“The sheer joy of something like the ‘Sunny’ series is the feeling that I simply have not read this before, and that is so rare… It’s fantasy, yet it comes from a cultural place that isn’t the stuff we’ve already seen 1,000 times before.”—Neil Gaiman
“The reader gets tangled up in Sunny’s journey in the most delicious of ways. The lush world and high-stakes plot are fun, imaginative, timely, and authentic. Sunny as a character is beautiful, strong, and resilient, and her host of friends and allies are well-drawn and compelling, adding to the magic of the story. Okorafor’s novel will ensnare readers and keep them turning pages until the very end.”—Booklist, starred review
“Fans of What Sunny Saw in the Flames will fall again for the wondrously intriguing fantasy world in modern-day Nigeria in this imaginative sequel… Don’t miss this beautifully written fantasy that seamlessly weaves inventive juju with contemporary Nigerian culture and history.”—School Library Journal, starred review
“Okorafor invents wild, fantastical creatures and worlds but she has a rarer gift too: She can describe the effect of using magic—the emotional and physiological repercussions of it—so viscerally, it’s as if it were a fever we’d contracted ourselves… the action sequences are enthralling. Okorafor describes Sunny’s moments of anguish beautifully, as well as her feelings of kinship and wonder. This is a novel about a girl who’s just trying to find her place in the world, when she’s called upon to save it.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A compelling and often terrifying version of one of fantasy literature’s most enduring traditions, [a perilous quest], recast in a thoroughly original way.”—Chicago Tribune
“Mythology, fantasy, science fiction, history, and magic blend into a compelling tale that will hold readers spellbound.”—Chicago Review of Books
“A charming adventure stocked with a house-sized spider, an Afro comb gifted by a goddess, and a giant flying rodent—one who loves hip-hop.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi is Nnedi Okorafor’s sequel to her award-winning novel What Sunny Saw in the Flames… As always, Okorafor effortlessly blends in critiques and observations of modern culture, reflecting on police brutality; the casual, familial misogyny in even the most modern households; and the cultural misunderstanding that can put Africans and African Americans at odds. This book, although written for young adults, is sophisticated in parsing out these adult issues, and it is a salve for grown-ups who may see themselves reflected in these very real, funny kids.”—The Washington Post
Dedicated to the stories that constantly breathe on my neck. I see you.
NSIBIDI FOR “LOVE”
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
ONE: TAINTED PEPPERS
TWO: YAAAAWN
THREE: HOME
FOUR: READING NSIBIDI IS RISKY
FIVE: AUNTIE UJU AND HER JUJU
SIX: IDIOK’S DELIGHTM
SEVEN: THE NUT
EIGHT: PEPPER BUGS
NINE: HOW FAR?
TEN: BROTHERLY LOVE
ELEVEN: WAYS
TWELVE: MURKED
THIRTEEN: DEBASEMENT
FOURTEEN: RELEASE
FIFTEEN: WAHALA DEY
SIXTEEN: HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD
SEVENTEEN: BOLA YUSUF
EIGHTEEN: CLOUDY SKIES
NINETEEN: TRUST, SHA
TWENTY: ROAD TRIP
TWENTY-ONE: BOOK OF SHADOWS
TWENTY-TWO: FRESH, FRESH, FINE EWUJU!
TWENTY-THREE: IBAFO
TWENTY-FOUR: THIS IS LAGOS
TWENTY-FIVE: THE JUNGLE
TWENTY-SIX: FLYING GRASSCUTTER
TWENTY-SEVEN: QUICK CHOICES
TWENTY-EIGHT: THE YAM FARM
TWENTY-NINE: FULL PLACE
THIRTY: ABOMINATION
THIRTY-ONE: AND SO IT WAS DECIDED
THIRTY-TWO: REALIGNED
THIRTY-THREE: GRASSCUTTER STEW
THIRTY-FOUR: JUDGEMENT DAY
THIRTY-FIVE: HOME, AGAIN
THIRTY-SIX: THE ZUMA ROCK FESTIVAL
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
1
TAINTED PEPPERS
It was stupid to come out here at night, especially considering the disturbing dreams Sunny had been having. The dreams Sunny suspected were not dreams at all. However, her mentor, Sugar Cream, had challenged her, and Sunny wanted to prove her wrong.
Sunny and Sugar Cream had gotten into one of their heated discussions; this one was about modern American girls and their general lack of skills in the kitchen. The old, twisted woman had looked condescendingly at Sunny, chuckled, and said, “You’re so Americanised, you probably can’t even make pepper soup.”
“Yes, I can, ma,” Sunny insisted, annoyed and insulted. Pepper soup wasn’t hard to make at all.
“Oh, sure, but you’re a Leopard Person, aren’t you? So your soup should be made with tainted peppers, not those weak things the Lambs like to grind up and use.”
Sunny had read a recipe for tainted pepper soup in her Fast Facts for Free Agents book but really, truthfully, honestly, she couldn’t live up to Sugar Cream’s challenge of making it. When making tainted pepper soup, if you made the tiniest mistake (like using table salt instead of sea salt), it resulted in some scary consequence like the soup becoming poisonous or exploding. This had discouraged Sunny from ever attempting to make it.
Nevertheless, she wasn’t about to admit her inability to make the soup. Not to Sugar Cream, whom she’d had to prove herself to by defeating one of the most powerful criminals the Leopard community had seen in centuries. Sunny was a mere free agent, a Leopard Person raised among Lambs and therefore ignorant of so much. Still, her chi who showed itself as her spirit face was Anyanwu, someone great in the wilderness. But really, what did it matter if you had been a big badass in the spirit world? Now was now, and she was Sunny Nwazue. She still had to prove to the Head Librarian that she was worthy of having her as a mentor.
So instead, Sunny said she’d leave the Obi Library grounds, despite the fact that it was just after midnight, to go pick three tainted chilli peppers from the patch that grew down the dirt road. Sugar Cream had only rolled her eyes and promised to have all the other ingredients for the soup on her office desk when Sunny returned. Including some freshly cut goat meat.
Sunny left her purse and glasses behind. She was especially glad to leave her glasses. They were made of green feather-light plastic, and she still wasn’t used to them. Over the last year, though being a Leopard Person had lessened her sensitivity to light, it hadn’t done a thing for her eyesight. She’d always had better eyes than most with albinism, but that didn’t mean they were great.
After her eye exam last month, her doctor had finally said what Sunny knew he’d eventually say: “Let’s get you some glasses.” They were the type that grew shaded in the sunlight, and she hated them. She liked seeing true sunshine, though it hurt her eyes. Nevertheless, lately her eyes’ inability to keep out sunlight had begun to make the world look so washed out that she could barely see any detail. She’d even tried wearing a baseball cap for a week, hoping the peak would shade her eyes. It didn’t help at all, so glasses it was. But whenever she could, she took them off. And this was the best thing about the night.
“I hope the goat meat is hard for her to get at this hour,” Sunny muttered to herself as she stomped out of the Obi Library’s entrance onto the narrow dirt road.
Not a minute later, she felt a mosquito bite her ankle. “Oh, come on,” she muttered. She walked faster. The night was hot and cloying, a perfect companion to he
r foul mood. It was rainy season, and the clouds had dropped an hour’s worth of rain the day before. The ground had expanded, and the trees and plants were breathing. Insects buzzed excitedly, and she heard small bats chirping as they fed on them. Back the other way, towards the entrance of Leopard Knocks, business was in full swing. It was the hour when both the quieter and noisier transactions were made. Even from where she was, she could hear a few of the noisier ones, including two Igbo men loudly discussing the limitations and the unreasonable cost of luck charms.
Sunny picked up her pace again. The sooner she got to the field where the wild tainted peppers grew, the sooner she could get back to the Obi Library and show Sugar Cream that she indeed had no idea how to make tainted pepper soup, one of the most common dishes of Nigeria’s Leopard People.
Sunny sighed. She’d come to the field several times with her friend Chichi to pick tainted peppers. They grew wild here and were not as concentrated as the ones sold in the Leopard Knocks produce huts and shops, but Sunny liked having functioning taste buds, thank you very much. It was Chichi who always made the soup, and Chichi liked it mild, too. Plus, the tainted peppers here didn’t cost a thing, and you could get them at any time, day or night.
It was the time of the year when the peppers grew fat, or so Orlu and Chichi said. Sunny had only learned of Leopard Knocks’ existence within the last year and a half. This was far from enough time to know the habits of the wild tainted peppers that grew near the fields of flowers used to make juju powder. Chichi and Orlu had been coming to Leopard Knocks all their lives. So Sunny was inclined to believe them. The peppers loved heat and sun, and despite the recent rains, there had been plenty of both.
When she reached the patch, she gathered two nice red ones and put them in her heat-resistant basket. The small patch of tainted peppers glowed like a little galaxy. The yellow-green flash of fireflies was like the occasional alien ship. Beyond the glowing peppers was a field of purple flowers with white centres, which would be picked, dried, and crushed to make many types of the common juju powders. Sunny admired the sight of the field in the late night.
She had been paying attention; she even noticed a tungwa lazily floating yards away just above some of the flowers. Round and large as a basketball, its thin brown skin grazed the tip of a flower. “Ridiculous thing,” she muttered as it exploded with a soft pop, quietly showering tufts of black hair, bits of raw meat, white teeth, and bones on the pepper plants. She knelt down to look for the third pepper she wanted to pick. Two minutes later, she looked up again. All she could do was blink and stare.
“What… the… hell?” she whispered.
She clutched her basket of tainted peppers. She had a sinking feeling that she needed all her senses right now. She was lightheaded from the intensity of her confusion… and her fear.
“Am I dreaming?”
Where the field of purple flowers had been was a lake. Its waters were calm, reflecting the bright half-moon like a mirror. Did the peppers exude some sort of fume that caused hallucinations? She wouldn’t be surprised. When they were overly ripe, they softly smoked and sometimes even sizzled. But she was not only seeing a lake, she smelled it, too—jungly, with the tang of brine, wet. She could even hear frogs singing.
Sunny considered turning tail and running back to the Obi Library. Best to pretend you don’t see anything, a little voice in her head warned. Go back! In Leopard Knocks, sometimes the smartest thing to do when you were a kid who stumbled across some unexplainable weirdness was to turn a blind eye and walk away.
Plus, she had her parents to consider. She was out late on a Saturday evening and she was in Leopard Knocks, a place non-Leopard folk including her parents weren’t allowed to know about, let alone set foot in. Her parents couldn’t know about anything Leopard-related. All they knew was that Sunny was not home, and it was due to something similar to what Sunny’s mother’s mother used to do while she was alive.
Sunny’s mother was probably worried sick but wouldn’t ask a thing when Sunny returned home. And her father would angrily open the door and then wordlessly go back to his room where he, too, would finally be able to sleep. Regardless of the tension between her and her parents, Sunny quietly promised them in her mind that she would remain safe and sound.
But Sunny’s dreams had been crazy lately. If she started having them while awake and on her feet, this would be a new type of problem. She had to make sure this wasn’t that. She brought out her house key and clicked on the tiny flashlight she kept on the ring. Then she crept to the lip of the lake for a better look, pushing aside damp, thick green plants that were not tainted peppers or purple flowers. The ground stayed dry until she reached the edge of the water where it was spongy and waterlogged.
She picked up and threw a small stone. Plunk. The water looked deep. At least seven feet. She flashed her tiny weak beam across it just in time to see the tentacle shoot out and try to slap around her leg. It missed, grabbing and pulling up some of the tall plants instead. Sunny shrieked, stumbling away from the water. More of the squishy, large tentacles shot out.
She whirled around and took off, managing seven strides before tripping over a vine and then falling onto some flowers, yards from the lake. She looked back, relieved to be a safe distance from whatever was in the water. She shuddered and scrambled to her feet, horrified. She couldn’t believe it. But not believing didn’t make it any less true. The lake was now less than two feet from her, its waters creeping closer by the second. It moved fast like a rolling wave in the ocean, the land, flowers and all, quietly tumbling into it.
The tentacles slipped around her right ankle before she could move away. They yanked her off her feet, as two then three more tentacles slapped around her left ankle, torso, and thigh. Grass ground into her jeans and T-shirt and then bare skin on her back as it dragged her towards the water. Sunny had never been a great swimmer. When she was a young child, swimming was always something done in the sun, so she avoided it. It was night-time, but she definitely wanted to avoid swimming now.
She thrashed and twisted, fighting terror; panic would get her nowhere. This was one of the first things Sugar Cream had taught her on the first day of her mentorship. Sugar Cream. She’d be wondering where Sunny was. She was almost to the water now.
Suddenly, one of the tentacles let go. Then another. And another. She was… free. She scrambled back from the water, feeling the mud and soggy leaves and flowers mash beneath her. She stared at the water, dizzy with adrenaline-fuelled fright. For a moment, she bizarrely saw through two sets of eyes, those of her spirit face and her mortal one. Through them, she simultaneously saw water and somewhere else. The double vision made her stomach lurch. She held her belly, blinking several times. “But I’m okay, I’m okay,” she whispered.
When she looked again, in the moonlight, bobbing at the surface of the lake was a black-skinned woman with what looked like bushy long, long dreadlocks. She laughed a guttural laugh and dived back into the deep. She has a fin, Sunny thought. She giggled. “Lake monsters are real and Mami Wata is real.” Sunny leaned back on her elbows for a moment, shut her eyes, and took a deep breath. Orlu would know about the lake beast; he’d probably know every detail about it from its scientific name to its mating patterns. She giggled some more. Then she froze because there was loud splashing coming from behind her, and the land beneath her was growing wetter and wetter. Sunny dared a look back.
Roiling in the water was what looked like a ball of tentacles filling the lake. The beginnings of a bulbous wet head emerged. Octopus! A massive octopus. It tilted its head back, exposing a car-sized powerful beak. The monster loudly chomped down and opened it several times and then made a strong hacking sound that was more terrifying than if it had roared.
The woman bobbed between her and the monster, her back to Sunny. The beast paused, but Sunny could see it still eyeing her. Sunny jumped up, turned, and ran. She heard the flap of wings and looked up just in time to see a huge dark winged figure zip by overhead.
“What?” she breathed. “Is that…” But she had to save her breath for running. She reached the dirt road and, without a look back or up, kept running.
The pepper soup smelled like the nectar of life. Strong. It was made with tainted peppers and goat meat. There was fish in it, too. Mackerel? The room was warm. She was alive. The pattering of rain came from outside through the window. The sound drew her to wakefulness. She opened her eyes to hundreds of ceremonial masks hanging on the wall—some smiling, some snarling, some staring. Big eyes, bulging eyes, narrow eyes. Gods and spirits of many colours, shapes, and attitudes. Sugar Cream had told her to shut up and sit down for ten minutes. When Sugar Cream left the office to “go get some things,” Sunny must have dozed off.
Now the old woman knelt beside her, carrying a bowl of what Sunny assumed was pepper soup. She was hunched forwards, her twisted spine making it difficult for her to kneel. “Since you had such a hard time getting the peppers, I went and bought them myself,” she said. She slowly got up, looking pleased. “I met Miknikstic on the way to the all-night market.” Miknikstic was a Zuma Wrestling Champion who was killed in a match and became a guardian angel.
“He… he was here?” So that was him I saw fly by, she thought.
“Sit up,” Sugar Cream said.
She handed Sunny the bowl of soup. Sunny began to eat, and the soup warmed her body nicely. Sunny had been lying on a mat. She glanced around the floor for the tiny red spiders Sugar Cream always had lurking about in her office. She spotted one a few feet away and shivered. But she didn’t get up. Sugar Cream said the spiders were poisonous, but if she didn’t bother them, they would not bother her. They also didn’t take well to rude treatment, so she wasn’t allowed to move away from them immediately.
“There was a lake,” Sunny said. “Where the tainted peppers and those purple flowers grow. I know it sounds crazy but…” She touched her hair and frowned. She was sporting a medium-length Afro these days, and something was in it. Her irrational mind told her it was a giant red spider, and her entire body seized up.