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

Céline’s words ring like a proverb through her head. Like an alarm. Like a command.

She knows where she has to go.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

Open field greets Ify.

Her minders wait by their jeep. Initially, Grace waits with them. In moments like this, Ify finds herself reverting to her old thinking. Familiar suspicions arise. Grace, so meticulous with her note-taking, ostensibly there to provide documentation of their progress and assist in Ify’s research, but probably there to spy on her. Her minders are probably beaming their reports to Alabast as she stands here. Searching for any misstep, cataloging any mistake, and gathering all the details so they can be sent in a post straight to her superiors. Ify turns her thinking elsewhere. She thinks about the fact that where there had once been concrete buildings with unpaved roads between them and cells with electrified openings designed to sizzle into amputation anything that touched them and where there had once been young boys in those cells with collars around their necks, bodies limp from having given up on fighting back, there is now field. Nothing but open field and the biomech animals that graze on it.

Grace materializes at her side, a little behind her, tentative. Unsure. Ify knows that Grace wants to ask what they’re doing here, what this place is or, rather, was. But Ify wants just a few more moments to herself here. Just a few more moments of her private grief.

She wants to walk through. Feel the grass against her ankles, make sure it’s not all a ruse. She almost reaches out a hand to touch the air where one wall had been. And in her mind, she hears the boom of a loud explosion and feels the wash of imaginary dust on her face, all from the memory of a suicide bomber’s detonation just outside another building. And she then sees in her mind a boy, even younger, who had, just before, been playing with blocks and telling Ify about his dreams of becoming an engineer. And this boy is telling her about the roses painted on the wall, and Ify is hearing him and realizing that he is talking about blood from the boy who’s just detonated the bomb he’d been carrying inside him.