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.