Chapter Six
1220 Words
The Architeces Of Dust
The first time Zaria realized how truly alone she was in the game, she was staring at the blinking cursor on a redacted document that refused to yield.
Not an error.
A command.
A firewall she wasn’t supposed to cross.
And yet, there it was—buried beneath layers of digital camouflage, an encrypted file labeled: Project Dust.
She leaned back in her chair, heart pounding. Malik had told her to review the procurement figures for a defense contract approved in the last quarter. Boring, right? Standard numbers audit. She’d nearly dozed off until her instincts kicked in—the numbers didn’t add up. A 2.6 billion naira black hole in procurement lines? No traceable endpoints?
The file didn’t belong in that folder.
And the words “Project Dust” weren’t supposed to exist.
She reached for her burner phone. Her hands trembled.
ZARIA: Found something. Possibly high-level.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Get out of that file.
She stared at the reply. Three seconds later, the document vanished from her screen, swallowed by invisible code.
And then—her lights flickered. Once. Twice. Off.
The room went dark.
She stood, breath sharp in her throat. Her flat was supposed to be secure—top floor in a compound Malik himself had signed off on. Armed gate. Backup generators. No random outages.
Her phone buzzed again.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Do not go home. Do not call Malik. Wait for extraction.
The floor vibrated beneath her feet.
A low, mechanical hum grew louder from below. A drone?
She rushed to the window—heart hammering. A sleek black quadcopter hovered just outside her balcony, rotors slicing the air with surgical precision. A cylindrical pod hung beneath it.
And then the pod ejected.
It clunked softly onto the floor of the balcony, hissing open.
Inside—headset. USB key. Gas mask.
No instructions.
Just trust.
Zaria hesitated only a moment before she grabbed them all and ran.
Thirty minutes later – inside a moving blacked-out van
The headset buzzed to life.
No visuals. Just sound.
A voice filtered in—familiar, but glitched. Distorted like it had passed through a dozen firewalls. She knew that cadence, though. Sharp. Measured.
Ruin.
“Did you open the file?” he asked.
“I tried. It locked me out.”
“That means it registered you.”
“Registered me for what?”
“For watching something you were never supposed to see. You’ve been flagged, Zaria. Tier Three isn't protection. It’s surveillance.”
Her pulse spiked. “Malik—”
“Doesn’t know yet. But he will.”
Silence buzzed between them. Then, softer:
“They killed the last person who accessed Project Dust.”
Zaria’s breath caught. “Who?”
A beat. Then two.
“My sister.”
FLASHBACK – Two years earlier
Her name was Kemi Adeyemo.
She was the quieter one. The softer one. The one who believed that policy could still fix what war had broken.
Zaria saw her now—face blurry in the haze of Ruin’s voice.
“She found the same file, but deeper. She didn’t stop digging. Three days later, her car exploded on the Third Mainland Bridge. They said it was a fuel tank rupture.”
“And you believed that?”
“No. That’s the day I stopped being Malik’s shadow and became something else.”
Zaria’s mind reeled. “Why didn’t Malik stop it?”
“He doesn’t know I ever found out. I made sure of that.”
“Then why help him? Why stay?”
A bitter breath. “Because staying lets me rewrite the rules from the inside. And because someone has to make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen again.”
Zaria was silent.
She felt something shift inside her.
This wasn’t politics anymore.
It was war with better tailoring.
Later That Night – Safe House, Shomolu
The van stopped. The back door opened to a quiet, dim-lit room with concrete walls, a single steel table, and maps taped to every surface—maps of Lagos, Abuja, and something coded in Cyrillic she couldn’t place.
Ruin stood there, hoodie damp from rain, eyes darker than she remembered.
“You’ve crossed a line,” he said.
Zaria crossed her arms. “So pull me back.”
His mouth twitched—something between a frown and reluctant amusement.
“Sit.”
She sat.
He pulled up a digital screen and slid the USB key she’d taken from the drone into a military-grade decryptor.
“What you saw—Project Dust—it’s not a defense program.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a playbook. A blueprint for destabilizing key regions of Nigeria under the guise of foreign assistance and public health campaigns. Funds re-routed. Armies misdirected. Epidemics used as cover stories.”
She blinked. “Who would do that?”
“Who do you think?”
She followed the files as they appeared—foreign NGOs. Shell companies with Chinese and Russian IP footprints. A London-based philanthropic arm funneling weapons through Borno.
And at the center?
A familiar name: ALHAJI UMAR BIN KATAGUM.
Zaria leaned forward, mouth dry. “He’s dead. Assassinated last year.”
“No. He faked it. Went dark. Malik’s people helped.”
She stood too quickly, blood rushing to her head. “That’s not possible.”
“It is,” Ruin said. “Malik doesn’t know the whole picture. He thinks Umar is an asset. But he’s the architect.”
Zaria sat slowly, world spinning.
“So what now?” she whispered.
Ruin looked at her, long and quiet.
“We bring it all down.”
Meanwhile – Maitama, Abuja
Malik stood in the darkened war room beneath the policy institute, watching red blips on a digital map flare and vanish. The GPS tag Zaria wore had gone silent two hours ago.
He clenched his jaw.
A voice crackled behind him.
“Sir,” said his aide, Onilade. “We’ve found something. From the Amaka files. A name.”
“Whose name?”
“Bin Katagum.”
Malik turned, sharply. “That’s impossible.”
“Apparently not.”
He stared at the blinking screen.
Everything shifted.
Back in Lagos – rooftop of the safe house
Ruin lit a cigarette—first time Zaria had seen him do something so mundanely human.
She leaned against the ledge beside him, breath fogging.
“You think Malik will believe it?” she asked.
“No. Not at first. But he will.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
He looked at her. “Then we burn it all down ourselves.”
The moon was low. The streets below quiet.
For a moment, there was only them. No war. No lies. Just two people breathing.
And then—
He leaned in.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Until his lips brushed hers, tentative, questioning.
She didn’t pull away.
Her fingers curled into his hoodie, grounding her. Anchoring him.
The kiss wasn’t perfect. It was too full of secrets. Too full of grief.
But it was real.
And that was more than either of them had in months.
When they pulled apart, Ruin touched her face, thumb grazing her jaw.
“No more lies,” he whispered.
“Then tell me everything,” Zaria said.
And so he did.
From the beginning.
- Writer
