Outside a back entrance, she and Grace are loaded into a MedTransport that only goes a short distance before, suddenly, the van stops and masked people with pistols at their hips snatch Ify from the stretcher. One of them fits cloth tightly around her eyes, then seals it with a tinted visor. Someone else attaches beads to her temple that instantly block out all sound. Another binds her wrists in front of her with zip ties that automatically slam her fists together. Then she’s bundled into what she thinks is the back of another van. Though she can see and hear nothing, she feels every bump in the road, every sharp turn, every time something thwacks against the vehicle’s frame. Unable to perceive her surroundings, she has no idea how much time has passed. A familiar feeling creeps into her, the claustrophobia that suffocated her when she was once a prisoner of war held in a cell she could walk across in three steps. She fights the feeling. These people aren’t going to kill her. They’ve rescued her. There’s the possibility that she’s been lied to, that the men in the black kaftans and with the false faces were there to protect her from exactly the kind of people that have Ify trussed up in the back of a van. But Ify has no choice now. She’s in the hands of this Ngozi. Who invoked Onyii’s name. A name Ify hasn’t heard in nearly five years. Once she’d adjusted and began her new life, Ify had hoped never to hear that name again. She realizes she still hasn’t forgiven Onyii for abandoning her all those years ago. She’s gone through every possible scenario in her head, tried to reason through every possible rationale that Onyii could have had for leaving her like that. And they’ve all failed in the face of Ify’s logic. Back then, she’d wanted nothing more than to see her sister again, to hear her voice, to be held in her arms. When it became clear to Ify that Onyii was never going to come, Ify had done everything in her power to purge Onyii from her mind, to leave her behind, to craft a new self that would never need someone as desperately as she had once needed Onyii.

Is this what Céline had meant? Are you avoiding a solution because you have to walk through some pain to get there? Céline had asked.

That’s when Ify determines that she will follow this path wherever it leads. If it means a cure for the refugee children in Alabast, then she will do this. Enough resisting. The detention center, that girl who had embraced her, Onyii. So far, Ify has been pushing all of these things apart in her mind, only willing to deal with each thing as it arose. But maybe they’re all connected.