📍 Ilorin Ridge — Minutes After Dawn
Fog drifted across the ridge in long, slow breaths, as though the earth itself were exhaling after holding tension for too long. The storm had passed, but its fingerprints lingered on everything—mud glistening under pale dawn, the metallic smell of rain-soaked metal, the electric sting of ozone clinging to the air like a ghost.
Bayo Adeniran stood with his hands on his thighs, bent slightly forward, gasping against the cold morning wind. Sweat and rainwater mingled on his face. His ribs still throbbed from the night's chaos, but he barely felt the pain. The weight of everything they had seen, everything they had survived, pressed harder than bruises ever could.
Behind him, Tope wiped water from her cheeks—she wasn't sure if it was rain, sweat, or the remnants of last night's fear. Her tablet flickered between dying light and faint blue pulses, struggling to reboot after the surge Ayo sent through the network. Her fingers trembled, but she forced them steady. She had to be strong. For Ayo. For all of them.
Eagle-One stood several meters away, scanning the horizon with disciplined precision. His boots were soaked through. His jacket clung to his frame. But his posture remained the same: upright, alert, unbroken. He was a soldier carved out of vigilance.
The ridge below stretched toward a series of farmland plots and abandoned structures, all softened by the morning fog. Somewhere in that fog, Bayo imagined the echoes of the network's awakening still humming like a heart that refused to stop beating.
"Signal stabilizing…" Tope whispered, tapping the edge of the tablet. The screen flickered again, then steadied, casting a dim glow across her face.
Bayo straightened and stepped beside her. "What do you see?"
The familiar pulses—Ayo's soft blue rhythm—rolled across the screen in waves. But beneath them, something else throbbed: a scattered, fragmented dance of light.
At first, Bayo thought it was interference. Static. Noise. But the lights moved in imperfect unison, overlapping and drifting apart like mismatched breaths struggling to synchronize.
Tope swallowed, her eyes widening.
"That's not Ayo," she said. "It's too… irregular. Too wide."
"Explain," Eagle-One said, stepping closer.
"It's coming from multiple points," Tope murmured. "Small signals. Clumsy. But they're trying to match him."
"Trying?" Bayo echoed.
"To breathe with him," she said softly.
A moment passed—soft, powerful. The air around them felt different. Warmer. Fuller.
Bayo lifted his head.
Across the ridge, faint radio static rose like distant murmurs. Old transistor sets, handheld traffic radios, broken market speakers… all flickering awake.
He heard it.
He felt it.
He understood.
Nigeria wasn't just hearing Ayo.
Nigeria was answering a nine-year-old boy.
Bayo exhaled shakily, the breath leaving him like relief and grief intertwined.
"He did it," he whispered.
"No," Tope said. Her voice carried a tremor—not fear, but awe. "They did it. He lit something none of us could."
Bayo turned toward her. Her eyes were glassy—wet not with tears, but with the fullness of someone who had almost lost the most precious thing she carried in her heart.
Tope looked away quickly, as though ashamed of being seen in that vulnerability. Bayo didn't press her. He knew what she was fighting inside—the part of her that still felt like the frightened sixteen-year-old girl who suddenly became a mother. The part of her that had wanted to do right but never had enough air to breathe.
Eagle-One raised a hand suddenly—sharp, silent.
"Movement," he whispered.
A low engine grumbled through the mist. A motorcycle's headlamp glimmered faintly, cutting a thin line of light through the fog. As it neared, the beam flashed in a pattern.
Three short.
Pause.
Two long.
Ayo's rhythm.
But Bayo felt it immediately—this wasn't Ayo.
Tope stepped behind him, protective instinct overwhelming reason. Her free hand clenched reflexively, as though shielding a child who wasn't there.
The motorcycle sputtered as it reached the ridge. The rider dismounted slowly, removed her helmet, and let it fall into the mud.
The woman who stood before them had eyes like someone who had survived too much to be impressed by fear. Dust streaks clung to her sleeves. Her breath formed small clouds in the morning air.
"You're Bayo Adeniran," she said. Not curious. Certain.
Bayo exchanged a quick glance with Eagle-One, then nodded. "Yes."
"I'm Rabi Dan-Musa," she said. "From Kano."
Tope's breath caught. "Kano? That corridor is under heavy drone lockdown."
"For people," Rabi replied quietly. "Not for truth."
She reached into her inner jacket pocket and pulled out a USB drive, its casing scratched and wet.
"This is the oxygen procurement file for all northern zones," she said. "Altered entries, diverted shipments, ghost clinics. I downloaded it before the sweep drones reached our office. When I heard the boy's message…" Her voice cracked, then steadied. "I followed it."
Bayo felt the world tilt slightly.
"You know about Ayo?"
"In Kano," Rabi said, "everyone heard him. My son woke me saying, 'Maman, the air is speaking.'" Her eyes glistened. "I haven't heard hope in his voice for years."
Tope's hand tightened around her tablet. Something inside her—something maternal and ancient—ached.
She remembered Ayo at five, sitting on the floor with wires and batteries, building small "breath boxes" he said could "help people breathe in bad places." She remembered telling him life wasn't that simple. She remembered his quiet answer:
"Then maybe life is wrong."
She blinked back tears.
Rabi stepped closer and pressed the USB against Bayo's chest.
"You're not fighting Lagos anymore," she said. "You're fighting a country-sized darkness. And we're ready to fight with you."
Thunder rumbled in the distance—not new storms, but old ones waking.
Eagle-One checked the sky. "Drone sweep incoming in three minutes."
Tope breathed out shakily. "What now?"
Bayo closed his fingers around the USB. The weight was small, but it pressed against him like a verdict. Mud smeared across his knuckles. Rain fell in thin, reluctant drops.
"We go to Abuja," he said finally.
Eagle-One stiffened. "That is a death route."
"Then let death meet truth halfway," Bayo replied. "That city signed these oxygen contracts. That's where the rot began."
Tope's throat tightened.
She had lost too much already. She could not lose Ayo. She could not lose Bayo. But she also knew, deep down, that there was no other road left to walk.
"The cost of breath…" she murmured.
"…is finally coming due," Bayo finished.
Fog below thinned, revealing the highway stretching toward the capital—a long wound of asphalt slicing through fields, villages, and buried secrets.
Rabi looked toward it, jaw set.
"If you're heading to Abuja," she said, "you'll need more than evidence."
Bayo nodded. "Then help us gather it."
Far away, in a burned-out café in Ibadan, a nine-year-old boy bent over a flickering screen as the generator coughed back to life. His small hands danced over the keys—instinctive, intuitive, brilliant in a way that frightened even him.
When the screen stabilized, he sat back and listened.
He heard their coordinates.
He heard their breath.
He heard the heartbeat of a country learning to inhale again.
He smiled—a small, tired smile.
"They're moving," he whispered. "Good."
He leaned forward and sent another pulse into the network—stronger, more certain.
Across Nigeria, signals flickered awake. Radios hummed with strange clarity. People paused in their morning routines, feeling something they couldn't name but recognized in their bones.
Nigeria inhaled.
The storm had not passed.
It had simply remembered its purpose.