Peter holds Ify’s gaze for long enough that sweat begins to bead Amy’s forehead. Then he looks away. “Everyone loved our family. Before the war, no problems.”
Ify lets out a quiet “Hmm.”
“Back then,” Peter continues, turning his attention to his more sympathetic audience, “it was possible to be a young man without joining a militia. Even though they would leave bodies to rot in the street, they would leave you alone if it was clear to them that you were not on the side of the government. The Angels of Heaven didn’t steal anything. They weren’t the reason we lost everything. That happened when another group, the Popular Front for Justice in Biafra, came in to take their territory. They were truly vicious. This group didn’t just want a Biafran state in southeast Nigeria. They wanted all of Nigeria to belong to Biafra. What is the expression? ‘Scorched earth’? That was them. Burn everything in their path, and as they left, they would salt the ground so nothing good could grow there.”
Amy gasps.
“Not literally. I mean that as a figure of speech. But, yes, that is what they did. They claimed to install hospitals and places where you could get an ID card. They claimed to have a police force and all these things that governments were supposed to have, and they claimed to represent the Igbo minority in the Muslim north. We should have welcomed them with open arms, right? They were here to rescue us from a government that cared not at all for my tribe. But when the Biafrans came, it was nothing but blood and thunder.” He turns to Ify. “You spent time with the Biafrans, yes?”
The only sound, other than Peter’s voice, had been the scraping of forks and knives and spoons against plates, but now even that stops. Ify doesn’t feel surprise. She doesn’t let herself feel surprise. All this time, this boy has been building toward something, and while Ify still doesn’t quite see the game he is playing, she can tell what type of person he is, and she is prepared for this. So, when her shoulders tense, it is not from being caught off guard. It is from what she wants Paige and Amy to see as her visceral, roiling anger. Just barely contained in the pulse of her jaw and the trembling of her utensils in her hands.
Amy puts her hand on Ify’s, and Ify knows she too is manipulating the woman—getting her to believe that Ify is in more distress than she really is—but if Amy were to ask, Ify would tell her that it’s for her own good. For a long time, Amy stares at Ify until Ify looks up and the two meet each other’s gaze. Amy gives her a soft, understanding smile, then turns to Peter. “We don’t really talk about Biafra or Nigeria with Ify here.”
“Oh,” Peter says, then leans back in his chair, his face blank.
“And your parents?” Ify asks. When she sees Peter thrown off balance, she knows she’s hit on something. “Did they die in the rebel attack?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Ify makes sure it sounds like an accusation when she says it.
Peter frowns. “I don’t know, because one day my cousin went missing, and when I went to look for him, I was captured. The Popular Front called me a spy, and they arrested me. Before I could look for my parents, I was thrown into prison.”
Ify fights to keep her frown from turning into a scowl. But her suspicions have been confirmed. Peter has been lying. Maybe about part of his story, maybe about all of it. There’s no way he could have known that Ify was once a high-ranking Nigerian official, that Ify had had access to all of the data collected on rebel movements during the Biafran War. There’s no way he could have known that Ify knew the names and military capabilities of every recorded rebel group in the country. Because, if he did, he would have changed his story.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
The box is hidden under the floorboards of Ify’s living room, beneath a rug and in a place where the grooves of panel hiding it are invisible to the naked eye. She’s buried it in the only portion of her apartment where the cameras cannot angle to see her. The one blind spot in her apartment’s surveillance system. She could have turned the cameras off and even blocked the auxiliary cameras. She could have found blankets to put up. She could have kept this box somewhere else. But this is what she does. She keeps it close, so that every time she walks over this space, she’s reminded of what she’s put here. What she’s carried with her.
With the removed panel next to her, she sits cross-legged in front of the space and reaches in and pulls out a black box large enough to fit in her lap but far too heavy for it. So she sets it beside her, careful to keep within the blind spot.
For several minutes she simply stares at the thing. Laying her eyes upon it sets her mind ablaze with memories, images colored with fire, coated in blood: she stands at the threshold of an apartment, the door slides open, she raises her arm and pulls the trigger on the gun in her hand; explosions rip through the city of Enugu, and she runs and runs and runs through the chaos and destruction as civilians cry and weep and die around her; a boy sits on the other side of an invisible electric fence, shadows cutting across his body in this cage, hands limp in his lap, evil smile sparkling in his eyes, and Ify on the other side of that fence, staring, analyzing, inspecting.
She puts her fingers to her neck, presses her index and middle fingers against the skin of her bodysuit, and immediately, chemicals flood her system with pleasure and relief and fill her with just the perfect amount of vertigo to wash away the memories.
Her hands stop shaking enough for her to lift the lid on the box, revealing row after row after row of mini drives. Small, almost obsolete micro SD cards on which are stored evidence. She pulls one out and fits it into an external device she’s pulled from a pocket and which she fits to her Bonder, a visor-shaped device whose edges she slips over her ears. A cord slithers out of an outlet by her temple, and she connects it to the external device.
A vision splashes to life before her, first in the faded blue of a holographic projection, then in the technicolor of a proper memory.
A tablet screen, held in gloved hands Ify recognizes as hers as a maglev jeep spirits her away from what she knows is a detention facility. Across from her sits a man who rescued her from rebels, who took her in and taught her about herself, a man who would then destroy her life. Daren. Ify has angered him—she remembers this much. But the version of her in the memory keeps her gaze focused on the tablet as she scrolls down a list.
Angels of Heaven.
Asawana Avengers.
Niger Delta Water Lions.
The list of terrorist groups—Igbo, Yoruba, Christian, Muslim, even Hausa—goes on and on. Ify scrolls with the regular speed of intense focus. Ify outside the memory knows what Ify inside the memory will find. Or, rather, will not find. She disengages from the memory, thrown back into her body with an intensity so strong it forces her to take several deep breaths. She is right.
The Popular Front for Justice in Biafra, the group Peter claims raided his village and arrested him, never existed.