A thought strikes her with the force of a concussion grenade, and she checks the sightlines, looks for where the surveillance drones would occasionally cloud, listens for their just-above-silence hum. Nothing. No microscopic wings beating, no purr of their recording machinery at work. Nothing’s watching her. In this city block, she’s, for all intents and purposes, unwatched.

Absentmindedly, she reaches for her temple, where her Whistle would be, but it’s gone. Long gone. Between the attack on the police station in Kaduna State, being spirited away by Ngozi to Xifeng’s underground headquarters, and fighting her way through the riot, there’s no way she could have managed to hold on to it. And there isn’t a Terminal in sight.

Even though no surveillance drones hover overhead, she ducks into the hollowed-out remains of a luxury apartment building. Shattered glass in the ground-floor lobby crunches beneath her feet. The lounge chairs and the floor still haven’t been cleaned of their stains. The reception desk stands across from her, unmanned. She doesn’t want to call out for any survivors. Nor does she want to risk getting trapped in an elevator, so she locates a set of stairs off to the side. In front of the stairs an emergency door hangs uselessly on broken hinges. With her gun at the ready, Ify shoulders the door open, sights the path above her, and makes the climb.

She doesn’t know why she refuses to stop at any of the lower floors until she realizes that the walk calms her. It takes her mind away from thoughts of the devastation, of what havoc Xifeng was still able to wreak even though her plan had ultimately failed. It keeps her from thinking of whether or not a synth she has come to care about—a synth carrying within her pieces of her lost sister—is still alive or in pieces destined for an unmarked grave.

The walk calms her and allows her subconscious to work. And ultimately, it’s what brings her to an idea. But for this to work, she’s going to need tools. And a mirror.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

She makes her way down a formerly beige carpet, both sticky and stiff with dried blood. Everywhere, traces of people leaving their lives behind in a hurry: doors hacked to pieces; jewelry and other wearable tech scattered everywhere, glistening in the bright, blinking light that suffuses the corridor; pepper soup spilled on a floor and left to congeal; stew for jollof rice splashed against walls; broken cooking bots twitching, user-less, and stuck in doorways they aren’t programmed to find their way out of.