Ify’s heart leaps into her throat. She can’t move. The thought of anything happening to Paige or Amy roots her where she sits, as though each word from Peter is another pour from a barrel of concrete.

“Now that I am seeing your face, I am wondering another thing. I am wondering how much they know about you. There is only one way you can be knowing that I am lying. That is because you are being soldier as well. For Naija Army. And you are knowing who is rebel and where they are being rebel. And now I am recognizing your face.” A smile splits his lips. “I am wanting to kill you once. I know because I am sitting in cell and you are standing on the other side of it wearing army gown, and you are standing with fancy army pilot, and you are writing things about me in your tablet, but you are not writing that I am being tortured by government and being held in my cell for almost every hour of the day. And you are not even changing your name when you come here.” He shakes his head, smiling wryly.

“They would never believe you.”

But Peter’s smile doesn’t fade. He knows. He knows that Ify is not certain. He knows that when the time comes, Ify would be unable to bring herself to lie. “I am thinking that for now, they are looking at you like daughter.”

Ify grits her teeth.

“But when they are finding out you are war criminal, maybe this change.” He shrugs, then walks back up the stoop and into the house. The door whisks open and shut behind him.

And Ify is left to the sunlight and the birdsong and the buzzing of insects, all of it a façade. A flimsy, horrible façade.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

The refugee ward sprawls before her. Her bodysuit tells her she has arrived just as the night shift is beginning. Even though she is off duty, Ify wears her lab coat with her nameplate on it. Over her bodysuit, it feels like a proper uniform, a thing this new Ify has grown comfortable in. The cavernous space, with its high, rounded ceiling and its silver walls, is filled with synthetic light. But the light here doesn’t bother Ify. Everything—the light, the temperature, the softly antiseptic smell—has been calibrated to allow for maximum comfort of the patients whose beds extend in row after row before her.

Ify is only here to watch. She’s not on duty, and she’s loath to disrupt the rotation of nurse attendants, red-blood and bot, who make their rounds, checking vitals and having quiet, smiling conversations.