Pain gallops through her otherwise numb shoulder. Vertigo pitches her against a wall, and she’s reminded that she needs to do something about this gunshot wound. So she heads into the next open apartment unit she can find. Thankfully, no corpses cover the floor or any of the furniture. The place looks ransacked: overturned tables and couch cushions torn like someone was searching for hidden valuables and a fridge with its door jammed open and its front screen winking static at her. She makes her way through the living room and checks behind the barrier separating it from the kitchen for anyone or anything that might be moving. Then she slowly steps down a short, dark hallway. Her hand pauses at a closet door. The keypad still glows, untouched by the fighting and chaos. She puts her ear to it, straining to hear anything: droid gears turning, a child’s whimper, the swish of someone trying to better hide behind clothes. But there’s nothing.

So she moves on to the study and finds furniture shorn of its wood coating so that the broken metal frames poke out like shattered bones. The desk, though, still stands. None of its cupboards have keypads, thankfully.

The bathroom too is empty, and so is the main bedroom, until Ify notices lumps underneath the bedsheets. With mounting dread, she pulls back the covers to find herself staring into the faces of a man, woman, and, between them, their adolescent son. Vacant eyes stare up at the ceiling. Saliva and some other fluid Ify can’t immediately name has left dried streaks down the sides of their mouths. Ify drops her gun, forgets the pain in her shoulder. Her hands come to her mouth. Tears stream down her cheeks.

“God in heaven,” she whispers.

She falls to her knees beside the bed and buries her face in the comforter, sobbing until she finds herself letting out, into the fabric, a scream so loud it gives voice to all the anguish and rage and sorrow she’s felt all her life. Everything she’d tried to put behind her during her life in the Colony spills out of her in that scream. All of her confusion and hatred at what Xifeng had let herself turn into, at the idea that forcing people to confront the worst thing that’s ever happened to them in such a violating manner could ever be conceived of as healthy or helpful or curing. All of the futility she feels with every patient who has died or passed into a coma while under her care. Her powerlessness to bring Onyii back to life. All of it finds a place in that scream.