It’s the face of someone who has just watched national monuments burn, who has watched mobs form and lynch bystanders in Abuja National Stadium. It’s the face of someone who has heard cries for help from countless people—innocent citizens, former combatants, people trapped while trying to flee—and been unable to save them. One perpetrator of an attack shouts out the reason for their vengeance and opens the wound, then others remember when they were attacked, and cries for revenge spread like a virus through the entire city. INCAR Plaza is ablaze. Dead bodies and weeping wanderers, some of them already shell-shocked, have turned Millennium Park into a graveyard. Abuja City Gate has become a macabre manifestation of the madness contained in the city. From its lowest arch hang half a dozen bodies.
The city is lost. Too many people already remember too much. And even now, new crimes are being committed, new wrongs that people will remember, despite the government’s best efforts.
This is what will happen to the whole country if Xifeng is not stopped.
With her sleeve, Ify tries to wipe some of the soot and dried blood from her eyes. The resulting smudging only serves to make her look more demonic. She turns from the broken glass and heads away from the fires. She sneaks from shadow to shadow when she sees police coming, and increasingly they grow heavier in their use of force. What chills Ify is watching people be subdued, then bundled away into vans. It is like watching the wholesale emptying of a neighborhood.
As she gets farther and farther into Garki District and away from the worst of the chaos, she begins to feel as though some sort of natural disaster has struck where she stands. Nothing moves. Maybe the Nine-Year Storm is an appropriate name for what the Biafran War did to this country. No one can be seen. She can even still smell burning food that has been left to cook for too long. As though everyone has just vanished in the middle of the business of living. There are some signs of chaos, but they’re lighter here. The blood on the ground is patchier. People had enough time to barricade their storefronts and secure the windows to their apartments and hide in their basements before the warring began in earnest.
All the dead and maimed here are regular people, civilians. And yet Ify sees even these people being swept up in immediate cleanup operations. Massive land mechs with pouches attached to their fronts like kangaroos roam the streets, and mechanical arms unfurl from their sides to pick up the bodies or pieces of bodies that litter the ground, then drop them into the pouch that opens and closes with a soft hiss every time. Ify’s eyes widen in terror. The erasure of trauma in real time. Like concrete paved over a pothole before the earthquake that created it is even over.
The tower she’s looking for looms over collapsed and near-demolished apartment buildings and office headquarters ahead, and she moves dutifully toward it, slinking through alleys, wary of anything moving. But anywhere she goes, to her horror, she’s the only thing breathing.
Empty plaza greets her before she gets to the tower.
She remembers the place teeming with life. She remembers the flood of workers spilling out wearing their djellabas and the women in their hijab as they met up and gathered in groups before heading to the nearby mosque for Friday prayer. Ify remembers Daren letting the both of them get swept up in the tide, being surrounded by all that industriousness. The city hummed with warm, thrilling life all around them. She remembers seeing young students flirt with each other on the benches on the first days of their internships, how pleasant the droids were in greeting people. Even the security droids seemed to have been programmed for maximum cordiality.
But now, before her, there’s nothing but emptiness spotted occasionally with the bodies of dead Augments and security droids. For a moment, Ify wonders why security was so thin here for what is perhaps the most important device in the entire country. Then she remembers the riots and how thick the security presence seemed in some places, how much like a war zone it had felt. A diversion.
It had all been a diversion.
Ify turns off her shockstick and slips it into her belt. Then she pulls out her pistol and readies it. The glass doors lie in pieces, and she steps gingerly over the threshold, then slips under the security barrier just after it. Guards lie motionless in pools of their own dried blood before their stations.
There’s been no attempt to clean up the carnage or to mask Xifeng’s trail. Bullet casings litter the floor, and Ify follows the path they’ve made through the central circular clearing, where, when she looks up, she can see all fifty floors, each floor a ring, through the glass ceiling at the top of the tower. That same glass crunches beneath Ify’s boots.
She’s faced with a semicircle of elevator bays, but all it takes is a single button press on all five of them to confirm what she suspected. The elevators are locked. She heads back to the control panels in the main lobby, strewn around the blood-stained lobby furniture, but when she tries to connect, her bodysuit pops at her shoulder and pain pricks her spine at the base of her neck where her Augment sits. It’s not worth it. Of course Xifeng would paralyze the building’s comms system and disable access to the building’s schematics.
Ify scans the walls and ceilings, and after some searching, she finds them. Orbs. Partly blackened from having been disabled, but there nonetheless. Xifeng and her group probably had them disabled remotely, which, Ify realizes, is how the orbs were able to remain suspended in place. She can’t hack into them, and they won’t have any of the recorded material she’s really looking for, but if she can tell where they’re turned, she can find the blind spot.
She looks from one to the other like she’s threading them together, like each is a puzzle piece she’s collecting. A pattern emerges, and she follows it with increasing speed until she finds herself at a far corner hidden behind the columns ringing the central lobby. A part of the wall has slid to the side, revealing an opening, and Ify steps through it to set foot on metal grating that clangs loudly. She’s more careful with the next step, pausing to look around at the maze of walkways and piping around her.
When she’s fully through, she surveys her surroundings. Islands of light reveal platforms at various levels and stairways or straight walkways connecting them. Through each island runs a pillar that disappears somewhere deep beneath Ify. When she looks down, all she sees is a golden glow. That’s where she must go, she knows.
The islands and the consoles that artificial intelligence maintain there are a distraction. That some of the consoles are dark with inactivity tells Ify why parts of Abuja were suffering from blackouts during the riots. In other parts, she had overheard authorities talking about switching to remote communication because the net had gone down in certain districts. No, she can’t think about that now. Focus.
She follows the walkways down and, after some time, finds herself passing between two thick pillars. She’s barely on the other side when a bullet rips through her shoulder. She hits the ground, pain tearing through her shoulder, then puts her back to the part of one pillar that eats into the walkway. The pain dizzies her, to the point where she nearly dips over the railing, but she steadies herself. Focus, she hisses at herself. Focus, focus, focus.
Wetness cools part of her shoulder around the burning wound. Were her bodysuit functioning properly, it would have worked to adjust her body temperature while locally numbing the affected area and cauterizing the wound, stopping the bleeding. But now, it’s just polyurethane material growing darker and darker with her blood.
She chances a glimpse around the pillar, and a bullet pings by her face. A sound like a massive pipe being hit by a wrench reverberates through the entire space. Ify can almost see the waves of sound ripple outward. A headache begins at the base of her skull. And there was no time even to see if there were any other hiding spots between her and the shooter. Trapped. Then she realizes what she has to do. She wishes she could program her suit to shut off auditory input. But all she can do now is close her eyes and grit her teeth. With her shockstick, sh
e strikes the pillar hard.
The gong ripples out like a concussive wave. Beneath it, she can just barely hear the clatter of a pistol. She squeezes through the gap between the pillars and instantly sights the shooter. Three shots and she’s down. Ify continues in a hurried crouch and spots two more sentries, each on one knee with their rifles at the ready, just as they turn to see her run by overhead. Three shots for each of them and they’re down. She rounds a corner down another staircase and dashes forward just as bullets snap at the walkway behind her. Someone below her.
She keeps running, then vaults over the railing and drops and drops and drops, trusting that she understands the patterning of the metal walkways. When she lands, she falls into a roll, but pain still snaps alive in her ankles. Through the hurt, she aims her pistol up and fires at the dark shapes above. Before they even have the chance to drop, she’s on the move again. The glow she saw earlier begins to surround her. She’s getting closer.
Her steps slow. Her left shoulder has gone numb. She keeps her pistol aimed with her right arm while her left hangs at her side, useless. Her heart is racing. The temperature around her is rising. The world starts to waver, as though she stands in the midst of a mirage.
She passes through what feels like a wall, then makes her way onto a platform. And when her steps echo loudly in her ears, she realizes just how much energy and electricity has been humming and buzzing around her in this basement. For some reason, none of that sound enters here. There’s just the platform that rings what appears to Ify to be a large metal hemisphere towering over her, so wide she can’t see its edges. Kneeling before it, almost in an aspect of prayer, is Xifeng.
Ify aims her pistol. “Get up,” she growls. She sees Xifeng, and in her mind swim images of the destruction and death she witnessed, the mobs hurtling down streets setting fire to everything, the dead bodies left in their wake, the citizens wailing over those they had just lost in violent feuds whose origins they didn’t even remember. Truly senseless violence. All because of the woman kneeling before the hermetically sealed vault in front of her. “Get. Up.”
Still, Xifeng refuses to move.
Ify marches to her, grabs her by the scruff of her collar, then hauls her to her feet. Xifeng’s face is twisted in determination. Ify knows where she’s seen that expression before. Walking through the detention center, looking into the cells at the captured enemy combatants. The thought flits through Ify that any number of them could have been innocent children caught in a sweep or the object of some feud an officer or soldier had with someone. She’s also seen that look on dying soldiers who clung to their weapons even as their life bled out of them. At one point, she had worn that same expression on her face: when she had been so absorbed in her mission of vengeance that she had helped bring about a terrorist attack that had killed over a hundred people and restarted a civil war. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what, Ify?” Xifeng asks in a steely, knowing voice.
“The virus. Where is it?” She presses the pistol to Xifeng’s forehead.
“You mean the antivirus.”
“Xifeng, this stops. Now. You’re beaten. Give up.” She presses the pistol harder. “I stopped you.” When Xifeng doesn’t move, Ify grits her teeth. “Are you happy? Have you seen what you’ve done? There have got to be at least a hundred people dead above us right now. And counting. Tearing each other to pieces over nothing! Over things nobody cared about until you forced them to. You did this, Xifeng. You’re oyinbo, and I will not let you destroy this country.”
“I’m not destroying this country, child. I’m saving it.” Her face softens. “Look at you. Look at what you’ve become.” She says it without malice. Ify hears admiration in her voice. Wonder. “The look on your face, the straightness of your limbs, the strength in your bearing. Walking through the fires of Abuja to get here, that was your transformation. You are beautiful. Hardened, strong, healed.”
Tears spring without warning to Ify’s eyes. “I am not healed, Xifeng!” Her bottom lip quivers. “I’m not.” Her gun hand shakes. “It . . . it still hurts.” It comes out as a squeak. A pitiful, mournful squeak, and Ify hates it—hates it with all her heart—but she can’t fight it. “It hurts so much.” Her world blurs behind a film of tears. “Why did you make me do this?” Even as she asks it, she knows the answer. Xifeng has told her a number of times what her mission was. But maybe if Xifeng sees right in front of her the evidence of what her plan has wrought, if she has to feel in her fingers and see with her eyes the blood and smoke that has happened because of her, if, somehow, all of the death and destruction is made real for her, then maybe she’ll give up. Maybe she’ll relent.
Maybe she will admit she was wrong.
Nothing in Xifeng’s expression changes. Her posture remains the same. Chin held defiantly high, eyes locked onto Ify’s, arms loose yet secure at her sides.
“Xifeng, what happened? How did you . . . how did you become this? You used to help bring refugees to safety. You were about peace. And bringing resources to help those in need. You were helping!”
“Things were different during the ceasefire. When war returned, everything changed.”
“This isn’t my fault,” Ify hisses, suddenly angry again. “All of this, everything going on above us, this is not my fault.”
“If those suicide bombers hadn’t followed you to Enugu five years ago, there’d still be peace.”
“How dare you,” Ify hisses through her teeth. Before she knows what she’s doing, she has her gun hand raised. Just as she’s about to hit Xifeng, she sees out of the corner of her eye a numbers display. The numbers blaze as though counting down to something. That’s it. There it is. The virus is being uploaded.
Xifeng follows Ify’s eyes. Then Ify aims her gun at the display. Xifeng grabs her and tries to wrestle her away, kicks her legs out from under her. Ify falls onto Xifeng. They twist and roll over. Xifeng knocks Ify’s gun out of Ify’s hands. It clatters against the metal hemisphere. Ify kicks Xifeng away and dives for the gun. Xifeng grabs her by the ankle and pulls her back. Ify twists and kicks at Xifeng, but Xifeng grabs her leg and twists as though to snap it. Ify rolls out of her grip and traps Xifeng with her legs, ankles crossed at her neck. And squeezes. Ify can feel Xifeng’s body tightening, spasming, from the lack of air. Before Ify can react, Xifeng pulls a knife from her belt and stabs Ify’s leg. Ify lets out a cry and lets go. Xifeng pulls out the small knife then leaps at Ify and falls on top of her. Ify blocks the strike with her forearms. Pain blossoms anew in her left shoulder. The knife’s edge inches closer and closer to Ify’s chest. Spittle drops onto Ify’s face. She’s losing strength.
Closer.
Closer.
Ify shifts, dodges the knife as it clangs against the metal of the walkway. In the next instant, she rams her elbow into Xifeng’s temple. Xifeng staggers across the platform, shaking the dizziness out of her head. Ify charges her, crashing into her middle and driving her away from hemisphere until they smash into the railing and Xifeng screams in pain. Xifeng leans back, holding Ify tight, pulling them both over the edge. Ify’s heart leaps into her throat. The air turns dangerously around her as she feels herself go over. At the last moment, she catches the edge of the walkway. Already, her sweat-slick fingers are slipping. Xifeng hangs on to Ify’s boot. Below them is a chasm. A part of the facility where not even the light can reach.
Xifeng tries to climb up Ify’s leg with a grim expression on her face. And that’s what does it for Ify. There isn’t a hint of remorse. There is nothing she can do to change this woman’s mind. She’s lost.
“Remember the war, Ify. Remember the war. She lives—”
Tears leak down her face when she kicks at Xifeng once, twice, three times, then watches her fall away, growing smaller and smaller until there is no trace of her left.
With the last of her strength, Ify pulls herself up onto the walkway and rolls onto her bac
k, heaving several mountainous breaths.
She crawls to her feet, then staggers over to the display she saw earlier, picking up her pistol on the way. When she arrives, she sees the progress bar nearly filled. Close by lies a hard drive, connected to a router broadcasting directly into the hemisphere. Ify takes aim and shoots the hard drive. Then, for good measure, she shoots the router. When she gets closer to the hard drive, she sees a small protrusion. It looks like a miniature version of the hemisphere attached to the drive. Something like the Bonder Ify would sometimes slip over her ears to connect to her devices. The answer to so many of her questions lies before her now with smoke issuing from its bullet hole. So much chaos over so small a piece of technology. Within that drive is the coding that would have destroyed an entire country.
Ify nudges it with her feet over the side of the walkway and watches the thing plummet deeper and deeper and deeper into the abyss. Where no one will ever see it again.
She closes her eyes, bites back a sob, then exhales and settles herself, Xifeng’s last words ringing in her head.
Remember the war, Ify. Remember the war. She lives.
Bleeding, Ify makes her way back to the surface.
Topside, Ify walks toward the waning destruction. “Grace!” she calls out, her voice hoarse with grief, a cry of desperation. Of rage. Of apology.
CHAPTER
40
It is important to be remembering. That is what the robot is saying who is pulling me from underneath the mountain of bodies where it is so hard to breathe that my chest is paining me fierce. It is like knife in my chest over and over and over, and I am not knowing for how long I am lying like this. But I am remembering that the first thing I am seeing is tiny hole of light coming from sky. Everything is shadow, and this is how I know I am being covered. And I am first thinking that this is what night is. That it is just blackness with tiny hole of light. But it is bodies. Many bodies piled on top of me. And then I am remembering the bodies are falling away. It is sounding like someone is dragging their foots on the dirt road, then it is sounding like a shirt rustling in wind, like someone is wearing a shirt too big for them and running down dirt road, and when I think of this thing, I am thinking that the person wearing this shirt should be giggling. I am liking the sound in my brain.
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