War Girls Page 14
She draws herself up and turns to the guard. “Are they all enemy combatants?”
For a moment, both Daren and the guard are unable to hold back their surprise.
“Under Article Three of the Centauri Convention on the Rights of the Child, members of a tribe under fifteen years of age cannot be categorized as enemy combatants. They are civilians. Even if they are given a weapon.” When the guard and Daren look at each other, Ify continues. “That means they cannot be held captive for longer than seventy-two hours before being granted access to civilian shelter within the borders of the enemy state.”
The guard rounds on Ify. “Child, you—”
Daren raises a hand that stops the guard in his tracks, then calmly turns to Ify. “And that is why they are in the process of building a school for these children. Even though many of them pretend to be refugees fleeing war and even though we can see through their deception, we give them shelter.” He looks to the guard, as though for confirmation. “Here, they are fed. Housed. Kept safe from whatever militia may be trying to kill them for fleeing or being captured.”
And look at how they are treated. She crouches down onto her haunches and tries to look into the boy’s face, but he won’t lift his head. Ify tilts hers to the side, tries to get a better angle. But the child stays absolutely still. And she knows that to activate her Accent would alert the guard, who is most certainly Augmented himself. Before her, on the other side of that invisible cell door, is a problem she can’t solve. Yet.
She stands, smooths her gown. “And the red-bloods?”
This time, it’s Daren who is taken by surprise.
“Is everyone who passes through here cyberized?” She makes sure to emphasize passes through to let the guard know she has no intention of pressing the detention issue. If he needs to say this is just temporary so they can continue to commit war crimes, let him. He will stay out of her way if she lets him. “Are the red-bloods kept in a separate facility?”
Daren nods at the guard as though to say, I have control of this situation, trust me. So the guard nods his assent, turns, and says, “Follow me.”
They round another corner, and the guard hurries them down the next corridor, probably to keep Ify from seeing what’s in each of the cells. They pass through a sun-drenched courtyard, then into another wing. Here, however, the hallways are wider, and the group slows down enough for Ify to notice, in one wall, a window opening out onto a large room.
Adults walk around the room, but they don’t wear any armor. Just robes with green and white stripes at the ends of each sleeve. Here, the kids cluster in groups, some young enough to barely be walking. A few of them rest against the wall; these ones seem older. But, through the flexiglas, Ify can see movement. She can see children talking to each other. Some of them are animated, others withdrawn. But they all seem . . . alive.
“I’d like access to that room, sir,” she says to the guard. She has grown into this role and knows that she has special status. She is among the favored of Abuja. The brilliant ones who are charged, from an early age, with guiding the country well into the future. She will go to the most prestigious universities. She will command a seat at the same table as those who run the Space Colonies. So who is this lowly guard to deny her access to a room in a children’s prison?
The guard taps his earpiece and speaks a few words, then a door farther down the hall opens up. Ify leads the way, and when she is inside, she sees the drawings that line the wall. She walks to one of the pictures and sees a compound sketched out, seen at an angle from above with soldiers toward the center of the page around what she realizes is an explosion. The captured moment finds the limbs frozen in mid-flight. A shaheed. A suicide bomber. Someone in a military vest stands at the bottom right corner of the page, looking both at the scene and at Ify. Another sketch shows a Nigerian aircraft, the green-and-white flag displayed prominently on the side, while what look like Biafrans with guns fall away beneath the gunfire. When she turns around to a circle of children, one of them can’t stop laughing. He scratches his scalp and giggles while looking very shy. Toys litter the ground, untouched.
A woman, one of the guardians, steps to Ify and Daren and smiles.
“Some of them have been making progress today. It is easier to reach them than to reach those who have been cyberized. The Biafrans altered their limbic systems when they cyberized them, changing their emotional centers so that they no longer feel things like grief. But these children?” She indicates the circle behind her with a sweep of her arm. “There is hope.”
Ify inclines her head toward one of the older boys leaning sullenly against the wall. “And him?”
The guardian lowers her head. “Some of them feel guilty. For getting captured.” She is not afraid to speak at full volume, and Ify realizes it’s because she believes none of the children can understand the Arabic-infused Hausa she speaks. “Some of them were elite soldiers sent to training camps in the forest. They were given better food and shelter than they’d had in their villages. They were the hope of their families. And now they are prisoners.”
“Do they get outside?” Ify asks. “Do they see the sun?”
“They are permitted an hour of natural sunlight. But because they are fully red-blood, they cannot spend too much time in an environment with too much radiation.” She sighs. “Some of them even refuse treatment and have to be . . . forced . . . into their healing baths.”
Ify frowns, then walks to the circle with the giggling child.
Some of them raise their heads when they see her.
She sits down on the rug with them and smiles.
“I drew the picture there,” says one of the boys, pointing to the one with the aircraft. “And when I get better, I want to be a pilot. I want to help my country.”
Ify smiles.
“I want to be a civil engineer!” shouts another.
The giggling boy grows quiet.
“And you?” Ify asks, smiling.
He hides his face behind his hands, then peeks through his fingers. “I don’t like violence,” he says, his words muffled by his palms. “War and blood. I don’t like it. I have hope for peace.” He pauses. “Sometimes, if my mommy give me money to eat biscuit, I dey buy twenty leaves of paper to draw. I see myself among de great artists of de world. Sometimes, there is too much dust here. It makes the water hard to drink, and it’s hard to see things.”
“Like what?”
“Like the roses.”
Ify blinks.
“The ones that grow on the wall.”
Ify frowns, looks around, and sees nothing but the pictures on the wall. As she’s looking, the papers start to shake. The ground begins to vibrate. Daren runs to Ify’s side just as an explosion erupts outside.
Everyone falls to the ground. The guardians sweep blankets from a closet and gather the children together. The older boy who had been relaxing against the wall scurries toward the rest of them, frightened out of his nonchalance.
Daren is on top of Ify. Dust falls on them both. The lights flicker, then turn back on. Outside, soldiers shout orders to each other. Ify closes her eyes, and suddenly she’s back in the camp among the other War Girls. She sees the mechs flying overhead and raining fire on their home. She remembers Onyii in her own mech speeding into the air and battling their attackers, who are in crabtanks with legs that crash through the school and shatter the greenhouse. It all takes hold of her. She can smell the char, hear the katakata of gunfire, see the dirt and stone and metal shoot into the air in columns with each explosion.
Then, everything grows silent.
For several long seconds, nobody in the room moves. Their guard is gone. Now more soldiers line the walls, peering out the windows but making sure to stay out of any line of fire.
One of the boys, the giggling one, is smiling.
“What was that?” one of the nurses asks.
The giggling boy stares directly at Ify. He’s not laughing anymore, but his smile chills Ify. “Roses,” he says. “When the dust is gone, there will be new roses on the wall.”
Ify’s heart sinks.
Roses.
The boy thinks the bloodstains on the walls of the compound are roses.
CHAPTER
21
It takes some wandering and curtly asking a few officers and soldiers for directions, but eventually, Onyii finds the main compound, what she guesses is the military headquarters for this unit operating out of Enugu. It looks a lot like a school campus extension. There are still signs that say UNIVERSITY OF ENUGU throughout the courtyard and along the hallways, but none of the people here look like students. Only young women and boys manning their stations, some of them behind turret guns on tall towers, others lounging on overturned crates with their rifles cradled in their arms.
Inside one of the compound’s buildings, Onyii roams the hallways. The map she downloaded is outdated and doesn’t indicate whose office is whose. But everyone lets her pass, and she suspects it’s because her reputation precedes her. Maybe Chinelo has personally told them who she is, that she is to be given free rein of the campus. Maybe they’ve heard of what she has done to the Green-and-Whites. Maybe a photo of her has already been circulated to everyone’s tablets. Onyii scans their faces for any reaction. She is used to seeing fear in the eyes of others. But some, even the occasional officer, glow with respect for her. Some even salute her, even though she bears no rank. She’s felt for so long like some wandering soldier, like some ghost, not a part of any formal military or any structure, just a whirling demon who flies wherever pointed and swings her bladed staff and fires her shoulder cannons and cuts through enemy forces. Going wherever the brigadier general tells her the enemy is. Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe ka anyi nuo agha! Ojukwu, give us guns to fight a war!
She stops at what looks like the doorway the others described. Wood paneling around double doors. Two guards out front. They look to her and nod, as though to say Chinelo isn’t busy at the moment. Even though she’s not accepting visitors, the Demon of Biafra is permitted entry.
One of them presses her thumb against the keypad by the door, which opens inward toward the room.
Onyii sees Chinelo standing behind a desk, leaning over it and looking down at a holo, then walks through.
As soon as the doors close behind her, a blow strikes her right in the cheek.
She topples, but just before she falls, she regains her balance. Just in time to block another blow. And another. The hands come fast. A boy’s hands. Too fast. But she catches one fist, and just as she winds up to hit the boy attacking her, he breaks out of her grip, ducks, and rips two fierce punches to her rib cage, then an uppercut that sends her staggering back. He rushes and tackles Onyii by the waist. She uses her momentum to flip him and kick him off.
He flies into a bookshelf, and several thick books fall on his back.
Onyii goes to kick him, but he grabs her leg. She leaps into the air and, with her other leg, catches him across the face. He puts his hand to his face as Onyii spins herself upright. She has just a moment to catch her breath.
The boy launches another blow. She blocks it, then another, then another. Lightning-fast. She catches each with her palm, then her forearm. The next rolls off her shoulder. He gets closer, starts to smother her. How is he able to move this fast for this long? And how does his small body contain such power?
Onyii remembers the gun in her pants.
The boy swings for her head. She ducks, skids behind him, so that she can aim her gun at the back of his head. He spins and knocks her hand away. The bullet hits the window. Onyii swings again, aims lower. That bullet hits the floor. Again and again, she pirouettes and just as she’s about to get a shot off, the boy knocks her hand away. She tries again, the boy hits her wrist so hard it sends the gun flying to the window.
The boy leaps into the air to deliver another blow. Onyii blocks it with her metal wrist and takes less than a second to note the boy’s surprise before sweeping his legs out from under him. She goes to stomp on his head, but he rolls away, just out of reach. Then he catches her downward kick and flips her backward.
She lands on her feet and blocks a blow aimed for her chest. A blow so strong it pushes her backward. She counters with her elbow and nearly catches the boy in the throat, but he grabs her hand and twists. Joints pop. Onyii flips herself over and out of the boy’s grip, and their hands shoot for the other’s throat, so that they’re caught in a stalemate.
Only then does Onyii hear Chinelo behind her desk shouting for them to stop.
“Chineke mbere!” she curses. “God help me!” Under the distress, there’s a note of laughter in her voice. They both look to Chinelo, locked in each other’s death grips, bleeding from the mouth, hair a dusty mess. Chinelo shakes her head. “Chiamere, stand down.”
Reluctantly, with a beseeching look in his eyes, Chiamere releases Onyii from his vise grip.
After a moment, Onyii does the same, then massages her throat, coughing. “Let me guess,” Onyii says when she gets her breath back. “Your abd.”
“Are you done test-driving him?”
“He attacked first.” Onyii straightens her clothes, puts a finger to her lip, and looks at the blood it comes back with. “Didn’t even see it coming,” she says, more to herself than to anyone else. She’s never seen someone move so fast in hand-to-hand combat. And to take such advantage of so cramped a space. She realizes that each time she tried to fire, Chiamere had angled so that there was no chance of Chinelo getting hit. All the while, he had been holding back.
“He’s programmed with a prime directive: to protect me at all costs. Even if that means sacrificing himself. He’s a soldier just like you, Onyii.” There’s a note of defensiveness in her voice. “He can fight as well as the rest of us.” She smirks at Onyii’s bloody lip. “Maybe even better.” Then she pushes off her desk and folds her arms. “I’ve something to show you. Follow me.”
She leads Onyii through a back door and into what looks like a sparse bedroom with little more decoration than Onyii’s.
There’s a bed and a bedstand with a tablet on it. A lamp by the far wall. And a boy standing just in front of the bed, dressed in suspenders and a bowtie. He can’t be older than ten or eleven years old.
Chinelo stands to the side, glancing with satisfaction at one then the other. “Onyii, meet your abd, Agu.”
For a long time, everyone stands in silence. Then Onyii, nervous, asks, “Do I shake his hand?”
“Whatever you want.”
“What did you do?”
“I baffed him and cooked him suya like a good woman,” Chinelo croons. “What does it matter what I did?”
Onyii frowns at Chinelo’s unhelpful sarcasm, then returns to her abd. She has no idea what to do.
Chinelo leaves, then comes back with Onyii’s gun. She hands it to Onyii and says, “Let him show you what he can do.” She presses her hands over Onyii’s and lowers her voice. “Tell him to take it apart.”
Onyii hands the gun, butt first, to Agu.
Agu holds it in front of him like he’s never seen a pistol before.
“Take it apart,” Onyii says.
In seconds, the thing lies in neatly arrayed pieces on the bed. Even the spring has been taken out. When Agu is finished, he holds his hands behind his back and stares into Onyii’s eyes, unnervingly.
Onyii can’t believe what she’s just seen. But the events of the day make all of this seem less strange. She has seen what boys who look like Agu can do. She has seen how easily they can break things. “Now put it back together,” she says.
Agu reaches for the gun, but Onyii grabs his wrist.
“Close your eyes.” Then she lets go.
Agu takes a moment to close his eyes. Then his hands dance over the parts until the gun is back as it had been. The boy exhales, then opens his eyes and hands the repaired gun, butt first, to Onyii.
This time, Onyii’s shock passes even more quickly. Now she’s smirking. The boy’s impassive face breaks open in a smile. Like he has brought home the highest marks in his class for his big sister to see.
“Welcome to the Abd Program,” Chinelo says, grinning.
CHAPTER
22
For a long time, Ify sits alone in the maglev limousine. With her Accent back on, she’s able to connect to the vehicle’s surveillance and can see through its windows, can rotate the cameras to see how the dust has settled. She can get the cameras to curl on themselves and show her just how thick and tinted the windows are, how the entire limousine is built to withstand blasts from buried mines and rocket-propelled grenades. It is through the cameras that she can hear. But Daren stands far enough away, chatting with the guards and camp administrators, that she can’t hear him. What if he’s also telling Daurama what happened through his comms? Ify tries to imagine the woman expressing concern for Daren’s well-being but not once asking about Ify. Daurama has never cared much for her.
The entire compound has shut down. Almost nothing moves outside. At least, nothing that isn’t supposed to. There had been a man selling balloons earlier. He had had them tied to the handle of his cart. He is nowhere to be found. Now the ground mechs are much closer. And soldiers stand by their military-issue hoverbikes. Where, before, one had to squint to see them, now they stand practically on top of the newly built town. All construction noises have stopped.
Ify gets the cameras of the car, small beads the size of raindrops, to stop moving. It feels too much like she’s playing a game. But as soon as she stills, terror grips her body. Her arms shake with the memory of the rumbling floor. Her legs go numb. She hears a loud whine, then it’s like earplugs muffle every other noise in the world. She can’t scream, can’t cry, can’t whimper. Tears leak down her face. Her heart kicks and bucks inside her chest. She can’t breathe. It feels as though she’s trapped. Wrapped tight in an invisible blanket choking the air out of her lungs, squeezing the sense out of her brain.