Neo-Accra is the most advanced city on earth and it is built on top of something it stopped naming. The towers are carved stone and brass, the waterfalls are load-bearing, the gardens are older than the foundations, and the sky is thick with palm-sized nano drones that nobody thinks of as watching. Then one morning the drums stop.

ELI is eighteen. He is sent out on foot to find the last Ewe shaman still keeping the Agbadza, and what starts as an errand becomes an apprenticeship: a mark of ash that machines cannot resolve, a shield of feathers that eats lightning, two Malinois — one flesh, one steel — that have to be earned rather than commanded, and a rhythm that the most sophisticated systems ever built cannot keep time with.

There are no guns in this game. The weapon is a drum.