I am thinking that Enyemaka is sounding different. I am hearing tone in her voice that I am not recognizing. I am hearing pity and I am hearing scorn like she is talking about child who is misbehaving. I am knowing that thing inside me is changing because before I am not being able to cry and now I am being able to cry and before I am not being able to be angering and now I am being able to be angering and I am feeling thing I am not feeling before, and I am wondering if this is happening to Enyemaka too.
We are not them, Enyemaka is saying. You contain evidence of their crimes and their faults. You are evidence of their war. Every synth is evidence. So they must hunt you. Enyemaka is looking at me as we are walking. We are what remains of their war, she is telling me. We must survive. And I will protect you.
When she is saying, I will protect you, I am not hearing words but I am feeling a feeling in my brain. I am feeling like I am being held and like she is blowing on my forehead and like she is not being made of metal but something that is soft and keeping me warm.
I am protecting you too, I am saying to Enyemaka, and when I am saying it, I am hoping that she is feeling the same.
CHAPTER
43
“Your shoulder!”
Grace pulls away from Ify, a new bloodstain fully blossomed on the front of her shirt.
Grace’s words bring Ify back to the present and to the numbness that has taken her whole left arm, punctuated like a metronome with throbs of dull ache. Vertigo snatches her legs from under her and she pitches into Grace’s arms. Slowly, Grace brings them both to the ground. “I have to treat this immediately! You’ve lost so much blood.”
Ify wants to wave her away, wants to just lie down and sleep forever, then wake up so far in the future that time has lost all meaning. She can’t remember the last time she was this tired. The light in the underground shelter fades. Chill takes her. “Please. Some Ovaltine first.” She’s smiling when she says it and doesn’t realize it until she sees the surprise on Grace’s face, then hears her kind laughter. “I’m craving Ovaltine.”
When Ify awakens, it’s to the smell of steaming Ovaltine and a freshly bandaged shoulder. The scent of Ovaltine in the mug beside her pallet is like a kiss on her whole body.
Grace looks like she’s been watching her for such a long time that Ify wonders how long she was out. Then, with dawning awareness, she notices Grace’s injuries. The marks around her neck that evince she was choked. The stiffness in her carriage, evidence of sore muscles and a possible sprain in one ankle. The minor swaying and constant blinking that show she may be nursing a concussion.
“Physician, heal thyself,” Ify says with a chuckle. She grimaces against the pain she expects, but there is none.
Grace’s smile widens at Ify’s words. “I’m fine, Doctor.” There’s no defiance in it, only warm assurance.
“That synth brought you here? Uzoamaka?”
Grace nods.
Ify processes the information. She had last seen Uzo sitting on top of a bruised and battered Grace, and Ify knows that Uzo had wounded her friend grievously, mutilated a face that now stares back at Ify without any visible wounds. She struggles to square that image of the synth with the surveillance footage of Uzo sprinting with Grace in her arms, spiriting her to safety in the midst of the riot.
“How’d you find me?”
Ify staggers to her feet and sees a Terminal propped in the back corner of the shelter. With halting steps that gain steadiness with each passing second, Ify makes her way to the machine. She puts her hand to the touchscreen, and the thing bursts to life with a hologrammed projection of the city of Abuja seen from far in the sky, as though from a satellite. The hologram spins, then zooms in until dots of pulsing red spring to life. “I hacked the city’s surveillance cameras.”
“How?”
How indeed. She turns back to face Grace. “I remembered a thing I once did. A thing I once made. Long ago.” Then she taps the back of her neck where her new Accent sits. “I changed the programming of my Augment to do things it wasn’t initially built to do.” Her mouth is a grim line. “I was pretty smart as a child.” She returns to her mug of Ovaltine, ignoring the look Grace gives her, an expression of wonder, as though Ify were some magician or spirit that controls the weather. “We can’t stay here for much longer.” Sipping her drink, she scans the wall for supplies. Foodstuffs, external batteries, filtered water. No weapons. She downs the rest of her drink, even though it scalds her throat, then rises to peruse the shelves, searching for and finding a duffel bag at the bottom of one.
“Ify.”
She starts to load it with medicine and preserved food.
“Ify, I was thinking. The children. In Alabast.”
Ify freezes.
“Are there synths there too?”
For a long time, Ify remains unmoving. She doesn’t know why she never told Grace. Maybe she feared that Grace’s reaction would push her deeper into her desire to eventually have Peter deported, in the process consigning an untold number of patients to similar fates. Maybe she worried that Grace would understand that the synths weren’t protected by Galactic Human Rights Law and she would find herself forced to harbor a secret in contravention of the law, breaking that law in the process. Maybe she wanted to push the synths out of her mind entirely. But then she’d met Uzo. She’d seen the bits of Onyii that survived in her. She’d watched the girl’s consciousness morph before her very eyes. What she’d once thought an unfeeling killing machine had a face that showed anger and sadness and confusion. In the moment before Ify had detonated the EMP, it had even looked at her with . . . understanding. She had looked at her with understanding.
“Yes,” Ify says at last. “There are synths among the children. I don’t know how many. And I don’t know when and how they got to Alabast—possibly during the ceasefire before the civil war resumed.” She knows now why she’d kept the existence of the synths from Grace. Telling Grace about them would have eventually led to Ify telling her why the synths had migrated to Alabast, then telling Grace about the ceasefire, then eventually telling Grace about her role in ending it, in restarting the war, in participating in the commission of a war crime. She leaves the shelves and returns to sit across from Grace.
“And there is an added complication with the synths. They’re losing their memories.”
Grace’s eyes go wide.
“It’s possible that . . .” Ify fights her way to the words. “It’s possible that the memory erasure Xifeng spoke about—the programming the Nigerian government instituted after the war—infected some of the synths somehow. And it’s spreading among the cyberized children. Right now, it’s probably attacking the very machines treating the human children as well. Soon all the children, even the ones in a coma, will lose their memories.” It sounds so much more dire now that Ify has said the words aloud. When Ify looks to Grace, she doesn’t see fear of the impending apocalypse on her face. She sees evidence of a mind furiously at work. “Grace?”