Ify remembers that Grace had held her tablet to her chest almost the whole time . . . to mask the readings. “What are you saying? We weren’t being watched?”

“We were being watched. Everyone in that hospital was either cyberized or undergoing cyberization, permitting the government access to their braincases.”

Ify’s eyes widen in horror.

“Everyone was watching us.”

They’ve been watching her. Ever since she set foot in this country, they’ve been watching her.

“That’s how the police knew to come after me. They heard me asking about the . . .”

Breath leaves Ify’s lungs so that she can only speak in a whisper. “And if the government can control what people see, it can block their sight too.” Grace nods. Ify shakes her head in disbelief. “No one helped us, because they didn’t see us.”

“Couldn’t see us.” Grace glances behind her, as though unsure that the partition is still in place, then turns back to Ify. “There was no Nine-Year Storm, was there?”

A maelstrom rages in Ify’s head. Too many questions, too many clues, none of them joining together, just flotsam and detritus hurled about against the walls of her skull. “No,” she breathes. “There was no storm.”

The lack of memorials around Aso Rock. The attack on Grace in Abuja. This story about a massive decade-long climate event that never happened. They’re erasing every trace of the war. But there has to be something left.

The coordinates must have been buried somewhere deep in Ify’s subconscious, somewhere beneath conscious thought, beneath language acquisition, beneath her bloody childhood memories, buried in her bones and in the thick of her muscle. Because when she presses the button by her armrest that unveils a console with a digital map, her fingers blaze over the glowing keys, the map’s target reticle zeroing in on a point near the border between Enugu State and Benue State.

Things will be different in the southeast, she tells herself. There will be at least some remnant of the war. They may have scrubbed all trace of it from the capital, but where the fighting was thickest, the land must bear some scars that remain.