When she’s ready, she slips from the grip of one of the guards, falls into a crouch, grabs the pistol at her waist, then shoots at one leg. When the guard screams and collapses, Ify pulls her body close, using it as a shield, then shooting the one behind her twice right in her bulletproof vest. The girl falls back, and Ify twists the girl she’s been using as a shield around and hits her once across the temple with her pistol, knocking her out. She crouches over the body, fishing through the pockets until she finds it: a small device, the size of her palm, like a bulubu ball cut in half. An EMP.

Just as she pulls it from the unconscious girl’s pocket, her eyes catch Uzo’s. Uzo, who has remained still this entire time. If Uzo hasn’t attacked them by now, maybe she’s willing to let them go. Maybe something Ify said made a difference, changed some of the synth’s thinking. Ify can’t take the chance. “I’m sorry,” Ify murmurs, cracking the device’s seal and slamming it onto the ground. The EMP detonates, and the blast hurls her and Grace backward, slams Uzo into the far wall, and sends the sound of frying circuits and breaking light bulbs echoing down each tunnel.

Lightning forks out of the ground, stitches up the walls, and strikes the ceiling overhead, then the sound of dozens of little puffs as machinery short-circuits and bursts apart. Cyberized shoulders, legs, eye sockets. Screams are cut off as quickly as they start. The rumbling and the popping and the screaming and the lightning’s shriek carry on through the tunnels until Ify hears a single large thunderclap followed by a rumbling that tells her something has collapsed.

Her bodysuit sparks, and pain pops to life on parts of her body—her stomach, her lower back, her thigh, her calf—as the EMP short-circuits her own machinery as well. But it’s a smaller hurt than what the others are going through. She’s only wearing her tech. It’s her clothing. But for the others—the synths and the rest of Xifeng’s footsoldiers—their tech is what makes them. It’s their bones and their organs. And suddenly those things are being turned off, all at once.

When the screams stop, their echoes bounce off the walls and fade, and the only sound is the hiss of fried tech and the dull rumbling of whatever is collapsing far away.

She goes back and undoes Grace’s restraints. Grace, who hasn’t said a word since screaming her grief at Ify’s faked death.

“I’m sorry,” Ify says, softly and hurriedly. “I didn’t have time to tell you what I had planned.” Then she pulls a pistol out of her pants and hands it, butt-first, to Grace. “Can you handle this?”