Ify holds up a hand to stop her. “The materials also need to read in Chinese. With my Augment, I can read it and I can decipher it, but I can’t write it.”

“But why Chinese?”

“Because this is going to be Uzo’s country of origin. And her documents need to read in all of its official languages. Otherwise, authorities will know that they’ve been forged. Ngozi will take point on preparing the documents, and you will perform the surgery to inscribe that identity onto Uzo’s body.”

“But—”

“I’m not asking you.”

The moon peeks through cloud cover, lighting the anger that shows through the tiredness on Grace’s face. How to tell her that Ify doesn’t trust her own hands? That she’s not refusing because she hasn’t performed a surgery in over a year but because memory of one done to her is still too vivid in her brain. Ify wonders what Grace would say if Ify told her the story, told her of how she and Onyii had been on the run, fleeing a Nigerian government and a rebel Biafran movement, both of which wanted them dead. Told her of how they’d found refuge in a submersible with Xifeng but that their pursuers were tracking them through a device implanted just below Ify’s heart. She wonders what Grace would say if she told Grace about how Onyii had had to cut her open without anesthetic and reach into her chest with her metal fingers to pull out the tracking device. She wonders what Grace would say if she were to show her the spot just beneath her left breast where Onyii’s bionic hand had entered.

Instead, she stiffens and says, “Ngozi can show you where to find the surgical tools.” Then she walks past Ngozi to her mech, climbs onto its lowered shoulders, and lies on her back, staring at the stars and wondering if this is what Onyii saw after she’d put Ify on the shuttle that spirited her into space.

A voice in the back of her mind recalls the exchange with Grace and asks Ify, What about the surgery you performed on yourself?

Looking at the stars, Ify tells this voice, “I can’t be as reckless with the lives of others as I have been with my own.”

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

Night deepens. But it doesn’t bring with it the serenity that can whisk Ify into sleep. Here, this close to the radiation, crickets don’t chirp, large animals don’t low or growl or whine at the moon. The ambient buzz she hears isn’t the telltale sound of insect life happening around her but rather the sizzle of the earth damaging things, killing flora and fauna. Making monsters.