The sky over Dakar was pale with harmattan dust. Traffic moved in heavy, slow tides. Buba leaned against the passenger-side door of a beat-up Peugeot 504, waiting for the second envelope.

The man arrived on foot. A cousin of a cousin. No names, no phones, just a phrase—borrowed from an old griot’s proverb.

“If the cow falls, the knives multiply.”

Buba nodded, took the envelope, and got back into the car without a word.

Inside were fifty PEG paper wallets—unbranded, untraceable, each preloaded through an obfuscated relay loop. No instructions. Just a lottery code on each stub, and a QR marking a low-bandwidth Pegged node.

He passed the envelope to the driver.

“Take these to the station. Then back to Saint-Louis.”

“They’re watching the stations.”

“Then stop just before.”

The driver didn’t argue.

In Saint-Louis, Ndaye waited in her courtyard, folding cloth over sacks of rice and tablets of soap. She had aged ten years in the last two. But her mind had not dulled. Her eyes were alert. She heard things before they were said.

She held a printed lottery sheet in one hand, the latest draw timestamp still warm from the thermal printer. Ten women gathered around her. None of them spoke above a whisper.

The PEG wallets had arrived earlier that morning. Quietly. Folded into sacks of grain.

“Fairness is not loud,” Ndaye said. “It just needs to happen.”

Each woman received one wallet. Each gave something in return—a promise, a risk, a name unspoken. That was the exchange.

That night, Buba sat in an empty classroom, writing by flashlight. The blackboard behind him still had chalk from last week’s civics lesson. He didn’t erase it.

He wrote:

“The PEG held.
The draw was clean.
We have no police, but we have this.”

Outside, two boys ran by, kicking a plastic bottle down the street. No one knew what was happening in Basel. But here, the wheel turned again.

And no one had stopped it.

L