Boca Raton, a city that slept more than it lived, wasn’t everything Kitai had hoped for. It smelled faintly of brine and chlorine, and seemed to have more retirement homes than actual people.

  She’d moved here three months ago, stepping into a life that felt like a borrowed coat: stiff at the shoulders, wrong at the seams, never quite hers. College was supposed to be a reset, the push she needed out of the stagnant loop she’d grown up in. Instead, she felt even more misplaced.

  She glared out the window of her Introduction to Anthropology class, willing time to move faster. Not just because she was bored, though she was. It was her birthday, and she wanted to be anywhere but here.

  Still, she’d made a deal with herself: every class, every day. No skipping. No excuses. So she folded in on herself at her desk and rested her forehead on her arms, letting the professor’s voice blur into background hum. Birthdays surfaced in her mind like unwelcome ghosts. Each one had passed like an ordinary day. No cake. No calls. Just another quiet reminder that no one was really looking for her.

  She’d been adopted at fourteen by the Deshawns, Erica and Craig, both marine biologists and now tenured professors at this same university.

  She exhaled, long and tired. The only reason they’d taken these jobs here, at this university, was to keep an eye on her. Not that they’d ever admit it.

  At the front of the room, the professor had shifted into another subtopic that sounded like muffled static to Kitai. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about anthropology. She already knew most of this. The Deshawns had been excellent at ignoring her feelings, but equally excellent at filling her time. Tutors in every subject, structured lessons from dawn till dusk. She’d learned ballroom dancing and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire before she’d learned how to drive.

  Five more minutes, she thought, sneaking a glance at her phone. She smiled faintly and began sliding her notebook and laptop into her bag.

  The professor started cold-calling students, so Kitai sank a little lower in her seat, hoping invisibility would take pity on her. No such luck. She caught her reflection in the window and grimaced. Her dark orange afro would always make her stand out, no matter how small she tried to make herself.

  She was Nigerian, with burnt-orange hair, green eyes, and olive skin. A combination so rare it might as well have been a curse. She’d learned that early at St. Mary’s Orphanage in Ojuelegba, Lagos. The matron whispered orisha, mami wata, osu like she was naming a problem. The other kids didn’t bother with whispers.

  It had been easy not to make friends when everyone already decided what you were.

  Even the Deshawns, in the four years they’d had her, kept their distance. They provided. They instructed. They did not attach. She’d long ago stopped mistaking that for love.

  “And with that, you’re dismissed,” the professor said, cutting through her thoughts.

  “Don’t forget to submit your essays on the impact of globalization on indigenous communities in West Africa,” she added, settling behind her desk.

  Kitai let go of a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  Then the professor cleared her throat.

  Kitai glanced up and met her eyes.

  “Fuck,” she muttered under her breath.

  “I’m really looking forward to your paper, kai-tai,” the woman said brightly.

  Kitai gave a stiff, automatic smile as she slung her bag over her shoulder and headed for the door.

  “It’s Kitai,” she corrected as she stepped out. “Pronounced Key-tai.”

  The words were tossed over her shoulder, too quiet and too late, swallowed by a tide of students spilling from another classroom.

  Was she a coward for never correcting people properly? Maybe. But what was the point of speaking up if no one bothered to remember? The effort felt useless. Like everything else.

  She pushed through the crowd and finally broke free into the breezeway. The sound hit her first: overlapping conversations, laughter, someone’s video playing too loud on a phone, the clatter of skateboards on concrete. Her chest tightened. Too many faces. Too many bodies.

  She hated this feeling. The prickly, restless anxiety that came with being surrounded by strangers who might look at her, might not, but would definitely forget her.

  Still, this was school. This was the deal.

  She threaded through clusters of people, cutting down a side path where the foot traffic thinned, and her thoughts slid back to the only teachers she actually missed.

  Gabin, the lean Frenchman whose dancing had flowed like water, his steps shifting between strict form and improvisation until she learned to trust her own rhythm.

  Isadora, all muscle and sharp angles, drilling self-defense into her body until reacting became instinct.

  Gbenga, the historian, whose lessons blurred myth and history so vividly she’d half expected old gods to step out of the margins of his books.

  And then, just before her fifteenth birthday, the Deshawns had dismissed them all.

  No explanation. No warning. Just one more promise that evaporated as soon as she tried to hold onto it.

  They were always like that. Vague futures, soft assurances, then silence. If she pushed, suddenly she was being unreasonable.

  Books had become the only constant. At the orphanage, they’d been her refuge. With the Deshawns, they were the one thing they shared without tension. For all their distance, they always came back from trips with books for her. Biographies, histories, fantasy epics, dense academic texts she wasn’t “technically” ready for but devoured anyway.

  Four years of training. Four years of isolation.

  Then, without asking her, they uprooted her and dropped her halfway across the world. Florida. Atlantic College. A country whose rules she didn’t fully know, surrounded by people whose lives seemed written in a language she didn’t speak.

  And I get to do this for four whole years, she thought dryly.

  She sighed in relief as she reached the quieter path, the crowd thinning to a few scattered students.

  Her backpack bounced lightly against her side as she walked. Her last class of the day, College Writing, wouldn’t start for another hour. Plenty of time to get back to her dorm, grab a snack, maybe loiter by the front desk to see if the cute DA was working.

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  And absolutely not talk to him, she amended. Tradition must be maintained.

  The sky had been clear that morning, but now dark clouds crept in fast, rolling over the campus like someone had flipped the lighting from “summer brochure” to “moody indie film.” A chill threaded under her skin.

  She quickened her pace and slipped her headphones on.

  She always took the same route. A narrow sidewalk that cut behind a row of academic buildings, half-hidden by scraggly palms and untrimmed hedges. It wasn’t pretty, but it was quiet, and quiet meant she could pretend the world was small enough to manage.

  She hummed along to the Asa song in her ears as a gust of wind brushed past her cheek.

  “Kitai?”

  The whisper trembled right against her ear, beneath the music.

  She froze.

  The name came again, soft, threaded through the wind instead of coming from a mouth.

  She pulled her headphones down around her neck and turned.

  A woman in a white crop top and baggy jeans walked toward her, cutting across the grass with the kind of loose, confident stride that said she’d never tripped over her own feet in her life.

  “Hello…” Kitai said slowly, taking a step back. “Do I know you?”

  The woman’s smile was quick, bright, almost relieved. Her eyes were… wrong. The color shifted with the light, the way oil does on water.

  “Thank the gods I’m not late,” she said. “And no, you don’t know me. That’s probably for the best.”

  Kitai’s shoulders tightened. Her voice didn’t sound like it belonged to a single person. It had layers, like a chorus slightly out of sync with itself, echo in a hollow room.

  “That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Kitai muttered. “Well. Nice meeting you. Goodbye.”

  She turned and walked away, fast.

  “Wait,” the woman called. “I have a message from your mother.”

  Kitai stopped like she’d hit a wall.

  Her mother would never send a message. Her mother was hypothetical: a blank silhouette she’d spent years trying not to think about. And besides, there were phones. Emails. Normal channels.

  But something in the woman’s tone—something quieter, more ancient under the words—told her this wasn’t about Mrs. Deshawn.

  Not the mother who signed permission slips.

  The mother who left her.

  Her stomach went hollow. The world narrowed to the sound of her own heartbeat.

  No. Mistake. It had to be a mistake. She was the mistake.

  Her birth mother wasn’t someone she allowed herself to want. Not anymore. Not after the beatings. The hunger. The way no one came when she stared past the bars of the orphanage window and prayed, childishly, for some sign that she hadn’t been discarded.

  She’d outgrown that need. She had to.

  Kitai clenched her fists and forced her body to move, to keep walking, to put distance between herself and the stranger unraveling her composure.

  The woman exhaled, a long, put-upon breath. “I didn’t want to do this,” she said.

  The air itself seemed to hum.

  The concrete under Kitai’s shoes turned liquid.

  It rippled, then swallowed. Her ankles sank into the ground, the pavement turning to something thick and unyielding. Pressure slammed up her legs and locked into her hips.

  Panic detonated in her chest. “What is happening?!”

  The woman blurred.

  One heartbeat she was yards away, the next she was right in front of Kitai, close enough that Kitai could see faint sigils pulse along her collarbone when she breathed.

  “Aje,” Kitai whispered. “Witch.”

  The woman’s mouth curled. “Witch? Please. Nothing that basic.” Her English slipped cleanly into Yoruba for a second, then back out again. “And yes, I understand you. I don’t speak it much anymore. Not big where I live.”

  She stepped closer, studying Kitai like a problem set. “You won’t have time to process this, so I’ll make it quick. I’m a courier. One of the few who can move between all the planes. But all you really need to know is this: I have a message from your mother.”

  Kitai’s pulse thundered. Her skin felt too tight.

  “How do you know Mrs. Deshawn?” she asked, voice thin, aiming for clueless and landing somewhere near trembling.

  The woman sighed as Kitai doubled over and vomited onto the pavement.

  “Oh, right. The nausea. Sorry.” She sounded mildly inconvenienced, not apologetic. “Side effect of your frame brushing against another plane. Most of us get used to it. You’re… new.”

  She waited, eyes scanning Kitai’s posture, her pupils, the way her fingers shook.

  “But I’m not talking about your adoptive mom,” she continued. “I mean your birth mother.”

  Kitai went still.

  Her lungs forgot how to work. Her brain fuzzed out at the edges.

  “The Deshawns haven’t told you anything, have they?” the woman went on. “Not about the planes, not about why they adopted you, not about who she is.” A beat. “I’m assuming they at least trained you. If they didn’t, we’re all in trouble.”

  Her voice was starting to thin, like a signal losing strength.

  The woman tugged a pocket watch from her jeans, glanced at its face, and clicked her tongue. “Of course,” she muttered. “Out of time.”

  A bag popped into existence between them, dropping to the ground with a dull thud. Canvas, heavy, the kind of weight that promised books or weapons or both.

  “Take this to your parents tonight,” she said. “They’ll explain. There’s a letter from your mother inside. Do not read it until after they tell you everything.”

  Her outline flickered, then thinned, as if someone were turning down her opacity.

  “This is all I can do for you, Kitai.” Her voice, now distant and layered again, seemed to echo from multiple places at once. “For all our sakes… I hope you’re the right soul.”

  And then she was gone.

  The ground released her without warning. Kitai’s legs buckled and she crashed to her knees, palms stinging against the concrete.

  She stayed there, breathing hard, fighting the urge to scream or laugh or simply lie down and pretend nothing had happened.

  Her fingers slowly uncurled.

  The bag lay just inches away, as real as the tremor in her hands.

  She grabbed it, slung it over her shoulder, and forced herself upright.

  Then she ran.

  Ran down the path.

  Ran through the breezeway.

  Ran past the students and buildings and palm trees that suddenly looked like set pieces in someone else’s story.

  She ran all the way back to her dorm.

  Back to the only people who might finally tell her why her life had never fit.