And she will suspect right then, in a strange flash while clutching the stone, that she will never find Nnedi, that her sister is gone.

Later, Chika will read in the Guardian that "the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North have a history of violence against non-Muslims", and in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim.

Chika has not reached the end of the second street, toward the market, when she sees the body.

"Then I will come back with my auntie's driver and take you home," Chika says.

"My nipple is burning like pepper," the woman says.

Then Chika feels a prick of guilt for wondering if this woman's mind is large enough to grasp any of that.

she and her sister should not be affected by the riot. Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.

She will find out it had all started at the motor park, when a man drove over a copy of the Holy Koran that had been dropped on the roadside, a man who happened to be Igbo and Christian. The men nearby, men who sat around all day playing draughts, men who happened to be Muslim, pulled him out of his pickup truck, cut his head off with one flash of a machete, and carried it to the market, asking others to join in; the infidel had desecrated the Holy Book.

The room is stuffy and smells nothing like the streets outside, which smell like the kind of sky-coloured smoke that wafts around during Christmas when people throw goat carcasses into fires to burn the hair off the skin.

But she has no reason to agree or disagree, she knows nothing about riots: the closest she has come is the prodemocracy rally at the university a few weeks ago, where she had held a bright-green branch and joined in chanting "The military must go! Abacha must go! Democracy now!"

Chika will learn that, as she and the woman are speaking, Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones.

It wasBrently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carryinghis grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident,and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed atJosephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from theview of his wife.

But Richards was too late.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—ofjoy that kills.