Around and around Konstance paces through the unchanging Nigerian sunlight. Again the sensation descends on her, gnawing the edges of her consciousness: something is not right. The scars on the trunks of the palms, the old dry leaf sheaths still stuck to the bases of the fronds, the coconuts high above her and the ones tumbled down in the planters: none of the coconuts, she realizes, have the three germination pores Father showed her. Two eyes and a mouth, the face of a little sailor whistling its way around the world—it’s not there.

The trees are computer-generated. They weren’t originally there.

She remembers Mrs. Flowers standing at the base of the Theodosian Walls in Constantinople. Wander around in here long enough, dear, she said, and you’ll discover a secret or two.

Twenty paces away, a vendor’s bicycle with a white barrow mounted in front of the handlebars leans against one of the planters. On the barrow cartoon owls hold ice cream cones. Inside its open receptacle, a dozen canned drinks shine in a bed of ice. The ice glimmers; the cartoon owls seem to almost blink. Like the book drop box in Lakeport, it’s more vibrant than everything else around it.

She reaches for one of the drinks and, rather than pass through it, her fingertips strike something solid, cold, and wet. When she lifts the drink out of the ice, a thousand windows shatter silently in the hotels around her. The tiles of the plaza strip away; the false palm trees evaporate.

All around her figures appear, people sitting or standing or lying not in a shady city plaza but on broken and begrimed concrete: some without shirts, more without shoes, living skeletons, some tucked so deeply within homemade tents of blue tarpaulins that she can see only their calves and mud-caked feet.

Old tires. Trash. Sludge. Several men sit on plastic jugs that once contained a drink called SunShineSix; a woman waves an empty rice sack; a dozen emaciated children crouch over a patch of dust. Nothing moves the way things moved after she touched the book drop box outside the old library in Lakeport; the people are only static images and her hands pass through them as if through shadows.

She bends, tries to see into the blurry patches of the children’s faces. What is happening to them? Why were they hidden?