Except Peter. Who is still in a hospital bed in a Colony high above her head, comatose and trapped in dreams whose horrors Ify can very well imagine.

Around her is pasture. Animals too mechanized to know that she should be feared walk by and sniff her and chew grass and process it in their multiple stomachs. Mechanized bees flit from flower to flower around her ankles. The night sky’s blue has deepened into black. Stars hang above her, and Ify even starts to doubt those. How does she know a giant dome doesn’t hang over this rural patch of Kaduna State, over all of Kaduna State, maybe over all of Nigeria? Who is to say that someone hasn’t built a false sky and painted false stars on it to watch over false animals in a false field at the center of which stands . . . a false doctor?

Who is to say that anything she looks at now is anything other than a lie?

Including the dark thing, like a moving shadow the size of a small boar, coming straight for her in the distance.

CHAPTER

24

It is feeling strange to me when we are leaving forest. Good thing is happening to me in forest. I am finding gosling, and Uzodinma is finding me. It is like I am wishing to be spending the rest of my life under ceiling made of leaves that is blocking out the sun when it is being too hot and I am wishing to spend the rest of my life being able to lie down in the cooling mud when it is raining and thing is crawling and slithering all over me but I am not minding because it is feeling like I am hugging the earth and the earth is hugging me. When I am seeing red-blood, it is reminding me that there is metal inside me and that I am killing and that I am doing bad thing.

In forest, I am not doing bad thing. In forest, I am not bad person.

So I am standing at the edge of the forest while others are going on ahead of me, but Oluwale stops and turns to me and waves me to him, and even though I am not saying any thing to him, I am thinking that he is knowing that question lives inside me, so much question it is feeling sometime that I am made of question, that if you peel my skin, you will find question spilling out. So I am walking with him.