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, she 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.”