CHAPTER
11
Ify walks up and down the rows of children, checking for the same thing—vital signs—while Grace strides at her side. “Have they shown any trace of plague? Or disease? If necessary, we will need to quarantine them.”
Grace has her tablet out in front of her and clicks through tab after tab. “No sign, Doctor.”
Ify doesn’t have the time or energy to correct her.
“The first few cases were staggered. Some of them were children who had been living in Alabast or adjoining Colonies for several years. They were students at local primary and secondary schools. Their parents were employed locally, although many of them had jobs as unskilled labor. There is no sign in any of the scans of underlying neurological conditions.”
Ify stops in her tracks. “Are they all red-blood?”
Grace nearly runs into her. “Um, Doctor. By law, we are forbidden to check. I had just assumed . . .”
“If they have brought a disease with them, perhaps it is something with a delayed fuse. Or worse, like cholera.” Ify stops at the bed of a boy who looks like he has just begun high school. Hair comes in patches above his lip and on his chin. He has a cleft lip, and his hair—grown long—is like a pool of ink on his pillow. She picks up his wrist, raises it a few inches over his forehead, pauses, looking for any reaction, then drops it.
It lands with a smack on the boy’s face, and Grace winces. When she recovers, she returns to her tablet and says, “They are totally passive. Mute, unable to eat or drink, incontinent, and”—looking down at the boy while Ify leaves his arm draped across his forehead—“unreactive to physical stimuli or pain.”
“When was the first case?” Ify asks, her voice devoid of emotion. She now has a puzzle in front of her to focus on. She’s been looking for this.
Grace taps a sequence into her tablet. “Someone with similar symptoms appears in the system from six years ago.”
“Is that the first?”
“The first that matches up, Doctor.”
“Let me see.” Ify snatches the tablet from Grace and scrolls through the information. There is a video file attached, and Ify opens it to a holographic projection of news camera footage. The camera follows a team of medical professionals around something on a stretcher as they hurry across tarmac to load it onto a shuttle craft. People dressed in worn-down clothes—the family?—crowd around the stretcher and follow it into the craft, some of them falling onto the tarmac in tears. The stretcher is loaded onto the shuttle and vanishes as the lid closes. “What is happening?”
“Deportation,” Grace says, quietly. “The child was deported. His father’s asylum application had been denied, as had his brother’s. The three of them were sent back to Vanuatu.”
Ify looks up in surprise. “Vanuatu? But there is no Vanuatu. That country has been underwater for . . .” The implications all hit Ify at once. She looks around her at row after row of beds and gulps. “Grace?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Pull up the immigration status of the patients’ families. And mark those who have received deportation notices within the past three months.” As she says this, she recalls the news broadcast of the government’s new stance on the migrants. And she recalls the feeling that had enveloped her, the idea that she’d solved a puzzle, that she’d found a way to get rid of a problem. And guilt grips her heart.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
After Grace leaves to do more research, Ify wanders the rows of hospital beds alone. Or almost alone. A few beds have family members crowded around them. Their clothes seem to reflect all manner of success or lack thereof. Some of the people attending to the comatose children or hovering over them wear slim-fitting patterned tunics with pleated pants. Others hold battered workers’ caps in grease-stained fingers. Some have small vacuum-sealed containers of food with them, aromatic scents wafting over to Ify and speaking to her of places filled with brown people, black people, on a floor crowded around a massive dish or a table and eating and talking and complaining and laughing. Food is forbidden in this part of the east wing, but Ify doesn’t stop them. Maybe that family is hoping the smell of home will waken their child. At one bed stands a child who looks only a few years older than the one in the hospital bed. They wear the school uniform of one of Alabast’s most prestigious secondary schools, and they are speaking in hushed whispers to the comatose child. It is not English. Ify scrolls through the options in her translator and finds it: Gujarati.
They really are from all parts of Earth. From the scattered whispering and murmurs and prayers and quiet pleadings, Ify hears Tamil, Persian, Pashto, Javanese, Tongan, and half a dozen other languages. Including Igbo.
She turns, and almost by the far wall, far enough to appear as a speck to the unaided eye, there he is. She uses the embedded camera on the Whistle attached to her temple to zoom in, and he appears in high definition before her eyes. Lanky limbs awkward, like he’s folded in on himself in the chair next to the hospital bed. She knows it’s him because of the bullet scar on the side of his head. There’s no one else it can be.
Peter.
A gasp catches in her throat. A cord snakes from the back of his neck into the cerebral monitor by the patient’s bed. How could she have not seen that outlet before? Ify thinks back to that time on Paige and Amy’s porch with him sitting next to her, then him jumping down a few steps and pleading, face to face, that she not reveal his lies, then him threatening to expose her past as a war criminal. Had he somehow managed to disguise it? There was no hair to hide it. Ify squints, then realizes her foolishness and zooms in further with her Whistle’s camera.
The cord isn’t connected to a cerebral monitor. It vanishes beneath the bed. Ify’s jaw tightens.
It’s connected directly to the patient.
The patchy skin. The outlet. She’s sure that were she to cut open the skin of his forearm, she would see gears and pistons and oil.
She’s seen a boy like him once before.
Lying in a rattling truckbed, part of a caravan passing through dark and heavy jungle, refugees either sleeping in one of the trailers or walking alongside, children playing bulubu by moonlight. She has a tablet in her lap and a pistol in her messenger bag, and she’s on her way to kill the woman who murdered her family. And sitting across from her is a boy with a touchboard clutched close to his chest, patchy skin on his arms, voice hoarse with disuse, rifle in his lap. A boy she has seen kill an entire group of marauders and show no remorse because he claimed he was doing it to protect the caravan as it wound its way to the refugee intake center near Enugu. The boy’s vitiligo, the way he only spoke in the present tense, as though everything that had happened or would happen to him were always happening to him, as though the war was simultaneously a memory and a thing still raging in his mind, as though he saw the ceasefire as a thing that could never last, as though he knew war was returning. His name had been Agu, and he had saved the woman whom Ify had tried to kill, the same woman who had then abandoned Ify to a lonely future in the Colonies. Agu, who had loved to make music with his touchboard. Agu, who had been forged out of other people’s parts and made a killer.