Warri, Nigeria — August 2003
The sky above Warri didn't shine. It hovered. Thick. Brown. Waiting.
Down below, in a quiet compound off Airport Road, a boy stood barefoot in the open, blood dripping from his knuckles, sweat running down his ribs.
Tony Black. Eleven. No shirt. No fear.
Behind him, the tall black gate was shut. Behind that gate was silence.
Inside the house—three floors of painted perfection and air-conditioned lies—nobody moved. Not even his mother.
She'd only seen the blood once. On his school socks. And she'd asked him,
> "Tony, what happened?"
He said, "Nothing."
She looked at him again, long and hard. But she didn't ask twice.
She didn't know him.
Not really.
She suspected. She prayed in whispers.
But she didn't know.
His father? Please.
Chief Godwin Black was too busy meeting people who wore agbadas and spoke in code. Politics, contracts, meetings, alliances. He didn't even see his son. Not clearly. Not truly. Tony was a ghost in his own house.
But outside—in the real world—he was something else.
Out there, on the streets, in the corners, by the school fences, behind the broken buses and gutter streams, Tony was seen.
Respected.
Feared.
He had just beaten one of Tega's boys. Big boy. JSS2. Big mouth.
Now he was spitting blood by the block wall, crying low, while Tony wiped his hand on the boy's shirt.
Tega would come later and say,
> "You move mad, I swear. But I like that. I like how you dey reason. Come roll with me small. I wan show you something."
That something? It wasn't a toy.
It was the code.
The first taste of blood oath. Brotherhood.
A gang, but deeper. A cult, but louder.
The thing that would make Tony's name ring from Effurun to Okumagba.
From the inner streets of Lagos to Europe, to Jo'burg, to Atlanta—
One day. But for now?
He was just a boy.
With fists like steel.
A fire inside him that nobody gave him, nobody taught him, and nobody could put out.
The streets had called. And he had answered.
He didn't want love.
He didn't want understanding.
He wanted respect.
And when he didn't get it, he took it.
---
This was not a boy you saved.
This was a boy you feared—or followed.
The streets didn't raise him gently. They raised him on war.
And Tony?
Tony was born fire.