I am calling her Ify.
CHAPTER
15
In the hall outside the operating room, Paige and Amy sit, Amy with her arm wrapped around Paige’s shoulder and Paige with her face buried in her hands. Amy looks up at Ify as she approaches. Her eyes are redder than Ify has ever seen them. Amy tries to get up from her seat to hug Ify, but Paige has fallen onto Amy’s lap. Her weeping has grown quieter, but her body shakes even more. So Amy just gives Ify a look of soft pleading. A look that says, Please help us. However you can, please help us.
Ify’s resolve stiffens, and she looks through the window and into Peter’s hospital room. All white, even the cyberized nurse who attends to him. The door slides open, and the nurse looks up, golden hair in a bob framing an angular face that ends in a pointed chin. She looks like a cartoon drawing of a nurse.
“May I help you?” The voice is too robotic for Ify’s tastes, like the voices announcing a rail line stop. Please mind the gap while descending from the train.
“I am visiting the patient.” She presses a button at her waist, and out of her eyes beams a holographic projection of her name and medical credentials.
“This is the trauma ward, not the neurology wing.” Rudeness or a mechanical lack of decorum, Ify can’t tell. The nurse stands before Ify and doesn’t move. It doesn’t help Ify give her the benefit of the doubt that this half-droid is coded as white. “Your pass does not permit you access to this patient.”
“My pass?” Ify grits her teeth, clenches her fists. In that moment, she doesn’t want to dress down the cyberized nurse who’s refusing her, she wants to hit her in the face. But she calms herself. The last thing she needs prior to her graduation and official appointment as assistant director of neurology and chief of the Refugee Program at this very hospital is documentation of a physical altercation with a half-droid who doesn’t merit the effort. “I’m family,” Ify says at last with a sigh. And it sounds like a concession. Like admitting defeat. She calls up her biographical information, and the nurse’s eyes go blank as she, undoubtedly, scans a list of permitted visitors behind her retinas.
“Very well,” the nurse says, before walking past Ify and leaving the room.
Ify swallows the anger. It burns her throat and stomach on the way down. A younger, less acclimated Ify might have looked into how to get that nurse fired or transferred to more odious work or might even have attempted to hack the nurse herself, enter her braincase and wreak havoc in direct violation of not only hospital protocol but Alabastrine law. But now, she gives herself several deep, long breaths and lets her shoulders settle. Her fists unclench. She has already forgotten the nurse.
When she gets to Peter’s bedside, she sees a boy without any visible wounds. MeTro sealant has healed the incisions running along his wrists. The blood has been cleaned from his body. Ify knows that were she to run her fingers through Peter’s hair, she wouldn’t even find red flecks along his scalp. The bullet scar remains, however. Like it is as natural a part of him as his fingers and toes and the hair under his armpits.
There’s a chair beside his bed, but Ify refuses to take it. Nor does she sit on the ledge where visitors are supposed to put their gifts for patients. Ify imagines every room on this floor has one, as though it’s expected that patients here will have loving family and friends showering them with presents and well wishes. As though everyone on this floor has someone who cares for them. Ify doesn’t know why the assumption annoys her. Maybe it’s lingering anger at the nurse’s racism, algorithm-powered or not. Maybe it’s how much the problem of the refugee patients is needling the back of her mind. Maybe it’s that whenever she thinks of Peter, she’s assaulted by a basketful of emotions: anger at his attempts at manipulating Amy and Paige, anger at her own hesitation in getting rid of him, guilt at whatever role she’s played in putting him here. Still, she can’t quite get rid of the feeling that this too is part of his plan, that this is what he’s willing to do to stay in their home and on this Colony. That this is checkmate in the game between him and Ify.
Her cramps have started again. She closes her eyes against the pain, then exhales slowly until it shrinks into something she can handle.
She pulls her Bonder from her coat pocket. Maybe if she can see what dreams he is dreaming while sedated, she can get a clue as to his motivations. Unlock more of the mystery of him. Were she cyberized, she’d be able to plug directly into Peter, but this visor-shaped device whose edges she slips over her ears has to do the job of an external link. She presses the button that lifts Peter’s bed into a slight incline, then searches the back of his bed for the opening that circles his outlet. When she finds it, she plugs her loose cord in, Bonding with him, and the world around her pixelates then falls apart block by block until darkness surrounds her.
She hears murmurs. Faraway voices, then static, then they become clearer. Words. She can hear their words.
“He says that when the militants came to his village, they took hostages. He also told us that his little sister was standing next to him and offered them five naira to let their mother go.” A snicker. “Apparently, it was all that she had.”
Another voice: “What is a child from the bush doing with five naira? An Efik family north of the Redlands? Probably stolen.”
The first voice drones as though the speaker is reading from a report. “During his initial interrogation, he claims the men were led to a room farther down the hall in a”—a pause while he scrolls through his notes—“a school building. The men were brought to the math room. Subject claims his father was led there with thirteen other men and shot. Allegedly, their bodies were dumped out of the window.” The speaker lets out a bureaucratic sigh. “This boy is the village’s only survivor.”
“Unlucky for him,” the second voice says, chuckling. “I am betting that he claims that God spared him because he only spared those with a higher purpose. Well, we will show him his higher purpose.”
Static distorts the voice for a second. Then a brief image of jungle, then a sunbathed road filled with pedestrians and vendors shouting their wares from their stalls. Then static.
Ify’s vision becomes clearer, and she sees that she is in a dark, dank room. Somewhere underground. Maybe abandoned. Water drips into a puddle somewhere outside of her vision. When she looks down, she sees that she’s bound to a metal chair. She’s in Peter’s body. Sounds echo, but she believes this is the type of place where sounds are made that aren’t supposed to be heard aboveground.
“Well, let’s get this over with, and we can bring him back to his cell upstairs.”
Two men, the speakers, walk into the room, and Ify feels Peter’s fingers clench into fists, where they’re bound behind his chair. They wear all black and don’t bother hiding their faces. Their hands are gloved. One of them is older, his face like it was carved from obsidian it’s so expressionless. The other is already grinning, and Ify, in Peter’s body, feels their heart race. Their jaw clenches. Tears spring to their eyes. Even though their legs are bound to those of the metal chair, their feet scuffle madly against the ground.