“Forced cyberization,” Ify says in an awed whisper. “The government forced cyberization on . . . on everyone.” The horror begins to sink in. When Ify looks up, Xifeng is facing her and only nods her head before passing through the beaded curtain that leads to the next room.

Ify can only stare, mouth open in shock. The government forced hundreds of millions of people to undergo cyberization. So it could catalog then delete their memories.

She pushes herself to move forward, and when she enters the next room, she’s confronted by wall after wall of what appear to be, when she squints, hard drives. Piled from the floor to the ceiling. “What are these?”

Xifeng walks back to Ify and puts a hand to her shoulder. “Memories. Every memory I could find and download about the Biafran War. It’s all here.”

So much life, so much death. And to think, it can all fit in one room.

“Is this a library?” Ify asks. “What are you going to do with these?”

That hardness returns to Xifeng’s face. “We’re going to restore them. My team has already been delivering these to select households throughout the country. When people get enough clues, they realize where the holes are in their memory, and it is our job to fill them. People will remember.”

Ify walks to one of the walls but feels as though she’s outside of her body. “But doesn’t it feel wrong?” She reaches up a hand to touch the ridged edges of the small devices, so many of them stacked together. “Making them relive their trauma?”

Xifeng watches her, hands clasped behind her back. “And yet you remain. You persist. You poke your head and your shoulders through the broken seam of the chrysalis, unsure even of your new form, having not yet seen it in its entirety. That was you when you first arrived in space, yes? You couldn’t have had any idea what you would become. But what you went through. That breaking, that rending—that’s where the pain is concentrated. Sometimes, what we are experiencing is simply our effort to reach forward. It’s a protracted stretching, Ify. One reaches toward something, one stretches a bit farther and is freed, having left behind some rusted-over part of one’s self, some shell that had clung to a familiar, safe tree but that is now an evacuated husk for which the butterfly has no more use.” She arrives at Ify’s side. “That’s what I am going to do for this country. Will you join me?”

CHAPTER

34

War is raging inside of me.