Without realizing, Ify’s fingers move over the Terminal’s touchboard. Squares light up beneath each touch of her fingertips. A window opens on the monitor indicating console settings for an external device detected. Her Augment.
She opens and calls up the command window, and before her unfurls the programming language of the Augment.
It’s a wonder of programming code. The product of some of the top minds in Alabast, what some have called the signal achievement of the last several hundred years, this thing that allows humans to walk back and forth over the line dividing them from computers.
And she starts changing it.
Her fingers move with increasing urgency. Deleting blocks of code, inserting new sequences, switching one block for another, altering the fundamental DNA of the thing.
They’re one floor away.
She types and types and types.
They’re on her floor.
Her bloodied fingers blur beneath her, they move so fast.
They’re going through rooms only a few doors down now.
Faster.
Kicking in doors that refuse to open.
Faster.
A whoosh of air as the front door to the apartment opens.
Type type type.
Boots on carpet.
Type type type.
Rifles raised.
The release mechanism on the rifle is activated just as Ify presses launch. Two simultaneous clicks.
Then the room becomes a world of blue lines. Nodes and edges. A coating of coding that washes over everything, spreading outward to show her not just the four soldiers in a line that stretches from the front door through the living room and kitchen to the bedroom’s doorway, but also their braincases, make and model, and their retinal input data. And their source code.
A single thought is all it takes to send out the pulse that hacks their braincases and deletes their source code.
All at once, the soldiers right outside her room collapse in a deadened heap. Deactivated.
Her mind clears, and in the empty space rushes the pain, reminding her of just where she sits. The bee holding the mirror shards hangs in place, as does the bee holding the cord connecting her Augment to the Terminal.
With as much steadiness and control as she can muster, she directs the bee to disconnect the cord. With a soft click and hiss, it comes loose. That bee heads back to the bottle of alcohol with the perforated top and once again dunks its legs before returning to the back of Ify’s neck and dabbing at the wound. It takes every muscle in her body not to flinch. Then, still keeping her gaze on the mirrors, she grabs the tube of MeTro sealant from where it lies on the towel, reaches behind her, and squeezes the gel slowly over the incision. Even as she caps the tube and puts it back down, she can feel the skin on the back of her neck reconnecting, the blood dried around the scar that will disappear in a matter of hours.
She closes her eyes and connects to every Terminal in the city, as well as to the remaining surveillance drones and the footage they have stored, and she blazes through it until something connects with the biometrical data she has stored on Grace. Her last location. A building from which she never emerged. The footage shows she’s being carried by something or someone running very fast. Too fast for a human carrying that burden.
Uzo.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Having this new version of an Accent with her reminds Ify of how much lesser her life had been without it. The instant access to all the information she could ever need makes her feel like a guardian spirit walks alongside her through the streets of Abuja, showing her which streets are safe and which are not well before she arrives at them, indicating to her who has been where and accessed which Terminals, showing her the world beneath the world, behind it, beyond it.
Still, when she finds the house where she had seen that figure take Grace in the drone footage, it feels too easy. Like a cheat code has been unlocked. How much less difficult this thing has already made her life.
It reveals to her no heat signatures on the first floor or the collapsed upper floors. And it reveals to her the opening that leads down to the passageway at the end of which is a featureless metal door with a broken keypad.
The broken flexiglas and dull screen might have deterred someone else. But it is nothing for Ify to hack. The display glows to life, then the door jiggers once, twice, before sliding open.
On the other side stands Grace, trembling legs spread wide, pistol raised, eyes closed. Were it not for their dire circumstances, Ify would laugh. Grace’s legs are too wide. She’s already turned her head away, and her eyes are shut.
“Grace,” Ify says in a hushed voice.
Grace opens her eyes one at a time.
“It’s me.”
Then Grace looks up, drops her gun, and wraps her arms around Ify so tightly that Ify has trouble breathing.
But Ify doesn’t mind. The wound on the back of her neck has already healed.
CHAPTER
42
Where the land is changing from green to red, from forest and jungle to desert, from wet and warm to hot and dry, it is like walking through wall. The path we are taking is moving us far away from people so that we are walking around cities and keeping far from humans in small villages. Sometime we are making criss-cross just to avoid man who is tilling farmland with servant droid. Sometime I am watching red-bloods with the droids that is serving them and sometime the droid is bringing the human water that is cooling their throat and sometime the droid is part of driving vehicle and sometime the droid is bodyguard or like attack dog to protect human, and I am not seeing machine and human but servant and master, and I am wanting to tell the droid that it is not having to be like this. We are being our own person and they can be their own person too, but Enyemaka is telling me to move with the group. We cannot afford to be leaving behind mess. Red-bloods cannot be knowing we are being here. If red-bloods are knowing we exist, they will be continuing to hunt us.
Enyemaka and I are crushing small small stone beneath our feet and I am knowing now that both our feet are being made out of metal and I am feeling even more that she is my sister. I am thinking of Xifeng and then I am thinking of when I am looking for her in junkyard and seeing police that is bringing out group of war children and lining them up and shooting them dead.
They were like you, Enyemaka is telling me.
They are being synth too?
Yes.
Why is red-blood killing them?
Because the humans want to forget the war. The war you were created to fight for them. They cannot bear to think on it. Erasing it from memory is the only way they can live together again. In this way, they are selfish and short-sighted. They cannot move forward to find peace. They must move backward.