“Perhaps. Or perhaps I am right because I am right.” There’s an edge of fatigue to Céline’s voice that wasn’t there before.

Ify smirks, then turns her back to the youth outside the mall and stares out over the darkening water. Fireflies dance over it, winking in and out of sight. Ify resists the temptation to light up their entire trajectories and track their movements. Let this natural wonder, at least, be preserved. “Is that what I am supposed to tell the committee, then? When they ask me how to cure these refugee children of their mysterious disease, I will tell them I couldn’t find a cure because there was too much peace?”

“Well, where are they coming from? The children.”

Ify squints. Although many state functions happen in Abuja, this isn’t where most refugee applications are processed. Preliminary research told Ify that. No, that happens further south. She walks herself through the intake process at the hospital. First, she receives the refugees from the shuttle, then she records their background information—as much as they can bear to remember—then she sets them up with treatment. Some of the cyberized will have been damaged either prior to or during their travel, some of the Augments as well. As a result, extracting information from them by way of download is difficult—in some instances, impossible. So they had developed the consent protocol to allow for a deeper dive into the braincases of cyberized refugees and those with Augments. Once permission is given, then technicians and doctors can get all the information they need, create a record in the government database, and move on to the next. For those red-bloods among them who had managed, against all odds, to flee war and devastation and make their way to the Space Colonies in one piece, bureaucracy and mystery await them. No matter how pressing their needs, they don’t have an outlet anywhere on their person, nor do they have a router in their brain that outside devices can connect to. There is no easy way to know them. So they have to wait.

Looking back at the process now, Ify lets herself feel a pinch of pain in her heart. So much of how she has designed her program has been with efficiency as the guiding principle. Get those who have been harmed in the care of the galaxy’s best hospital as quickly and securely as possible. And every quarter, she’s been asked for her numbers: number of admissions, number of discharges. And always, it has been the numbers. With the refugees, always the numbers. Maybe if she’d paid more attention, she could have stopped this. Could have prevented it.

“Are you avoiding a solution because you have to walk through some pain to get there?”