Ify fights to keep her frown from turning into a scowl. But her suspicions have been confirmed. Peter has been lying. Maybe about part of his story, maybe about all of it. There’s no way he could have known that Ify was once a high-ranking Nigerian official, that Ify had had access to all of the data collected on rebel movements during the Biafran War. There’s no way he could have known that Ify knew the names and military capabilities of every recorded rebel group in the country. Because, if he did, he would have changed his story.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

The box is hidden under the floorboards of Ify’s living room, beneath a rug and in a place where the grooves of panel hiding it are invisible to the naked eye. She’s buried it in the only portion of her apartment where the cameras cannot angle to see her. The one blind spot in her apartment’s surveillance system. She could have turned the cameras off and even blocked the auxiliary cameras. She could have found blankets to put up. She could have kept this box somewhere else. But this is what she does. She keeps it close, so that every time she walks over this space, she’s reminded of what she’s put here. What she’s carried with her.

With the removed panel next to her, she sits cross-legged in front of the space and reaches in and pulls out a black box large enough to fit in her lap but far too heavy for it. So she sets it beside her, careful to keep within the blind spot.

For several minutes she simply stares at the thing. Laying her eyes upon it sets her mind ablaze with memories, images colored with fire, coated in blood: she stands at the threshold of an apartment, the door slides open, she raises her arm and pulls the trigger on the gun in her hand; explosions rip through the city of Enugu, and she runs and runs and runs through the chaos and destruction as civilians cry and weep and die around her; a boy sits on the other side of an invisible electric fence, shadows cutting across his body in this cage, hands limp in his lap, evil smile sparkling in his eyes, and Ify on the other side of that fence, staring, analyzing, inspecting.

She puts her fingers to her neck, presses her index and middle fingers against the skin of her bodysuit, and immediately, chemicals flood her system with pleasure and relief and fill her with just the perfect amount of vertigo to wash away the memories.