“Is that even the word for what I do?” Céline replies, waving the question away with her smile. She walks over to Ify’s desk and shifts around some tablets and microprocessors. “Do you have a graph of her?”

“Who?”

“Your secret weapon. Your pièce de résistance.”

Ify puts the box down and walks past Céline. “Where were you?”

She can feel Céline move behind her, reach for her. “Ify, I—”

“Where. Were you.”

“Ify.” Céline’s voice softens. “What happened down there?”

Ify wants to tell her friend that she was forced to confront her past. Memories rock Ify. An earthquake telling the story of war and betrayal and children held in cages and a riot in Abuja. She waits for it to pass. How does she tell Céline all of what happened? That she was responsible for the capture and torture of children, that she was the reason war continued for as long as it did, that people she thought would once help in peacetime turned out to be villains. That she had once been a villain herself. “I had a sister,” she says without warning.

“What? You’ve never mentioned her before.”

“We were from different tribes, but she raised me. It was several years into the war when she found me. My family had been murdered, and I was all alone. We lived in a camp in Delta State by the water. When I wasn’t in school, she would take me to the edge of this small cliff and we would watch the sun set, and then she would stay with me as I traced constellations in the stars and told her about how much I wanted to go to space. Because of a mistake I made one day, our camp was raided and we were separated. She became a Biafran soldier, and I was brought to Abuja, where I was taught how glorious it was to be a Nigerian. Suddenly, Onyii and I were enemies. Just like that. Because people told us we were. I was told that we Nigerians were in the right and that we were doing what we had to do to bring about peace. I was told that the people we captured and the people we killed were beyond saving. Many of them could never be convinced that peace was the way. When I found my chance to see my sister again, Nigerian society rejected me and cast me out. So I went to find my sister and kill her. Because she was the one who had murdered my family.”

When Céline says Ify’s name, her voice is thick with sorrow.