She knows she should be asleep, but her mind is working the main problem before her, and she cannot let herself rest until she finds a solution. Peter.
It takes all her effort to keep from cursing herself for underestimating him. But how could she have known he would piece things together so quickly? She still can’t figure out what he’s after. But what if it’s as simple as a place in Alabast? It’s an attractive enough life. She looks around at her room and thinks about the rest of her apartment: the spacious living room with its high-backed sofas and minimalist-patterned cushions, the kitchen connected to it, and the bathroom large enough to do a cartwheel in. It would be attractive to any migrant, especially one fleeing war. But she has tried to chase him away, and rather than look for easier marks, he has dug his heels in. And why lie about his origins? Why not just say that he is fleeing conflict? Maybe he is worried that, because the war is ended, his application for asylum will be denied and he will have to languish in the Jungle before being deported. She feels as though she is on the cusp of figuring out his motive, figuring out what he is trying to get and what he’s willing to do to get it, but that moment when it all clicks is just out of reach. Whenever she tries to grab it, it slips further and further away. So she stares at the ceiling and waits and hopes it will fall into her head.
Answers come to prepared spirits, a professor told her.
Her wallpaper TV flashes with a broadcast from the main Colony news station. A light-skinned woman in a blazer and red blouse is talking while a chyron rolls by below: NEW IMMIGRATION POLICY PASSED BY LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL TO GO INTO EFFECT TOMORROW. EXPERTS PREDICTING RISE IN DEPORTATION ORDERS.
Is this the answer Ify’s been looking for?
Her Whistle chirps with an incoming call.
She activates it, and before her appears Grace. All the poise and tenderness from earlier is gone, replaced by a jittery, barely restrained urgency. “Doctor, there is an emergency. Your presence is needed in the east wing immediately.”
If Ify is honest with herself, she needs this. Work can distract her from these other worries. It can cocoon her in purpose. Already, she is changing into her hospital outfit. “What’s the emergency? And you don’t have to call me Doctor . . . yet. My licensing exam isn’t until three months after graduation.”
“Well, Doct—I mean, Ms. Diallo. We . . . we’re not quite sure. It’s the refugees. They’re not responding.”
Ify freezes in the act of putting on her hospital coat. “What do you mean not responding?”
“Please come immediately. I will keep this comms channel open as you make your way to the hospital. In the meantime, I’m uploading all the information we have at the moment. But I think it’s best if you see this in person.”
Ify receives the documents with a ping before Grace has even finished talking. Patient diagnostic after patient diagnostic. Hundreds of documents she reviews as she leaves her apartment, takes the elevator down to her street, and hurries to the ward. All of them children. She looks at the FOUR scores, the measure grading their Full Outline of UnResponsiveness. Nearly all of them are at zeroes. Those with higher scores start to decline right before Ify’s very eyes, so that by the time she arrives at the hospital, all of them have reached zero. Eyelids closed. No response to pain. Absent pupil, corneal, and cough reflexes. Their breathing steady with the ventilator rate. But what worries Ify is what may happen if the comas persist. The longer they stay like this, the greater their risk of catching things like pneumonia. And dying.
All thoughts of clinical diagnosis fall away, however, when she arrives at the ward and sees them. Hundreds upon hundreds of beds holding children strapped to cerebral monitors. All of them beeping in unison. All of those sounds telling her that these children are just barely alive.
CHAPTER
10
In the trailer, Xifeng is swabbing my wounds and putting together the skin of my arms where it is ripping. I am thinking backward to attack and not remembering feeling any pain. And when I am sitting on stool with my arm in Xifeng’s hands soft as beachsand, I am not feeling any pain either. I am only feeling pain from sun and from poison in the air when I am being pulled from mountain of bodies, like I am being born, and when I am baby and everything is new. I am feeling thing like pain, but then that is going away and I am not feeling any thing. And I am wondering if it is because something is broken inside me.
For a long time, Xifeng is working without saying any words. I am thinking that this is the first time she is seeing me fighting and killing, but I am remembering that I am running away from caravan to keep her safe but also to be keeping her from seeing me fighting and killing.
“Do you know why we are doing this work, Uzo?” she is asking me in Taishanese.
I am looking at Xifeng’s face when she is saying this softly. She is not looking at me. She is focusing on my arm and on repairing my wound and spraying chemical on it that will be binding the skin back together and hiding the metal underneath that is my skeleton.
“We are preserving memory of a painful time in your country’s history. We are making sure that people don’t forget. It is important to remember these things, even if they hurt to remember.”
When she is saying these thing, I am thinking of the old woman and when I am carrying dead body to her and water is leaking from her eyes. She is sadding, but it is feeling like good thing to be doing this thing for her.
“The government in this country is forcing people to forget.”
It is the first time I am hearing Xifeng talking about government. Every time I am hearing or seeing government it is when people are wearing soldier uniform or people are shooting at people wearing soldier uniform. Always in rememberings. This is the first time I am hearing it with my ears.
“The government is using their powers to erase the memories of everyone in the country. Everyone is connected by way of their braincases like the one you have in your head. They are all linked to their net, which helps them live their lives. It helps them buy groceries, listen to music, study in school. But it is also a tool of surveillance for the government, and the government is peeking into the minds of every citizen and erasing their memories of the war. Do you know why this is bad, Uzo?”
I am watching Xifeng lifting my shirt and dabbing with antiseptic at the cuts on my side. And I am thinking of woman who is sadding over body I am bringing her. But I am also thinking of rememberings I am downloading into my braincase and things I am seeing in my mind, and sometimes seeing those things is making me angry and is making me to be sadding. Air conditioning in the trailer is chilling my skin. “It is hurting,” I say.
Xifeng is looking at me and stopping with my medicine, and I am thinking that she is thinking I want her to stop healing me, but I like it when she is touching me like this.
“The rememberings, I mean,” I am saying to her, and I am making sure to be speaking Taishanese too, because even though she is sadding at first when she is hearing it, she is then smiling, and I am thinking that this is a thing that is making her to be happy.