She backs away. “I . . . I don’t know you.” What just happened to her still rattles her, loosens every thought in her brain until she can’t think clearly anymore. “I don’t know you.”

“But, Ify, it’s me! Telling you to get ready for school. It is me! Watching sunset with you and carrying you in my arm and waking you when you are sleeping, it is me! You are knowing me.” Then, strangely enough, the girl begins to cry. “Ify, please.”

Police dressed in full black riot gear snatch the girl off the ground. She stretches her arms out to Ify, begging to be let back, begging Ify to take her, to hold her, screaming, “Ify! Ify, please! It is me!” She writhes and bites one of the hands holding her, falls into a crouch, then, just as she’s about to burst at Ify, a net appears from nowhere, wrapping around her and pressing her into the ground and sizzling her into submission.

As volts of electricity run through her and sparks fly from the skin of her exposed legs, she keeps her gaze locked on Ify. Never looking away until her eyes go blank. Even then, it seems as though the girl sees Ify and nothing else.

“Please,” says one of her minders, “we must get you to safety.”

Too stunned to resist, Ify climbs back into the jeep and lets the door slam shut. Then they are moving again. The fog in her brain is too thick. She doesn’t even know where she is going.

The driver is complaining about police operations and how there is never enough warning, about how much noise is made during these things, and something breaks through the mist clouding Ify’s thoughts.

“Where are they being taken?” she asks.

Grace is still catatonic.

After a pause, the driver offers, “The police station, I think. There were military present, but it seems as though it was a state police operation. Yes, the police station is most likely.”

The man in the passenger’s seat nods in agreement.

“Take me there,” Ify says, with as much sternness as she can muster.

“What? Are you mad?” asks the driver.

“Take me there. I want to go to the police station, and you will take me there.”

The passenger snorts. “She is not serious-oh,” he jokes to the driver.

Ify leans forward, past Grace, sticking her head through the partition space. “Do you think you are irreplaceable? Both of you? It will not be an anonymous communiqué to your employer that you were derelict in your duty. It will be a report directly from me. So you will know it was me that ejected you from your place of employment like a space dinghy from a shuttle station. I am a Colonial official. You will take me where I say you will take me. Are we understood?”