Ify turns off her shockstick and slips it into her belt. Then she pulls out her pistol and readies it. The glass doors lie in pieces, and she steps gingerly over the threshold, then slips under the security barrier just after it. Guards lie motionless in pools of their own dried blood before their stations.

There’s been no attempt to clean up the carnage or to mask Xifeng’s trail. Bullet casings litter the floor, and Ify follows the path they’ve made through the central circular clearing, where, when she looks up, she can see all fifty floors, each floor a ring, through the glass ceiling at the top of the tower. That same glass crunches beneath Ify’s boots.

She’s faced with a semicircle of elevator bays, but all it takes is a single button press on all five of them to confirm what she suspected. The elevators are locked. She heads back to the control panels in the main lobby, strewn around the blood-stained lobby furniture, but when she tries to connect, her bodysuit pops at her shoulder and pain pricks her spine at the base of her neck where her Augment sits. It’s not worth it. Of course Xifeng would paralyze the building’s comms system and disable access to the building’s schematics.

Ify scans the walls and ceilings, and after some searching, she finds them. Orbs. Partly blackened from having been disabled, but there nonetheless. Xifeng and her group probably had them disabled remotely, which, Ify realizes, is how the orbs were able to remain suspended in place. She can’t hack into them, and they won’t have any of the recorded material she’s really looking for, but if she can tell where they’re turned, she can find the blind spot.

She looks from one to the other like she’s threading them together, like each is a puzzle piece she’s collecting. A pattern emerges, and she follows it with increasing speed until she finds herself at a far corner hidden behind the columns ringing the central lobby. A part of the wall has slid to the side, revealing an opening, and Ify steps through it to set foot on metal grating that clangs loudly. She’s more careful with the next step, pausing to look around at the maze of walkways and piping around her.

When she’s fully through, she surveys her surroundings. Islands of light reveal platforms at various levels and stairways or straight walkways connecting them. Through each island runs a pillar that disappears somewhere deep beneath Ify. When she looks down, all she sees is a golden glow. That’s where she must go, she knows.