Chapter Thirteen: "Lines and Loops"
The air was thick with chalk dust in the Civil Technology workshop, but Andra didn't mind. This was her favorite space on campus—concrete floors, steel scaffolding along the sides, the smell of timber and metal shavings. It reminded her of home, of her father's old toolbox, of days she'd spend watching masons patch cracks in Makutano Hills' community school.
Mr. Obonyo, their Structures and Materials lecturer, stood at the front with a block of concrete in one hand and a broken cylinder in the other.
"This is failure," he declared, holding up the broken piece. "And this—" he turned the other way and raised a polished brick slab, "—is design. Intention. Engineering."
Andra scribbled notes furiously, her fingers aching. Her sketchpad already bore outlines of her own: a reinforced lintel design for high-humidity environments, bamboo reinforcement techniques, diagrams of ring beams.
She felt alive in this class.
But in just a few hours, she'd be across campus, sitting in the pale blue Computer Science Lab, staring at a screen that felt like it was designed to mock her.
That day's Computer Programming lab didn't go much better than the last. They were learning about loops now—"for," "while," "do while."
The instructor threw around terms like iteration, increment counters, infinite loops.
Andra got stuck in one—an actual infinite loop.
The program she'd written was supposed to count from 1 to 10. It never stopped. She had to restart her laptop. Twice.
Ken leaned over with a grin. "Still not vibing with C++?"
She groaned. "I'd rather calculate dead loads in reinforced slabs."
"But both have loops," he teased. "You just prefer steel ones."
Despite the joke, he sat beside her, walking her through the loop structure again. She took notes carefully, embarrassed but grateful.
"Thanks," she mumbled when they were done.
Ken shrugged. "That's what engineers do—we help each other build stuff, yeah?"
Andra smiled faintly, but her mind was already racing. There was a quiz next week. She'd need more than good intentions and borrowed help to pass.
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Back at her hostel room, Kingsley was napping. She took a deep breath, poured herself a cup of black tea, and pulled out her sketchpad. One half of her brain was steel and soil; the other, filled with dread over brackets and semicolons.
"Loop," she whispered, staring at the code again.
She thought of her own life—classes, motherhood, unending financial stress, Parker's vague promises, her parents' faith in her.
Her whole life was a loop.
But unlike a computer, she didn't have the option to break and reset.
She had to finish.