Her fingers move with increasing urgency. Deleting blocks of code, inserting new sequences, switching one block for another, altering the fundamental DNA of the thing.

They’re one floor away.

She types and types and types.

They’re on her floor.

Her bloodied fingers blur beneath her, they move so fast.

They’re going through rooms only a few doors down now.

Faster.

Kicking in doors that refuse to open.

Faster.

A whoosh of air as the front door to the apartment opens.

Type type type.

Boots on carpet.

Type type type.

Rifles raised.

The release mechanism on the rifle is activated just as Ify presses launch. Two simultaneous clicks.

Then the room becomes a world of blue lines. Nodes and edges. A coating of coding that washes over everything, spreading outward to show her not just the four soldiers in a line that stretches from the front door through the living room and kitchen to the bedroom’s doorway, but also their braincases, make and model, and their retinal input data. And their source code.

A single thought is all it takes to send out the pulse that hacks their braincases and deletes their source code.

All at once, the soldiers right outside her room collapse in a deadened heap. Deactivated.

Her mind clears, and in the empty space rushes the pain, reminding her of just where she sits. The bee holding the mirror shards hangs in place, as does the bee holding the cord connecting her Augment to the Terminal.

With as much steadiness and control as she can muster, she directs the bee to disconnect the cord. With a soft click and hiss, it comes loose. That bee heads back to the bottle of alcohol with the perforated top and once again dunks its legs before returning to the back of Ify’s neck and dabbing at the wound. It takes every muscle in her body not to flinch. Then, still keeping her gaze on the mirrors, she grabs the tube of MeTro sealant from where it lies on the towel, reaches behind her, and squeezes the gel slowly over the incision. Even as she caps the tube and puts it back down, she can feel the skin on the back of her neck reconnecting, the blood dried around the scar that will disappear in a matter of hours.

She closes her eyes and connects to every Terminal in the city, as well as to the remaining surveillance drones and the footage they have stored, and she blazes through it until something connects with the biometrical data she has stored on Grace. Her last location. A building from which she never emerged. The footage shows she’s being carried by something or someone running very fast. Too fast for a human carrying that burden.

Uzo.

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