The memory intrudes. Crashes through the walls of Ify’s mind to bring her back to that mud-and-stone building in a village she no longer remembers but has pieced together through what others have told and shown her. The night is so deep that everyone has turned into shapes moving in the dark, passing beneath the occasional moonbeam, sometimes with a face so stained with ink and gore that they look less like a person and more like a creature from nightmare. Ify with a pet dog clutched to her chest as it bleeds over her dress. The village’s adults gathered outside while a rebel commander proclaims that everyone is to die because they belong to an enemy tribe. Ify shivering alone in her room as the gunshots ring out and her mother and father are dumped into shallow graves. Ify unable to move, hoping that if she remains still enough she can simply vanish, fade away and turn into smoke and never come back. Then a young girl painted black with mud and blood, holding a rifle across her skinny body, walks into the house. Slow, sure steps. She doesn’t hesitate until she gets to Ify. No matter how much she tries, Ify can’t render herself invisible to this specter, this ghost. This creature that pries the dead dog from her arms and takes it away and buries it, then returns for her. To bring her to a place that will eventually become the camp where she raises the girl and carries her like she is her little sister and loves her and makes sure she wakes up in time for school and makes sure their droid closely shaves Ify’s head during the summers so that the heat won’t get trapped on her scalp by her hair and scavenges to find pads for the girls when they start to bleed and braids hair and cooks food and teaches them to fight and to read and to know what the earth looks like when a landmine is buried beneath it and how to tell what type of mech is flying overhead by its sound, and it all overwhelms Ify so that sobs struggle inside her chest for release.

“I’m sorry,” Ify says softly. For wanting revenge. For leading the suicide bombers to Enugu to break the ceasefire. For trying to forget Onyii and everything Onyii had done for her. For trying to forget how Onyii had saved her life. And given her a new one. “I’m sorry.”

Someone’s hand closes over her own, and Ify looks to her right to see Grace looking at her and smiling, her fingers tightening over Ify’s.

Through her tears, Ify smiles back. And they ride like that in silence until Ngozi’s mech pulls off to the side and lowers onto a hill overlooking desert patched with islands of green.

“Do you see that?” Ngozi asks.