She thinks I’m in mourning over Peter, Ify realizes. A part of her wants to tell her the truth, that she just lived through what may be Peter’s very real trauma, that she was transported back to a time she’s done everything in her power to forget, when she was complicit in exactly those same acts of torture. She wants to tell Amy that she believes a part of her, however small, is responsible for the boy in that hospital bed, for turning him into what he is, for creating him in the first place. War does that. It is the pot and it is all the ingredients for the stew, and what gets spooned out and put on the plate is Peter. But she says nothing. Instead, she accepts Amy’s hug in silence.

It is not her fault.

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Except for a few attendants making their rounds up and down the rows of beds, Ify is alone in the ward housing the refugee children. The lights have dimmed. Ify figures it’s part of a power-saving measure now that the kids have been marked down as unresponsive to light. She makes sure that the attendants are far enough away that they won’t see what it is she’s about to do.

It’s against all protocol to perform an invasive procedure without the patient’s consent. But curiosity has taken hold of Ify like never before. She must know the answer to the questions stirring inside her: What happened between her and Peter? Is there something in there that can help Ify figure out what’s been going on with these children?

When she’s certain she’s in the clear, she takes a seat next to the child she’d seen Peter with earlier, the one she now knows for certain is cyberized. She pulls her Bonder out of her pocket and checks to make sure it’s in working order. She dares not put it on, but she calibrates it to download instead of stream. And like that, she plugs her cord into the outlet at the base of the child’s neck. There’s no way to know what memories she’s downloading, whether they’re peaceful or painful, whether they’re of family or torturers, whether they’ll provide coherent snapshots of an episode or whether they’ll be a chaos of disparate puzzle pieces.

Satisfied with the data she’s downloaded, she disconnects and stands up. Just before she leaves, she smooths out a wrinkle in the motionless child’s bedsheet.

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