Ify demurs. “I’m not a doctor yet.” But everything Xifeng is saying is unspooling like thread in her mind, attaching to bits of driftwood, clue after clue after clue, and slowly pulling them together. She remembers the Cantonese woman who had died in her sleep, scared to death by her nightmares. Then there was the man who had gone blind after having witnessed his family’s torture. His sight had been restored, but only after weeks of trying to figure out what was wrong with him. And now the children whose response to deportation orders was to fall into comas. Was that what it was? A response?

Xifeng stops in the empty cave corridor. The echoes of bustle and movement soften until the only noise either of them hears is the occasional drop of water from the ceiling, landing on a puddle at their feet. “It became an epidemic. And the only way the government could see fit to treat it was to wipe all trace of the war from the minds of its citizens.”

“But how? How do you do that? How do you explain missing family members or a crater where a village used to be? How do you explain mechs that wash up on the shore in pieces? Or mines buried underground that haven’t detonated yet? I . . . I saw Biafra. Like none of it ever happened.”

Xifeng only shakes her head, then she resumes walking while Ify hurries to catch up. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Nine-Year Storm.” Xifeng can barely bring herself to snort derisively at the fiction. “The government was busy. The people were the easiest part. They just wanted peace. And they were willing to do whatever it took to feel it again. Imagine coming back to your neighborhood to find it reduced to ashes by the people you went to work with. Imagine your coworkers coming home to the poorly dug graves of their children whom you killed. Lie to them and tell them a tornado ruined their lives. A wildfire, a tsunami, radiation fallout.” They stop at the threshold to another room. Outside the entrance stand two armed guards facing forward. Xifeng grows still, looks to the ceiling. “If you could be cured of any physical ailment, would you sacrifice nearly a decade of your past for it?”

The question is like nothing Ify has ever heard before. Faced with it now, she can’t say what she would choose. So much of what and who she is now is not only because of what happened to her but what she remembers. And she knows for a fact that were her mind to be scraped of all those memories, her body would remember. She would carry those episodes, those experiences, in her ribs, in her heart, in her legs. In her eyes. Unless . . .