Ify folds her arms and leans against the sink, staring off into the middle distance. “Before I arrived here, I wanted to be a pilot.” The instinct rises in her to crush the memories bubbling to the surface—memories of a refugee camp in Nigeria, memories of the sister who abandoned her smiling at her and telling her to hurry up and get to school on time, memories of mechs and enemy soldiers raining fire and death on that camp—but she lets them come. “I would look into the night sky and see the Colonies winking at me like stars, and I would tell myself that, when I was older, I’d go there to study orbital physics and flight. My . . .” The word catches in her throat. “My sister was a pilot. During the war.”

Grace’s eyes go wide. “You had a sister?”

The last time Ify saw Onyii’s face, it had been a blur. Ify had just undergone a surgery. Onyii had removed a tracker from inside her body. Then a haze had blanketed Ify, cocooned her. The next thing she knew, she was in the complete darkness of a cargo hold and wouldn’t see light until the shuttle she’d been put on had docked in Alabast.

“What happened to her?”

For a long time, Ify is silent. She moves past Grace’s question. “Whenever I think of piloting, I think of her. And whenever I think of her, I think of killing.” She turns to Grace and hopes that Grace can see the new brightness in her face. The warmth she’s trying to put there. “So I decided to study medicine. I wanted a job where I didn’t have to break things. I could fix them instead.”

Grace sniffs against a sob and smiles.

Ify takes a step and is close enough to see the shards of morning in her assistant’s eyes. With her thumb, she wipes the still-shining tearstains from Grace’s cheeks. “Take the rest of the day off.”

“But, Doctor!”

Ify raises a hand to stop any further objection. “Physician, heal thyself.” At the question in Grace’s eyes, Ify says, “I attended chapel when I was recently arrived. I would go with a very dear friend of mine while we were students. That’s where I heard that passage from Luke 4:23. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

Grace’s smile broadens. “Thank you, Doctor.” Then she’s off.

Ify lets out a heavy sigh after several seconds of watching the door Grace has just passed through. Then her Whistle trills. She sees the number for a mechanic and answers, “Hello?”

“Hi,” says the young voice on the other end. “You dropped off a Bonder earlier this week?”

Her heart races. The comatose girl’s neural data. “Yes. Is it ready? Were you able to recover the data?”

“Err . . . you should probably come by.”

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