How indeed. She turns back to face Grace. “I remembered a thing I once did. A thing I once made. Long ago.” Then she taps the back of her neck where her new Accent sits. “I changed the programming of my Augment to do things it wasn’t initially built to do.” Her mouth is a grim line. “I was pretty smart as a child.” She returns to her mug of Ovaltine, ignoring the look Grace gives her, an expression of wonder, as though Ify were some magician or spirit that controls the weather. “We can’t stay here for much longer.” Sipping her drink, she scans the wall for supplies. Foodstuffs, external batteries, filtered water. No weapons. She downs the rest of her drink, even though it scalds her throat, then rises to peruse the shelves, searching for and finding a duffel bag at the bottom of one.

“Ify.”

She starts to load it with medicine and preserved food.

“Ify, I was thinking. The children. In Alabast.”

Ify freezes.

“Are there synths there too?”

For a long time, Ify remains unmoving. She doesn’t know why she never told Grace. Maybe she feared that Grace’s reaction would push her deeper into her desire to eventually have Peter deported, in the process consigning an untold number of patients to similar fates. Maybe she worried that Grace would understand that the synths weren’t protected by Galactic Human Rights Law and she would find herself forced to harbor a secret in contravention of the law, breaking that law in the process. Maybe she wanted to push the synths out of her mind entirely. But then she’d met Uzo. She’d seen the bits of Onyii that survived in her. She’d watched the girl’s consciousness morph before her very eyes. What she’d once thought an unfeeling killing machine had a face that showed anger and sadness and confusion. In the moment before Ify had detonated the EMP, it had even looked at her with . . . understanding. She had looked at her with understanding.

“Yes,” Ify says at last. “There are synths among the children. I don’t know how many. And I don’t know when and how they got to Alabast—possibly during the ceasefire before the civil war resumed.” She knows now why she’d kept the existence of the synths from Grace. Telling Grace about them would have eventually led to Ify telling her why the synths had migrated to Alabast, then telling Grace about the ceasefire, then eventually telling Grace about her role in ending it, in restarting the war, in participating in the commission of a war crime. She leaves the shelves and returns to sit across from Grace.

“And there is an added complication with the synths. They’re losing their memories.”

Grace’s eyes go wide.