War Girls Read online

  Also by

  TOCHI ONYEBUCHI

  Beasts Made of Night

  Crown of Thunder

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  RAZORBILL & colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com

  Ebook ISBN 9780451481689

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Onyebuchi, Tochi, author.

  Title: War girls / Tochi Onyebuchi.

  Description: New York : Razorbill, 2019. | Summary: In 2172, when much of the world is unlivable, sisters Onyii and Ify dream of escaping war-torn Nigeria and finding a better future together but are, instead, torn apart.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019016805 | ISBN 9780451481672 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Sisters—Fiction. | Cyborgs—Fiction. | War—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Nigeria—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.O66 War 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016805

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my mother

  CONTENTS

  Also by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Interlude

  Part II

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Interlude

  Part III

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  1

  Southeastern Nigeria

  April 2172

  The first thing Onyii does every morning is take off her arm. Other War Girls have gotten used to sleeping without their arms or their legs. But Onyii’s phantom limb haunts her in her sleep. In her dreams, she has all her arms and legs and can run. She can run far and fast and away from whatever is chasing her. She can hold her rifle, and she can aim, and she can feel her face with all of her fingers. But then she’d wake up and try to touch her body with a right arm that wasn’t there anymore. She never got accustomed to waking up without all of her body there, so now she sleeps with her arm attached, even though sometimes she accidentally crushes and bends some of the machinery. Even though the sweat from her night terrors rusts some of the more delicate circuitry. Even though she wakes every morning with the imprint of metal plates on her cheek. Which is why she gets up earlier than the rest of the camp and spends the quiet morning hours at her bedside station, oiling the gears and tinkering with the chips. In the darkness, the sparks from the metal as she works are the only light in her tent.

  Ify sleeps through all of it.

  Onyii takes a moment to listen to Ify snore. The birds outside have just started their chirping, but they’re still quiet enough that Onyii can hear Ify’s patterns. Two smooth snores, then a hiccup. Onyii’s dreams are a blur of chaos and blood and screaming. Flashes of gunfire. Rain falling hard but never hard enough to wash the tears from her face. Ify’s face is serene in slumber, the tribal scars soft ridges on her cheeks. Her lips turn up at the edges. For almost her entire life, the child has only known peace.

  When Onyii finishes, she disconnects her arm from its station and places it against the spot where her shoulder ends. She’d left that battle long ago with a stump. But the doctors had had to cut away the rest of the arm, because it had gotten infected. Now there is only mesh wiring over the opening, so that her socket is more like a power outlet than anything else. Nanobots buzz out of the metal arm socket, trailing wires. The threading then attaches the metal to her flesh. Electricity shocks through her body—a small burst like scraping feet against carpet then touching a doorknob. Then she’s able to flex her fingers. She tries out her elbow joints, bends the arm, swings it slowly back and forth, rotating the shoulder, then stretches and lets out a massive yawn. She waits until she’s outside the tent to let out her gas.

  The world is green and wet with recent rain. The dew hasn’t yet dried from the grass. Leaves bend on their tree branches overhead.

  Wind whips about her. Engines scream overhead, and Onyii looks up just in time to see aerial mechs, massive humanoid robots, with green and white stripes painted on their shoulders, screech through the sky, as they’ve been doing for the past year. Shoulder cannons and thrusters attached to their compact bodies. State-of-the-art nav systems. Yet they can’t detect the rebel Biafran camp right under their noses. As long as the signal dampener they rigged to hide this outpost from the Nigerian authorities is u
p and running, they’re safe. The government forces can’t even see the rebel flag waving right below them. A blue background with half of a yellow sun at its bottom, golden rays radiating outward like lightning bolts.

  Onyii stretches her flesh-and-blood arm and shoulder, arches her back and listens to the cracks ripple up her spine, then shakes herself loose. She’s still wearing only her bedclothes—a compression bra and athletic shorts that stick to her in the heavy Delta humidity—but it’s comfortable enough for a morning run.

  She makes her usual circuit of the camp. First, she heads to the camp’s periphery, past the school for the little ones and one of the few auto-body shelters—a place where faulty robotics can be tinkered with, where arms and legs can be made. Where the girls can become Augments, given limbs or organs more powerful than what they were born with. Sometimes, it’s a place where medical operations happen and people are given new eyes or the bleeding in their brain is stopped and a braincase has to be installed. Onyii knows some of the others sneer at the place, like people only go there to come out less than human, but some of those who look sideways at the people working in there and getting worked on have never seen war. Half-limbs only become half-limbs because they’re trying to make someone whole. An Augment is not an ugly thing.

  She hangs a left and spots the orchard and the fruit trees that line it. Beyond the orchard, a vegetable garden sits encased in a greenhouse large enough for a few people to enter and roam about in. Rotating spigots programmed to automatically spray water on the plants hang from the ceiling, and artificial light panels line the walls. The camp hasn’t needed them for some time, but when the nights get long—too long—they can’t let the food suffer.

  Onyii spirals outward on her run and passes the mess hall—usually empty this early in the morning. But as Onyii runs by she spots a girl in jungle fatigues with her jacket unbuttoned and draped loose over her shoulders as she leans on her rifle, dozing. Chike. At the sound of Onyii’s feet brushing the grass, Chike starts awake and straightens. It’s a wonder she doesn’t hoist her assault rifle and aim it right at Onyii; she’s so jittery. When Chike realizes where she is, she settles back, and her posture relaxes.

  It’s only me, Onyii thinks, who will pafuka your head when your commanding officer finds out you’ve been sleeping on your watch!

  Onyii ambles past. These morning runs double as patrol surveillance. Backup for those on watch. The outpost may be hidden from radars and scanners, but what’s to keep a Green-and-White from walking right through their perimeter? At fifteen, Onyii is among the oldest in the camp. The younger ones—some of them new to living on their own and some of them just learning how to be people again after having grown feral in the jungles—have trouble adjusting, staying awake during patrols, concentrating during school, not screaming in their sleep. With some of them, their guns are bigger than they are. But they’re slowly turning into steel, turning into the type of girls who can be depended on during an attack, the type of girls Onyii would be happy to have at her side in a fight. Proud, even.

  Her route takes her farther out to the practice grounds where weapons training happens. Jungle trees with their broad, heavy leaves hide the girls from above, and there’s enough foliage here to absorb most of the noise they make as they shoot toward the shoreline. She gets to the cliff, and below her lies the beach. Melee combat happens here too, when it’s scheduled, but during the warm seasons, Onyii will occasionally arrive on her morning runs to see some of the girls already laid out, naked beneath the sun, giggling or roughhousing, and she’s reminded that many of them are still just kids. And the sun for them is still a gentle, loving thing. Some of them have never looked up into a clear blue sky, at an out-of-place twinkling, and recognized a drone ready to drop a bomb on their homes. Maybe some of them have seen it and still don’t care. Those ones always turn out to be good fighters. Reckless, but good.

  In the distance is the water, still more black than blue this early in the morning. Onyii hears the faint sound of metal banging, of water sloshing against steel, and what she sees as specks or small shapes along the horizon, she knows to be the mineral derricks. Old and rusted but still capable of leaching resources from the Delta. Their resources. The blue minerals buried beneath Onyii’s feet and, farther out, beneath the ocean floor. This is what the Nigerians are killing Biafrans for. Not a morning passes that Onyii doesn’t think about setting charges to those things and blowing them into coral debris. It’s been said that the minerals are the divine right of the Igbo, their blessing from Chukwu, the supreme being whose energy powers all of existence. But the minerals are just dust to Onyii. Powerful, important dust, but nothing more.

  Other than the Nigerian mechs that streak overhead from time to time, the derricks provide Onyii’s only glimpse of the outside world. There are more people out there than us and our enemies. Every time she sees the derricks, she aims an invisible gun at them with her still-human hand.

  She doubles back and passes the hangar where the mobile suits are stored. They’re smaller than the Nigerian mechs that screech through the sky overhead and closer to the shape of actual humans. Rust spots their armor, and Onyii knows there isn’t enough lubricant around for all the gears that need it. But the beat-up suits—stocked with ammo for their guns and equipped with night vision and a neural adapting system—are enough to get by. Then there are the skinsuits. Depending on how old or how big you are, they either fit tightly enough to suffocate or they hang off you like hand-me-downs, even after you press the button on your wrist to compress them. The skinsuits are supposed to collapse to fit like a second layer of flesh for journeys out past the camp, where the radiation gets so thick that skin peels almost instantly.

  The ammo crates all have Mandarin characters written on their sides in fluorescent blue ink. But the girls know by looking which containers hold the 7.62 mm bullets and which hold the ammo for the shoulder cannons on the mobile suit mechs. They know which hold the bullets for their assault rifles and which hold the knives for when the bullets run out.

  It never seems like enough, the smuggled arms. But orphans never steal enough bread for a feast, only enough to last the day.

  Onyii continues towards the Obelisk. But even before she gets to it, she can see sparks arcing out of its base. It looks like a mini mineral derrick, microscopic by comparison, driven into the ground. Beneath Onyii’s feet, fiber-optic cables run throughout the camp and beyond, buzzing the earth constantly with charges, zapping the soil over and over to release the water soaked into it. The water is then purified and made available for washing and cooking and cleaning. It also collects the minerals that power nearly every electronic device in the camp.

  Today, it’s somehow busted.

  Onyii crouches at the base and sees a blackened stretch of tech running along one of the cables, ending right before it pierces the grass patch. She didn’t build this, so she doesn’t know it as intimately as others in the camp do, but she’s fixed things before.

  She takes a long time squinting at the mechanical carnage before a flash of movement changes the air around her. Suddenly, Chinelo’s at her side, all long, gangly limbs. Still, somehow, she manages not to make a sound. The opposite of clumsy. In fact, Onyii remembers the first time she saw Chinelo—tall even as a child—move with a grace she’d never seen before. Covered in ash and soot and blood, Chinelo had moved with the confidence of a general.

  Now Chinelo wears a jungle-colored compression bra over her small chest and pants with many deep pockets. A green, patterned bandana holds back her locs. Ancient, obsolete “cell phones”—relics of a different era—hang from her necklace, clacking together to make some weird music Onyii doesn’t particularly like.

  “You want to break our water, is that it?” Chinelo jokes.

  She jokes like that from time to time. Dark jokes about how all the girls here are, for some reason, not made of the type of material to create children. Onyii heard one t
ime that when your water breaks, you are near to birthing a child.

  But looking at Chinelo now, the sheen on her skin a glowing mix of night sweat and morning dew, Onyii sees a girl who only knows how to laugh.

  “Hurry up now, before we are all stinking, and the Green-and-Whites smell us,” Onyii shoots back, smiling.

  Chinelo smirks, then her bees buzz out from her hair. Tiny robotic insects that tell Chinelo the temperature and the water density in the air and the amount of radiation in each drop of rain that lands on them from the tree leaves overhead. They tell her how warm Onyii is next to her, and they tell her the state of Onyii’s prosthetic arm. As Onyii watches, the bees descend onto the well to tell Chinelo what needs to be repaired. Then they go to work.

  Onyii remains crouched on her haunches, a position of battle-readiness. Chinelo sits back in the grass while the robotic bees do their job.

  “We need to make a run,” Chinelo says like she is telling Onyii to bathe more often. Her Augments are more internal. A braincase for her brain, ways of having data transmitted directly to her, even some metal where bones should be. On the outside, she is as human as anyone. But finely tuned machinery ticks and hums inside her. Still, even with a body that can connect on its own to the camp’s network, she is more human than machine. Cyberized, but still, she bleeds red blood.

  “And what will we find in the forest that we can’t find here?” Onyii stares at the well as light spreads along the once-blackened portion of circuitry.

  “That’s the thing. You never know. Our tools are rusted, and our guns need ammunition, and just the other day, one of the lights in the greenhouse went out. The nights are getting longer, and our generators won’t last.”

  Onyii wants to tell Chinelo that they’ve lasted at this outpost for years, that they’ve made more with less, but it’s a conversation they’ve had a million times before. “And what if there are Green-and-Whites on patrol?”

  Chinelo elbows Onyii. “They have not found us yet. Why would they find us now?”