Someone started clapping. Then another. Then the whole jetty.

The rain hadn’t come to Bonny Island in three weeks. The creeks were low, the mangroves brittle, and the elders said the river was holding its breath. But Eteima Bonny Wari, at twenty-three years old, had stopped waiting for signs.

She was twenty-three. Her name was Eteima Bonny Wari. And she had just started the fight of her life — not for revenge, but for the water that had raised her.

She slept on a mat by the window, the photograph of her father tucked under her hand. In her dream, he was young again, laughing on the jetty, telling her: “The river remembers everything. And so must you.”

Eteima smiled — a sharp, quiet thing. “I’m not asking them.”

“I have to,” she said. “The clinic in Port Harcourt said they can test my water samples. If the fish are poisoned, we need to know.”