“Let me see.” Ify snatches the tablet from Grace and scrolls through the information. There is a video file attached, and Ify opens it to a holographic projection of news camera footage. The camera follows a team of medical professionals around something on a stretcher as they hurry across tarmac to load it onto a shuttle craft. People dressed in worn-down clothes—the family?—crowd around the stretcher and follow it into the craft, some of them falling onto the tarmac in tears. The stretcher is loaded onto the shuttle and vanishes as the lid closes. “What is happening?”

“Deportation,” Grace says, quietly. “The child was deported. His father’s asylum application had been denied, as had his brother’s. The three of them were sent back to Vanuatu.”

Ify looks up in surprise. “Vanuatu? But there is no Vanuatu. That country has been underwater for . . .” The implications all hit Ify at once. She looks around her at row after row of beds and gulps. “Grace?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Pull up the immigration status of the patients’ families. And mark those who have received deportation notices within the past three months.” As she says this, she recalls the news broadcast of the government’s new stance on the migrants. And she recalls the feeling that had enveloped her, the idea that she’d solved a puzzle, that she’d found a way to get rid of a problem. And guilt grips her heart.

■  ■  ■  ■  ■

After Grace leaves to do more research, Ify wanders the rows of hospital beds alone. Or almost alone. A few beds have family members crowded around them. Their clothes seem to reflect all manner of success or lack thereof. Some of the people attending to the comatose children or hovering over them wear slim-fitting patterned tunics with pleated pants. Others hold battered workers’ caps in grease-stained fingers. Some have small vacuum-sealed containers of food with them, aromatic scents wafting over to Ify and speaking to her of places filled with brown people, black people, on a floor crowded around a massive dish or a table and eating and talking and complaining and laughing. Food is forbidden in this part of the east wing, but Ify doesn’t stop them. Maybe that family is hoping the smell of home will waken their child. At one bed stands a child who looks only a few years older than the one in the hospital bed. They wear the school uniform of one of Alabast’s most prestigious secondary schools, and they are speaking in hushed whispers to the comatose child. It is not English. Ify scrolls through the options in her translator and finds it: Gujarati.

They really are from all parts of Earth. From the scattered whispering and murmurs and prayers and quiet pleadings, Ify hears Tamil, Persian, Pashto, Javanese, Tongan, and half a dozen other languages. Including Igbo.