Layla and her family are taken from their home by government agents, given ten minutes to pack, and sent to a processing center for internees. At the center, Layla is permanently marked with her ID number using invisible ultraviolet ink. Later, they are herded onto a train and told to not leave their seats. They are not told where they are going.

There are obvious parallels here to the way the Nazis sent Jewish people to the concentration camps or how the U.S. government interred Japanese Americans during World War II. Layla's invisible ID stamp is a slightly more subtle version of the identification numbers tattooed on camp prisoners during the Holocaust. Layla and her family stop being treated like people and instead become a kind of cargo that needs to be shipped, tracked, and managed.