Dear Ify,

I’ve only just now received news of your deployment. Do you remember when we used to attend chapel together? I was always running late, and I would ask you to save me a seat. And, without fail, by the time I arrived, you would have cleared a whole pew for me. I once thought you contained magic. If there were someone near and dear to you, you would move heaven and earth for them. You were younger than me, newer to Alabast, and yet you seemed so certain of yourself and your powers. Eventually, you told me why you were able to guard so much space for me. You told me it was because whenever you would sit in a pew where the whites sat, they would see you and move away. You always had a logical, scientific explanation for things. Even if they didn’t make sense, they contained logic. I still believed there was magic in you. I still do. I encourage you to let go of logic as you return home. Fear does not contain logic. Our sense of home does not contain logic. There is magic in both of these things. I am learning these things as a colonial administrator. You can pave streets and make them ordered. You can introduce ordinances for waste disposal and educational requirements. You can create a proper protocol for migrant resettlement. You can do all of these things, but at the center of our work is people. People and the hope they bring with them. People and the memories they bring with them. Please don’t walk away from your memories. There is magic in them. Be well, ma copine.

Take care of yourself.

Je t’aime.

Your chapel seatmate,

Céline

Ify closes the message to find Grace sitting across from her, hands folded in her lap, a concerned look on her face.

“Home,” Ify says to the question in Grace’s eyes. “I haven’t been back in a very long time.” She looks out the window at the once-familiar streets and whispers to herself, Home.

Part II

CHAPTER

20

Lagos, Nigeria:

2181

I am running. Always it is feeling like I am running.

When I am in Xifeng’s trailer and the police are first seeing me, I am running and they are chasing me and I am losing myself in Lagos. But then drone is sighting me and more police are hunting me. So I am living in jungle and finding cave and I am watching other people be wandering and thinking maybe they are like me. Maybe they are running too. And some of them have burned skin like jollof at the bottom of a pot, like Xifeng used to make. And some of them have metal inside them like me, but it is on the outside and their metal is having rust on it.