The air in the stairwell was cold and dead. It was a stark contrast to the thick, recycled atmosphere of the flat they had just left. For three days, that small apartment had been their entire world—a prison, a sanctuary, a sickroom. Stepping out of it felt like being born into a new, terrifying reality. The freedom was a physical thing, a cold shock against Adekunle's skin, laced with the metallic scent of danger. He gripped the steel file tighter, its familiar weight the only thing tethering him to the moment.
They descended the stairs in absolute silence, moving like ghosts in their own home. Each step was deliberate, each breath held. Adekunle could feel the vibrations of the building through the soles of his shoes, a place that now felt hollowed out, occupied only by the lonely and the dead. The weeping they had heard from the second floor was gone. He tried not to think about what that silence meant.
Emerging from the back of the building into the moonlit yard was like stepping onto an empty stage after the audience has fled a terrible play. The smouldering embers in the fire drum cast a faint, pulsing glow, illuminating the pathetic detritus of Ikenna's brief reign: a shattered bottle, a discarded chicken bone, the stained mattress. It was the camp of a defeated army.
They didn't cross the front yard. Instead, Ben led them back the way they had come, to the high wall at the rear of the compound. The climb was faster this time, their muscles primed with adrenaline and a desperate sense of purpose. As Adekunle swung his leg over the top, he paused, looking back at the dark block of flats. On the third floor, a single window was a black, vacant eye. Inside, Funke was alone, her life a guttering candle flame they were racing to protect. The weight of that responsibility settled on him, heavier than any backpack. He would not fail.
They dropped into the familiar darkness of the back alley and began to move. Their destination was two streets away, a journey that in the old world would have taken five minutes. Now, it was a treacherous expedition through enemy territory. The city at night was a different beast entirely. The silence was vast, a living entity that made every small sound—the crunch of glass under his worn trainers, the distant, mournful cry of a dog, the rustle of wind through a discarded newspaper—feel amplified and significant.
The first street was a gauntlet of shadows. They hugged the walls, moving from the darkness of one doorway to the next. The moon was a liability, casting long, sharp shadows that could betray them as easily as they could hide them. Every flicker of movement was a potential threat. A loose curtain flapping in a broken window looked like a lunging figure; a plastic bag skittering across the road was a stalking animal. Adekunle's mind, the philosopher's mind, was now fully enslaved to the primal instincts of his body. His hearing was sharper, his sense of smell more acute. He could smell the rot of uncollected garbage and something else, the faint, sweet perfume of night-blooming jasmine from a garden someone had once lovingly tended. The contrast was sickening.
As they reached the end of the first street, Ben held up a hand, pulling them into the deep shadow of an overturned van. He pointed. Across the intersection, they saw the aftermath of the event Adekunle had only heard about. Blade's kingdom.
A small provision shop had been ransacked, its contents strewn across the pavement. But this wasn't the chaotic, opportunistic mess of a mob. This was the cold, efficient work of an organized force. Empty ammunition casings glinted like metallic insects on the ground. Dark, sticky patches stained the pavement near the doorway. There were no bodies, but the story was written in the silence. The previous owners of this small territory had been absorbed or erased. This was the larger world they now inhabited, a world of competing predators where mercy was a fatal weakness. Adekunle felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. They were so far out of their depth.
"This way," Ben whispered, pulling him away from the scene and down another side street, a longer, more circuitous route. He was avoiding the main roads, avoiding the places where a group like Blade's might still be operating.
They moved through a maze of residential lanes. The houses here were dark, their occupants either gone, dead, or hiding in absolute silence just as they had been. It was a neighbourhood of ghosts. Once, Adekunle stumbled, his foot catching on something soft. He looked down and saw a child's teddy bear lying in the gutter, its button eyes staring up at the moonless sky. The smallness of the tragedy, the sheer innocence of the lost object, hit him harder than the scene of the ransacked shop. He felt a lump form in his throat and forced it down. Emotion was a luxury he could not afford.
Finally, they reached the end of the last side street. Ben stopped them behind the corner of a building, peering cautiously around the edge. Before them lay their destination: Al-Hassan's Superstore.
It was a fortress. The building took up half the block, a modern, two-story structure of concrete and glass. But the glass was dark, and the entire storefront was protected by a single, formidable sheet of corrugated steel—the industrial-grade shutter Ikenna had spoken of. It ran the full width of the store, its edges seated in thick steel guide rails that were bolted directly into the concrete pillars of the building. There were no external locks, no handles, no visible weaknesses. It was a seamless, impenetrable wall of metal.
Adekunle's heart sank. Ikenna had been right. It was a vault. They could have stood there for a week with tyre irons and they wouldn't have made a dent. The flicker of hope he had nurtured began to die, replaced by a cold, hollow despair. They had come all this way for nothing.
He looked at his uncle, expecting to see the same defeat on his face. But Ben wasn't looking at the shutter as a whole. His eyes, the eyes of a lifelong engineer, were narrowed, focused on one specific point. He was scanning the area above the shutter, near the top right corner.
"What is it?" Adekunle whispered.
"The motor," Ben breathed, his voice tight with a sudden, intense excitement. He pointed. "Look. See that square panel, just below the roofline? It's newer than the rest of the wall. The colour is slightly off."
Adekunle followed his gaze. He saw it. A three-foot-square metal plate, held in place by a series of heavy-duty bolts. It was the external maintenance panel for the shutter's powerful electric motor.
"That is the brain," Ben explained, his voice gaining strength, the despair replaced by the thrill of a problem to be solved. "The power comes in there, the control circuits are in there, and most importantly, the manual override clutch is in there. In the old world, if the power went out, that is how you would open the shutter. You would get a key from the manager, open that panel, disengage the motor's clutch with a lever, and then you could raise the heavy shutter with a chain fall."
A new, more powerful wave of hope surged through Adekunle, so potent it almost made him dizzy. "So we can get in?"
"Not like this," Ben said, crushing the hope as quickly as it had appeared. "That panel is half-inch steel. The bolts are hardened. You see the heads? They are not standard. They are security bolts, star-shaped. We have nothing that can turn them. And even if we did, we would need a wrench with a long handle, something to give us leverage to break the torque. We don't have the tools."
The hope died again, this time leaving a bitter, ashen taste in Adekunle's mouth. Of course. It was never going to be that simple.
They stood there for a long time, two mice staring at the locked door of the cheese pantry. They had found the way in, but they did not possess the key.
"The tools we need…" Adekunle began, the shape of a new, even more dangerous plan forming in his mind.
"I know," Ben said, his voice grim. He had already arrived at the same impossible conclusion. "They are in the shop."
Their old shop. The one on the main road, in the heart of the chaos. The place they had fled what felt like a lifetime ago. To get the medicine for Funke, they first had to commit to another journey, a journey back into the very belly of the beast, to retrieve the heavy-duty wrenches and socket sets that were their only chance.
Ben leaned back against the wall, the weight of their predicament pressing down on him. He looked utterly exhausted, but his eyes were clear. The path forward was insane, a suicidal long shot. But it was a path. It was better than the slow, agonizing surrender of waiting for death in their third-floor prison.
"Okay," Ben said, his voice a low, steady rumble of resolve. "One more trip. We go to the shop. We get the tools. We come back here." He looked at Adekunle, his gaze intense. "We do this, and we do not fail. For Funke."
Adekunle nodded, the single word a silent vow. He looked back at the fortress of a supermarket. It no longer seemed impossible. It was just a lock. And now, they knew where to find the key.