You are with family now, and she is showing me other synth. They are not with Enyemaka now, they are somewhere else, but they are alive, and it is bringing me joy to know this thing. Before Enyemaka is carrying me away, she is ejecting cord and plugging it into my outlet and sending me nanobot that is healing me and telling my body and my brain many things. Nanobots is telling me that I will be okay and that we will be making our own future and becoming our own persons and that nothing good can ever come from staying with normal people.

Part III

CHAPTER

41

Abuja, Nigeria:

2181

It isn’t hard for Ify to find an abandoned home. In the spectral silence of the riot’s aftermath, there are too many. A part of her aches to see people again, aches for the indifferent thrum of swaying pillars of body heat to pass her by. Without the music and chatter and whirr and hum of a million mechanical devices, Abuja has turned into a realm of ghosts.

Most evidence of the butchery has been cleared away. No bodies—whole or in pieces—litter the streets. The fires have been extinguished. There isn’t even the buzz of nanobots, holding the bio-neural data of the deceased hovering over Augmented corpses. The sight of those ground vehicles picking up bodies and tossing them into front pouches haunts Ify and, as she walks, gun in hand through a deserted residential quarter, she shakes the memory away. She has to find Grace.

The thought occurs to her that Grace could have been any one of the dead bodies stuffed into those pouches, pieces of her scrubbed from the street, all evidence she had been in this city erased. That’s what will eventually happen to this whole place, Ify realizes. Already, she’s witnessed the beginnings of the cleanup operation, and even before the riots were over. Those left behind will have their memories of the event removed by the government. And during their treatment, their homes will be demolished and replaced. Maybe some neighborhoods will show the wear and tear of a natural disaster. They’ll tell the story of a storm coming through. And that will be the lie: that whatever destruction has befallen them, whatever killed their loved ones, whatever destroyed their stores, and whatever broke the very ground they stood on was anything but manmade.

Even though the air is hot and humid and Ify sweats through her broken bodysuit, a chill runs through her.

She wants to call out for Grace, shout her name not just to hear her cry out her location and not just to hear that Grace is okay but to feel less alone.

Right now, she is the only living thing on this street.