Ify pulls the blankets up to her chin and doesn’t realize that she’s been asleep until the muffled sound of voices reaches her. Reflexively, she reaches for her temple where her Whistle would be, but there’s nothing but hair. She tries to grow as still as possible and listen.

“She would remove her leg,” Ngozi is saying, her words gauzed by the van’s metal walls, “because it was connected and the government could track her through it. But we would drive into the desert, and she would take off her leg and I would remove my own Augment, and we’d leave them behind in the car and I would carry her. I would carry her until we’d reached our spot, and then we would sit in the sand together and watch the sun set.”

Ify strains her ears to hear what follows, then she realizes no one is speaking.

“Tell me what’s happening outside.” Ngozi again. “Do they know about us in the Colonies?”

Ify looks around her and sees that Grace is gone.

Then, Grace’s voice. Low and soft on the other side of the van’s walls. Too quiet for Ify to know what she’s saying, whether she’s lying to Ngozi or not.

After a quarter of an hour, Grace climbs back in and buries herself beneath her own pile of blankets. Ify marvels at how easily her assistant is able to find sleep.

CHAPTER

30

Xifeng is making us all to wear clothing that is dampening our signal. When I am putting on this thing that is tight on my skin, it is like shadow is falling over the world. I am not being able to talk to my siblings. And I am not having so much information buzzing like one million mosquitoes in my brain. But it is giving me relief to be not always hearing and seeing everything that is happening around me. When I am putting on the signal-dampening suit, it is like someone is shutting down the noise in my head so I am hearing with ear like red-blood and seeing with eye like red-blood and even smelling with nose like red-blood.

“I am not liking this costume,” Oluwale is saying next to me. “I don’t like pretending to be a human.”