“Meteor shower, I think,” Nikolai answered him in English. “Hopefully we won’t get hit by another big one.” He often popped back and forth between English and the Khoisan languages, but the occasional stray click carried through, and he retained traces of the trilling burr many Khomani laced their English with.
“Big one?”
“Like the one that killed the dinosaurs.”
“Oh.” Unconcerned, Ngubi nibbled on his own melon.
“They track them, you know,” Nikolai pointed out.
Ngubi raised his brows. “They leave tracks?”
Nikolai knew the man was yanking his chain, but he couldn’t help himself. “They use equipment that tells them where the meteors might pass, and which ones might hit us.”
Ngubi waved a hand in the air. “If they see that a big one is going to hit, what will they do about it?”
Nikolai shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“See,” his dad said in English, “there is such a thing as too much knowledge. What good does it do to know something will kill you, and not be able to do anything about it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have sent you to that teacher.”
Nikolai snorted a laugh. Ngubi often openly lamented that he had done so, but he’d worked very hard to ensure Nikolai received an education. Not an easy process, as they were dodging white-haired women on a regular basis. Nikolai’s schooling in Tsabong had been interrupted many times while they retreated into the desert.
Once he’d got through primary school, Ngubi had taken him to an elderly retired teacher he trusted in Upington. There, Nikolai came as close as he’d ever had to blending into society for five years, while the man crammed his eager mind full of knowledge.
Then his teacher had gotten sick. Nikolai had seen it in the man’s life essence well before his diagnosis.
At first, he hadn’t understood what he was seeing. Only that something was wrong. And one night, driven by an instinct he didn’t fully understand, he placed his hands on the old teacher, and tried to drive the jagged redness away.
Two days later, a white-haired woman turned up in the nearby market.
Ngubi appeared out of nowhere and spirited a resistant Nikolai back into the desert. He’d sensed that whatever was wrong with his old teacher was mortal, but the elderly man had pushed him to leave.
And to his shame, he’d gone. His teacher died within a year.
Even now, thinking about it, Nikolai’s heart hurt. He didn’t know if he could have saved him, but he sure would have liked to try.
He glanced across the fire to his dad and asked a question that had become depressingly routine. “Why do they keep coming?”
Ngubi didn’t look up from poking at the tubers to ask who “they” were. But he didn’t offer the usual shrug and, “I have no idea.”
This time, he said, “Perhaps you need to leave the desert.”
Nikolai stared at him, but his gut twisted into a knot. “Leave? And go where?”
Ngubi folded his arms around his skinny legs. “Maybe you need to live someplace else. It is no longer safe for you here.”
The knot inside Nikolai tightened. “Away from the desert? Or you?” Ngubi had raised him, kept him safe. Was he telling him to go?
“I cannot follow you elsewhere, Nikolai.” Ngubi measured him with his dark gaze. “I do not fit anywhere but here. But they keep coming for you, and I am getting old. I will not live forever. If you stay, they will find you.”
He hated thinking of his dad as old, but Ngubi had been in his thirties when he’d found Nikolai. Now his white hair framed a face lined by many years living beneath the desert sun.
“Where would I go?” Nikolai shook his head. “I prefer life beneath the stars. They don’t stare at me. At least, if they do, they don’t comment.”
His dad wasn’t willing to let it go. “There might be places where you blend in. And that would be safer for you now.”
“Where are these places?” Nikolai demanded.
“I do not know,” Ngubi admitted. “But the cities have all kinds of people. You would not stand out as much there.”
