Elijah, whose prior life had never prepared him for anything remotely as absurd as baby elephants, found himself the object of unwanted attention. One particularly cheeky calf named Toto had taken a distinct liking to him, pursuing him with a persistence only rivalled by hunger. Elijah’s attempts at shooing the animal off were futile.

”You’re not supposed to feed them snacks!” one of the carers laughed, catching him mid-surrender with a half-eaten banana.

”It stole it!” Elijah insisted, as Toto curled its trunk around his leg with unrepentant joy.

”You’re marked now,” Bette quipped dryly from the sidelines. ”Good luck.”

Kamau, for his part, treated the elephants with a kind of respectful wariness. He would muck out the pens with the solemnity of a man making penance, keeping a cautious eye on the curious trunks reaching for his tools.

”They’re too clever,” he grumbled one afternoon after a calf successfully opened the latch to the tool shed. ”And they don’t forget anything.”

”You’re not wrong,” Nyah said, appearing at the gate, her boots thick with clay and her sleeves stained with sweat. ”But then again, neither do we.”

Nyah’s days were spent outside the sanctuary, acting on what Elijah and Kamau had given them. In whispers, in diagrams drawn in the dirt, in names uttered with clenched jaws. And she turned those fragments into fire.

She led raids with rangers on poacher hideouts, using the coordinates of known safe houses to ambush supply caches. She intercepted a convoy bound for a border crossing, uncovering animal parts hidden beneath crates of farm produce. At night, she sent encrypted updates to Bette, tracking patterns, recording sightings, slowly painting a map of how the machine worked. Piece by careful piece.

There were failures too. One operation resulted in a near-miss, with the poachers gone minutes before the rangers arrived. Another night, they found a field littered with carcasses, vultures already spiralling above. But each sting brought new intel, and with it, another thread unravelled.

Bette coordinated from within, managing the chaos, keeping the foundation running under the guise of normalcy.

She and Tina messaged often, quiet, loving notes tucked between updates on the day. A photo of a baby elephant napping under a tree, a stunning sunset, the likes could only be seen so far inland. In return, Tina would send a picture of Angelica lying on a soft mat by the veranda, chubby legs kicking, tiny fingers reaching for the sky, her gummy smile bright enough to crack Bette’s heart wide open.