Puzzle pieces swim inside her head. Clues. Hints. Theories. Hypotheses. But flickering in bright red like a broken neon sign are the words It’s your fault. She closes her eyes and sees it all in flashes. She’s standing at the threshold of a door with a bag at her side and a gun in her hand, and on the other side of that door is the woman she’s traveled across a country to kill. On the other side of that door is the woman who murdered her entire family. Onyii. Then she sees the city of Enugu, the city to which she’d tracked this woman. And she sees the people ambling through it, buying jewelry, cooking ogbono soup on the side of the street, selling their wares, flirting, joking, all in a burst of colors and light glinting off shining surfaces. She closes her eyes tighter, trying to force away the memory, but then, as though it were happening right around her, she hears the explosions, thunder that surrounds her, that takes the ground out from beneath her. Thunder going on for what seems like forever. Then screams and weeping and a city covered in blood. No.

No.

She refuses to believe it. There is something else. There has to be. Something else has caused the influx of refugees from Nigeria. Something else brought Peter here. She tells herself this over and over again. There is something else. And after several minutes, she can bring herself to believe it. There is something more to the mystery of the comatose children. It’s not her fault.

She says this to herself—it’s not my fault—as she takes a few deep breaths, then rises from her chair to, with a thought, raise the blinds in her office.

She pulls up surveillance of the refugee ward so that it broadcasts over her floor-to-ceiling window. Like this, she can monitor the comings and goings without having to actually set foot among her patients. When the contact with them becomes too much—the antiseptic smell, the too-fine detail in their faces, the sounds of their machines’ monotonous beeping and humming and droning—she can watch them like this. It gives her an odd sense of peace, gazing down at them from above. Surveilling them. She dares not call it godlike. But it is like that—the part of God that’s supposed to be caring and loving and watchful—protective, even.

And that’s when she sees them. Two women sitting next to a bed. She sees their hair, their hands, and the way they fold over the patient’s hands like layers of soil. Or beach sand. She zooms in, and one of them looks up, her eyes closed, her mouth moving in prayer Ify can’t hear. Paige. And beside her, with head bowed, is Amy. They’re praying over Peter.

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