“What are we doing?” Grace hisses. “We have a mission.”
Ify looks around, searching for an answer. If she is honest with herself, she wants to stay because Onyii, somehow, is here, in this place beneath her feet, in the air around her, in the lowing and growling and buzzing of the winged and feathered world around her. Dying children wait for her high in space, but doesn’t she deserve her own brand of peace? “If we leave and are captured by the security services, what happens to us?” she asks Grace.
Grace smolders but takes the point. “We can’t just do nothing. Are we going to sit in her van, driving around this country until she figures out what she wants to do with us?”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” Ngozi’s heading toward them with a feline saunter. Her hand drifts behind her in case she needs to reach for her pistol. Ify knows now to keep her eye on it. “Come on, it’s time to go.”
Grace steps between Ify and Ngozi. “Go where?”
Ngozi looks Grace up and down, as though surprised by what she’s seeing, then smirks. “Somewhere safe.”
“How do we know you’re not just going to drive us around until the end of time?”
Ngozi frowns at Grace and takes a step toward her so that their noses are nearly touching. “And if that’s my plan, what will you do?”
“Ngozi,” Ify calls out, warning. “Ngozi, please.”
Grace backs away so that she can look at both Ify and Ngozi. “We have a job to do,” she tells Ngozi, while never taking her eyes off of Ify. “There are lives at stake.”
Ngozi stares without saying a word, her expression one of immovable cliffside rock.
“Ify, let’s go.”
“Where would we go?” Ify asks.
“She’s right, you know.” This from Ngozi, the pistol out from her waistband and firmly in her hand.
Grace notices it and stays still. “Ify. Please. Those children are dying.” All the while, Grace has eyes for nothing but that gun. “Ify, what are you doing? Ify, please!” Her face changes, her spine straightens. “All right. Fine. I’ll do it myself.” She takes a step back, but that’s when Ngozi raises her gun arm.
“What?” Grace asks, defiant but shaking. “Because I’ve seen your face I can’t leave alive? After you shoot me, are you going to stuff me in your trunk, find somewhere quiet, and set it all on fire?” She looks to Ify, the accusation thick and dark in her eyes. “And you would let her?”
“You don’t understand,” Ify says, hating the weakness in her voice. “You’ve never had a country like Biafra.”
Grace looks at Ify like someone she no longer recognizes. For a long time, her mouth forms around words but refuses to speak them. Then, she appears to give up. Her arms fall to her sides. “You have no idea what I have or haven’t had.”
Ngozi’s arm hasn’t wavered the whole time.
Ify steps forward and puts her hand on Ngozi’s, pushing the gun to the floor. “Let her go. She can’t harm us.” The two Igbo women share a meaningful glance, then Ngozi relents and tucks the pistol back into her pants.
Grace runs back in the direction of the forest and vanishes.
“Think of the children, right?” Ngozi says, joking, as she and Ify head back into the van and set off.
Staring out the window at the country she feels she’s seeing for the first time, Ify is surprised at how little guilt there is in her heart.
CHAPTER
32
We are sitting in cave and laughing at hologram projection Oluwale is making of when he is kneeling on crabtank and steering it with poles he is jamming into its head and screaming war cry. I am telling to the others how I am feeling fear in my chest like THU-THUMP of my heart over and over and some of them are having expression of marvel in their eyes because they are never knowing what fear is until I am telling them. Uzodinma is not with us. He is in other room, but I am wanting him to be hearing this—hearing my story and hearing Oluwale’s story—because if he is seeing that we are feeling these thing and that we are telling story not like machine but like red-blood, then we are not being machine. We are being thing that is making family. I am wanting him to be seeing me and telling himself that we are being family. But he is in another room, and he is not seeing or hearing us.
While there is laughing and chat-chatting in the caves, I hear scuffling and someone trying to scream but hand is covering their mouth. I am telling from the sound that this person is being prisoner, then the sound is drifting away and Xifeng is coming to us. Some of the synths are standing at attention like little war child. Other is sitting down and smiling at her like she is big sister and not commander of army they are belonging to. And some of them are looking at her with love in their eyes and I am recognizing this as look that child is giving their mother when they are loving each other.
“Uzo, come with me?” Xifeng is asking me in English.
“Yes, Mother,” I am saying in Taishanese, because, for some reason, I am wanting the others to know that I am special to Xifeng, that I am different. Favored.
We are walking down cave pathway, and orb is floating over our head all along the pathway, lighting our way. Xifeng is leading me past room filled with girls who are cleaning their guns and checking their ammo and other room where synth is connecting to external hard drives that Xifeng is collecting before we are being reunited, and synth is downloading rememberings onto hard drives, and I am thinking about how things used to be with me and Xifeng. I am thinking of how it was just us and the Enyemakas, and I am thinking of riding in a boat with Xifeng and how quiet the night is being in Lagos Lagoon when we are arriving in Makoko neighborhood to be delivering remembering. And I am remembering that we are small small group and even though there is no blue or red or other color shading the remembering like there is being with the ones that is not belonging to me, it is feeling like a different lifetime ago when I am doing these thing with Xifeng. Even though we are walking past that room fast fast, I am seeing that already external hard drive is filling entire walls.
“It makes me happy to see you with the children like this,” Xifeng is saying suddenly.
My heart is heating when I am hearing her call us children.
“You are becoming your own people.” Smile is spreading on her lips. “Growing from your memories.”
“We are organizing them,” I am telling her with excitement in my voice. I am truly feeling like child because word is moving from my mouth faster than I can think it. “Oluwale and Uzodinma are teaching me how to be organizing my memories based on what color they are being shaded in and who is appearing in them. And like this we are knowing which memories belong to us and which are being implanted and belonging first to others. And I am thinking that this is what is making us to be our own people.”