“Ify, that’s not what they would do to him.” The tone in Céline’s voice stops Ify where she stands. “They’d send him to the Jungle to suffer until he self-deports back to Nigeria.” Céline takes a step toward Ify, but because it is a hologram projected by her Whistle, it looks only like more of Céline’s body has vanished off-frame. “You see what color he is. You know what they do to les noirs.” And Ify sees in a separate hologram what Céline encounters every day in real life because of her position as a Colonial administrator. Children playing in glass-studded mud, malnourished and with faulty Augments, weaving their way around crudely built zinc trailers and huts that stand no chance against the freezing temperatures when the Alabastrine administrators of the Jungle choose to open the vents and clear the waste that accumulates in the slum. Trailers slashed with yellow or blue or purple paint depending on which aid agency they represent, refugees waiting in lines that go on forever for a vaccination or treatment for whatever disease is rampaging through the population at any given time. Families wrapped in bubble coats; when they speak, their breath clouds before their faces and frost tips their eyebrows. Large pools of wastewater dotting the landscape. Drones ever circling, looking for crimes, whether committed out of malice or desperation, they don’t care. They swoop in and fire electric bolts at the target, then their claws retract and they drag the victim away, on the ground and through the wastewater, then into the air, where a jail transport van hovers. Or Augmented police, towering twice as tall as any human and muscled with steroids and gear oil, stomping through the tent cities, crushing homes, beating men and women. Hammering, always hammering, as people try to build their makeshift homes or legal aid clinics or mosques or churches or art therapy centers. Discarded sleeping bags, rotten food, broken shoes half-buried in faulty, recently re-poured concrete.

The place Céline tries to rescue refugees from. The place too many of them don’t escape. The Jungle.

“You would send him to this place?” Céline asks.