Her steps slow. Her left shoulder has gone numb. She keeps her pistol aimed with her right arm while her left hangs at her side, useless. Her heart is racing. The temperature around her is rising. The world starts to waver, as though she stands in the midst of a mirage.

She passes through what feels like a wall, then makes her way onto a platform. And when her steps echo loudly in her ears, she realizes just how much energy and electricity has been humming and buzzing around her in this basement. For some reason, none of that sound enters here. There’s just the platform that rings what appears to Ify to be a large metal hemisphere towering over her, so wide she can’t see its edges. Kneeling before it, almost in an aspect of prayer, is Xifeng.

Ify aims her pistol. “Get up,” she growls. She sees Xifeng, and in her mind swim images of the destruction and death she witnessed, the mobs hurtling down streets setting fire to everything, the dead bodies left in their wake, the citizens wailing over those they had just lost in violent feuds whose origins they didn’t even remember. Truly senseless violence. All because of the woman kneeling before the hermetically sealed vault in front of her. “Get. Up.”

Still, Xifeng refuses to move.

Ify marches to her, grabs her by the scruff of her collar, then hauls her to her feet. Xifeng’s face is twisted in determination. Ify knows where she’s seen that expression before. Walking through the detention center, looking into the cells at the captured enemy combatants. The thought flits through Ify that any number of them could have been innocent children caught in a sweep or the object of some feud an officer or soldier had with someone. She’s also seen that look on dying soldiers who clung to their weapons even as their life bled out of them. At one point, she had worn that same expression on her face: when she had been so absorbed in her mission of vengeance that she had helped bring about a terrorist attack that had killed over a hundred people and restarted a civil war. “Where is it?”

“Where’s what, Ify?” Xifeng asks in a steely, knowing voice.

“The virus. Where is it?” She presses the pistol to Xifeng’s forehead.

“You mean the antivirus.”

“Xifeng, this stops. Now. You’re beaten. Give up.” She presses the pistol harder. “I stopped you.” When Xifeng doesn’t move, Ify grits her teeth. “Are you happy? Have you seen what you’ve done? There have got to be at least a hundred people dead above us right now. And counting. Tearing each other to pieces over nothing! Over things nobody cared about until you forced them to. You did this, Xifeng. You’re oyinbo, and I will not let you destroy this country.”