“Grace!” Ify calls out. “Grace! Grace, it’s okay!” Someone smacks her hard across her face, and Ify looks up to see Ngozi staring back at her. “What is this, Ngozi? What’s going on?” She jerks herself against her restraints. “What are you doing? Let me go. Let. Me. Go.”
But Ngozi just walks away.
“Come back here!” Ify shouts. She’s screaming more than she needs to, but it will do Grace some good to hear her voice, to know that she’s still alive and kicking. Ify raises her voice as much for Grace as she does herself. She spaces out her movements and her shouting to conserve energy. Things had morphed so quickly. One minute Ngozi was leading her to a safe haven after all those days on the run from the Nigerian Security Service. Then Ify was manacled to a chair. A different Ify would have had her guard up, would have known how to read a body, would have detected the lie in how Ngozi walked and talked. “Grace?” Ify calls out, hoping Grace will hear her and, in hearing her, be put at peace.
Her captors spread out toward the wall of this room under orbs of light. Behind them sit shelves containing all sorts of foodstuffs and mechanical equipment. Bonders, Augments, EMPs. More synths start to file into the room. Ify recognizes them from that episode at Kufena Hills when the lot of them burst from the forest with half the Nigerian military chasing after them. That’s when everything changed, Ify realizes. When that synth saw her face and gave her a glimpse of the sister who had abandoned her.
So lost in thought is Ify that it takes her a moment to register the new quiet. When she comes to and her vision focuses, she finds she can’t breathe. How . . .
“Hello, Ify,” says Xifeng, sitting in a chair right across from Ify.
Grace. “Let my friend go,” Ify hisses after a moment’s shock. “She can’t hurt you.”
Xifeng feigns surprise, then demurs, smiling. Her dark, gray-threaded hair comes down in waves to her shoulders. When she leans forward in her chair, forearms on her knees, her hair, coarse and thick, casts malicious shadows across her face. “I’m not worried about that, child,” Xifeng says. Then she reaches out her hand, pulls back, then reaches out again to hold Ify’s cheek in her hand. “I know she can’t hurt us. I had her brought here for her own protection.”
Ify grits her teeth. “She didn’t look very protected.”
Xifeng’s hand falls away. She reclines in her chair. “You’ve grown.” The smile that crosses her face chills Ify. “It feels like so long ago. When we first met, you were a little girl alone in the jungle. You’d been fending for yourself for I don’t know how long. All alone. No family, no one to watch over you. And me, a simple VR filmmaker ferrying refugees to safety during the ceasefire.” She pauses, takes Ify in with her gaze. “How much of that time do you remember? Do you remember our conversations? Do you remember the little boy named Agu? The child soldier who could play a touchboard like a master? Absolutely gifted. How much of that do you remember?”
Ify realizes her whole body has been coiled this entire time. “Xifeng, what are you doing here?”
“The same thing I was doing when we first met, Ify. I’m preserving memory.”
“But . . .” Her throat has dried up. Words scratch against it. “But it’s against the law.”
The others watch in silence, but Ify finds herself wishing they’d intervene, wishing they’d take either her or Xifeng to another room, wishing they’d say something, do something, to put a stop to this. But Xifeng holds her gaze. So much of that face is as Ify remembers, but the hair has thinned a little, and gray threads through it. There are new wrinkles around her eyes and a new hardness in her cheeks and jawline. It is odd to Ify, seeing someone age, seeing someone who refuses to be frozen in amber, whose face isn’t just the same cyberized snapshot for the rest of their lives. Everything about Xifeng—her posture, her naturally aging face, the look in her eyes—suggests rebellion.
“Let me go,” Ify says.
“No one’s keeping you here.” Xifeng looks around at the young women standing guard. “You are absolutely free to leave on your own. But should you make it out of here, know that the security services will chase you.” She pulls a small tablet the size of her palm out of her breast pocket and swipes a few times before holding the screen out to Ify. “You are a known fugitive.”
Ify’s fists clench against the chairback.
Xifeng puts the device back in her pocket. “You were asking the wrong questions. Or, rather, the right ones. In these times, that is enough to get you reprogrammed. We saved you, Ify. If they find you, they will forcefully cyberize you and invade your mind and rip your memories right out.” She speaks with her hands, and with each word, it’s as though she loses more control over herself until she takes a moment to breathe and straighten herself.
“But I’m a Colonial official. They wouldn’t . . .” The rest dies in her throat.
A sigh escapes Xifeng. “Your country has changed so much since you’ve last been here.”
“I know my country,” Ify growls. The sound surprises her. Then she realizes how clenched her fists have been, how tight her jaw feels. There’s anger in her. “What do you know of Nigeria?”
“You left and I stayed.”
Ify lunges forward, hauling her chair off the ground. Instantly, two guards are on her, twisting her arms behind her and holding her in place. Despite her best efforts, they force her back down. “How dare you! You know nothing of this country!”
Xifeng considers her nails while Ify thrashes in the grip of her captors. “You’re breaking the law! You’re a criminal! Nothing more! When they catch you, they will bury you under the jail. You have no right to meddle in our affairs.”
“Our?” The look she gives Ify fills Ify’s stomach with fear. “Our affairs?” Xifeng rises from her chair and walks to Ify so their faces are inches apart. “I know what you did in Enugu.”
Ify grows slack. “What?” It comes out as little more than a whisper.
Xifeng walks away, hands clasped behind her back, then makes a slow circuit of the room, as though to acknowledge every one of her soldiers. At the entrance to the room, that girl appears. That synth who moved so much like Onyii. Xifeng pauses in front of her, then, palming the back of her head, draws her near so that they both face Ify. The girl’s expression is inscrutable.
“What are you talking about?” But Ify knows. Even as she can’t bear to hear it, she knows.
“During the ceasefire. When you joined my caravan of refugees, you told me you were looking for a young woman and you showed me her face. I didn’t know who she was at the time. Even when she brought you back to me, I didn’t know quite what she had done. I hadn’t known that this Onyii you were looking for was the so-called Demon of Biafra, that she was the most skilled mech pilot on both sides of the war, that she had killed hundreds, possibly thousands over the course of her service, and that she had raised you in a little camp in southeastern Nigeria when you were a child.” Xifeng pauses to look lovingly at the synth clutching her leg, then continues. “You were going to Enugu to kill her because she had murdered your family. And in the process, Enugu was bombed. Hundreds wounded, dozens dead. Those were the initial tolls. Many more people would die by the time the rubble was cleared away. That is what you did. You led a group of suicide bombers into a civilian city where they proceeded to detonate themselves and kill as many people as possible.” Around the room, several people—none of them synths—audibly gasp. The air thickens. Some of the girls clench their fists. Others shift their feet in the dirt like they’re preparing to leap. Others tense, struggling to maintain composure in the face of the emotions roiling inside them. And at the center of this maelstrom sits Ify. And Xifeng. “There had been peace, but your quest for vengeance broke that peace. I remember, Ify, because I was there. I saw the waves of hatred you unleashed with that attack. But you left.”