The constant pain didn’t help her black mood. If she closed her eyes, her brain jumped to the prior day’s work problems or the data from Welga’s body. They circulated in her head like creatures on a merry-go-round. Zeli had been uncommunicative for nearly two days. The encroaching blackout by al-Muwahhidun in the Maghreb had pushed through Mali into eastern Senegal.

The caliph liked to target the local constellations and cables before any other infrastructure. Cut off the network and stop all news, all communications. She feared for Zeli’s safety. Synaxel had put a yellow flag by their project to indicate that they had fallen behind on deadlines, and the other members of her team expressed their displeasure at her slowdown. God willing, this will be the last time.

She found only bad news with Welga’s data, too. Her sister-in-law’s condition showed a disturbing trend proportional to zip use. Cerebral effects hit areas of the mesolimbic system, the same area that addictive drugs affected, but pills were designed to avoid habituating effects. Why couldn’t she figure this out? What was she missing? Welga’s primary zip consumption came from Synaxel designs, and Nithya had access to their entire database.

Unless she didn’t.

Nithya hobbled to the bathroom and donned her networking jewelry. “Sita, have any of my Synaxel queries about Welga’s problem failed?”

“Out of three hundred forty-six queries, seventeen were denied access.”

“Sita, show me the queries.”

With all of them next to each other, the keywords for the blocks were obvious: cAMP, KCNA1, myokymia, GIRKs. Any query that had two or more of those terms had been denied. None of those had a relationship to her juver project, but why would Synaxel need to keep that information from her? All user data had to be available to the public unless it belonged to a minor or a government agent. Nothing in her search terms would be restricted to either category of people. She’d never hit a wall on general information, not in all her years of work.

“Sita, print a hard copy of the queries and then send a request to Peter to lift the block on them.” Her manager would wonder why she wanted the data. She had to think up a good excuse before he replied.

“You have a message from Salimata Ba.”

At last! “Show me.”

The message from Zeli was text-only. It read: On the move. Frontline defense crossed my village. Limited access. Will update when we’re safe.

Nithya had invited Zeli to come to India when al-Muwahhidun in the Maghreb pushed through central Mauritania, but the girl had declined. Zeli refused to leave without her family. In truth, Nithya’s flat was too small to house all of them, and neither of them had the travel funds, so it hadn’t been a practical offer.