Chapter 22 Recovered

Ritual isn’t something that happens only in temples here. The whole city throbs with it: festivals erupting into trance and song, women possessed by spirits, ancestors remembered with offerings, the boundary between the ordinary and the divine blurring in music, dust, and sweat.

Nearby, Tarmo’s phones are arrayed like instruments. He switches languages with practiced ease — Russian, Estonian, English — rerouting ships, redirecting Africa’s arteries, king of the air and the sea for a few minutes at altitude.

I catch only fragments. But I hear enough.

Recovered. As if I were a misrouted crate somewhere between Labé and Cotonou.

The caviar arrives. The children in my belly play catch. And somewhere below us, Benin waits — its fetishes on every threshold, its spirits moving through the streets like weather.

Some things cannot be rerouted.

I.Ph.

— Recovered, Chapter 22, The Memory Cartographer — Alkebulan Chronicles © 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.