Static. A kitchen. Stew is cooking over a pot. A woman stirs with a massive wooden spoon. A hand—Ify-Peter’s hand—reaches over. The woman smacks it. Static.
“So,” says the first man, pulling at the gloves on his hands. “Let’s talk about that higher purpose of yours.” He walks to a side wall and comes back with something buzzing and sizzling in the palm of one hand.
Ify-Peter squirms in their seat, then thrashes as the interrogator comes near. When the interrogator is close enough, they see that there are bees buzzing in the man’s hand, their metal carapaces glistening with light from a source they can’t find. “Please.” More thrashing. “Please, please no more.”
Static blitzes out the vision, then everything comes back.
“We don’t believe your story,” the second interrogator says.
The first kneels before Ify-Peter. “If this group massacred your village, then why would you join them? Why did we find you in their camp?” His voice is low and almost playful. “It doesn’t make any sense. A proper victim would seek revenge against those who wronged him. Like a man. Are you a man?”
Ify-Peter chokes back a sob.
“I asked you a question. Are you a man?”
More wordless weeping.
“Very well then.” The interrogator pulls a knife out of a pocket on his vest and cuts away Ify-Peter’s pant legs, exposing their thighs to the cold. Then the interrogator upends the swarm of metallic bees onto their legs, where they burrow beneath the skin, and pain sears through their entire body, spiking at the base of their brain, turning everything to gray static, and suddenly—
Ify is back in the hospital room, gasping. The other end of her cord lies on the floor. She staggers into the chair and forces herself to take several deep breaths. She presses her palms to her eyes, trying to block out the vision and the experience she’s just had, racked by sobs that shake her shoulders. She should have been prepared. She curses herself, for not expecting to intrude into a painful memory. Then she straightens. That memory could belong to anyone. Peter is a synth, a combination of other people’s neural data cobbled together to generate enough information to simulate humanness. It’s all fake. That couldn’t have been Peter. With this, she’s able to take the pain she experienced and box it and stuff that box deep in her mind. She puts her fingers to her nose, and they come back red. Hurriedly, she snatches tissues from the dispenser above Peter’s bedstand and dabs at the nosebleed.
Then she takes off her Bonder, folds it, and stuffs it back into her pocket.
When she looks down, Peter is staring straight at her. His eyes didn’t flutter open. One moment, they’re closed; the next, they’re not. The more she observes him, the more like a machine he seems. “You lied,” she says, trying to make her voice as hard as possible. “Your family is not Igbo. You are Efik. Or you would be if you weren’t a synth. But you were a synth, made for war and aligned with rebels. Then you were captured. Who’s to say that you were actually tortured?”
He says nothing. His face doesn’t move.
“Because you are a synth, you are not subject to human rights protections under Alabastrine law. Your very existence is a danger to everyone here.” She searches his face for a reaction. “You are not human. Once the authorities are notified of your presence, you will be arrested and deported.”
“Please,” he says, and his voice sounds just like it did in the memory of his torture.
Ify steels her heart against him.
“You made them torture me.”
“What?”
His words are weightless. Breathy things that a strong wind could blow away, yet Ify feels as though each one could pulverize her. “It was beneath the cell where I was being held where I saw you.” He licks cracked lips. “I remember. I know it was you.”
“You don’t know—”
“Please.” He raises a hand limply, as though to stop her. It immediately falls back onto the bed. “I know it was you. The men obeyed you and the pilot you were with. If they are torturing me, it is because you are making them.” His words don’t match his tone. The words should be coming from someone angry, someone threatening vengeance. But his voice is one of resignation and soft certainty, the type of voice with which the elderly speak when they know they don’t have much longer to live. Tears brim in his eyes. “But I am not hating you. I should be hating you, but I am not. I should be wanting to kill you, but I am not. Even while others that I am with are wanting to be killing you and doing horrible thing to you, I am not.” He holds her gaze. As weak as he looks in that bed, he refuses to break her gaze. “You are leaving the war. You are surviving and leaving. And you are coming here. Why am I not able to do the same? You are doing horrible thing during war, just like I am doing horrible thing during war.”
“We are not the same.”
A tear slides down his face, drops from his chin. “But I survived. And I left. And I came here.”
“You are a weapon. You will always be a weapon. You can’t change. And this?” She gestures at the entirety of the hospital room. “You doing what you did? It changes nothing. I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to manipulate them into caring for you. You want them to hold on to you even tighter, so you do something like this.” She’s getting angrier than she intended, and tears spring anew to her eyes. This isn’t my fault, she tells herself. “But it’s not going to work. Because I”—she jabs a finger into her chest—“I am here to protect them. I know what you are, and I won’t let you hurt them.”
She leaves before she can say any more, stomping to the door and waiting frustratedly for it to slide open. When she stops outside, she remembers that Paige and Amy are on the bench right next to her. She wipes the wetness from her eyes and stuffs her bloodstained tissue in her pocket.
“Oh, Ify,” Amy says, rising to hug her.
She thinks I’m in mourning over Peter, Ify realizes. A part of her wants to tell her the truth, that she just lived through what may be Peter’s very real trauma, that she was transported back to a time she’s done everything in her power to forget, when she was complicit in exactly those same acts of torture. She wants to tell Amy that she believes a part of her, however small, is responsible for the boy in that hospital bed, for turning him into what he is, for creating him in the first place. War does that. It is the pot and it is all the ingredients for the stew, and what gets spooned out and put on the plate is Peter. But she says nothing. Instead, she accepts Amy’s hug in silence.
It is not her fault.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Except for a few attendants making their rounds up and down the rows of beds, Ify is alone in the ward housing the refugee children. The lights have dimmed. Ify figures it’s part of a power-saving measure now that the kids have been marked down as unresponsive to light. She makes sure that the attendants are far enough away that they won’t see what it is she’s about to do.