Ify finds an isolated stretch of gilded fencing along Jabi Lake and rests on her forearms. Jabi Lake Commercial Center is a hive of activity, and Ify turns and leans back on the railing to watch all the life happening in front of her. So much of her experience of the world can be filtered: by way of her external Augments, she can lower the murmur of voices and raise the volume of the lake lapping against stone behind her; she can increase the intensity of the new-grass smell, even as she knows how false this grass is beneath her feet. She can watch the setting sun splash colors like oil paint across the sky and twist the dialings on her settings to filter the colors, making them sickly or blurring the lines between the golds and the blues and the purples.

It’s as she’s playing with the colors in the sky and as couples glide by with small silver balls strapped to their ankles, allowing them to hover above the ground, that Ify hears Céline’s reply.

“You sound disappointed,” she says in her Francophone accent. “‘It’s not completely destroyed,’ so il doit y avoir un problème.” She clicks her tongue. “Something must be wrong, that is what you’re thinking.”

“It doesn’t feel right.” Ify is grateful she doesn’t have to move her mouth to have her words beamed straight through space off three satellites and directly into Céline’s Whistle. Still, paranoia expands and contracts like a second set of lungs inside her chest. Something’s not right. And others could be listening. Her very next thought is that this is precisely what she used to do to others. During the war.

“Maybe this is you adopting the colonizer mentality. You expect Nigeria to be a”—Céline chuckles—“what is that old phrase . . . ‘shithole country’?” Her chuckle turns into a full-throated laugh. “Even when you lived there, the technology far surpassed much of what was in the Colonies. You said it yourself. Those few times you did speak about where you came from, you showed me pieces of what was maybe the most advanced country on the planet. I mean, you were developing technology to simulate regional spacetime phenomena with the gravitational pull of a black hole and using that to combat forest fires! Your country is in the process of terraforming land that les blancs had said would be uninhabitable for at least another century. And you come back now, after four, five years away and expect to see bullet holes in the buildings and craters from shelling in the roads. There can be such a thing as peace, Ifeoma.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re going to be a colonial administrator and you want your job to be easy.”