“Grace!” Ify calls out. “Grace! Grace, it’s okay!” Someone smacks her hard across her face, and Ify looks up to see Ngozi staring back at her. “What is this, Ngozi? What’s going on?” She jerks herself against her restraints. “What are you doing? Let me go. Let. Me. Go.”

But Ngozi just walks away.

“Come back here!” Ify shouts. She’s screaming more than she needs to, but it will do Grace some good to hear her voice, to know that she’s still alive and kicking. Ify raises her voice as much for Grace as she does herself. She spaces out her movements and her shouting to conserve energy. Things had morphed so quickly. One minute Ngozi was leading her to a safe haven after all those days on the run from the Nigerian Security Service. Then Ify was manacled to a chair. A different Ify would have had her guard up, would have known how to read a body, would have detected the lie in how Ngozi walked and talked. “Grace?” Ify calls out, hoping Grace will hear her and, in hearing her, be put at peace.

Her captors spread out toward the wall of this room under orbs of light. Behind them sit shelves containing all sorts of foodstuffs and mechanical equipment. Bonders, Augments, EMPs. More synths start to file into the room. Ify recognizes them from that episode at Kufena Hills when the lot of them burst from the forest with half the Nigerian military chasing after them. That’s when everything changed, Ify realizes. When that synth saw her face and gave her a glimpse of the sister who had abandoned her.

So lost in thought is Ify that it takes her a moment to register the new quiet. When she comes to and her vision focuses, she finds she can’t breathe. How . . .

“Hello, Ify,” says Xifeng, sitting in a chair right across from Ify.

Grace. “Let my friend go,” Ify hisses after a moment’s shock. “She can’t hurt you.”

Xifeng feigns surprise, then demurs, smiling. Her dark, gray-threaded hair comes down in waves to her shoulders. When she leans forward in her chair, forearms on her knees, her hair, coarse and thick, casts malicious shadows across her face. “I’m not worried about that, child,” Xifeng says. Then she reaches out her hand, pulls back, then reaches out again to hold Ify’s cheek in her hand. “I know she can’t hurt us. I had her brought here for her own protection.”

Ify grits her teeth. “She didn’t look very protected.”