“And who have endured the same trauma,” Ify finishes.
“Yes, Doctor.”
They arrive at the door to the man’s room. “Thank you, Grace.”
After a stunned moment, Grace permits a small, embarrassed smile. “Certainly, Doctor.”
As they walk in, an aerial drone assistant hovers before the man’s face, adjusting the wires connected to his temples.
Mr. de Freitas sits up in his bed. “Doctor?”
Ify surprises herself by smiling. “Yes, Mr. de Freitas.”
“I can see!” he shouts. “I can see! My eyes!” He puts his fingers to his face, touches his cheeks and his chin, his eyelids. “I can see again.” He can’t stop touching his face, even his ears and his small afro. “They gave me new eyes! I can see!”
Ify notes the small scars by his temple, the mark of recent cyberization. “And your adjustment to light sensitivity? Is the light too bright?”
“Light? Oh my God.” He laughs. “Light. I can see light!”
“Careful!” She rushes out to touch his arm. “Please do not stare directly at it. You may damage your new retinas. They are made to be more durable than natural eyes, but that does not mean they are indestructible.”
He stares at Ify for a dazed second before letting out a full-bellied chuckle. “Yes. Of course. Not indestructible.” His chuckle turns into a string of cackles. “Of course. Of course.” His voice grows softer, filled with awe. “I thought I would never see again. After the things I had seen, I thought I never wanted to see anything, but I can see. Thank God, I can see. God is good all the time!”
Ify smiles, even as tears fill her eyes. “And all the time, God is good.”
Tears spill down the man’s cheeks. “Will . . . will crying damage the retinas too?”
Ify takes the man’s hand in hers. “No, Mr. de Freitas. It is okay to cry,” she says, as though she’s giving herself permission as well.
Maybe Grace was right. Maybe this thing happening right now—the same thing Ify witnessed when the Cantonese woman had motioned Grace close and whispered lovingly into her ear about the food market—maybe this thing is important too.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The bot sits unactivated in its slot on the wall of the bathroom stall as Ify removes her menstrual cup and deposits it into the bin that sterilizes them. Most have the bot conduct the entire process automatically while they recline and read or let their mind wander. But Ify prefers to do it herself.
When she’s finished, she leaves and heads to the sink to wash her hands. But just as the water begins to sluice through her fingers, she hears whimpering. The water stops, and Ify listens for a moment to whoever is crying in the stall two down from her own. Then she moves her hands, and the water pours from the faucet again, drowning out the sound.
A few seconds later, Grace appears at the sink next to her, checking her face in the mirror, wiping away tear streaks, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. She gives Ify a perfunctory nod and a swift “Doctor” before she begins washing her hands.
Ify moves her hands to the air dryer next to the sink, then wipes the remaining water away. She should leave, but she doesn’t. Something keeps her there as Grace works to put herself together.
“Doctor?” Grace asks, her hands clean and dried.
“Yes, Grace?”
Grace looks Ify in the eye, and the grief is still there, despite her efforts to wash it away. “Why did you choose this work? Why this?”
Ify folds her arms and leans against the sink, staring off into the middle distance. “Before I arrived here, I wanted to be a pilot.” The instinct rises in her to crush the memories bubbling to the surface—memories of a refugee camp in Nigeria, memories of the sister who abandoned her smiling at her and telling her to hurry up and get to school on time, memories of mechs and enemy soldiers raining fire and death on that camp—but she lets them come. “I would look into the night sky and see the Colonies winking at me like stars, and I would tell myself that, when I was older, I’d go there to study orbital physics and flight. My . . .” The word catches in her throat. “My sister was a pilot. During the war.”
Grace’s eyes go wide. “You had a sister?”
The last time Ify saw Onyii’s face, it had been a blur. Ify had just undergone a surgery. Onyii had removed a tracker from inside her body. Then a haze had blanketed Ify, cocooned her. The next thing she knew, she was in the complete darkness of a cargo hold and wouldn’t see light until the shuttle she’d been put on had docked in Alabast.
“What happened to her?”
For a long time, Ify is silent. She moves past Grace’s question. “Whenever I think of piloting, I think of her. And whenever I think of her, I think of killing.” She turns to Grace and hopes that Grace can see the new brightness in her face. The warmth she’s trying to put there. “So I decided to study medicine. I wanted a job where I didn’t have to break things. I could fix them instead.”
Grace sniffs against a sob and smiles.
Ify takes a step and is close enough to see the shards of morning in her assistant’s eyes. With her thumb, she wipes the still-shining tearstains from Grace’s cheeks. “Take the rest of the day off.”
“But, Doctor!”
Ify raises a hand to stop any further objection. “Physician, heal thyself.” At the question in Grace’s eyes, Ify says, “I attended chapel when I was recently arrived. I would go with a very dear friend of mine while we were students. That’s where I heard that passage from Luke 4:23. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”
Grace’s smile broadens. “Thank you, Doctor.” Then she’s off.
Ify lets out a heavy sigh after several seconds of watching the door Grace has just passed through. Then her Whistle trills. She sees the number for a mechanic and answers, “Hello?”
“Hi,” says the young voice on the other end. “You dropped off a Bonder earlier this week?”
Her heart races. The comatose girl’s neural data. “Yes. Is it ready? Were you able to recover the data?”
“Err . . . you should probably come by.”
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The mechanic’s shop is a pristine collection of glass surfaces. External connecting devices and custom-made cases for them, encased in glass boxes, hang from hooks in the wall. Customers mill around, attended to by aerial service bots. Light just bright enough to make everyone feel comfortable, filling the air with soft chatter, shines over everything.