“God in heaven,” she whispers.
She falls to her knees beside the bed and buries her face in the comforter, sobbing until she finds herself letting out, into the fabric, a scream so loud it gives voice to all the anguish and rage and sorrow she’s felt all her life. Everything she’d tried to put behind her during her life in the Colony spills out of her in that scream. All of her confusion and hatred at what Xifeng had let herself turn into, at the idea that forcing people to confront the worst thing that’s ever happened to them in such a violating manner could ever be conceived of as healthy or helpful or curing. All of the futility she feels with every patient who has died or passed into a coma while under her care. Her powerlessness to bring Onyii back to life. All of it finds a place in that scream.
When she can’t scream anymore, she sits with her back against the bed, chest heaving with sobs she tries to hold back. Her drive for survival fights its way back to the front of her mind, carrying with it clarifying thought and the remains of her plan. She struggles at first, but eventually pushes herself to her feet and begins rifling through the cabinets in the room. While searching, her foot brushes up against a wire. She follows it until she gets to a small room off to the side, a walk-in closet at the center of which stands a Terminal. It’s a smaller domestic model, but it still hums with life. That must be how they did it. Programmed a shutdown sequence and connected it through a landline to their own braincases. She imagines each family member plugging in, then seizing as the sequence sends killer nanobots up and down their neural synapses and they seize, then fall back, dead. And she imagines the remaining family members watching this happen, then following suit themselves. Tears spring anew to her eyes and breath shortens in her lungs, but she pushes away the visions before she collapses again.
The touchboard near the Terminal’s center glows aquamarine, and a brief key sequence calls up the monitor. It still blinks with the kill-sequence commands. Ify shuts that down, sending it back to its normal home screen. When she finds, under the settings, an option for external device repair, a heavy sigh of relief comes. Step one is done.
She makes her way back to the study and goes through the drawers to find styluses and a bottle of adhesive. In the bathroom, amid spilled bottles of medication, she finds rubbing alcohol, gauze, civilian-issue MeTro sealant, and a small flexiglas container inside which sit three drone bees. Perfect. The mirror reflects back to her a face still covered in dried blood and soot, tear streaks turning the blemishes into dried riverbanks that run down her cheeks. She closes her eyes, then finds a towel on the ground. It’s soft and protective around her fist. With a single strike, she shatters the mirror.
Then she bundles her findings—rubbing alcohol, gauze, MeTro sealant, the bees, and shards of mirror—into the towel and sets them down in front of the Terminal. Working fast, she connects the Terminal’s plug into an outlet at the bottom of the bee container, then inputs a sequence in the Terminal that makes the container glow with life. The bees are active.
She detaches the touchboard and monitor and pulls them to her lap, then sits down and opens the container. With another key sequence, she has one of the bees pick up a shard of mirror, then extend its legs to hold another so that, looking forward, Ify can see the back of her neck reflected at her. She pulls her braids over her shoulder and sees the back of her neck crusted with red and black, the collar of her bodysuit stuck to her skin. After taking a moment to still her hands, she takes another shard of mirror in her hands and reaches behind her to slowly, steadily peel away the polyurethane so that the protrusion of her vertebrae beneath her skin shows. The flesh there feels cool, chilled by this exposure to the air. Somewhere beneath that epidermis, at a point Ify remembers with her body, is her Augment. A ball of metal the size of a pea. Dull gray and nonfunctional since the EMP but possibly her only route out of here.
She takes several deep breaths, then inputs a series of commands that sends a second bee to the back of her neck, where it aims its thorax. A moment later, a hot needle of pain shoots into that spot at the base of her neck, the bee shooting a thin laser beam slicing open the flesh while sizzling away the blood and cauterizing the wound. Without anesthetic, the hurt threatens to overwhelm Ify’s brain. Tears pool in her eyes. Her teeth clench. But she forces her fingers to program the third and final bee, first to pierce the mesh covering of the bottle of alcohol and plunge its legs into it, then to pick up the loose end of the Terminal’s plug and fit it into the tiny orb sitting in a swathe of tissue just above Ify’s spine, a buffer put there during her initial implant surgery. Fighting tears, she tries to bring the bee to press the wire to the orb and connect her to the Terminal, but it keeps meeting resistance. Over and over, it pushes, then backs away, then pushes, monotonous and insistent. In the mirror, through a fog-inducing ache, Ify sees the problem. The Augment is still buried beneath folds of skin. The incision isn’t large enough.
Her breath quickens, then she closes her eyes. Just as she reopens them, she hears it. The faint footfalls of faraway boot steps.
Soldiers.
Sweat makes rivulets of the gore and soot on her face. Her heart races. Rushing, she reaches behind her, digs her fingertips into the wound, and peels the skin back, biting her scream into a muffled groan as the bee holding the cord pushes and pushes, then slips the cord’s end over the Augment. Ify lets go, and her bloody hands fall to the carpet as sharp, heavy breaths rack her body. The Terminal monitor is a blur before her until, with her wrists, she wipes the tears from her eyes.
It all comes down to this. The idea that struck Ify during her journey up the stairs: reprogram her Augment to operate independently of any external device or power source. Turn it into a weapon. Turn it into her Accent.
She closes her eyes and whispers. It sounds like a prayer—a part of her mind knows this—but it’s a series of equations that begins the algorithm she learned as a child in a camp full of war orphans. An algorithm she’d taught herself while she tinkered with the tiny orb that she had fit into her ear and inadvertently used to upend her entire life. An algorithm that, when programmed into this tiny device, would allow her to hack into nearly any database anywhere. The algorithm she thought she could forget, along with the rest of her past in this country, when she assimilated into life in Alabast.
Her mind empties as she communes with the numbers.
The quick boot steps are getting closer. Doors sliding or slamming closed. Furniture overturned, rooms searched. They’re only a few floors away now.
The ache at the back of her neck keeps intruding on her awareness, but she dives deeper and deeper into memory to find a little girl in her bed at night while the rest of the camp is asleep, the covers pulled over her to make a tent over her sitting form while a thin Maglite illuminates the little hemisphere held aloft by a spindly-legged contraption she’d put together weeks prior, her tablet, its screen cracked, connected by a closed network to the half-orb, and her fingers typing in a key sequence that spills out into a self-replicating command sequence on her tablet, growing more elaborate with each iteration.