It’s been almost a month, and every time Ify walks through the streets of Abuja, she wonders if anyone will recognize her. They are all strangers, but she had once been a high-ranking student at the nation’s most prestigious academy. She had been an aide to Shehu Daren Suleiman Sékou Diallo, the Nigerian army’s most skilled and decorated mech pilot, the man who had given Ify his family name. She had overseen countless council meetings where policy that would affect the hundreds of millions of people in the nation was debated and enacted. She had been a Sentinel, charged with sitting in any number of watchtowers sprinkled throughout the capital city and conducting surveillance via the orb drones that lazily hovered over everyone’s heads. Now she looks around and there are no orbs. No drones. No watchtowers. Only hyperloop rail lines overhead, framed by walls of glimmering flexiglas, and giant advertisements for clothes and streaming football matches reflected on the shining surfaces of skyscrapers, and citizens whose silver-threaded outfits glisten in the sunlight.
Beside her, Grace has her gaze inclined upward, taking in sign after sign after sign in Mandarin.
Ify sees the frown developing on her face and says, “China was instrumental in the rebuilding effort during the ceasefire. Though they did not recognize Biafra as a country, they aided in the resettlement effort.” She knows that, if she were to close her eyes, she would see that refugee convoy again and the trailers around which walked or played little children and the little boy, the synth named Agu, who guarded them, and Xifeng. In so many of her memories, Xifeng is there waiting for her. Even now, with her eyes open, Ify finds herself glancing at the faces of those they walk past, and in so many faces, she sees Xifeng’s.
Grace doesn’t ask where they’re going, and if she did, Ify would have no answer for her. Maybe she would tell her that this was some African part of the research process, getting in touch with the land before studying it, feeling it with one’s feet as a way of detecting illness, some juju to play into stereotypes. How to explain that, at the root of everything, is a desire to be caught? For someone to recognize her and declare her crimes for all the world to hear, then arrest her? How to explain that since she woke up this morning, she’s wanted that more than anything?
I’m walking until the guilt goes away, she wants to tell Grace, but can’t.
Ify cranes her neck and does not see a sky festooned with digitized Nigerian flags like she expected. Maybe her memory of that is false. Nor does she see the Nigerian president’s face projected onto the giant façades of glass-and-steel business centers. There are no soldiers patrolling the streets. When they arrive at Aso Rock and Ify sees the outcrop of granite rock, almost one thousand meters high, on the city’s outskirts, she expects to see a parade of military vehicles and parliamentarians surrounded by their bodyguards. She expects to see soldiers acting as leaders, generals assuming their places in government, but everyone wears suits, some of them more slim-fitting than others. They all look like businessmen. They all look alike.
Using the Augment embedded in her neck, Ify scans them and notes on her holographic retinal display what districts they represent. This one represents Abia State and this one Bayelsa. Those three there are from Katsina State, and the two standing next to them are from Oyo and Delta. But were she looking at them with an unaided eye, she would see clones. Nothing but clones. Perhaps they are all cyberized and all outfitted with similar facial features and similar body structures. Maybe this is simply what is fashionable. And they are all shaking hands and joking. Some of the legislators who do not look older but talk as though their insides are older than their outsides speak in patronizing whimsy to the younger ones. But there is no military. Not a single bar denoting rank. Not a single soldier stiff at attention. She adjusts her scanner to see if perhaps the vehicles are cloaked. It could be that the air is swarming with drones, clouds of them thick enough to blot out the sun. All it would take is the right calibration for the massive ground mechs she’s sure are there to materialize out of thin air. To have the sky shimmer around them, then to have them revealed in all their violent, militaristic glory. If she squints hard enough, maybe she can even detect the outline of high-powered minimechs hiding in the shadows or strapped to the bottom of the maglev Land Rovers, ready to detach and fire at whatever needs killing.
But nothing. The air is still. The chatter is soft; then, as the parliamentarians walk into the halls of the National Assembly to begin the session, the chatter is gone. And nowhere in this area is there a statue or monument or plaque—anything—to indicate that she had once been here, that Daren had once fought a war for this place, that millions had died. At the very hall of government, no markers of sacrifice. No sign of the vanquishing of villains.
No indication, even, that there had been heroes.
“Were there this many Chinese during the war?” Grace asks.
Ify turns to consider Grace for a moment before leading them back the way they had come. Enough walking for today. “No,” she says quietly, too harshly.
There is no more war, Ify tells herself. Even as she can’t quite bring herself to believe it.
Ify finds an isolated stretch of gilded fencing along Jabi Lake and rests on her forearms. Jabi Lake Commercial Center is a hive of activity, and Ify turns and leans back on the railing to watch all the life happening in front of her. So much of her experience of the world can be filtered: by way of her external Augments, she can lower the murmur of voices and raise the volume of the lake lapping against stone behind her; she can increase the intensity of the new-grass smell, even as she knows how false this grass is beneath her feet. She can watch the setting sun splash colors like oil paint across the sky and twist the dialings on her settings to filter the colors, making them sickly or blurring the lines between the golds and the blues and the purples.
It’s as she’s playing with the colors in the sky and as couples glide by with small silver balls strapped to their ankles, allowing them to hover above the ground, that Ify hears Céline’s reply.
“You sound disappointed,” she says in her Francophone accent. “‘It’s not completely destroyed,’ so il doit y avoir un problème.” She clicks her tongue. “Something must be wrong, that is what you’re thinking.”
“It doesn’t feel right.” Ify is grateful she doesn’t have to move her mouth to have her words beamed straight through space off three satellites and directly into Céline’s Whistle. Still, paranoia expands and contracts like a second set of lungs inside her chest. Something’s not right. And others could be listening. Her very next thought is that this is precisely what she used to do to others. During the war.
“Maybe this is you adopting the colonizer mentality. You expect Nigeria to be a”—Céline chuckles—“what is that old phrase . . . ‘shithole country’?” Her chuckle turns into a full-throated laugh. “Even when you lived there, the technology far surpassed much of what was in the Colonies. You said it yourself. Those few times you did speak about where you came from, you showed me pieces of what was maybe the most advanced country on the planet. I mean, you were developing technology to simulate regional spacetime phenomena with the gravitational pull of a black hole and using that to combat forest fires! Your country is in the process of terraforming land that les blancs had said would be uninhabitable for at least another century. And you come back now, after four, five years away and expect to see bullet holes in the buildings and craters from shelling in the roads. There can be such a thing as peace, Ifeoma.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re going to be a colonial administrator and you want your job to be easy.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I am right because I am right.” There’s an edge of fatigue to Céline’s voice that wasn’t there before.
Ify smirks, then turns her back to the youth outside the mall and stares out over the darkening water. Fireflies dance over it, winking in and out of sight. Ify resists the temptation to light up their entire trajectories and track their movements. Let this natural wonder, at least, be preserved. “Is that what I am supposed to tell the committee, then? When they ask me how to cure these refugee children of their mysterious disease, I will tell them I couldn’t find a cure because there was too much peace?”
“Well, where are they coming from? The children.”
Ify squints. Although many state functions happen in Abuja, this isn’t where most refugee applications are processed. Preliminary research told Ify that. No, that happens further south. She walks herself through the intake process at the hospital. First, she receives the refugees from the shuttle, then she records their background information—as much as they can bear to remember—then she sets them up with treatment. Some of the cyberized will have been damaged either prior to or during their travel, some of the Augments as well. As a result, extracting information from them by way of download is difficult—in some instances, impossible. So they had developed the consent protocol to allow for a deeper dive into the braincases of cyberized refugees and those with Augments. Once permission is given, then technicians and doctors can get all the information they need, create a record in the government database, and move on to the next. For those red-bloods among them who had managed, against all odds, to flee war and devastation and make their way to the Space Colonies in one piece, bureaucracy and mystery await them. No matter how pressing their needs, they don’t have an outlet anywhere on their person, nor do they have a router in their brain that outside devices can connect to. There is no easy way to know them. So they have to wait.
Looking back at the process now, Ify lets herself feel a pinch of pain in her heart. So much of how she has designed her program has been with efficiency as the guiding principle. Get those who have been harmed in the care of the galaxy’s best hospital as quickly and securely as possible. And every quarter, she’s been asked for her numbers: number of admissions, number of discharges. And always, it has been the numbers. With the refugees, always the numbers. Maybe if she’d paid more attention, she could have stopped this. Could have prevented it.
“Are you avoiding a solution because you have to walk through some pain to get there?”
Ify knows Céline doesn’t mean to be flippant about it, but she asks herself how Céline could possibly know what Ify’s been through, what she’s done. What she would have to face if she were to do exactly what Céline is suggesting.
The wind blows softly on her back, and she closes her eyes. And there she is again.
A dark, dank room. Two men walk in from around a corner. Her fingers clench into fists where they’re bound to a chair. The men wear all black and don’t bother hiding their faces. Their hands are gloved.
Static.
The first is stretching his gloves on his hands. “Let’s talk about that higher purpose of yours.”
Static.
The man is holding bees buzzing in his hand, their metal shells gleaming.
Static.
Hissing through her teeth, “Please, please, please no more.”
Static.
A knife comes out of a man’s vest pocket, cuts away her pant legs. And the bees swarm her legs and burrow beneath her skin and—
She gasps when she returns to the lake. It takes her several moments to realize where she is, that she’s not in an underground chamber being tortured, that she’s not Peter, that she’s not being strapped to a chair while another version of herself—another Ify—waltzes through the aboveground facility with a government official at her side. She dashes away tears. No. No, there has to be another way. She can’t go back to that facility.
She can’t.
The thoroughfares of Abuja glow with neon light. It still startles Ify how much Mandarin there is in the signage, like it is gobbling up the English. The signs of Chinese investment in the recovery of this place are evident, but there’s a further penetration. Foreign smells wafting from roadside restaurants, foreign chatter overheard in the streets and alleyways. A mixture of fashion trends she doesn’t remember: kaftans tailored to look like tangzhuang jackets with straight Mandarin collars, cheongsam in bright multicolored prints.
A shout rises above the music. Ify dismisses it, part of the chaos of urban nightlife, until she hears it again, followed by an unbroken string of Cantonese. Suddenly, she hears English mixed in, then she recognizes that voice: Grace.
She breaks off into a sprint, crashing through people on the side of the road, not bothering to apologize, nearly tripping over a sizzling hot dish outside a restaurant stall. Grace. As she gets closer, she looks for the crowd that will have inevitably gathered, but nothing has broken the steady stream of Abujans. The shouting is getting louder, less insistent, more frightened. Ify hurries until she sees large men on either side of Grace, one holding her arm in a vise grip while the other has his finger pressed against his temple, face angled to the sky. Like he’s talking with a commanding officer. They wear all black, black visors over their eyes, and stand a full head taller than the tallest person for miles. Their boxy, muscled frames tell Ify that they are Augments, if not fully cyberized. They don’t carry guns but have shocksticks and wrist restraints hanging from their hips.
“What’s going on?”
Grace sees Ify, and Ify’s heart drops at the bottomless fear in her assistant’s eyes.
“Let her go! What’s the meaning of this?”
The officers, with the pattern of the Nigerian flag emblazoned on their shoulders, ignore Ify. One of them slips wrist restraints from his hip. All thought leaves Ify as she smacks them away. In one swift motion, she puts herself between Grace and the arresting officer, forcing him to look down at her. For a long second, he’s silent.
“I am an Alabastrine official on diplomatic business, and this is my assistant, and you will unhand her now.” She can feel herself being scanned, both officers instantly pulling up her credentials on their retinal displays. For several moments, no one moves. Not Ify, not Grace, not the police officers made of steel.
Then the officer holding Grace lets her go, and she falls onto the ground. “Grace Leung was found in violation of Article 263, subsection 10, of the penal code, relating to violations of memorial integrity—”
“Memorial integrity? What?”
“According to witness and surveillance reports. Punishment to comprise a fine of 250,000 naira or five years’ imprisonment—”
Grace lets out a whimper, and Ify shouts, “What?!”
“Subject to the ultimate judgment of the state magistrate.”
Outrage overpowers any fear Ify feels, and she raises herself up to the machine. “As Alabastrine officials, we are outside your jurisdiction and therefore not subject to your penal code.” She spits the words out, hating herself even as she does. What does she look like, using her status as an outsider to trample on her own country’s laws? Still, she looks around for anyone to stop and at least pay attention to the commotion. Someone to lend a hand or to record the encounter on a device in case anything were to happen. Someone to leap in and help. But it is as though she and Grace are invisible. As though there is no one but them and the police. Them and these machines.
The second officer, who has so far been quiet, puts a hand on the shoulder of the first, and the two exchange a wordless gaze, no doubt communicating an entire conversation between them. It shocks Ify to see so human a moment happen between the men, snapping the illusion that they are nothing more than chunks of unthinking metal.
When the first officer looks back, he seems to relax. “Enjoy your stay in Nigeria, Ms. Leung.” They turn, almost in unison, to walk away.
“My ID!” Grace shouts.
The first officer turns back around, fishes a card out of his pocket, and holds it out to Ify. By now, Grace is standing, if hunched over and brushing the dust off herself.
Ify snatches it out of the man’s hand and glares at him, unblinking, until the two officers vanish into the crowd.
When Ify is certain they’re out of earshot, she whirls around. “What were you thinking? Are you stupid? Are you trying to get us killed? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?” It’s as though so much of the anger she’s tried to suppress is now spilling out of her. She catches herself when Grace’s composure breaks and her bottom lip begins trembling.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she manages through the beginning of sobs.
Then Ify sees it. The terror shaking Grace’s bones against each other. The resolve and clinical discipline washed away by fear. And she brings Grace into her arms. “It’s okay.”
Grace cries into Ify’s shoulder, and they stand there for several minutes, Ify smoothing Grace’s hair, an island of quiet in the sea of people rushing around them. “I thought I could conduct some research.”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
Grace looks up at Ify. “I didn’t do anything, Doctor. I swear.”
“It’s okay. I’m . . . I’m sorry for losing it. I just . . . it’s been a long time since . . . well, I’m not used to being back is all.”
“But, Doctor, all I was doing was collecting stories of the war.”
“We don’t have to do any more work tonight. Let’s just go home and rest.”
“But wait!” She breaks away from Ify, and that resolve is back.
Ify moves closer so that they can speak in whispers. “It’s normal for people not to want to talk about their trauma.”
“That’s the thing. I’d done all my research previously. When I asked them about the war, they had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Maybe some of them were far from the worst of it. There’s an explanation, Grace. Let’s go.”
“But, Doctor, no one knew about the war. I spoke with over a dozen people before the police came.”
Ify frowns. “Where were these people?”
Grace steps out of the mouth of the alley where they’ve stood and points up and down the street. Ify looks up into the sky, and as the maglev cars pass by, ambling up and down their flightlines, she sees them. The orbital surveillance drones. There are surely more embedded in the buildings and perhaps more strung throughout the air, too small to see with the naked eye. And they all would have seen Grace.
They all might have heard her too.
“Come on,” Ify says, grabbing Grace’s arm and pulling them back into the rush of crowds, zigzagging a path the long way back to the apartment. Ify knows it’s foolish to hope, but maybe they will have spent at least a moment or two outside the sightlines of the surveillance drones thickening the air above Abuja.