Sometimes simply walking through a stilled tableau will bring it back to life, infuse it with motion, like pressing resume on a paused recording. But sometimes there is a missing piece or something has been knocked loose or an errant stick has found its way in between some gears in the machinery. It always looks like a different thing, the glitch, and sometimes Ify will spend what feels like several hours in a memory before she finds it, a single patch of ground, barren where there should be grass, or a bit of sky that’s the wrong color. This time, it’s a young man leaning against the school building, back pressed up against the wall. But there are two of him occupying the same space, like a photograph shot with double exposure. Or like he is caught between two frames in an animation. One version of him is pressed up against the wall, arms folded, sweat beading his brow, a malicious smirk on his face. The other version is leaning forward, one foot angled forward, the other pressed against the wall like he’s getting ready to spring from it, an action pose.

Ify heads over to the glitch. Every footprint she leaves in the dust, every indent she leaves in the grass, masks itself as soon as she’s passed, erasing any trace of her presence. It’s a constant effort on Ify’s part to control her involvement in the rememberings, to not alter too much, to adjust only what needs adjusting. To fix and not break. As code streams before her face in the hospital room, she sees what that coding describes in the memory.

When Ify gets to the glitch, she sees, out of the corner of her eye, a shimmer in an alleyway between buildings. Is this what triggered the glitch? Ify heads to it and is bathed in shadows only a moment before she finds herself walking out onto shimmering green water. Beneath her appears a thin dinghy laden with armed soldiers who arrive out of thin air, constructed pixel by pixel. Turning left and right and behind herself to look at them, she sees that none of the soldiers appear older than her. Indeed, few of them even look older than Uzo. Ify faces forward again, but her gaze dips downward toward the water, frozen in its shimmer, and that’s when she sees the reflection. The features are distorted by the waves, but the metal is just as Ify remembers. Covering half her face, including one eye, its border drawing a line down to her chin. Ify can also see where the metal’s frontier vanishes into a forest of locs. The right eye—the mechanical one—is glowing a fiery yellow.

It’s Onyii.

When Ify freezes, she realizes too late that she’s off balance, and she pitches forward right into the petrified waves, which shatter like crystals and surround her, then melt away pixel by pixel until—