War Girls Page 11

  Onyii sneers. “Why would we be like them?”

  The brigadier general slaps his hand on the table. “Is a joke, soldier.” Then he pulls a cigar from his breast pocket and lights up. “What will you do to celebrate your victory?”

  All Onyii can think about is Chukwu, that mineral mixture that will numb her aching joints and slow her racing mind. “Plan for the next maneuvers.”

  “No rest for the Demon of Biafra.”

  She has hated that moniker ever since people first began whispering it just within earshot. She hates when she hears it from her comrades. She hates when she hears it from the enemy. She hates when she hears it from her commander. But, to her, it’s like the pain in her bones. The ache in her limbs. The fire-like needles that spike up and down her spine. Just a part of life. As much as the blueness of the sky and the blackness of recently charred earth. As much a part of life as sweat and mosquitoes and birdsong.

  “Well then, soldier.” He puffs on his cigar. The acrid smoke fills the room. “You are dismissed.”

  Onyii forces her body to fold itself together, then stand. Her joints scream at her as she salutes.

  She leaves behind the soft hum of the generator for the earsplitting sound of Diggers at work and soldiers shouting over the noise and laser saws cutting away pieces of metal from the Green-and-White mechs. It’s all so very loud.

  No one notices Onyii finding a space in a tiny alleyway between two tents. No one notices her pull a small vial from a pocket at her waist and pour a line of powder—crushed minerals—onto the back of her hand, just under her knuckle. And no one notices her hungrily snort it.

  Every time she takes Chukwu, she remembers that first night in the forest when a single hit of the powder Chinelo had given her had fully restored her broken body.

  Her eyes roll into the back of her head. The noise around her fades and fades and fades. The sky turns from blue to pink, and the birdsong returns. And this time, it’s no longer short bursts of gunfire but a full song, with rises and dips, with a melody she can discern, a melody that reminds her of a song from long, long ago.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Ify stares out the window of the car she shares with Daren. Whenever she returns to Abuja from elsewhere, she remembers what the city was first like to her. Even four years ago, it was all reflective surfaces. An entire city made out of glass. Glass skyscrapers so tall their tops vanished in the clouds. Glass domes threaded with gold atop every mosque. Flexiglas lining the high-speed railways. You could see through everything. There was light everywhere. Blinding, overpowering light. But that had just been Ify’s eyes, sensitive from so much time spent in the bush among natural light, accustomed to dull colors and a sun that shone on her from far, far away.

  In the beginning, people gawked. At least, they did when they weren’t cheering or crying with joy or pointing at her and proclaiming the greatness of the Nigerian military. She’d been afforded very little rest before she’d been paraded out for everyone to see, still clothed in her rags, still smelling of Biafra, still wearing the tribal scars she’d been given by the War Girls, but a girl returned. Rescued. The only survivor of her family’s massacre. Her homecoming turned into a spectacle, televised for all the world to see. She had escaped. It’s only now, four years later, that journalists and politicians and other children have mostly stopped asking her about what it was like among the savages. Now she is just like any other high-achieving student with good enough marks to one day earn a place at a piloting school in America.

  But the memory of her arrival here is never far from her.

  When they had repaired her Accent and fused it to her, the entire world was a mess of data. Numbers and letters and gauges spinning around her, shouting at her. It was Daren who taught her filters, how to turn some of the data-gathering off while leaving other parts on.

  In their car, the leather feels soft as melted butter beneath Ify. Childishly, she squirms on it, moves back and forth and giggles. Daren shoots her a glance, as though to chastise her, but he just winds up smirking. Ify turns to the window and watches as men and women—some of them cyberized, some of them Augments—pause briefly in front of stores and offices, waiting for their identities to be scanned. The Augments sport prosthetic hands or legs, some of them with completely metal arms in their sleeveless djellabas. The cyberized Nigerians look just like anyone else on the outside, but fiber-optic wires and microchips make up their insides. Their brain sits comfortably inside its titanium casing. Couples sit silently in restaurants, having full conversations over their comms systems. Parents silently discuss the weather while their children run around, giggling out loud in the streets. Silver spheres float high above the streets—surveillance orbs. Ify looks up and sees all of the watchtowers they are remotely connected to. Everything in this city is monitored.

  The two of them ride in silence for several minutes, turning onto the expressway and gliding high over the pedestrians below. They hew to the air-traffic corridors while trains arc upward against the side of glistening towers.

  The gravity was set before they got into the car, so that when it goes sideways and when it twirls upside down for a bit in a slow barrel roll, Daren and Ify remain in their seats. However, Daren has his hand out, and as they spin, the folded paper crane in the center of his palm remains still.

  The car finishes its circuit just as Ify reaches forward and, for a brief moment, detaches from her seat and floats in the air. Then they’re right side up again, and Ify holds the crane gingerly to make sure she doesn’t crush it. It looks exactly like all the others.

  The image comes back to Ify in a flash: a hospital floor littered with paper cranes. Pieces of paper torn from somewhere Ify couldn’t see from her hospital bed and folded with one hand—one new, mechanical hand—into little bits of origami, then dropped onto the floor as if that’s all the new hand had energy for.

  She remembers waking up in that hospital. Feeling no pain and seeing nothing but the bright lights above her. She was encased in something that refused to let her move. A cocoon. Then, when the fog of panic had cleared from her mind, she remembered the aircraft crash. The explosion that shook their frame, the way the craft had spun in the air. The shouting. Then the feeling of being buffeted from all directions by the wind. The pain of so many bones breaking. Then silence. Somehow, the blanket Daren had wrapped her in had saved her. Had trapped her and hardened its shell around her, protecting her body.

  Daren would tell her afterward that he had equipped the blanket with a homing beacon, a distress signal in case anything happened to them. He would say this after the doctors spent weeks and weeks stabilizing him after the crash. After they had replaced several organs and fabricated an entirely new skeleton for him. After they had rewired much of his nervous system to accommodate cyberization. After they had built him a braincase and successfully transferred his consciousness to it.

  One of the first things they had done was replace his arm. And Ify had lain on her bed, silent except for the occasional whimper, as doctors took her cocooned shape and submerged her in a pool of liquid several times a day. Until one day, she managed to turn her head, the cocoon loose enough to just barely give way, and see beneath the curtain that separated them, the man’s fingers working. Absently. Mechanically. She couldn’t tell where he’d gotten the paper from, but the hand moved without hesitation.

  And that’s how she watched him get better.

  The first cranes were misshapen, one wing much larger than the other or with folds in all the wrong places. But then they became cleaner, more symmetrical, until they were wonders of geometry. Over and over and over, he would fold them, then drop them on the floor.

  Daren didn’t mention the paper cranes after they’d both left the hospital. But occasionally, she would find him in his office and one or two new ones would sit at his desk’s edge. Sometimes, Ify tells herself that he makes them for her. That w
hen he was near death, he had reached for her. And making cranes was how he had kept himself stimulated, active, alive.

  Ify feels at home in the car with Daren. The entire city moves beneath them, abuzz with activity, but here, above it all, she has him to herself. And every time he looks at her, thinking that she doesn’t notice, he smiles, and Ify’s heart thrills. Someday, she will earn a scholarship to America, where she can work to build magnificent things among the Colonies, see space and so much of what it contains. Study the planets up close, meet the stars where they sit, and bring that knowledge back to Nigeria. She dreams of building extraordinary structures that will beat back the waters that gobble up more and more shoreline with each passing month. And she will figure out ways to harness that energy and power entire cities with it. She will figure out how to terraform those parts of pasture in the North that the desert has conquered. She will study and learn how to resettle those tribes. She will make Nigeria a beacon of light on the continent. She will make Daren proud.

  When she was younger, it all felt like a dream. Like a thing for her to think about so that she wouldn’t give too much thought to the girls who bullied her or to the ways they all had to scrounge through the forest for supplies or how the lights in the greenhouse would occasionally give out, spoiling their crops. Here, everything is proper and working, and she will study and learn how to make it even better. It feels like prophecy. Like the course has already been set.

  The launch station shimmers in the distance.

  Their car descends along an air tunnel until it glides just above paved road with giant magnets strewn underneath the asphalt.

  The launchpad and the buildings surrounding it glow like a temple. Like somewhere people go to in order to pray. The car makes it to the first barrier, and the guards nod to Daren. When the car passes through, she feels as though she has entered hallowed ground.

  A shuttle launching into space. When Daren talks about it, he sounds casual. He has probably watched this sort of thing many times. But for Ify, each time it’s like watching a miracle happen.

  In the road, a platform rises above the ground, and the car heads into a tunnel with fluorescent lights all along its ceiling. Eventually, they stop in a garage. Daren steps out of the car, and Ify follows. Before Daren can make it to the elevator, Ify hugs him and buries her face in his hip.

  “You’re welcome, Kadan,” he says. Then, “One day, it will be just me watching the shuttle launches. You will be on the other side, waving goodbye to my tiny little frame as the rocket takes you into space.”

  As they make their way to the observation deck, Ify takes hold of Daren’s hand with one of hers. In the other, she carefully cradles the paper crane.

  * * *

  Ify has her olfactory sensors turned on when they reach the observation deck and Daren greets the men in suits. Men whose skin looks like paste. White men. Some of them sweat. Ify can hear the cooling systems in the others, the cyberized ones, working fast and hard to keep them comfortable. More than any human beings, they resemble the near-colorless clay out of which children made dolls. Oyinbo. Man with peeled skin.

  “Must we stand so close to them?” Ify whispers to Daren.

  He squeezes her hand, too hard, and Ify knows this is punishment. She’s to be on her best behavior in front of what her Accent tells her are mining executives from the American and British Space Colonies. For the occasion, he has draped his silver locs regally over both shoulders.

  Guards man every entrance and exit, and they stand stiffer at attention when they see Daren. The white men see it, and Ify thinks she detects a note of fear in their expressions. But Daren is all ease, practically gliding over the ground as he shakes their hands. Ify suppresses a shiver as she watches his smooth skin touch their slimy palms. But she hides her grimace as much as she can.

  As far away as they are and even with the thick glass between them, Ify can hear the rumble of the shuttle preparing for launch. The commands from the guard station come through muffled, but Ify can trace the words they form. The rapid-fire instructions. Then someone stating coordinates, announcing launch calculations. Finally, the countdown begins.

  Smoke billows out of the rocket’s bottom and turns into a sort of dress for the shuttle. With a whooshing sound, the supports fall away. Then Ify hears the thunder of engines powering on. There’s that first push, like the shuttle is leaving a womb, then it goes farther and deeper into the sky, and Ify cranes her neck to watch it soar higher and higher. Light twinkles around it, and she can tell that it has detached its secondary engines. Even where those large hunks of machinery will land has been calculated, and Ify knows sand pits buttressed by netting wait to catch the falling engines. All of it has been planned and accounted for. She can’t tell what’s on the shuttle, and most of her doesn’t care. It’s enough just to watch the miracle of space flight happen.

  Daren stops his conversation short for the moment and turns to watch with Ify. She glimpses the same wonder glowing in his eyes. “Allahu akbar,” he whispers just beneath his breath. A moment later, he has returned to the mining executives.

  Ify hears Daren quietly say her name. One of the oyinbo tries to sound it out. Ify knows she shouldn’t spy on them, but she can’t help herself. The brief glimpse she already stole through her Accent revealed a world of possibility to her. Their suits are black, their shirts white, and their bellies protrude, as though to suggest how much prosperity they enjoy. “Look how well we are eating,” their bellies say to Ify. But she doesn’t have to look at them to have her Accent beam their information to her, which makes the prospect of spying on them even more enticing.

  She easily learns their names. The letters after them seem to signify where they went to university. They contain the names of places Ify recognizes from her studies. Maybe this is where they have gained their professional expertise. Then she scrolls through their biometrics and frowns at their blood pressure numbers and their body mass index, and a neurological scan reveals a slowness that shocks her. How can anyone who thinks so poorly become so successful in America?

  It is said that in the Colonies, the color of your skin bestows certain advantages. In Nigeria, everyone is the same color. Here, your success is based on your ability. Ify is smart, so she is surrounded by the smartest. Just like the most gifted athletes are surrounded by the most gifted athletes.

  These mining executives are a mystery to her. But she can tell from quickly cross-referencing their titles and company names with the library database she has constant access to that they represent companies eager to get the minerals beneath Nigeria’s soil. The minerals that power the whole country. Ify suppresses a snort. They cannot even generate their own self-sustaining energy sources.

  Their conversation turns to Biafra, and Ify’s mind quiets. They are talking about mechs now, and just as they mention them, diagrams of the giant humanoid robots appear before Ify’s eyes. She taps her wrist beads to create a screen on which she can play a simple jewel-snatching game and look like she’s not eavesdropping. Anyone with half a brain can see through her ploy, but she persists. They talk about mechs and a land that seems so far away, but that Ify knows in her head is very geographically close. Again, they mention mineral deposits, and Ify realizes that’s why Biafra has come up so often.

  Daren lets out a soft chuckle. “The Biafrans,” he tells the oyinbo, “they think those minerals are some gift from their supreme god. And this supreme god has lesser angels flying around, planting yams in their fields. Such primitive peoples do not deserve these resources.”

  It still quiets Ify’s heart to hear talk of Biafrans like this.

  The war mechs are supposedly a gift to Daren and the Nigerians. Daren calls them Igwe. Despite whatever deficiencies they may possess, the Americans cannot be beat for the quality of their war machines.

  She knows what they will be made to do, where they will be made to go. She can see the dirty Biafran c
amps they will drop bombs on, the rusty Biafran mechs they will slice through and gun down as though they were made of paper. And her heart aches, because it means Daren will be gone fighting.

  When she chances a glimpse at him, her heart swells. Nigeria’s Super Eagle.

  They celebrate him at all of the football games. Before every match, they salute him. The cheers become particularly feverish whenever Nigeria hosts a foreign team. And when one of Nigeria’s strikers scores a goal, the entire pitch erupts. The scorer backflips or does something similarly acrobatic and point with both hands at Daren, wherever he sits in the crowd, silently saying, “We do this for you, Great Protector of Nigeria.” And Daren always says that he is no king, no prince, no member of any royal family. This is a democracy, after all. He is just a lowly mech pilot. And everyone laughs, knowing that he has single-handedly turned the tide of several decisive battles since the beginning of the civil war. If Nigeria now stands on the cusp of crushing the fledgling Republic of New Biafra, it is because of him.

  The men all let out a chuckle, Daren’s softer than the others, and they shake hands again. Ify tries not to cringe. Daren comes next to Ify.

  “Did you get to see it?” he asks her.

  There’s still a light trail of smoke arcing into the sky, left over from the shuttle’s flight. “It was awesome.”

  Daren pats the back of her head, lightly squeezing her braids. “That is exactly the word I would have chosen.” For a long time, they stare at the fading chemtrail. Then Daren says, “I know you worry about the war and how long it will continue. We are almost done.” He talks about it like war is only adults’ business, like it is a very long discussion that she couldn’t possibly hope to understand, and it’s one of the few times she grows impatient with him. “Soon, there will be peace.” He leans in close. “And maybe then the smelly oyinbo will leave us alone.”