Ify grits her teeth as she fights her way through another mob. Fires rage all around them, roaring and devouring everything, burning so bright they turn the night into daytime. The flames loom so high, consuming market stalls and office towers and multistory adobe apartments, that they cast the people rioting in the streets as silhouettes, otherworldly spirits come from fable or from dreams to wreak havoc through a city.

A group of men caught in a brawl see Ify and lunge toward her at once. She has in one hand a shockstick and in the other a machete, and as they charge her, she parries each blow and slices and dodges and hits with her shockstick, electrocuting her attackers and disabling them. Soot and dried blood coat her face, and when she stalks past the shattered remnants of a storefront window, she sees in the shards of glass what she looks like.

It’s the face of someone who has just watched national monuments burn, who has watched mobs form and lynch bystanders in Abuja National Stadium. It’s the face of someone who has heard cries for help from countless people—innocent citizens, former combatants, people trapped while trying to flee—and been unable to save them. One perpetrator of an attack shouts out the reason for their vengeance and opens the wound, then others remember when they were attacked, and cries for revenge spread like a virus through the entire city. INCAR Plaza is ablaze. Dead bodies and weeping wanderers, some of them already shell-shocked, have turned Millennium Park into a graveyard. Abuja City Gate has become a macabre manifestation of the madness contained in the city. From its lowest arch hang half a dozen bodies.

The city is lost. Too many people already remember too much. And even now, new crimes are being committed, new wrongs that people will remember, despite the government’s best efforts.

This is what will happen to the whole country if Xifeng is not stopped.

With her sleeve, Ify tries to wipe some of the soot and dried blood from her eyes. The resulting smudging only serves to make her look more demonic. She turns from the broken glass and heads away from the fires. She sneaks from shadow to shadow when she sees police coming, and increasingly they grow heavier in their use of force. What chills Ify is watching people be subdued, then bundled away into vans. It is like watching the wholesale emptying of a neighborhood.