At nine forty on Wednesday Comfort came into classroom three with the grammar book under her arm, the Onuoha one from 2018, and as she stepped up onto the platform step (a concrete step seven centimetres high that she had swept herself the evening before, because the caretaker had been in Lokoja for three days taking his wife to the hospital) the children already had their exercise books open at the page on the past participle as she had asked, all except Tobi, whose desk in the second place of the second row was empty, with the exercise book open all the same, because his desk neighbour — Adebayo, who was a child who took care of other people's things the way a godfather takes care — had prepared the right page for him while waiting for him to arrive, and Comfort, up on the step, had looked at the empty desk with that layer of irritating tenderness she always felt when the children protected one another better than she knew how to protect them.

The first engine was heard at nine fifty-two. Comfort did not register it, because in Iluke Bunu Wednesday was market day and the engines went down Akinmade street every twenty seconds, and the noise of a single engine was not a fact. The second engine came thirty seconds after the first, overlapping, and it was the overlap that entered her ear like an anomaly, because two engines arriving together from the same direction are not two motorcycles going to market but two people going together, and two people going together toward a school at nine fifty-two on a Wednesday are two people who have a reason, and Comfort, while she was completing the sentence “the past participle is the verb form that indicates a completed action”, heard the fourth engine, and then the sixth, and then stopped counting them, because between the sixth and the one that would have been the tenth there were many at once, and at that point Comfort stopped writing on the blackboard and felt her hand dragging on the chalk with the sound of skin sticking, because there was sweat on her fingertip, and she turned toward the class and counted: thirty-one children, and Tobi's desk empty.

The courtyard was full of engines at nine fifty-six. Comfort got the children down from the desks: the desks of the first row were at the window that gave onto the courtyard, those of the second row were covered by the desks of the first, but the glass would not have been enough to cover the silhouette of a standing child, and at that point Comfort had to choose between two of her ways — the way of the raised voice that kept the door shut, and the way of the real door — and she understood, in a half-second stretch that, thinking back on it now, seemed to her as long as the whole lesson, that the raised voice would not hold the door shut against forty engines, and she had to go out first into the corridor, because the corridor led to the science room, which was the only room on the ground floor with a metal door and no windows onto the courtyard, and to reach it you had to pass in front of the west entrance where the men with the engines perhaps already were. She went out first. The thirty-one children followed her in single file like a single breathing creature. Halfway down the corridor, crouched on the first step of the service stairs, was Tobi. Comfort took him by the right wrist. The wrist was small. Tobi said nothing. Comfort pulled him up and put him in front of her, because in front of her was the place where her hand could hold him, and so they entered the science room thirty-two.

The science room was narrow. There was a long table with the Bunsen burners off. There were two shelves with the glass jars. There was a high window that gave onto the back wall. Comfort had the children sit under the table. She sat down too, at the end, on the floor. In classroom three the sentence was still on the blackboard, interrupted halfway through the last word, at the point where the sweat had stuck skin to chalk, and on the desks there were thirty-two exercise books open at the right page, including Tobi's, prepared by Adebayo, in a room where there was no one. She did not speak. She did not count the children. She put her hands on her knees. The raised voice was not needed. The door of the science room was metal.