She enters Uzo’s room, the whole place blanketed in false light. For a while, Ify looks around at the room’s smooth, rounded edges, its perfect symmetry, its spotlessness, its fluorescence. Then she goes to the console on the wall by the door and turns off the lighting, simultaneously flipping the blinds to reveal the refugee ward on the other side of the window. It’s not natural lighting that spills into their room in thin bars, but it’s closer, and this makes Ify feel as though she’s doing a right thing. She then moves her chair so that it faces Uzo, and they stare at each other, Uzo’s face impassive, Ify trying to school compassion onto hers.

“I am thinking you are looking for Onyii in me,” Uzo says.

Uzo’s bluntness still has a way of disarming Ify. Maybe her break with Céline is too recent.

“Not just in my head but in the way I am moving. How I am walking and sitting and breathing. I am not Onyii. I am being called Uzo.”

“You are right, Uzo.”

This seems to quiet the synth.

“I need your help. Your . . . your rememberings. I can’t find the order to them. I can’t find the right coding.”

“I am organizing them. They are being connected, but I am sorting them so I am knowing which one I am being born with and which one I am collecting during my mission.”

“How do you find what you’re looking for?” Ify hears the change in her own voice. She’s not asking as a scientist or as a doctor. She’s asking as a human. When she asks Uzo how she finds what she’s looking for, she knows she means it for herself as well. She’s lost. So lost, adrift in her own mission, helpless before what is killing these children, bereft after losing the anchor that has held her most steadily in her life in the Colonies, adrift in a sea whose waves threaten to take these pieces of Onyii further and further away from her.

“I am using word with you now, but when I am talking to myself or to Enyemaka or to my brother and sister, it is coming out as many words put into one.” Her mouth works. “If I am wanting to be happy, I am not simply telling myself to find happy remembering. I am looking for being-held-in-arms-of-mother or I am looking for fixing-BoTa-for-my-grandfather-after-brother-is-breaking-it or I am looking for sitting-in-field-picking-flowers. And each of these thing is coming into my mind as one word. It is like . . .” Uzo looks around, as though searching the room for a word. Then she does a thing Ify has never seen before. “It is like a circle,” Uzo says, drawing one in the air with her index fingers.