The first kneels before Ify-Peter. “If this group massacred your village, then why would you join them? Why did we find you in their camp?” His voice is low and almost playful. “It doesn’t make any sense. A proper victim would seek revenge against those who wronged him. Like a man. Are you a man?”

Ify-Peter chokes back a sob.

“I asked you a question. Are you a man?”

More wordless weeping.

“Very well then.” The interrogator pulls a knife out of a pocket on his vest and cuts away Ify-Peter’s pant legs, exposing their thighs to the cold. Then the interrogator upends the swarm of metallic bees onto their legs, where they burrow beneath the skin, and pain sears through their entire body, spiking at the base of their brain, turning everything to gray static, and suddenly—

Ify is back in the hospital room, gasping. The other end of her cord lies on the floor. She staggers into the chair and forces herself to take several deep breaths. She presses her palms to her eyes, trying to block out the vision and the experience she’s just had, racked by sobs that shake her shoulders. She should have been prepared. She curses herself, for not expecting to intrude into a painful memory. Then she straightens. That memory could belong to anyone. Peter is a synth, a combination of other people’s neural data cobbled together to generate enough information to simulate humanness. It’s all fake. That couldn’t have been Peter. With this, she’s able to take the pain she experienced and box it and stuff that box deep in her mind. She puts her fingers to her nose, and they come back red. Hurriedly, she snatches tissues from the dispenser above Peter’s bedstand and dabs at the nosebleed.

Then she takes off her Bonder, folds it, and stuffs it back into her pocket.

When she looks down, Peter is staring straight at her. His eyes didn’t flutter open. One moment, they’re closed; the next, they’re not. The more she observes him, the more like a machine he seems. “You lied,” she says, trying to make her voice as hard as possible. “Your family is not Igbo. You are Efik. Or you would be if you weren’t a synth. But you were a synth, made for war and aligned with rebels. Then you were captured. Who’s to say that you were actually tortured?”

He says nothing. His face doesn’t move.

“Because you are a synth, you are not subject to human rights protections under Alabastrine law. Your very existence is a danger to everyone here.” She searches his face for a reaction. “You are not human. Once the authorities are notified of your presence, you will be arrested and deported.”

“Please,” he says, and his voice sounds just like it did in the memory of his torture.

Ify steels her heart against him.

“You made them torture me.”