Then soldier are standing around and facing each other and joking behind their helmet and I am pressing my ear to window to hear them, and I am hearing them tell about child they are executing and calling them Ceasefire Children, then they are calling them synth and saying they are rubbish and I am hearing that they are looking for more of them. I am hearing them say extermination and Biafra and memory.

And then, they are seeing me.

CHAPTER

19

The Medical Committee sits before Ify like judges at a tribunal. The vaulted ceilings are painted with depictions from the Bible of moments of healing. Lazarus raised from the dead, someone’s hand reaching out to touch the hem of the Christ’s garment, even the beginnings of the universe. The floor’s tiles glisten as though, every second, nanobots are hard at work giving them their extra sheen. The benches behind Ify are largely unoccupied, which seems odd to her, given what is at stake. If there were any sense of justice or concern beyond the very clinical, the committee members would have allowed the families of those affected by the widespread coma epidemic to this hearing. They would have publicized it. They would have distributed the reports—report after report—written by scientists, medical professionals, and political thinkers on why, all of a sudden, thousands of children have suddenly become unresponsive to treatment and seem to have cast themselves to death’s edge.

But no. In the benches behind her sit Grace and a few other medical professionals, most of them Ify’s contemporaries and subordinates. Many of them are native Alabastrines, scattered fallen snowflakes amid the steel pews with wood overlay. And some of them, Ify knows, have resented her rise, how she has surpassed them in rank, how she already has assistant director in her title. How people are already calling her Doctor even though she has yet to take her licensing exam.