“No.” Whatever hard drives Xifeng and her group have already distributed, whatever memories have already been reawakened, it’s reached a critical mass. Enough people know of enough carnage that the reprisal attacks have begun.

“Yes, Ify. It’s begun.” Xifeng looks to two guards standing by one of the walls, and they reach Ify in three long strides.

Before Ify can fight back, they have her in restraints. “Stop this!”

Xifeng spreads her arms, as though to indicate the whole world and its burning. “This is the reckoning. This is how the healing happens.” Then she turns and leaves. The little girl Xifeng had held close to her side earlier has taken her place.

Ify lets out a wordless roar at Xifeng’s back. Words fail her. Sentences fall apart on her tongue. And all she has to contain the emotions roiling inside her, the feelings and thoughts storming through every fiber of her being, is that roar. Long and loud until all breath has left her lungs.

CHAPTER

36

I am smiling at the Chinese man who is calling me Onyii, then I am hearing, Get up! Get up! and it is snatching me out of the remembering, the first remembering I am ever having that is feeling like it is mine and like it is before Enyemaka are finding me under pile of corpses. But I am not having time to be thinking about this because I am hearing rumbling overhead and, in storage closet, Binye is pulling me to my feet and we are both rushing to the entrance, where we are seeing girl and synth run in all directions to assume battle formations.

I am running in direction of where I know Xifeng and Ify are, and my heart is thrilling because I am knowing that I can be protecting Xifeng in way that Ify cannot, and I am not caring that I am feeling this way toward Ify, even though when I am younger and it is just me and Xifeng and Enyemakas, I am loving Ify with all of my heart and wanting her to love me too.

I arrive at the room where Ify is being held. I am standing by the room’s only entrance and only moving so that some of the girls who remain can be bringing in Grace, who they are also binding to chair. That way, I am looking at the two of them. The swelling and bleeding is gone from Grace’s face, but the fear is remaining. And I am seeing how Ify is noticing how her friend is changed, how she shrinks when she is touched, how it is like her entire body is being exposed nerve endings, how she is looking no one—not even Ify—in the eye.

“What’d you do to her?” Ify growls at me.