She wants to put one foot in front of the other and see if she actually passes through air or walks straight into a wall or a room or an entrance or the end of a hallway. She squints and wonders again if maybe it’s just a trick of the air that is hiding the phalanx of black-suited guards from her. They have to be here somewhere. There had been so many of them before, and now there are only horses and small bulls and a few deer, none of them completely natural, all of them false. All of them lies. Big or small, all lies.

“Doctor?” Grace’s voice, fire melting the ice encasing her.

Ify opens eyes she had not realized were closed. “Yes?”

Grace pauses before speaking, as though she is testing potential sentences out in her head, trying to match words in increasingly complex and sensitive combinations. When she does speak, the words halt and start back up again and tumble over each other. “At the hospital . . . when we were in the doctor’s office . . . did you . . . what—”

“This was a detention center,” Ify says, cutting Grace off and, Ify imagines, answering half of the dozens of questions swimming behind her assistant’s eyes. Something in Ify has broken. She knows what she’s doing, and she recognizes the desperation driving it. If every remnant of the war, every trace of the carnage and trauma, is being washed away, she will plant her flag, be a living testament to the fact of the horrors that happened. They will not erase her experiences. It was not all a dream. It happened. She happened. “In a section of the compound was a room holding children only a little older than the ones in Dr. Ezirike’s office. They were enemy combatants.”

A sharp intake of breath from Grace at what Ify is implying.

“They were held here after their capture. Some of them fought with militia forces. Some of them fought directly for the Biafran rebels. But here is where we held them.”

“And . . . what did you do to them?”

Ify says nothing. Instead, she steps forward, then forward again, then forward again, and stops. When she looks down, she feels she’s arrived at the center of the thing. Certainly the center of something. And she wonders if she is standing above the spot where Peter had been tortured. She wants to close her eyes but can’t bring herself to relive those moments. So instead she stands in that spot and turns and turns and turns.