As she gets farther and farther into Garki District and away from the worst of the chaos, she begins to feel as though some sort of natural disaster has struck where she stands. Nothing moves. Maybe the Nine-Year Storm is an appropriate name for what the Biafran War did to this country. No one can be seen. She can even still smell burning food that has been left to cook for too long. As though everyone has just vanished in the middle of the business of living. There are some signs of chaos, but they’re lighter here. The blood on the ground is patchier. People had enough time to barricade their storefronts and secure the windows to their apartments and hide in their basements before the warring began in earnest.

All the dead and maimed here are regular people, civilians. And yet Ify sees even these people being swept up in immediate cleanup operations. Massive land mechs with pouches attached to their fronts like kangaroos roam the streets, and mechanical arms unfurl from their sides to pick up the bodies or pieces of bodies that litter the ground, then drop them into the pouch that opens and closes with a soft hiss every time. Ify’s eyes widen in terror. The erasure of trauma in real time. Like concrete paved over a pothole before the earthquake that created it is even over.

The tower she’s looking for looms over collapsed and near-demolished apartment buildings and office headquarters ahead, and she moves dutifully toward it, slinking through alleys, wary of anything moving. But anywhere she goes, to her horror, she’s the only thing breathing.

Empty plaza greets her before she gets to the tower.

She remembers the place teeming with life. She remembers the flood of workers spilling out wearing their djellabas and the women in their hijab as they met up and gathered in groups before heading to the nearby mosque for Friday prayer. Ify remembers Daren letting the both of them get swept up in the tide, being surrounded by all that industriousness. The city hummed with warm, thrilling life all around them. She remembers seeing young students flirt with each other on the benches on the first days of their internships, how pleasant the droids were in greeting people. Even the security droids seemed to have been programmed for maximum cordiality.

But now, before her, there’s nothing but emptiness spotted occasionally with the bodies of dead Augments and security droids. For a moment, Ify wonders why security was so thin here for what is perhaps the most important device in the entire country. Then she remembers the riots and how thick the security presence seemed in some places, how much like a war zone it had felt. A diversion.

It had all been a diversion.