “So you lied to me,” he said. “And then you lied by not lying.”

“No,” Jemima said quickly, defensively. “I didn’t lie about what I felt. I didn’t expect to feel anything.”

She looked away for a second, sniffed, and then

spoke softer, “You were the only person who made

me question why we were doing any of it. You weren’t supposed to be soft. You were supposed to be the law.”

Karim let out a short, humorless sound. “Love and betrayal,” he said. “They always come in the same breath.”

Jemima’s hand found the edge of the table and pressed until her knuckles whitened. “It’s

complicated,” she admitted. “And I’m tired of simplifying it.”

He held her gaze for a long time. The detective’s caution battled with a tired, more human hunger — a desire for some remainder of decency in the world he could still stand by. He rose slowly and took a step closer, the movement more performed than aggressive.

“Don’t take part in killing the last person,” he said quietly. “Whatever you believe you’re fixing, let it end here. You have done enough. Go back home.”

She blinked, confusion and a hurt hurt mixing in her face. “What do you mean?What do I tell Samuel and Aisha ?”

He shook his head once, a guarded shrug of an

admission he didn’t want to give voice to. “You owe them nothing. Not anymore.You owe me nothing too but I’m asking you now… put your hand down.”

Jemima’s eyes searched his face. “Why should I trust you?” she asked, and there was no irony in the question — only raw need.

“Because I’m asking you not to become what you hate,” he said. “Because I’ve seen what vengeance

does to people who think they can control it.”

She looked away, and the softness in her face fell like a curtain. Karim felt a hollow, ugly thing opening and wanted to close it with words: a promise, a caution, anything. Instead he straightened, smoothed his top with a small, professional gesture, and walked to the door.

At the threshold he paused and looked back. “I’m telling you this as a man who still believes in law,” he said, “not as a judge. Do what you must — but stop here.”

Then he left.

Outside in the hallway the light was harsh. Karim moved through it slowly, his steps measured. He swallowed down a bitterness he didn’t want to cheapen with talk. In front of the elevator, he paused for a second, hands braced on the button, and let the sound of the hotel seep into him — low voices, keys, the distant clack of a keyboard. He felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

When he reached his flat that evening a single brown envelope sat on the doormat. The insignia on the flap

— the crest of the Nigerian Police Force — was stamped in black. He picked it up with cautious fingers and slit it open.

Inside, on official letterhead, crisp and cold, was a reinstatement notice: Detective Karim Bello is hereby reinstated to active service, effective immediately. Signed: Inspector General, Lagos Command.

He stood there for a long time with the light by the door painting the paper a small square of authority. A thousand half-thoughts crowded him: coincidence, intervention, something more sinister? The timing was precise enough to feel like fate, blunt enough to be practical.

He folded the letter and placed it in his pocket. Whatever it meant, the next morning he would return

to the precinct in irony: a man whose belief had been rattled but whose job had been returned to him.

Back at the safe house by the port, the others were already in motion.

Samuel knew nothing about the meeting with Karim but somehow, he felt the cold of it. The doubt that had found it way into Jemima’s heart. He sat on a low chair near the window, his hands steepled and old scars peeking through the blood-dark skin. He watched the sea and then turned when Jemima entered.

A map lay across the table — names circled in red, photographs clipped with clothespins, neat lines

connecting dots like a patient’s chart. Yua stood near

the stove, pouring tea quietly into a chipped mug. Aisha moved with the economy of someone who had not slept in weeks but had given up any notion of rest that was not useful.

They spoke in the low, precise tones of people about to do impossible things.

“We finish this soon,” Samuel said, not as a question.

The room was a small island of sweat and planning.

Jemima’s hands hovered over the map. She felt

Karim’s words like a live wire along her spine. Don’t take part in killing the last person, he’d said. That

instruction became a small, stubborn thought that would not leave her.

The plan moved forward in stages. Vehicles arranged. Routes plotted. Disguises set. Yua checked each knot he would tie as if they were lines on a life raft he must not fail to secure. Aisha reviewed a list of names, each trailing a ruined life; Jemima’s throat tightened reading them.

“Are you sure about this?” Jemima asked at one point, and her voice was not accusatory so much as brittle with fear.

Samuel’s stare was even. “There is no surety in this,” he said. “Only necessity.”

Jemima closed her eyes for half a second and thought of Karim’s face: the way he’d asked her not to cross the final line as if he were guarding something sacred. She felt the sharp split between loyalty — to the new found family— and a different, quieter loyalty emerging to a man she barely knew .

When Aisha noticed the change in her, she didn’t

speak. Instead she put a hand on Jemima’s shoulder, a small, human touch like an offering. Jemima flinched but did not pull away. She let the touch rest there as if measuring its warmth.

That night they set a time. By the end, the world would either be cleaner or rotten further beyond repair.

Karim’s reinstatement was the thing that made the precinct hum with sudden usefulness. He found his badge where he had left it in DSP Adewale’s office along with his sidearm. He remembered the face off with Jemima and Aisha and wondered if coming back was right. The inspector’s note was crisp and precise; he ran his thumb along the indent of the seal as if that alone might tell him the story of who had pulled the strings.

He did not know which side would get to him first — the law or the ghosts who’d been pecking at the bones of Lagos.

Between midnight and first light, the city thinned. Near the port the air tasted of salt and diesel; the warehouses breathed cold. The car doors clicked, tires whispered over rain-slick tarmac.

In the safe house, they packed the last of the things that might matter: fake IDs, a faded photograph, a handkerchief Aisha had kept since she was ten.

Jemima moved like a machine while her heart argued against it.

She kept thinking of Karim’s face, of his weary plea. “Don’t take part in killing the last person.” The thought was a kind of tether to a life she had almost let go of — a life where injunctions mattered and consequences had forms other than blood.

Samuel rose, the old engine of his body creaking, and walked to the door. He faced them for a long heartbeat and then nodded.

“Soon,” he said.

Jemima’s hands trembled as she fastened her jacket. She had never done a job that required her patience without question before; this one demanded both

patience and the blood of the world. She felt like a

woman walking into cold water, the first lurch of a dive that might either save her or drown her.

She stepped out into the night with them, and for a moment, as the door shut behind her, she thought she heard somewhere, barely, Karim’s voice — not in words but as a presence: a warning, a pleading, a memory of what might still be unbroken.

The plan had begun. She went along.

And she felt the guilt like a small, familiar stone in her coat: heavy, real, impossible to ignore