Both Paige and Amy have furrowed brows focused on Peter, like he is both an equation to solve and a fascination, some strange and exotic animal from another planet that they’ve come across. Ify has seen that look before, and every time, she’s struggled to find the words for what boils in her chest, what she wants to say to get them to stop. He is not a shiny foreign object. He is a boy and quite possibly a liar. But she just remains silent, twirling sauce-drenched spaghetti around her fork and trying to look as though she’s enjoying the meal while listening to Peter’s story.

“There was one rebel group, they were called Angels of Heaven, and they were inching closer into the countryside. And getting closer and closer to where we lived. The morning they came, I was asleep in the guest room at a cousin’s house. It is tradition for us to—how do I put it—swap relatives from time to time. Our houses have many stories, and cousins come to live with you or you go to live with them. For a while, my grandmother stayed with us, and I had to give her English lessons because she was too old to be cyberized, and she only spoke the kind of Igbo that I couldn’t use my software to translate. But the heart knows.” He smiles, and charm sparkles in his eyes. It repulses Ify. The manipulation is so blatant. She can tell immediately that he is doing everything he can to take advantage of them. But why? What is his agenda? “Anyway, I was in my cousin’s house’s guest room when we hear this huge BOOM!” He leaps from his chair and Amy and Paige shriek in unison, so that when he sits down again, he’s fighting back a grin. “Glass everywhere. Pshhhhhhh! Imagine how the ground would be shaking beneath you. It would be terrifying, right? I wasn’t terrified. Maybe I was numb. Maybe I knew I was protected. The sound of the explosion told me that it had been a vehicle bomb. Maybe a car. More likely a truck. There’s a very particular sound to a truck bomb. Once you hear it, you never forget.”

Ify’s frown deepens.

“So, I went outside. And everywhere, pieces of building were falling down. It was like weather, the way stones and shrapnel and pieces of metal fell from the sky. That is what the violence became in my country during the war. It was like the weather.” He doesn’t look to Ify for confirmation. Indeed, this whole time, it seems as though he’s been making a conscious effort to ignore her, to pretend she doesn’t even exist at this table. “I walked past a building that had been cut in half by the bomb. There was shooting. Katakata. Katakata. Everywhere, bullets flying. Even pinging the walls around me.