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the red earth.
    Keita wished that the deacon were just pretending. He wanted the deacon to get up and fetch his Bible. It didn’t seem possible that a person could be so big and strong one moment, and lifeless the next.
    “Deacon Andrews?” The deacon didn’t stir. “Deacon Andrews,” Keita said, louder. Still no response.
    Keita knew what his parents would tell him: Run, Keita. Just run .
    So he got up and ran, focusing on his breathing, just as he had been coached. Inhale deeply, fill the diaphragm, exhale. Control the air. Keep the oxygen moving through your blood. Breathe. Run.

CHAPTER TWO
    O N THE LAST PERFECT DAWN OF HIS CHILDHOOD, with the sun rising out of the Ortiz Sea and casting a soft light over Yagwa, the capital of Zantoroland, Keita awoke in his family’s home. He was twelve years old and training every day to become a champion runner.
    Keita rose from his bed, pulled on his shirt, shorts, socks and shoes, and slipped out of the bedroom that he shared with his sister. Apart from the bathroom, the house had only one other room, which shared three functions: there was a small study in the corner where his father wrote, a bed for his parents curtained in another corner, and a space with a fridge, stove, table and couch where the family gathered. “Liquidity,” as his father called it, was a bit short, and the family had been required to give up their summer home in the Red Hills, but they still had more than most residents of Yagwa: the windows of their home weren’t broken, the roof held, the door locked and they had an air-conditioning unit that worked when the electricity was on. Keita passed through the front room and out the door.
    It was a clear sunny day. To the south of the city and beyond the flatlands with their orange and lemon orchards, Keita could see the mountains in the distance.
    Keita had studied maps, and he knew that Zantoroland—only one hundred kilometres long and eighty wide—was but a speck in the Ortiz Sea in the Indian Ocean. Africa to the west and Australiato the east were far too distant to be seen, but Keita knew they were there. Looking down Blossom Street, Keita could see the port and the waters of the Ortiz Sea. There were fifteen hundred kilometres of open water stretching north to the nation of Freedom State. Like all schoolchildren, Keita knew that Freedom State had enslaved Zantorolanders for some two centuries but, after abolishing slavery, had deported most black people back to Zantoroland. Ever since that time, adventurous Zantorolanders had braved the Ortiz Sea in fishing boats, taking their lives into their hands as they tried to slip back into Freedom State, one of the richest nations in the world.
    Keita passed through the Faloo district, where all the houses were similar—purple, pink, green or blue two-room matchboxes with gardens and briskly swept stone steps out front, and outhouses and family burial grounds out back—and jogged down the gentle slope of Blossom Street into the heart of town. Slow and easy , his father always told him. Not every run should cause pain. Some should just be to celebrate your working limbs, breathing lungs and beating heart.
    The street levelled out, and the pavement came to an end at the edge of the more heavily populated district where the Kano people lived in mud-brick houses with corrugated tin roofs. The roads were narrow, muddy and potholed in that neighbourhood, not safe for running.
    “We don’t have much,” Yoyo had said a hundred times, “but for those who are truly poor, running symbolizes privilege.”
    Keita would reply, “But I don’t have money. You never let me have any!”
    And Yoyo would say, “Your shoes would fit perfectly on someone else’s feet.”
    To avoid taunting the shoeless and to stay on the smoother pavement, Keita skirted the Kano district and ran to the heart of Yagwa, which held two banks, a library, a cinema, three restaurants, the Pâtisserie Chez Proust and all the shops kept by the