That is why I am here. It is purpose that is being given to me, but it is also purpose that I am choosing for myself. There is thing in my brain that is making me special, and it is thing that will be helping these people. And this is the future I am choosing: to be helping these people, some of whom may be my brother and sister.

And this is making me to not be nervous.

CHAPTER

51

For Ify, there is always a slight spell of vertigo.

One moment, she’s seated at her desk, her chair reclined slightly back so that she stares up at an angle, her vision filled with projected screens and tabs and windows from the variety of software programs she’s running, her gloved fingers at work on the touchboard in her lap. She takes a sharp inhale, then, the next moment, there’s emptiness. Nothingness, not even color. A pure absence that lasts for the briefest of instants before the world begins to build itself around her.

In the beginning, it is a random memory, what Uzo has been calling a “remembering,” as though there were an action involved. Ify lands in the middle of a forest or a field outside a village like the one in which she finds herself now. And everything is frozen. A still-life painting, but one that Ify can walk through.

In a circle outside the squat blue school building, children have gathered, and one of them is in the center, frozen mid-dance, upright but with legs crossed at the ankles and arms akimbo, his shadow a stretched-out reflection before him. The shadow flickers, however. As do the faces on some of the children in the circle surrounding the dancer. Ify’s avatar walks through the still tableau as her real body—she knows, though she cannot feel it—reclines in a chair in an all-white room, fingers racing over a touchboard.

Ify looks at the dancer’s shadow, how it shimmers and fills with static every few moments, then looks to the sun and gauges its position, the angle at which it casts its light. It doesn’t shine with a real sun’s force, so Ify doesn’t need to shield her eyes from it. Still, she cannot shake the habit.