Ify follows, alighting gently on the grassy knoll, and zooms in with her Accent-powered camera.

“That forest.”

And there it is along the horizon. The beginnings of a forest, above which rises several columns of smoke.

“The signal stops there.”

Ify’s heart drops. Uzo.

CHAPTER

46

I am not cleaning the blood off of my skin. I am not wiping it from my mouth. I am not scraping it off of my tongue. I am not liking the taste but it is tasting like metal and so it is feeling like it is already part of me. It is drying in my hair and it is crusting on my arms and my legs, and it is the same color as the radiation spots that is making holes in my shirt. Before too long, my shirt is just strips of cloth hanging from my body and more and more of my skin is peeling away and revealing the metal that is lying beneath like bone of animal, and this is happening to all of us.

When the other synths are expiring, we are uploading their data into the remaining Enyemakas, but it is happening so much now that I am not having time to bury them, so they are just falling down into the red dust and breaking down. Some of them are being eaten so much by the air that when they are falling, they are coming apart in pieces. Their arm is falling away and their leg is snapping and they are having no hair. Sometime it is like all of them is just crumbling, and I am sadding each time it is happening because it is feeling like I am losing an important piece of myself every time it is happening. Enyemaka is always telling me that they are still being alive, but I am not seeing them breathing or laughing or running in circles with their arms spread out like airplanes. So how can they be still alive?

There are being no more humans now for long time, but I am being fine with this because I am not angering so much anymore. It is not anger like hot thing under my skin that is eating me from inside. It is cold anger, like something hard that is making my step heavy and is making it hard sometime to lift my shoulder, like I am being stuck with my arms hanging at my side or my neck turned a certain way and it is taking much effort and cracking to be fixing myself and still walking. But the cold anger is also pushing me forward. It is what Xifeng is once telling me is called determination.