Old haunts, old memories. The Banque Nationale de Djibouti was still there. She went inside, used some old credentials to go down to the vault. The safe was where she’d left it and when she opened it she was relieved to find the Sandberg locket still there. She slipped it on, closed her fist around it. Cheap quartz on a platinum necklace, it burned into life when it came into contact with her node. Memories transferred, rewrote new neural pathways—

She was crying, her ice cream fallen from the cone onto the dirty sand—

Watching Chains of Assembly on the sofa with her mother, a warm, fuzzy shape next to her—she couldn’t remember her name or her face, only that moment, the feeling of contentment, on the screen Johnny Novum kissed the Beautiful Maharani on the red sands—

A breach of the wall to the city and she was inside, a conscript holding a gun, her squad beside her, something enormous and terrifying poked its head in through, it swallowed one of her men before anyone could react, its giant feelers moving, and she opened fire, screaming and screaming as she sprayed the thing with bullets—

Spending hours in that cave in the mountains making her first bomb out of parts—

Watching it go off against the sunset, days later, and thinking in surprise, But this is beautiful. . . .

She came to, the locket dull again. She tucked it away and left in search of more.

On the promenade in a dead-letter drop behind a false brick in the old sea wall she found her mother’s face.

“No one is neutral here,” Nasir said, quoting the poet, Darwish. He checked his gun. Laila looked at him a little oddly but checked her weapons too. They got into the patrol car. Heading out of the city, Laila checked the instruments.

“The UXOs are restless tonight,” she said. “And the port police reported a Leviathan moving offshore, though it’s in the deeps.”

“They’re not the only ones restless,” Nasir muttered.

“You think there’ll be trouble?”

“I’m sick of picking up litter, Laila,” Nasir said. “I’m sick of being thought of as an errand boy, someone to keep down the noise and take out the trash. We’re the shurta, Laila! Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Not in Neom it doesn’t,” Laila said. “Besides, isn’t that why we both joined? A steady pay for a steady job, and you get to go back to your own bed in the morning. No one has to get shot and no one has to die.”

“Habib almost died,” Nasir said.

“Habib almost died because you dragged us into the hole!” Laila said.

They were quiet. Something large crossed the sand ahead of them and slunk behind a dune faster than Nasir could make it out.

“It was my fault,” he said.

“Nasir, I didn’t mean it like that—”