I run until I get to where I know I need to go. It is intersection of paths just like any other intersection, but I am knowing this one is special because Xifeng is marking it on map. Binyelum is waiting there for me and smiling, rifle resting against her shoulder.

A skinny black obelisk stands in the center of the intersection. It glows like blue lightning is rippling under its skin. I stick EMP to it, and Binye and I run for cover behind a building. There is all the noise and katakata of warfare, then I feel the wave from all the EMPs we put on the obelisks in the facility all at once. Like when the water under Falomo Bridge is trying to be eating us. Then there is no sound at all.

That is what Xifeng is telling us to wait for. “Wait for the silence,” she is telling us before we are starting our mission. The silence of all the enemy’s machines turning off at once. So when I am hearing the silence, I am taking off my signal dampener and suddenly my brain is open again and taking in all of the information and I am even hearing my brother and sister again and some of them is whooping and cheering, even as they are binding remaining guards. It is making me happy to be hearing the sound of my family again.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

In front of me and Xifeng is wall full of pods, and in each pod is being a human being. It is like this in almost all of the buildings. Their insides are being like greenhouse where sunlight and water is being made for plants.

“This is where it happens,” Xifeng is telling me.

While she is speaking, the other soldiers are going through the buildings and shutting off the pods and waking up the people that is being held in them.

“Forced cyberization.” A snarl comes onto her face. “And then they wipe out the memories.”

“Memories of the war,” I say, to myself more than to Xifeng.

Something is stirring in me. Not a good feeling but a bad feeling like dizziness and nausea and then suddenly

metal is cold and wrapping around my wrists and my feet is dangling in the air. My neck is being stiff like tree trunk or like tree branch that is skinny because it is feeling like my head is going to be falling off of it and landing on the floor. I am turning back and forth slow, but that is the only way that my body is moving. Everything is feeling dry and stiff, even the blood that is coming from my nose and gash on my head.