Grace steps out of the mouth of the alley where they’ve stood and points up and down the street. Ify looks up into the sky, and as the maglev cars pass by, ambling up and down their flightlines, she sees them. The orbital surveillance drones. There are surely more embedded in the buildings and perhaps more strung throughout the air, too small to see with the naked eye. And they all would have seen Grace.

They all might have heard her too.

“Come on,” Ify says, grabbing Grace’s arm and pulling them back into the rush of crowds, zigzagging a path the long way back to the apartment. Ify knows it’s foolish to hope, but maybe they will have spent at least a moment or two outside the sightlines of the surveillance drones thickening the air above Abuja.

CHAPTER

22

Sometime when we are walking, I am seeing what is in front of me and sometime I am not.

Sometime, there is being forest with heavy leaf that is blocking us from the sun and there is being chirping and growling and rumbling of bird and animal and even there is being slow stomping of shorthorn, and baby wulfu is playing and we are climbing over root that is sticking up from ground or we are crawling under low branches or tree trunk that has fallen. And sometime, I am seeing boy and girl in front of me with dirty shirt that is being inside out and there is being gun over their shoulder. And I am seeing big man we are calling Commandant at front of the line and we are stopping in some place and creating hologram to trick people who are coming so that we are later killing them and stealing from them. Then I am seeing forest again with Oluwale and Uzodinma and the others who are walking with us.

In the beginning, there is no pattern to when we are stopping and sitting down and finding our peace.

But when we are sitting down, I am practicing looking for rememberings and sorting them. I am practicing organizing them, and it is becoming easier for me to be finding which I am having after Enyemaka are rescuing me from pile of corpses and which are coming from before then. I am knowing now that some of these rememberings are not mine. They are belonging to other people and being given to me. Some of these remembering is colored with red and others with yellow. But the ones with the girl I am calling Ify are blue-green. There is sometime being full color to them, but always there is blue-green at the edge. Like hologram but fuller. Maybe realer.