Ify starts when she realizes tears are running from her eyes. “It was a mistake,” she says, but all she hears is a whimper. “It was a mistake.”
Xifeng stops and steps forward, leaving behind the little synth girl. “What was the mistake?”
“I . . . I didn’t know about the bombers. I . . .” She sags in the arms of her captors, her legs going limp beneath her. “I just wanted to kill Onyii.” She has her head bowed and tears blur her vision, but she can feel the disdain Xifeng is staring at her. “I just wanted revenge.” She lets herself go, and the sobs come rushing over her in waves. Her body convulses with each one. It feels as though she is being choked. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” She says this over and over and over again, and she realizes this is the first time she’s admitted this to herself. For so long, she has carried those two events—shooting Onyii and the bombing of Enugu—together in her mind, one single tragic episode, and it has been so much easier to believe she was responsible for both, that her thirst for vengeance had cost so many lives. She had even been prepared to die, to be executed by Biafran authorities after her capture. But Onyii had rescued her. Even as war was starting back up around them, Onyii had rescued her.
“Look at you now.”
Ify looks up from her hands.
“Look at you now.” There’s no scorn in Xifeng’s voice. In fact, there’s wonder. And admiration. “You’ve grown and become successful and built an extraordinary life for yourself. All the while, you have been carrying these horrible memories inside you.” She comes down to one knee before Ify. “Ify. Listen to me,” she says as she undoes Ify’s restraints and unhooks her ankle clasps from the chair legs. Her voice has grown soft. Recognizably soft. This is how she used to talk to that child soldier who played the touchboard when she was teaching that synth how to be a boy. “We have to keep these memories inside us. Or else there is nothing to push us forward. There’s nothing to learn from. You grow nothing in a barren field.”
Ify holds Xifeng’s gaze and sniffles.
“Intentionally wiping away memories of our most important experiences is no way to live.”
“It’s so hard,” Ify whimpers softly through her tears.
Xifeng brings her into an embrace that Ify is too weak to resist. “But we must, child,” Xifeng whispers into her hair. “We must.”
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Ify watches several of the girls lay Grace on a stretcher and bring her to a medical tent.
“No harm will come to her.”
Ify frowns at Xifeng.
“No more harm.”
Xifeng walks on ahead and it’s not until Grace disappears from Ify’s view entirely that Ify follows Xifeng into the maze of caverns. Already, this place feels familiar. She no longer fears she’ll fall into whatever puddle she steps into, not like when Ngozi had first brought her here. The guards have fully reactivated the bodysuit that had been damaged in the attack on the police station, and it feels good and secure to have it on again. Surrounded by so much strangeness, this is one familiar thing. Still, a part of her misses the mental and physical quiet that came with not being connected to anything.
“It wasn’t this way in the beginning,” Xifeng tells her as they walk. “The war ended, but there were still attacks. Militia that refused to give up, paramilitary still addicted to the high of war. I remember seeing it when I was running the caravans. Children with machetes at their waists and deadness in their eyes. There were still people who thought they could make their fortune off the illegal trade in certain goods, but for that to work, there needed to be a certain level of violence. But that?” Xifeng shrugs ahead of Ify. “That’s easy enough to stop. It was when people started getting sick that the government began to think something was truly wrong.”
“Sick?” Ify’s thoughts race to the refugee children held in Alabast.
“The war was an open wound, but no one wanted to treat it. No one wanted to speak of it or deal with it. People went about their lives, living next to the people who had murdered their families. But containing that inside you with no outlet, it destroys a person.” There’s a faraway quality to Xifeng’s voice, as though she’s invoking the experiences of specific people, reliving the hurt they showed her in their faces. “The government tells you that there’s peace and order and insists on rational dealings. But your mind, whether or not it has been fractured by trauma, knows there’s more to life than this. So it protests. But you can’t launch vigils or march in the streets, so these protests disappear into your body. They become kidney stones or trouble breathing. Backaches, migraines, neoplasms. Toothaches, depression, psychosis. They mushroom in your interpersonal relationships. Marriages fail, friendships disintegrate, the families left after the war are shattered.” She looks over her shoulder at Ify without missing a step. “You’re a doctor. Is emotional constipation a clinical enough term for that?”
Ify demurs. “I’m not a doctor yet.” But everything Xifeng is saying is unspooling like thread in her mind, attaching to bits of driftwood, clue after clue after clue, and slowly pulling them together. She remembers the Cantonese woman who had died in her sleep, scared to death by her nightmares. Then there was the man who had gone blind after having witnessed his family’s torture. His sight had been restored, but only after weeks of trying to figure out what was wrong with him. And now the children whose response to deportation orders was to fall into comas. Was that what it was? A response?
Xifeng stops in the empty cave corridor. The echoes of bustle and movement soften until the only noise either of them hears is the occasional drop of water from the ceiling, landing on a puddle at their feet. “It became an epidemic. And the only way the government could see fit to treat it was to wipe all trace of the war from the minds of its citizens.”
“But how? How do you do that? How do you explain missing family members or a crater where a village used to be? How do you explain mechs that wash up on the shore in pieces? Or mines buried underground that haven’t detonated yet? I . . . I saw Biafra. Like none of it ever happened.”
Xifeng only shakes her head, then she resumes walking while Ify hurries to catch up. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Nine-Year Storm.” Xifeng can barely bring herself to snort derisively at the fiction. “The government was busy. The people were the easiest part. They just wanted peace. And they were willing to do whatever it took to feel it again. Imagine coming back to your neighborhood to find it reduced to ashes by the people you went to work with. Imagine your coworkers coming home to the poorly dug graves of their children whom you killed. Lie to them and tell them a tornado ruined their lives. A wildfire, a tsunami, radiation fallout.” They stop at the threshold to another room. Outside the entrance stand two armed guards facing forward. Xifeng grows still, looks to the ceiling. “If you could be cured of any physical ailment, would you sacrifice nearly a decade of your past for it?”