Ify watches the pro-immigration demonstration from the window of her office, arms folded, brow furrowed. Among the marchers are Black and brown protestors, and sprinkled throughout are cadres of Japanese protestors with banners bearing slogans in kanji. At the head of the march are mestizos and descendants of the First Nation tribes, alternating verses of a song they chant at full volume, their arms linked together. Many protestors wear traditional garb from their cultures, but many more wear the dress of those who’ve acclimated to Alabast, simple-colored loose-fitting shirts and blouses and suit jackets. Red and blue and white and green and pink and orange, but throughout the procession, a shimmer. Many of these people can afford to take the day off from work to protest the government’s new hardline immigration policy. Among them is Grace, holding a placard of her own with slogans in Alabastrine English, French, Dutch, and Traditional Chinese characters.

You care too much, Ify wants to tell the girl, who, were she in Ify’s position, would be risking not just her job but her medical license as well. If Grace wants to be the best medical care provider she can be, she should focus on her studies. Focus on actual patient care: the checking of vital signs, conducting the right tests, offering the correct prognoses. She shouldn’t be waving a poster in the air and shouting like some rabble-rouser. But Ify hears them call for shutting down the Jungle, and the images return to Ify. The horror and the squalor.

She turns away from the window and finds herself thinking of the boy whose hand she’d picked up and dropped at the hospital the other day. Completely unresponsive. Afterward, she and Grace had overseen the insertion of a feeding tube through his nose. No reaction whatsoever.

Projected on the screen behind her from her tablet is page after page of the recent report from the Alabast Psychiatric Association done in collaboration with a number of political scientists hired by the government. It is a mess of hypothesis and conjecture, so much guesswork with no concrete proof, and no throughline or central argument. The medical epidemic that has overtaken the refugee children isn’t yet widespread knowledge. So far, it has only made noise in the government and medical communities. Ify shudders to think of what form popular feeling might take. Before she can arrest the visions, she sees white Alabastrines shouting that this is what those migrants deserve, that they should have never come here, and so on and so on.

“Focus,” she hisses to herself.