When Ify woke up, she fumbled over to her workstation and had all her monitors running almost instantly, sketching the shapes that still burned vivid in her head and logging those sketches into an online editor where she watched it all come to life, the black rings of fire touching, then interlocking, growing more and more complex until they began to fold on each other like bits of origami. Then, from that, Ify had derived the algorithm to replicate self-assembly, and suddenly she was staring at the mechanism for mnemonic repair.

The cure for memory erasure.

And now that coding exists in a liquid filled with nanobots that nursing assistants begin to inject into the arms of the children they all stand around.

Ify has no idea how long the mechanism will take before activating—whether it will begin its work immediately or lie dormant in the bloodstream for months or maybe even years, by which point too much precious material will have been eaten away. All Ify can do after the injections is tell the nursing assistants to stay with their patients and monitor for any change in activity.

She’s on her way out with Grace when she hears the dull roar of cheering from far away. “What is that?”

But Grace, now paying attention to the world around her, taps in a sequence on her tablet and gasps. “Doctor.”

Ify turns, annoyed even now at Grace’s insistence on calling her that, but stops as soon as she sees the image on which Grace’s eyes fixate.

Grace gulps, then reads some of the text in a document next to what appears to be a government press conference. “‘The Migration Board finds no reason to question what is stated about the health of the children affected by this current crisis. It is therefore considered that, for their recovery, they need to be in a safe and stable environment. This is necessary for full recuperation.’” Grace looks up from her tablet. “What does this mean?”

Ify walks out to the floor where, already, families gather around the sickbeds, excitedly speaking to children who may or may not be able to hear them. Some are weeping into their child’s blankets, others are taking a patient’s hand and, not realizing they’re doing it, shaking it as they dance in place. “The deportation orders have been canceled,” Ify says. The full import of the words that just came out of her mouth sinks in. “The deportation orders have been canceled.”

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