Tolu, Zelu's younger brother, recounts an interview-style memory from a family Christmas trip to Nigeria when he was about fourteen and Zelu was nineteen, in her first college year. After visits to Lagos and the Yoruba palace, the family stayed at their father's house in an Igbo village. Tolu noticed Zelu had returned from college transformed, immersed in Black women writers and politics, more fully herself.

Sitting outside before a family meeting, Zelu produced a joint, likely obtained from their shady cousin Osundu, and convinced Tolu to smoke with her. They entered the meeting room high, struggling to suppress laughter beside their devout grand-aunties as their grandfather welcomed Tolu's father, Secret, and the family from America.

During the meeting, Grandfather confronted Osundu for stealing a generator. After being hit on the head, Osundu confessed, was berated by relatives, and stormed out in tears. Afterward, Zelu had Tolu push her behind the old house to their great-grandfather's obi, the ancestor shrine, where she explained Igbo terms she had learned by asking Grandfather, and pointed out Orion and the Milky Way.

Tolu reflects on how that night he first saw Zelu as fully human rather than a distant superhero who had survived her accident. He describes a vivid lingering dream of Zelu walking on robot legs, confident and luminous, beside their masquerade-father at the obi—a dream he never shared with her. He closes by insisting that Zelu, despite everything, is no robot but deeply human and feeling.