Ngozi is out ahead in her mech. They’d emerged from Xifeng’s underground base in the forests outside Abuja and cut a path straight for the countryside, where government forces would be sparsest, but not before activating the cloaking tech both craft had enabled. It worked much the same way the face-scrambling cream did, disrupting surveillance signals so that when they entered Nigerian airspace, they didn’t look like a jet and an aerial mech but rather like two giant radiation-infected birds. Their westward flight toward Kwara State would make sense on government radars. They would look like two misplaced creatures, denizens of the Redlands who had gotten lost and were heading back home. That’s where Ngozi was leading them. The Redlands.

“I overheard you while you were gathering supplies,” Ngozi says through the comms system that connects them. Her face appears before Ify as though she were calling through Ify’s Whistle.

“Yes,” Ify says. “How do you know she’s still alive?” Ify can explain her own feelings, that knowing Uzo’s still alive is more a matter of intuition and wishing than anything else, that she has no hard proof Uzo has survived the chaos, especially when so many synths have died already, but that she has felt somewhere deep in her body that this synth that has pieces of her warrior sister in her would somehow find a way to make it out. When she was with Xifeng, Ngozi must have spent time with the synths, seen what they were capable of, what they were growing into. Maybe she’s felt the same way.

“Xifeng had all of the synths implanted with tracking devices,” Ngozi says as the country beneath them grows more and more overgrown with jungle. Even though they’re cloaked, they fly low to avoid the mechs and ships sitting at higher altitudes among the clouds. “She had plans to distribute them throughout Nigeria, spreading the forbidden memories while her antivirus worked to cure the cyberized.” Her mouth stumbles around the word distribute. That tells Ify, more than anything else, that Ngozi has come to regard the synths as people. Or much closer to people than to machines. Something about that heartens Ify and brings a smile to her face.

But then Ify thinks about the implications of Xifeng’s actions. Tracking devices. More surveillance. The more she ponders Xifeng’s plan and the lengths she had gone to in order to bring about her reckoning, the more she realizes that Xifeng was turning into the very surveillance state she had hated.