“Your accent.”
“You are correct. You are correct. I . . . I am not being entirely truthful. But—but I am trying to save my life. I am desperate, and I am needing help, and they—they are helping me. Please.”
Options war within Ify. Expose him and maybe limit the damage. But how to tell Paige and Amy without breaking their hearts? Maybe try to push him toward other sponsors. Let him deceive other oyinbo with his fanciful stories.
A mask comes over his face. Like a shadow. “If you tell them, I will hurt them. Deeply.” He clenches his fists and stands like something spring-loaded, like a bullet ready to be fired from a gun. “I have learned ways of making people suffer. I know they are dear to you. All the time, they are talking about you. So if you want nothing bad to be happening to them, you will be keeping my secret.”
Ify’s heart leaps into her throat. She can’t move. The thought of anything happening to Paige or Amy roots her where she sits, as though each word from Peter is another pour from a barrel of concrete.
“Now that I am seeing your face, I am wondering another thing. I am wondering how much they know about you. There is only one way you can be knowing that I am lying. That is because you are being soldier as well. For Naija Army. And you are knowing who is rebel and where they are being rebel. And now I am recognizing your face.” A smile splits his lips. “I am wanting to kill you once. I know because I am sitting in cell and you are standing on the other side of it wearing army gown, and you are standing with fancy army pilot, and you are writing things about me in your tablet, but you are not writing that I am being tortured by government and being held in my cell for almost every hour of the day. And you are not even changing your name when you come here.” He shakes his head, smiling wryly.
“They would never believe you.”
But Peter’s smile doesn’t fade. He knows. He knows that Ify is not certain. He knows that when the time comes, Ify would be unable to bring herself to lie. “I am thinking that for now, they are looking at you like daughter.”
Ify grits her teeth.
“But when they are finding out you are war criminal, maybe this change.” He shrugs, then walks back up the stoop and into the house. The door whisks open and shut behind him.
And Ify is left to the sunlight and the birdsong and the buzzing of insects, all of it a façade. A flimsy, horrible façade.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The refugee ward sprawls before her. Her bodysuit tells her she has arrived just as the night shift is beginning. Even though she is off duty, Ify wears her lab coat with her nameplate on it. Over her bodysuit, it feels like a proper uniform, a thing this new Ify has grown comfortable in. The cavernous space, with its high, rounded ceiling and its silver walls, is filled with synthetic light. But the light here doesn’t bother Ify. Everything—the light, the temperature, the softly antiseptic smell—has been calibrated to allow for maximum comfort of the patients whose beds extend in row after row before her.
Ify is only here to watch. She’s not on duty, and she’s loath to disrupt the rotation of nurse attendants, red-blood and bot, who make their rounds, checking vitals and having quiet, smiling conversations.
She sees her assistant at a patient’s bed, which is elevated to a sitting position. Ify’s assistant, brown hair tied back in a messy bun with strands falling over her face, fingers folded to keep her fingers from twitching, probably bubbling from the caffeine streaming into her from the patches on her skin beneath her top and lab coat, is smiling. Grace.
Ify taps her temple to activate the Augment in her neck and enhances her audio input to better hear what Grace is saying. She tells herself it’s to observe and critique her assistant’s work, but she sees something human in the connection between Grace and the Chinese woman with blanched skin and fading black hair, and a part of her longs for that. So, she enhances and listens and starts when she realizes Grace isn’t speaking English.
A frown creases her brow. Grace isn’t cyberized, not even partially. She has no language translation software downloaded into her, and Ify spies no Augment on Grace’s body, nothing in her hair, nothing on her temple, no small half-sphere attached to the back of her neck. Ify scrolls through her languages and alights on Cantonese. Then it all comes through clearly.
“You’ve never had durian?” the patient asks Grace, shocked.
Grace chuckles. “No, ma’am, I have not. My grandfather says it is popular on Earthland and is always complaining that he can never find it in the markets here.”
“Does he not live on Earthland?”
“No, we brought him to the Colonies several years ago. He’s getting older, and my parents wanted him to be near family.”
“That is so sweet. Well, when you see him again, tell him I know where he can get good durian. I know where the good Hong Kong market is.”
Grace laughs. “But where will he eat it?” she exclaims. “The whites will complain about the smell before it even leaves the bag!”
Which gets both of them laughing loud enough for Ify to hear without her enhanced audio. She wants to chastise Grace for displaying such boisterous mirth in a place where people are suffering, where people will look to her and see joy and be plunged even deeper into their own despair—Ask the patient about her medical condition! Ask her about her sleep patterns or her food intake or her stool!—but she can’t bring herself to stay angry at her assistant.
“Come close, child,” the woman says, when they’re done laughing.
Grace leans in, and the woman whispers something Ify can’t catch. Grace slowly breaks away, and the woman puts a hand to Grace’s face, smiling. The urge bubbles in Ify to ask Peter about gari and pepper soup, to tell him where to find the best jollof in Alabast, to connect him to Nigeria here and be reconnected with Nigeria on Earthland. Then she realizes where her thoughts have taken her, and suddenly the lights in the refugee ward are too bright, the scent of antiseptic too strong, the temperature too warm and too cold at the same time. Ify doesn’t see the rest of Grace’s interaction with the patient, because she has rushed out of the ward, shedding her lab coat and badge and thoughts of Peter along the way.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The walls of Ify’s bedroom glimmer with soft blue light.
Her tablets glow with readings of patients she has been studying and their various medical conditions. The physical ailments are easy enough to treat. Sometimes, it is simply a matter of seeing how the body and the brain are interacting, how they are learning from and about each other. At first, Ify thought it would be different when working on cyberized or partially cyberized patients. The braincase or the false organs, they were supposed to work on a pre-regulated rhythm or operate on a predetermined schedule, something that could be tweaked or adjusted or changed in a laboratory. She thought it would be like tinkering with the inside of a watch. But, just like with red-bloods, it is all about harmony. If she’s learned nothing else, it is that disharmony in one part of the body will lead to disharmony elsewhere. And that sometimes, to aid someone suffering physical pain, you needed to treat a disharmonious mind.