The Book of Phoenix

This novel serves as a prequel to Nnedi Okofor's Who Fears Death, set in a near-future world of genetic experimentation and corporate tyranny.

The story opens two hundred years after a global catastrophe. Sunuteel, an old nomadic man of the dark-skinned Okeke people, discovers a cave of ancient computers in the desert. One transmits an audio file to his portable device containing "The Book of Phoenix," narrated by a woman's voice.

Phoenix is a prisoner in Tower 7, a skyscraper in Times Square, Manhattan, and one of seven research towers run by LifeGen Technologies. The captive speciMen, or genetically modified beings, call the organization "Big Eye." Phoenix is an "accelerated biological organism" created two years ago but physically resembling a 40-year-old woman who can read a 500-page book in two minutes. The tower's lobby houses The Backbone, a massive tree that grew through all 39 floors after scientists poured an experimental growth formula on it.

Phoenix's only friend and love is Saeed, a young Egyptian man whose engineered body digests only inorganic materials. After witnessing a time-viewing device showing scenes of genocide, Saeed despairs and eats an apple Phoenix gave him. Human food is fatal to his body, and Phoenix is told he has died. Grief-stricken, she resolves to escape.

Her body has been changing: Her skin glows, her temperature soars past 300 degrees, and electronics break at her touch. Mmuo, a fellow speciMen imprisoned in Tower 7 who can walk through walls, guides her escape through the building. In the greenhouse, her doctor Bumi, a Nigerian woman, reveals Phoenix was designed as a weapon. Phoenix pulses with green light, causing plants to grow explosively. She finds a glass dome containing a dark-skinned winged man with brown feathers, shatters it, and frees him. He kills the guards while she flees to the lobby, where hundreds of soldiers shoot her. Her dying light causes The Backbone to grow so violently it topples Tower 7. Phoenix burns to ash.

Seven days later, Phoenix awakens in the ruins, reborn. The Backbone, now enormous, stops time to present her with a wooden box containing an alien seed etched with moving geometric designs. When she touches it, she sees a vision of the seed traveling through space to Earth, buried in the soil long before the tower existed.

Fleeing through the city, Phoenix sprouts wings from her back spanning over 30 feet and flies for the first time. The winged man reappears, destroys a pursuing Big Eye helicopter, and departs. Phoenix flies across the Atlantic for two weeks, guided by the seed. In Sierra Leone, a woman gives her a blue burka to conceal her wings. The seed leads her to Wulugu, a town in northern Ghana, where she buries it beneath a shea tree. Her inner light transfers into the seed, causing every tree in the region to flourish. The villagers embrace her, naming her Okore, meaning eagle in the local Twi language.

Phoenix settles into village life and falls in love with Kofi Atta Annan, the town's gentle doctor, whose family was taken by the Big Eye years earlier. When Big Eye operatives arrive in Wulugu, Phoenix intervenes to stop one from assaulting a local girl, accidentally killing him. The incident reveals Phoenix's identity and location. The Big Eye attack Kofi's home; Kofi shields Phoenix and is shot dead. As Phoenix burns with grief, she glimpses a black slit in the air, a boundary between life and death, and slips her skeletal hand into it before dying.

Phoenix regenerates in the crater. Bumi, now scarred and fitted with a cybernetic arm, leads the capture team. Phoenix surrenders to protect the townspeople and the buried seed. Bumi injects her with tracking nanobots, and they begin the journey to America. Over the Atlantic, the winged man teaches Phoenix to "slip" through time and space by reaching into the boundary she glimpsed while dying. Instead of following orders, Phoenix slips to Tower 1 in Illinois, the nexus of all the towers, where she frees imprisoned speciMen and triggers a mass escape that ends with the tower in flames.

Phoenix slips to New York, consumed by rage. Mmuo talks her down, and Saeed steps forward, alive. The Big Eye injection fails to kill him; he wakes in a morgue at Tower 4 in the US Virgin Islands, tagged for organ harvesting, and escapes. Reunited, the three vow to destroy all remaining towers. To eliminate the tracking nanobots, Seven, as Phoenix now calls the winged man, wraps her in his wings while she burns at 6,000 degrees Celsius. She dies and reconstitutes over a month, during which Mmuo narrates his own history: how the Big Eye massacred his student group in Nigeria, abducted him, and infused his skin with alien-derived molecular technology.

After her return, the group visits the Library of Congress, where Phoenix reads classified Tower Records and discovers her origins. She was constructed from the DNA of over 10 West Africans combined with cells from "Lucy," Tower 1's first speciMen, who carried the complete human genetic blueprint. An African American woman named Vera Takeisha Thomas carried Phoenix to term and named her. The records also reveal that Tower 4 generates 80 percent of the towers' income through mysterious "harvests."

They travel to the US Virgin Islands to destroy Tower 4. Inside, Phoenix finds HeLa, a Jarawa woman and the last survivor of her Indigenous people from India's Andaman Islands. HeLa's blood grants immortality, and seven men have each paid billions for injections of it. HeLa begs Phoenix to kill her; Phoenix refuses. In the ensuing battle, Mmuo is killed on the beach with ammunition designed to penetrate his enhanced skin. Saeed shoves captive children over the cliff to safety and escapes as others jump. Phoenix burns Tower 4 to the ground. HeLa perishes in the fire, choosing death over further exploitation.

Phoenix regenerates after one day. Revolution spreads as freed speciMen calling themselves the Ledussee rally under her name. In New York, however, a panicked mob kills Seven and chops down The Backbone. The Big Eye locate the group at their Tower 4 position, kill the freed children, and capture Saeed.

Shattered, Phoenix slips to a Los Angeles prison to find Vera, now wheelchair-bound and dying of cancer caused by Phoenix's radiation in utero. Vera whispers, "give 'em hell" (207) and dies in Phoenix's arms. Consumed by loss, Phoenix becomes the weapon she was designed to be. She casts herself as a soldier of Ani, the goddess said to have reshaped the world, sent to wipe the slate clean. Standing on the stump of The Backbone, she incinerates Bumi and the Big Eye camp, then scorches the entire planet, boiling the oceans and burning every city.

In a brief epilogue, Saeed, engineered to survive such destruction, walks to Africa a year later and uses a memory-extracting device on one of Phoenix's feathers to send her story into a database labeled "The Great Book." The framing narrative resumes: Sunuteel transcribes Phoenix's story over 30 days but rewrites it as a myth about the Okeke people's curse and the superiority of the Nuru, the light-skinned group in his society. His wife records this version, which spreads as the most influential text for the next hundred years. In the epilogue, a narrator named Sola, who claims to speak from the future, criticizes Sunuteel for burying Phoenix's true story and notes that the Great Book "deformed the lives of many until the one named Onyesonwu came and changed it again" (232), connecting this novel to Who Fears Death, in which Onyesonwu, the sequel's protagonist, challenges the distortions Sunuteel introduced.