The fluorescent tube above locker forty-seven had been flickering for three weeks. Chinwe Eze noticed it the way she noticed most things in this place: with the quiet cataloguing of a woman trained to watch for what others ignored. The flicker cast a stuttering shadow across the metal door, a code she could not quite read.
She pressed her dispatch badge against the scanner. The lock clicked, the door swung open, and the smell of old paper and something sharper, something chemical, drifted out from the narrow metal interior.
There was an envelope in her locker.
Chinwe stopped breathing. Her hand hovered over the dispatch vest she kept folded on the top shelf. The envelope was plain, manila, unsealed. No name. No stamp. Just her locker number scrawled in a hand that leaned hard to the right, the kind of slant that suggested speed or agitation or both.
She had worked the Lagos State Emergency Hub long enough to know that lockers were not private. Maintenance had master keys. Supervisors had master keys. The cleaning crew probably had master keys. But the envelope was placed with care, tucked against the back wall so the door would hide it, and the paper smelled faintly of something she could not place, something that brought the back of her tongue alive with a memory she did not want to name.
She pulled the envelope out and sat on the metal bench between the rows of lockers. The dispatch floor hummed beneath her, a low vibration carried up through the concrete. Somewhere across the room, a radio squawked and went silent. A printer coughed paper into a tray.
The envelope held two things.
The first was a USB drive, small, black, unmarked. The second was a photograph.
Chinwe looked at the photograph for a long time before she could make herself understand what she was seeing. The image was printed on matte paper, slightly overexposed, the colors leaning toward yellow. It showed a young woman in profile, caught mid-turn, her mouth open as though about to speak. Behind her, a window. Outside the window, a sky the color of weak tea.
The young woman in the photograph was her sister.
Amaka Eze had been twenty-three when she vanished. That had been four years ago, one month, and eleven days. Chinwe had marked the count in a notebook she kept in the glove compartment of her car, updating it each morning before she started the engine, the way some people said a prayer. Amaka would be twenty-seven now, if she was still alive. Chinwe tried not to think about the if.
The woman in the photograph looked older than twenty-seven. Or perhaps younger. It was difficult to tell. The face was thinner than Chinwe remembered, the cheekbones sharper, but the mouth was the same. The eyes were the same. And there, just behind the ear, a small mole that Chinwe had kissed a thousand times when they were children, a game they had played, a way of saying I love you without words.
Chinwe closed her hand around the photograph. The paper crinkled, and she loosened her grip, smoothed it flat against her thigh. The chemical smell was stronger now. She brought the envelope close to her face and inhaled slowly.
Fixative. The smell of fixative, the kind Amaka had used in the studio she kept in the back of the kindergarten where she taught. Amaka had painted. Amaka had drawn. Amaka had worked in charcoal and pastel and ink, and her fingers had always carried the faint ghost of one medium or another.
Fixative. And something else. Cigarette smoke, maybe, though Amaka had never smoked. Or perhaps a different kind of smoke.
Chinwe put the photograph in her dispatch vest pocket and closed the envelope around the USB drive. She stood. The bench scraped against the floor. Across the room, a man in a dark jacket was watching her. He looked away when she looked at him. The movement was too fast, the pivot too clean, the kind of practiced nonchalance that only came from training.
She did not approach him. Not yet. The hub had cameras, but cameras were not memory. Cameras were not witnesses. Cameras were tape that could be edited, lost, overwritten.
She had learned that lesson the hard way.
The shift began the way shifts always began at the Lagos State Emergency Hub, with the handover briefing and the distribution of radios and the slow rotation of dispatchers into their seats. The hub occupied the third floor of a building that had once been a textile warehouse, its high ceilings now hung with cables and monitors and the soft white glow of a hundred screens. The windows overlooked a stretch of road that never went quiet, even at this hour, even at three in the morning, the endless shunting of traffic that Lagos seemed to perform like a hymn.
Chinwe took her seat at console four, across from a woman named Tope who was reading a novel behind a clipboard. Tope glanced up, nodded, went back to her book. The console was a curved desk with three monitors, a keyboard worn smooth by years of typing, a telephone with seventeen lines, and a headset that smelled faintly of the previous shift. Chinwe logged in. The system accepted her credentials without complaint.
The first call came in at twenty minutes past the hour. A domestic disturbance in Surulere. Chinwe typed the address, assigned a unit, and moved on. The second call came in six minutes later, a chest pain in Yaba. She typed, assigned, moved on. The third call was a fire in Apapa, already reported by a second caller, and she patched it through to the fire service and listened to the dispatcher's voice on the other end of the line, flat and urgent and certain.
She worked. She answered. She did not think about the photograph in her pocket.
At half past four, the floor went briefly quiet. Tope closed her novel and stretched, the small sounds of her joints audible in the hush. Across the room, the man in the dark jacket had moved to a different position, closer to the water cooler, and he was talking to one of the senior dispatchers in a voice Chinwe could not hear.
She thought about the USB drive in her vest pocket. She thought about the photograph. She thought about Amaka.
Four years ago, one month, eleven days. The notebook in the glove compartment. The prayer each morning. The studio with its fixative smell. The kindergarten where Amaka had taught five days a week, the children who had loved her, the parents who had trusted her, the headmistress who had wept at the memorial service and never quite forgiven Chinwe for the questions she had asked afterward.
Amaka had claimed she could hear voices. Not the metaphorical kind, not the small inner murmur of conscience or imagination, but actual voices, distinct and external, arriving unbidden and refusing to depart. Chinwe had been a journalist then, working the investigative desk at a paper that no longer existed, and she had tried to listen. She had tried to understand. She had sat with Amaka in the studio and asked her to describe the voices, and Amaka had described them in careful, considered language, the way a translator might describe a poem.
But the police had not been interested. The family had not been interested. Only Dele Okafor, the retired inspector who had once worked missing persons, had taken the claims seriously, and even Dele had eventually gone quiet, had eventually stopped returning Chinwe's calls.
The photograph. The USB drive. The man in the dark jacket. The smell of fixative and something else.
Chinwe pulled the photograph from her vest pocket and looked at it again. The woman in the image was turned half away from the camera, the window behind her throwing a flat gray light across the planes of her face. She was wearing a shirt Chinwe did not recognize, dark blue, the collar open. There was a scar along her jawline, faint but visible, a thin white line that caught the light.
Amaka had no scar on her jawline.
Chinwe stared at the scar. She turned the photograph over. The back was blank, no writing, no stamp, no identifying marks. She brought it close to her face and inhaled again. Fixative. Cigarette smoke. And beneath both, faint but unmistakable, the smell of something that had no business being on a photograph printed on matte paper.
Petrol.
The first call after four in the morning was a traffic accident on the Third Mainland Bridge, a car overturned, one driver trapped. Chinwe dispatched the ambulance and listened to the chatter of the units as they responded, the calm professional voices that moved through emergencies the way surgeons moved through flesh, cutting only where cutting was required. The work was a kind of anesthesia. The work let her put the photograph down.
She did not put the photograph down.
At five-fifteen, the shift supervisor walked the floor. His name was Femi, and he had a habit of standing too close when he spoke. Chinwe kept her eyes on the monitors. Femi stopped at her console, asked if everything was all right, and she said it was, and he moved on. The man in the dark jacket was gone. The water cooler stood alone.
At five-thirty, the cleaning crew arrived, three women in gray uniforms who moved through the hub with the efficient choreography of a routine performed nightly. One of them emptied the wastebasket near Chinwe's console. Another wiped down the break room counter. The third swept the floor near the lockers with a wide push broom that whispered against the concrete.
Chinwe watched the woman with the broom. The woman was older, her hair covered in a wrap the color of faded denim, and she moved with a stiffness that suggested long hours on her feet. She swept in long, slow arcs, each pass covering a few feet, and she did not look at Chinwe, and she did not look at locker forty-seven, and she did not, Chinwe noticed, look anywhere except at the floor.
The shift ended at six. The handover briefing was brief. Tope yawned, gathered her things, and left without saying goodbye. Chinwe stayed at her console, entering the final logs, and then she stood and walked back toward the lockers. The cleaning crew had finished. The floor was still faintly damp. The fluorescent tube above locker forty-seven was still flickering.
She did not open her locker. She walked past it, out of the locker room, down the corridor, through the security door, and into the gray light of a Lagos morning that was already hot. The parking lot was nearly empty. Her car sat in the second row, a silver hatchback with a dent in the rear quarter panel that she had never gotten repaired.
She sat in the driver's seat. She closed the door. She took the notebook from the glove compartment and updated the count.
Four years. One month. Twelve days.
She put the notebook back. She took the photograph from her vest pocket and laid it on the passenger seat, face up, so Amaka's eyes were watching the road.
Then she took out her phone and dialed a number she had not dialed in three years.
The line rang four times. Five. Six.
A voice answered, male, deep, unhurried, carrying the slower cadence of the east.
"Eze, " the voice said. "It is early for you."
"Dele, " Chinwe said. "I need your help."
The line held a silence that had texture, the kind of quiet that accumulates when two people share history they have never quite resolved. Chinwe could hear something in the background on Dele's end: a kettle, perhaps, or the faint percussion of rain on a metal roof.
"You sound tired," Dele said.
"I am tired."
A pause. Then: "You are in Lagos."
"Since yesterday."
"And you are calling me."
"Yes."
Another pause, longer this time. When Dele spoke again, his voice carried the particular gentleness he used when he was about to say something he knew would be difficult.
"You found something."
It was not a question. Chinwe closed her eyes. The morning light through the windshield was already bright, the color of weak tea, and the parking lot around her was beginning to fill with the early arrivals of the day shift. A woman in a red uniform walked past her car carrying a thermos. Chinwe watched her through half-closed lids.
"I found a thing," she said. "I do not know what it is yet. I need someone who knows how these things work. How disappearances work. How evidence works."
"You need a retired inspector who has not slept properly in three weeks."
A small, unexpected sound escaped her, somewhere between a breath and a laugh. "That too."
"Tell me what you have."
"Not on the phone."
"That serious."
"That careful."
Dele was quiet for a moment. She heard the kettle click off. She heard him pour. She heard the small ceramic sound of a cup being set down.
"There is a train from Lagos to Enugu," he said. "It leaves by seven in the morning. If you leave tonight, you arrive tomorrow afternoon. Or there is the morning flight. It leaves before dawn."
"I will take the train."
"Bring whatever you have found. Bring the original. Do not send it ahead. Do not photograph it and send the photograph."
"I know how evidence works, Dele."
"I know you know. I am saying it anyway."
She almost smiled. The photograph on the passenger seat caught the light, and Amaka's face, for a moment, looked less like a photograph and more like a person glimpsed through a window.
"I will be there tomorrow," Chinwe said.
"I will be at the station. Platform four is usually less crowded."
"Thank you."
A pause. Then Dele said, softly: "Chinwe."
"Yes."
"I am glad you called."
She did not trust herself to answer that. She said goodbye, ended the call, and sat for a moment in the quiet car. The dispatch center was a low building behind her, its windows catching the new sun. Somewhere inside it, a woman she had never met was beginning her shift at the console Chinwe had occupied all night. The woman would notice the sticky residue of the label on the underside of the keyboard. The woman would wonder, perhaps, and then she would wipe it away, and the wondering would be over.
Chinwe started the car. She drove back to her flat in Yaba, a small place above a tailor's shop, the kind of place where the stairs smelled of fabric and the landlord only fixed things after the third request. She parked, climbed the stairs, unlocked her door. The flat was spare. A narrow bed, a table, a laptop, a suitcase she had not fully unpacked from her last move. On the wall, a single framed photograph: Amaka at twenty-two, standing in front of a wall she had painted herself, grinning, holding a paintbrush like a weapon.
Chinwe showered. She changed. She packed the USB drive into a small padded envelope, along with a printed transcript of the timestamps she had begun to compile. She wrote a short note in block letters on the front of the envelope: EVIDENCE. DO NOT DUPLICATE. She tucked the envelope into the inner pocket of her jacket. Then she took the notebook from the bag, opened it to the page with the count, and added a single line beneath the numbers:
Enugu, today. Dele.
She closed the notebook. She looked at the photograph on the wall.
"I am going to find out what they did to you," she said.
Amaka did not answer. Amaka never answered. But the grin in the photograph stayed, and the paintbrush stayed raised, and for a moment Chinwe allowed herself to imagine that her sister was watching, and that she approved.
Then Chinwe picked up her bag, locked the door, and went to catch the train.
The journey took fourteen hours. She did not sleep. She watched the landscape change from coastal flatness to the green, rolling rise of the east, and she thought about the voices on the USB drive, and she thought about Dele, and she thought about the way her own voice had sounded on the recording, asking where Amaka was.
The train pulled into Enugu just before four in the afternoon. The platform was half-empty, the air softer than Lagos, carrying the smell of red earth and the distant sweetness of something frying. Platform four was quieter still, a strip of concrete shaded by a corrugated awning, and at the far end of it, sitting on a bench with a folded newspaper in his lap, was a man Chinwe had not seen in three years.
Dele Okafor stood when she approached. He was taller than she remembered, or perhaps she had forgotten. His hair was grayer. His face had settled into the kind of stillness that comes from long practice at waiting. He wore a simple button-down shirt and dark trousers, and his shoes were old but well-polished, and he looked, Chinwe thought, exactly like a man who had once been a police inspector and had chosen, in retirement, to remain one in his own way.
He did not embrace her. He extended his hand. She took it. His grip was firm and dry.
"Eze," he said.
"Okafor."
He looked at her for a long moment, taking inventory. "You have not been eating well."
"I have been eating adequately."
"That is not what I said."
A breath of laughter escaped her, brief and involuntary. "I brought what I have."
"Good. We will look at it. But first," he said, gesturing toward the exit, "you will eat a proper meal, and you will sit in a chair that does not move, and you will tell me everything from the beginning."
They walked out of the station together, into the late afternoon light of Enugu, and Dele led her to a small restaurant two streets away, the kind of place with plastic chairs and a menu written in chalk and a radio playing highlife from a speaker mounted above the counter. They ordered. The food arrived quickly: pepper soup, heavy with scent, the broth dark and the meat tender. Chinwe realized, with a small shock, that she was ravenous.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Dele set down his spoon, folded his hands on the table, and looked at her with the patient, unhurried attention of a man who had spent decades listening to people tell him the worst days of their lives.
"Start," he said. "From the moment you arrived in Lagos. Leave nothing out."
And so Chinwe began.
She told him about the missing persons case in the drawer. She told him about the cold case binders. She told him about the surveillance on the dispatch center, and how she had come to volunteer at the call center, and the nights she had spent listening. She told him about the job listing, the interview, the locker assignment, the woman who had been fired the morning Chinwe arrived. She told him about Tope and her bored yawns. She told him about the fluorescent tube and the way it flickered over locker forty-seven.
She did not tell him about the key. Not yet. That would come later, when she had shown him the USB drive, when she had played him the audio, when she had watched his face and understood what he understood.
When she finished, the restaurant was emptying. The highlife on the radio had shifted to something slower. Dele sat very still, his hands still folded, his eyes on the table.
"The USB," he said finally.
Chinwe reached into her jacket and took out the padded envelope. She placed it on the table between them. Dele did not touch it immediately. He looked at it the way a man looks at a thing that might be a gift or a grenade.
"You played the audio," he said.
"Yes."
"You heard a voice that sounded like your sister."
"Not like. Hers. Hers, Dele. I know her voice. I have heard it every day of my life. It was her voice, spliced into recordings of emergency calls."
"And you heard your own voice."
"Yes."
"Asking where she was."
"Yes."
Dele was quiet for a long time. The radio played. A moth circled the overhead bulb. Somewhere in the kitchen, a pot clattered.
"This is either evidence," Dele said at last, "or it is a trap. Possibly both."
"I know."
"If it is evidence, then someone went to considerable lengths to acquire recordings of your sister's voice and recordings of your voice, and they embedded them into emergency call logs, and they placed those logs on a USB drive, and they placed that drive in a place where you, specifically, would eventually find it. That is not casual. That is engineering."
"I know."
"If it is a trap, then the engineering is the point. They wanted you to find it. They wanted you to react. They wanted to see what you would do."
"I know."
Dele looked at her. "And yet you came to Enugu."
"I had to talk to someone."
"You could have called."
"No."
"Why not?"
Chinwe met his eyes. "Because if this is a trap, then I do not know who is listening. And I know that you, of all people, understand the discipline of a conversation that happens only in a room."
Something shifted in Dele's expression. The stillness remained, but the quality of it changed, became less patient and more alert, the way a man looks when he recognizes that the situation has moved beyond theory.
"You are saying they may be monitoring your communications."
"I am saying I do not know. And I am saying that until I know, I am treating everything as if they are."
Dele nodded slowly. He reached for the envelope, then stopped himself, and looked around the restaurant with a careful, unhurried gaze. The few remaining patrons were absorbed in their meals. The woman behind the counter was wiping down the surface near the radio. No one was looking at them. No one had been looking at them.
"Come," Dele said. "We will go to my office. It is small, but it is mine, and I know every corner of it."
He paid the bill. They walked out into the evening. The air was cooler now, carrying the smell of the earth after the heat of the day. Dele's office was a ten-minute walk, on the second floor of a building that had once been a bank, the old vault door still mounted in the wall of the lobby as a kind of architectural joke. The stairs creaked. The hallway smelled of dust and floor polish.
Dele unlocked his door. He switched on the light. The office was small and spare: a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a small kitchenette in the corner with a kettle and two cups. On the walls, framed commendations from his years in the force, and a single photograph of a younger Dele shaking hands with a man Chinwe did not recognize.
"Sit," Dele said. He went to the door and locked it, then checked the window, which faced an airshaft. He drew the curtain. He returned to the desk and, for the first time, opened the envelope.
The USB drive was small and black, unmarked. Dele did not insert it into a computer. Instead, he took a small device from his desk drawer, the size of a matchbox, and attached the drive to it. A small light blinked. He waited. The light turned green.
"It is clean," he said. "No executable. No payload. Just files."
"How can you tell?"
"The device reads the drive's boot sector without executing anything. If there were a malicious payload, the light would be red. It is green."
Chinwe exhaled. She had not realized she was holding her breath.
Dele took a laptop from the desk drawer, an older model, thick and plain. He plugged the drive into it. The folder appeared on the screen. He scrolled through it slowly, his face lit by the glow, his expression unreadable.
"Forty-three files," he said. "All audio. All timestamped. All labeled with call identifiers that match the format used by the Lagos State dispatch system."
"You recognize the format."
"I helped design a version of it, many years ago."
He selected the first file. He did not play it. He looked at the metadata. He opened a second. A third. His frown deepened, not in confusion but in the particular concentration of a man piecing together something he suspects he already understands.
"The timestamps are real," he said. "They correspond to actual emergency calls logged in the Lagos system during the period you were listening."
"You can verify that?"
"I can request the logs. Quietly. Through an old colleague who owes me a favor."
"And the spliced audio?"
He clicked on the tenth file. The room filled, suddenly, with the sound of a woman screaming. Then the scream cut off, replaced by the clean, professional tone of a dispatcher. Then, beneath the dispatcher, like a current beneath a river, another voice, soft and breathy, rising.
Chinwe's whole body went rigid.
Dele stopped the playback.
"Again," Chinwe said. Her voice was not steady.
Dele looked at her. "Are you sure?"
"Again."
He clicked play. The scream. The dispatcher. The voice beneath. This time Chinwe closed her eyes, and she listened not to the sound but to the cadence, the breath, the particular way the voice rose at the end of a phrase, the way a question sounded like an invitation.
It was Amaka. There was no doubt. There was no possibility of doubt. Amaka was alive, or had been alive at the moment this recording was made, and her voice had been captured and placed into a file alongside the screams of strangers.
When the file ended, Chinwe opened her eyes. Dele was watching her with the expression of a man who has seen grief before but never learned to be careless of it.
"She is alive," Chinwe said.
"Or she was."
"When this recording was made."
"When this recording was made."
Chinwe looked at the laptop. The file list glowed on the screen, forty-three small rectangles of sound, each one a small door into a small room.
"Play the others," she said. "All of them."
Dele hesitated. "Chinwe."
"All of them, Dele. I need to know what they did to her."
"It is late."
"It does not matter what time it is."
He studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, and began to play the files, one after another, and Chinwe sat in the small office in Enugu and listened to her sister's voice emerge, again and again, from beneath the voices of strangers in distress.
The forty-three files took an hour and twelve minutes to play in full. Chinwe sat motionless through each one. She did not take notes. She did not speak. She only listened, and the listening hollowed her out, scoop by careful scoop, until by the final file she felt like a shell on a beach, all the living parts long since scattered.
Amaka's voice appeared in thirty-one of the recordings. Sometimes only a word, sometimes a phrase, sometimes the strange melodic underlay that seemed to accompany the screams like a river running beneath a city. Twice, in the files from the December batch, the voice rose clearly enough that even without knowing her, a listener would have heard the particular music of a young woman from Enugu, educated, imaginative, stubborn about the things she believed.
Dele stopped the playback after the final file. The office was very quiet. The air smelled of old paper and the cold tea neither of them had touched.
"Now what?" he asked.
Chinwe looked at her hands. They were not shaking. She noticed this with a small, distant surprise.
"Now I go back to Lagos," she said. "I have to."
"You should not go alone."
"I have gone alone before."
"You went alone before and you did not come back the same."
She did not answer. Dele regarded her for a long moment, then he opened the drawer of his desk and took out a small leather case. From inside the case he withdrew a key.
"This is for the flat on Herbert Macaulay," he said. "The one I keep for clients. It is empty. It is registered under a name that is not mine."
"Dele."
"You will need somewhere to stay that is not your name, not your old address, not anything connected to the woman who left Lagos three years ago. Whoever is running this did not expect you to find these files. They did not expect you to find them tonight. But you have, and by morning they may know."
Chinwe took the key. The metal was cool against her palm.
"I will call you," she said. "Every day. The same time."
"Call me twice. If you do not call me twice, I will come."
"You are retired."
"I am still a man who keeps his promises."
She almost smiled. She had not smiled in a long time. The attempt hurt in a way she had not expected, like stretching a limb that had been held in one position too long.
They did not embrace. They were not that kind of people. But when she stood, he stood also, and they looked at each other across the small office, and something passed between them that did not require touch.
Then Chinwe gathered the small things she had brought into his life for the past three days, the notebook, the pens, the toothbrush, the spare shirt. She put them into the canvas bag. She did not look again at the laptop, but she felt the weight of what it held, and she knew she would carry that weight in a different way for the rest of her life.
She left the flat on Ranger Avenue before dawn. The streets of Enugu were still mostly empty. A few motorcycles moved through the early mist, their headlamps small and yellow. She walked the three kilometers to the motor park, and the walk did what the listening had not, which was to return her body to her, step by step, breath by breath. By the time she reached the park, her legs were tired and her mind was clear, and she was ready to move.
The first bus to Lagos left at five forty-five. She bought a ticket. She did not sleep. The road unspooled through the early morning, and she watched the country change around her, the high plateau of Enugu giving way to the rolling country of the midwest, the farms and small towns and the great green sweep of forest that led, eventually, down to the coastal plain where the air thickened and the light changed and Lagos waited, vast and indifferent, at the edge of the sea.
At Onitsha the bus stopped for thirty minutes. She got down and bought a roasted plantain from a woman at the park entrance, and she ate it standing in the sun, and the sweetness of it was so particular, so much the taste of her childhood, that for a moment she could not move. People moved around her. A man argued with a conductor. A child cried somewhere. A woman in a wrapper balanced a tray of drinks on her head with the ease of long practice. Chinwe stood among them and felt the strange doubleness of being here, in this place she knew, while her sister was wherever her sister was.
The bus pulled out. She did not sleep. The road continued. Somewhere past Ore, her phone buzzed with a text from Dele. Three words only: Be careful, nne.
She did not reply. She put the phone back into her bag and looked out the window, and the country kept changing, and the light shifted, and at last, in the late afternoon, with the sky heavy and gray above the lagoon, the bus entered Lagos.
The city received her the way the city always received her, with noise, with exhaust, with the particular press of too many people in too small a space. She let herself be carried by it for an hour, from the motor park to a danfo to the quiet side street in Yaba where the flat was. The building was unremarkable, a small block of flats from the seventies, the kind of building that holds its tenants without ever quite acknowledging them. The key worked. The door opened onto a narrow room with white walls and a single bed and a window that looked out onto a concrete yard.
She put her bag down. She did not unpack. She stood at the window and looked at the yard and let the city sounds fill the room, the distant horn, the closer argument, the generator two buildings over that would not stop until midnight.
She took out her notebook. She wrote the address from the recording, the address the woman had whispered in the dark, the address that might mean something or might mean nothing. She wrote the words the woman had said. She wrote the phrase the woman had used. Amaka nwere m. The only person I have.
She sat with the notebook open for a long time. Then she closed it, and she sat in the quiet of the small flat, and she waited for the night to come so that she could begin.
The emergency hub operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The night shift began at ten. At eleven, the dispatch floor would be staffed by a reduced team, the work slower, the calls fewer, the corridors emptier. She had learned this in her time investigating them. She had learned where the cameras were and where the cameras were not. She had learned the rhythm of the place, the way it breathed at night, the way its attention loosened.
She would go in at eleven. She would not go in as a visitor. She would go in as a call. She had arranged it already, before she left Enugu, through a contact who owed her a favor and did not ask what the favor was for. A false report. A fabricated emergency. A reason for a team to be dispatched to a place where no emergency existed, while Chinwe, somewhere else in the building, went to the basement where the recording equipment was kept, the equipment that had somehow been mislabeled, somehow archived, somehow forgotten, and she would find what was there to find.
She did not know what she would find. She did not know if she would find anything. She did not know if the man who had sent the file would still be there, or if the woman who had whispered the address was still alive, or if her sister was still alive, or if any of the forty-three voices were still alive.
She only knew that she had to try. She had carried the weight of the not-knowing for three years. She had carried the guilt of the story that went wrong. She had carried the absence of her sister the way a person carries a missing limb, the phantom sensation always there, the reaching toward something that was not there anymore.
She would not be able to rest until she had tried. She knew this about herself. She had always known it.
At ten forty-five, she changed her clothes. She put on dark trousers, a dark shirt, flat shoes. She put the phone, the notebook, the small torch, the small knife she had carried for three years without using, into the pockets of her jacket. She did not look in the mirror. She did not need to see herself to know what she looked like. She looked like a woman going to do a thing she had been preparing to do for a long time.
She stepped out of the flat. The street was quiet. The generator two buildings over had stopped. The only sound was the distant hum of the city, the vast animal sound of Lagos at night, breathing in its sleep.
She began to walk.