Ify receives the documents with a ping before Grace has even finished talking. Patient diagnostic after patient diagnostic. Hundreds of documents she reviews as she leaves her apartment, takes the elevator down to her street, and hurries to the ward. All of them children. She looks at the FOUR scores, the measure grading their Full Outline of UnResponsiveness. Nearly all of them are at zeroes. Those with higher scores start to decline right before Ify’s very eyes, so that by the time she arrives at the hospital, all of them have reached zero. Eyelids closed. No response to pain. Absent pupil, corneal, and cough reflexes. Their breathing steady with the ventilator rate. But what worries Ify is what may happen if the comas persist. The longer they stay like this, the greater their risk of catching things like pneumonia. And dying.

All thoughts of clinical diagnosis fall away, however, when she arrives at the ward and sees them. Hundreds upon hundreds of beds holding children strapped to cerebral monitors. All of them beeping in unison. All of those sounds telling her that these children are just barely alive.

CHAPTER

10

In the trailer, Xifeng is swabbing my wounds and putting together the skin of my arms where it is ripping. I am thinking backward to attack and not remembering feeling any pain. And when I am sitting on stool with my arm in Xifeng’s hands soft as beachsand, I am not feeling any pain either. I am only feeling pain from sun and from poison in the air when I am being pulled from mountain of bodies, like I am being born, and when I am baby and everything is new. I am feeling thing like pain, but then that is going away and I am not feeling any thing. And I am wondering if it is because something is broken inside me.

For a long time, Xifeng is working without saying any words. I am thinking that this is the first time she is seeing me fighting and killing, but I am remembering that I am running away from caravan to keep her safe but also to be keeping her from seeing me fighting and killing.

“Do you know why we are doing this work, Uzo?” she is asking me in Taishanese.

I am looking at Xifeng’s face when she is saying this softly. She is not looking at me. She is focusing on my arm and on repairing my wound and spraying chemical on it that will be binding the skin back together and hiding the metal underneath that is my skeleton.

“We are preserving memory of a painful time in your country’s history. We are making sure that people don’t forget. It is important to remember these things, even if they hurt to remember.”