GHOST PHONE

CHAPTER TWO: HOME

Kijiji Block was four floors of patched concrete and bad decisions, the kind of building people said was held up more by habit than anything structural. Zane's place was on the fourth floor — half a room, really, the kind of space that made you aware of every corner.

He shared it with his grandmother.

Bibi Amina was sixty-three and small in the way that made people underestimate her exactly once. She had a look she gave you when she knew something was off, patient and level, like she was simply waiting for you to catch up to what she'd already figured out. She'd raised Zane since he was five, after his parents went to the coast and the calls thinned out and then stopped altogether. She never brought it up. After a while, neither did he.

He got in just after seven. She was at the stove, back to him, heating water on the single burner.

"You eat?"

"Not yet."

She pointed at the table without turning around. Covered plate — ugali and beans from last night, already cold. He sat down and ate without comment, like it was exactly what he'd wanted.

The phone pressed against his ribs the whole time. Warm. Steady. Almost like breathing.

He waited until she left for the market.

He sat on his mat in the corner and held the thing in both hands and actually looked at it.

No logo. No port. No buttons anywhere on the sides. Glass on both faces, smooth and unscratched, and those three faint letters on the back that he kept coming back to. He pressed the screen once. Nothing. Held it longer. Still nothing. Then he tried the two-corner trick, both thumbs at the same time, the one that sometimes worked on military-grade handhelds that had no business being in the yard.

The screen came on.

No lock. No welcome. Just black, and in the center of it a single icon — a white circle with a smaller circle inside. Like a target. Or an eye, depending on how you looked at it.

Zane looked at it for a moment.

Then he tapped it.

It didn't open an app. It opened a map — Neo-Nairobi, but not any version of it he recognized. Not the kind you pulled up for bus routes or to check if the northern roads were flooded again. This was the city underneath the city. Tunnels and passages and chambers branching out below the streets like the root system of something enormous. And moving through them, slow and deliberate, were dozens of small white dots.

He leaned in. Each dot had a number. And at the bottom of the screen, in text so small he had to bring it close to his face:

UNITS STANDING BY. AWAITING COMMAND.

He sat back.

Outside, a matatu leaned on its horn three times. Somewhere down the hall a baby was crying. The city going about its morning the way it always did — loud and indifferent and completely unconcerned.

In the half-room on the fourth floor of Kijiji Block, Zane didn't move.

***

THE TAP

He told himself he wasn't going to do anything. Just look. Study the map, figure out what he was actually holding, then put it away and think. Maybe talk to Dex about it. Maybe.

That lasted about four minutes.

Twenty-two dots. All underground, all still. They sat in three clusters — one beneath the Central Market district, one under the old Eastlands rail corridor, and one directly below Vane Corporation Tower, which scraped the sky higher than anything else in the city.

He zoomed in on the cluster under the tower. Five dots, packed tight, in a chamber that didn't show up on any map he'd ever pulled. The chamber had a label: 07-B.

He zoomed further. The dots resolved into small wireframe shapes — humanoid, roughly, but off in ways that snagged his eye. Too broad at the shoulders. Arms with a second joint below the elbow. Where feet should've been, flat heavy plates.

Not delivery bots. Not the little cleaning units that skittered around the Upper District sidewalks. These were built with a different purpose in mind. Built thick. Built to last through something.

He should have put the phone face-down and gone outside.

His thumb found dot 07 instead — the one sitting slightly apart from the others in chamber 07-B. A small arrow sat beside it, the same icon that meant move or activate on every interface he'd ever used.

He told himself he was just going to hover over it.

He tapped it.

Nothing, for a second.

Then the dot moved. Barely — a few millimetres on screen, maybe ten or twenty metres in the real tunnel below the city. It slid north, paused, stopped.

Zane didn't move.

His thumb was shaking, just slightly, in a way he couldn't make stop. He had just moved something. Something with weight and joints and flat heavy feet, somewhere in the dark underneath Neo-Nairobi, by touching a piece of glass in his corner of Kijiji Block.

The phone buzzed once — short, soft — and a notification bar appeared at the top of the screen.

UNIT 07 ACTIVATED. AUTONOMOUS MODE ENGAGED.

Autonomous.

The dot started moving again. Not because he'd told it to. Slow and even, pushing north through the tunnel system, trending toward the surface.

Oh no.

He tapped the dot again, hunting for something — a stop, a cancel, a way to undo the last thirty seconds. The screen offered him options: speed, direction, a camera icon. No stop. Nothing that looked like off.

He hit the camera.

The map dropped away and a live feed took its place. Dark tunnel. Concrete walls running wet. And at the bottom of the frame, the ground moving past in a steady rhythm — heavy flat feet, one after the other, unhurried, heading somewhere with the patience of something that didn't get tired.

Unit 07 was walking.

And it was heading for the city.