But Ify is entranced. “The children,” she murmurs to herself. Time has slowed down for her, so she can watch it all unfold like paint splashed onto a canvas: the aerial vehicles spilling over the treeline, the children scattering, some of them being caught by ground forces, the one girl charging, barreling, like a faultline in the earth, straight for her.
The child is close enough for Ify to see her face, then the girl leaps from an impossibly far distance. Arms outstretched, as though there are claws on her fingers. One of Ify’s minders sticks his arm out to bat the child away, but Ify, acting before thinking, pushes the man aside and walks straight into the child’s embrace.
The child wraps her arms and legs around Ify like a restraint, like something made out of metal, and is shaking. The thought occurs to Ify that maybe she is being targeted. Maybe this is some odd assassination attempt and this child is carrying a bomb inside her body.
She tosses away the thought. No, this is peacetime. No one would want to blow up a Colonial official in peacetime.
The girl shivers against Ify even as the tableau of violence plays out before Ify and the children scurry, some of them vanishing into the forest, others unlucky enough to be caught in the electrified netting or shot down by paralyzing bullets. The minders grip the girl by her shoulders and arms and try to pry her loose, then the girl cries out in pain as electrical currents sizzle along her skin and she falls to the ground.
“What did you do?” Ify shouts at one of the men as the girl writhes, then comes up onto her hands and knees. Ify sees a shockstick raised to strike the girl down and grabs the man’s arm to stop him. “What are you doing? Stop it.”
The girl coughs, and a spattering of oil stains the grass. She comes up and stands too close to Ify, and there is beseeching in her eyes, and joy and fear and wonder. “Ify.”
“What?” How does this girl know her name? Suddenly, the girl’s hands grip Ify’s face and pull it down and close so that her head is bowed before the girl’s. A small breeze, like a breath exhaled slowly, whispers against her forehead. Ify’s eyes shoot open. What is this? What is happening? Flashes of Onyii flit through her mind. She breaks free and can’t help but stare in horror at the child.
“Ify, it’s me.”
She backs away. “I . . . I don’t know you.” What just happened to her still rattles her, loosens every thought in her brain until she can’t think clearly anymore. “I don’t know you.”
“But, Ify, it’s me! Telling you to get ready for school. It is me! Watching sunset with you and carrying you in my arm and waking you when you are sleeping, it is me! You are knowing me.” Then, strangely enough, the girl begins to cry. “Ify, please.”
Police dressed in full black riot gear snatch the girl off the ground. She stretches her arms out to Ify, begging to be let back, begging Ify to take her, to hold her, screaming, “Ify! Ify, please! It is me!” She writhes and bites one of the hands holding her, falls into a crouch, then, just as she’s about to burst at Ify, a net appears from nowhere, wrapping around her and pressing her into the ground and sizzling her into submission.
As volts of electricity run through her and sparks fly from the skin of her exposed legs, she keeps her gaze locked on Ify. Never looking away until her eyes go blank. Even then, it seems as though the girl sees Ify and nothing else.
“Please,” says one of her minders, “we must get you to safety.”
Too stunned to resist, Ify climbs back into the jeep and lets the door slam shut. Then they are moving again. The fog in her brain is too thick. She doesn’t even know where she is going.
The driver is complaining about police operations and how there is never enough warning, about how much noise is made during these things, and something breaks through the mist clouding Ify’s thoughts.
“Where are they being taken?” she asks.
Grace is still catatonic.
After a pause, the driver offers, “The police station, I think. There were military present, but it seems as though it was a state police operation. Yes, the police station is most likely.”
The man in the passenger’s seat nods in agreement.
“Take me there,” Ify says, with as much sternness as she can muster.
“What? Are you mad?” asks the driver.
“Take me there. I want to go to the police station, and you will take me there.”
The passenger snorts. “She is not serious-oh,” he jokes to the driver.
Ify leans forward, past Grace, sticking her head through the partition space. “Do you think you are irreplaceable? Both of you? It will not be an anonymous communiqué to your employer that you were derelict in your duty. It will be a report directly from me. So you will know it was me that ejected you from your place of employment like a space dinghy from a shuttle station. I am a Colonial official. You will take me where I say you will take me. Are we understood?”
The driver and the other minder both look at each other before nodding. The driver takes the jeep into gear, and it hovers off the ground. Ify consults her tablet to give her hands something to do, though her fingers tremble too much to be of much use. The passenger mutters a joke beneath his breath.
Without looking up from her tablet, Ify says, “I think I prefer you both silent.” After a beat to confirm their obedience, she says, “Thank you.”
She stares sternly at Grace, sending in her direction as steely an expression as possible, so that when Grace does finally look up from her lap, she sees in Ify’s face the silent command to pull herself together.
They have work to do.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
“Grace, stay here,” Ify says as they pull up before the police compound.
The officers who stand in the parking lot by their maglev jeeps and their hoverbikes, watching Ify walk straight for the front entrance with purpose and the confidence of an oyinbo, don’t have to know who she is to see that she has the bearing of someone with authority. One or two of them might snicker at the sight of that woman striding so far ahead of her minders, but others see her minders and the bulge of weapons beneath their jackets and the way every single door opens for Ify and their quiet laughter dies down. Whatever badge she wears or title she holds or uniform she has on, it has imbued her with power. She has spent nearly half a decade in the Space Colonies perfecting the use of that power, getting accustomed to wearing it, to wielding it, especially as someone who does not look like how many think the powerful should look. She has grown used to the tenor of her voice when she’s addressing authorities she needs something from, the way she must braid together compassion and command when speaking with her subordinates, the fact that she must treat every encounter as though she is talking to an equal or an inferior. She moves with the walk of someone who owns the land she sets foot on. She has to.