Julius didn’t answer straight away. After checking all the pockets, he pushed his and Gabe’s shoes and uniform inside his still-buttoned shirt, then tied it in a ball using the sleeves and flung the whole lot onto the warehouse’s flat roof.

‘Now they won’t know we’ve been here,’ Julius said, feeling parking-lot grit dig into his feet and realising his soles had softened since childhood days running barefoot with his country cousins. ‘I just have a cheap calls-only SIM – do you have data on your phone?’

‘Of course,’ Gabe said as Julius dropped the spare clip in his pocket and tried getting the gun to sit in the elastic waistband of his new shorts.

‘Use maps and get our location,’ Julius said. ‘No point calling unless we know where we are.’

‘Right,’ Gabe said, then he gave Julius a pleading look. ‘Was Taiwo dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ Julius said, then shocked himself by thinking, I hope so …

Three heavily built guys were crossing the road towards the embankment. Julius eyed them, one hand on the gun.

‘Down here,’ Julius ordered, keeping his back to the metal wall as he led Gabe into an alley between the warehouse and its identical neighbour. ‘Is your GPS working?’

‘We’re here, where these two roads meet,’ Gabe said, more his normal self as he let Julius see the map on screen.

‘Try Orisa first,’ Julius said. ‘Mum’s phone is likely to be busy.’

A battered minibus with construction equipment on the roof stopped at the top of the embankment. To Julius’s relief, the three men ducked through its rear doors before setting off with plumes of grey exhaust.

Gabe was close enough for Julius to hear the calls flake out.

‘I tried Mum and Orisa, but it says no network.’

‘It gets overloaded in the city centre when something big happens and everyone tries to use their phone at once,’ Julius explained, remembering the same thing happening during the violence at the precinct. ‘We’ll try every few minutes until we get through. Give me the phone. Let’s see what’s around here.’

Julius opened Maps on Gabe’s phone. They were on a street he didn’t know, but it appeared to be a major road radiating east from the city centre. Home was seven kilometres south, either through Akure’s outer slum districts or by taking your life in your hands and walking beside speeding traffic on the beltway. The Cross was three kilometres east. The route had no obvious dangers, but would anyone be there at nine on a weekday?

But while Julius studied the map, he’d subconsciously known where he was going all along. Crossing the city centre from south to north meant going through the precinct and other dangerous areas at the heart of the battle between area boys and Transport Union. But even with Gabe limping, he could be with Duke in half an hour …

THIRTY-THREE