Chapter 9: X-Ray
1681 Words
_Three months ago. 11:02 PM. Mrs. Abah’s flat, Block C, Life Camp._
Zara Eze didn’t knock. She scratched. Three times. Like a cat begging to come in from the rain.
Except it wasn’t raining.
Mrs. Abah opened the door with her wrapper tied tight and a kitchen knife in her hand. Sixty-seven years in Abuja teaches you that. Night knocks are never good news.
Zara stood there under the stairwell bulb. No gloves. First time Mrs. Abah had ever seen her bare hands. The nails were bitten to the quick. The skin around her thumbs was raw.
And she was shaking.
“Anti,” Zara said. She’d called Mrs. Abah _Anti_ since she was 12, since the day she caught Zara crying on the stairs after her mother’s funeral. “I need you to remember something for me.”
Mrs. Abah lowered the knife, but didn’t put it down. “Child, it’s past 11. What is this? Are you safe?”
Zara stepped inside without being invited. She didn’t sit. She paced. Three steps to the window. Three steps back. Like she was measuring the room for a coffin.
“If anything happens to me,” Zara said. No hello. No smile. Her voice was low. Used for podcast confessions at 2 AM. “If I die. If they say I jumped. If they say I killed myself...”
“Zara—”
“Don’t believe them, Anti.” Zara stopped pacing. Grabbed Mrs. Abah’s hands. Ice cold. “Promise me.”
Mrs. Abah was a Yoruba woman who’d buried a husband, two brothers, and a son. She knew death. She knew lies. “Who is _they_, omo mi?”
Zara’s eyes flicked to the door. To the dark stairwell beyond. “Police. Commissioner Dasuki. His men. They’re in my phone. My car. My flat.” She laughed. One sharp bark. “They even bugged my gloves.”
“Your gloves?”
“I take them off to shower. To sleep. That’s when they come. That’s when they... listen.” Zara pulled her sleeves down over her hands. Hiding them. “So I don’t take them off anymore.”
Mrs. Abah’s chest went tight. “You’re not making sense.”
“I know.” Zara’s smile was terrible. “That’s why I’m here. Because you make sense. Because you’re just the old woman who sells zobo on the estate. You’re nobody to them.”
She reached into her bra. Pulled out a key. Small. Silver. On a red string.
“Storage unit. Kado. Number 17-B.” She pressed it into Mrs. Abah’s palm and closed her fingers over it. “If Amara needs to hide, that’s where. There’s money. Passports. A phone. Clean.”
“Amara? What does your sister have to do with—”
“She’s next. If they finish me, they’ll finish her. Because she won’t stop. She never stops.” Zara’s voice broke. First time. “She thinks I’m brave. I’m not. I’m just... angry.”
Mrs. Abah held the key. It was warm from Zara’s skin. “What do you want me to tell her?”
Zara went to the window. Pushed the curtain aside. Looked down at the parking lot. A black Prado sat under a streetlight. No plates. Engine running.
“Tell her to find the sergeant with the scar,” Zara said, not turning around. “Left eye. To temple. Nnenna Okeke. SCID. She’s clean. Only one. Tell Amara... tell her I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Zara finally looked back. And Mrs. Abah saw it. Not fear. Not grief.
Resolve.
“For what I put inside her.”
Mrs. Abah frowned. “What did you—”
“And Anti?” Zara opened the door. Stepped into the hallway. “If you see my gloves moving... if they knock...”
She looked down the stairs. Into the dark.
“Run.”
Mrs. Abah kept that key. Sewed it into her brassiere that night. For three months.
She didn’t believe about the gloves.
Until last night.
---
_Present. 4:44 AM. SCID Safehouse, Gwarinpa._
The X-ray machine hummed like a dying wasp.
I lay on the table, paper gown sticking to my skin with sweat and fear. The room smelled like ozone and antiseptic. Like a storm about to break.
Ife stood by the monitor, arms crossed. Not my best friend. Not the girl I did chemistry homework with. _Nurse Okafor, SCID Medical Liaison_. Okeke pulled strings to get her credentialed at 4 AM.
“You swallowed plastic,” Ife said. Her voice was clinical. Distant. It hurt more than a slap. “It should be in your stomach. Maybe intestines. We confirm location, then we plan extraction.”
“Extraction,” I repeated. My tongue felt thick. “Like a tooth.”
“Like a bullet,” Okeke said from the door. She hadn’t slept in 36 hours. The scar on her face looked deeper under fluorescent light. Carved, not faded. “Dasuki’s lawyer is filing habeas corpus. We have 36 hours before a judge kicks him.”
36 hours. The SD card had maybe 48 before stomach acid corrupted it. We were racing corrosion.
Mrs. Abah sat in the corner on a plastic chair. Her phone was gone. Confiscated. “For your safety,” Okeke said. But Mrs. Abah kept patting her chest. Where the key used to be. Where Zara’s last request sat for three months.
Tunde was in the doorway. Arm in a sling from the safehouse breach that hadn’t happened yet. But would. Okeke said Dasuki’s people hit every location twice. Once to scare. Once to finish.
He shouldn’t be here. Okeke banned him. “Conflict of interest. Victim’s fiancé.”
He came anyway.
“He’s her fiancé,” I’d told Okeke. “If I die, he’s all Zara has left.”
Okeke had looked at me for a long time. Then: “Fine. But he stays by the door. And if he twitches, I shoot him.”
Ife hit the button.
The machine buzzed. The screen lit up.
We all looked. Like it was a TV and the season finale was on.
My ribcage. White arches. My spine. A pale snake. My stomach. A dark balloon.
And inside my stomach, a small, bright rectangle. SD card. Zara’s handwriting: _For Amara_. Now inside Amara.
Next to it, something else.
A second rectangle. Smaller. Thinner. With a wire. Thin. Curved. Like a hook.
The room went quiet.
Ife frowned. Stepped closer to the screen. “You swallow two things?”
“No.” My voice came out a whisper.
“Zoom in,” Okeke said.
Ife’s fingers flew over the keyboard. The image enlarged. Pixelated. Then cleared.
The second object wasn’t plastic.
It was metal.
And it wasn’t sitting in my stomach.
It was embedded. In the lining.
“What is that?” Tunde said. He took one step into the room. Okeke’s hand went to her gun. He stopped.
Ife’s face was bloodless. “Amara... when did you get a pacemaker?”
“I didn’t.”
“Because that’s what this looks like.” She pointed, hand shaking. “But it’s not in your heart. It’s in your stomach. Attached to the card. And Amara... it has a power source.”
The air left my lungs.
_“It’s already in her. You’re too late.”_
Zara’s last words on the roof. I thought she meant the evidence. The SD card.
She didn’t.
She meant this.
Okeke was already on her radio. “Tech, I need a full-spectrum sweep on Eze, Amara. Check for transmissions. Now.”
The X-ray screen flickered.
The image of my ribs stuttered. Then lines of text scrolled across my sternum. Green. Like old computer code. Like the Matrix, but inside my body.
_>> SIGNAL FOUND_
_>> UPLOADING... 12%_
_>> LOCATION: SCID SAFEHOUSE GWARINPA_
_>> TRANSMITTING TO: 192.168.1.17-B_
_>> HEARTBEAT DETECTED. SYNCING._
Ife stumbled back from the monitor. “It’s using you. Your pulse. To power itself.”
Tunde said, “What the hell does 17-B mean?”
Mrs. Abah stood up. The plastic chair scraped.
“The storage unit,” she whispered. Her voice was 100 years old. “Zara’s key. Number 17-B. In Kado.”
The SD card wasn’t just storage.
It was a beacon.
And it just told Commissioner Dasuki exactly where we were.
Okeke moved like she’d been electrocuted. “Evac. Now. Full scramble. He’s coming.” She grabbed her phone. “All units, we are compromised. Repeat, we are compromised. Dasuki has the location.”
The lights went out.
Not a blackout. A surgical cut.
The backup generator kicked in one second later. Red emergency lights bathed the room in blood.
And from the hallway, over the generator’s growl, came a sound.
_Knock. Knock. Knock._
Three times. Slow. Deliberate.
The same knock from Zara’s apartment. The same knock from the gloves.
But the gloves were in evidence lockup. In SCID HQ. Three miles away.
So what was knocking?
I looked at the X-ray screen. Still glowing in the red dark.
The second object. The wire. The “pacemaker.”
It was moving.
Not floating. Crawling.
One end had detached from the SD card. It was inching, millimeter by millimeter, up the wall of my stomach.
Toward my esophagus.
Toward my heart.
_>> UPLOADING... 18%_
_>> HEARTBEAT SYNC: 89BPM_
_>> MIGRATION INITIATED_
Ife saw it. Her medical training overrode her fear for half a second. “It’s not a pacemaker. It’s a crawler. Micro-robotic. Military grade.” Then the fear won. “Amara, it’s trying to get to your heart.”
“Why?” Tunde yelled. “Why her heart?”
Mrs. Abah answered. She was crying. But her voice was steady. Like she’d been waiting three months to say it.
“Because,” she said, “Zara told me. ‘It’s already in her. You’re too late.’ She didn’t mean the card.”
She looked at me. Through me.
“She meant herself.”
_>> UPLOADING... 24%_
_>> ZARA_EZE.EXE BOOTING_
The knocking came again.
From inside my chest.
- Writer
