War Girls Read online

  Ify’s blood goes cold. She leans forward in her seat, squinting closer at the hologram.

  That face.

  “No. You’re supposed to be dead,” Ify whispers.

  Even with the new machinery covering half her face, even with one eye replaced by cybernetics, even with the metal having grown from her shoulder all the way to her head like it is colonizing her, Ify recognizes that face.

  Onyii.

  Her sister.

  The transmission ends so suddenly that it leaves Ify in a daze. Her Accent shuts off. The absence of Daren’s mind stings, then numbs. A shiver runs through her.

  She comes to just in time to see Daren rush out of the hall.

  CHAPTER

  27

  They enter forest past the Makoko slum in the early morning. Agu shifts the pack on his shoulders, grunting beneath its weight before marching forward through the knee-high elephant grass. Trees with fat leaves weighed down by morning dew tower over them. Shadows move across their field of vision. Onyii has her mechanical eye turned to heat detection so she can better see the bodies of living things they come across. And better eliminate all that stands in her way. Agu cranes his neck to see Onyii detaching herself from the shadows almost a dozen paces ahead.

  They reach the precipice of the forest. From there, they can see the east wing of the oil processing plant. It has the look of an abandoned city. Something left behind. But there’s precious material in there. Material precious enough for the Nigerians to hide behind this smokescreen. They know it. They’ve gone over the intel, verified the sourcing, cross-checked it where they were able. And they know that the Nigerians are not above just this sort of trickery. They are arrogant enough to leave something so valuable so unguarded because they think the Biafrans will fall for it. But underestimating Biafra will be the death of them.

  Agu swings his pack to his front and takes out and unfolds the tripod for his rifle. Then he pulls out the weapon, clicks on a scope, and adds an extension to the barrel. He lies on his stomach in the wet moss and props the extended barrel on the tripod’s catch. In another moment, he is all set up. And Onyii knows from his training that he is capable of lying like that, unmoving but completely alert, for at least half a day. For now, they just need to provide cover until the coast is clear. Half a minute in, his fingers dance on the rifle grip and on the barrel. Absently playing a piano that isn’t there.

  Even though Onyii is supposed to continue facing the forest to protect them, she takes cover with him in the bush. Tallgrass hides them. And she knows that, with normal, unenhanced sight, no one could see that two bodies lie hidden against the ground, ready to strike.

  The war is nearly done. What are your plans for after? Onyii asks Agu.

  For nearly a minute, Agu is silent. Then he says, I don’t know. He adjusts the zoom on his scope, then switches it back, and Onyii knows he’s just giving his hands something to do, either to keep his fingers limber or because he is nervous. Do synths get nervous? But when Agu speaks again, his voice is different, if only slightly. I am having memories. Of playing the piano. There are people around me, listening. Sometimes, there is only one person. But this person too is smiling. They are liking it when I played the piano. I think I am liking it too.

  After a moment’s shock, Onyii smiles at the thought. She had just been following Kesandu’s suggestion for making Agu a better killing machine. It had not occurred to her that before Agu was made into a synth, he had had a whole other life. A feeling of pride, followed closely by gratitude, swims through her. If she has connected him to his past somehow, and maybe made him happy, then she has done a good thing. For once, she does not care whether or not this will make Agu better at covert operations.

  But those memories are false.

  Onyii starts.

  They are implants inserted into my core processing unit to help me have more range of emotion and make me better in espionage operation. As abd, I am having training not only for combat missions but also for subterfuge, and my creators are believing I need to pretend to be a full red-blooded human to the greatest extent possible. He pauses. It is the most he has spoken at once in all the time Onyii has known him. After the war, I will serve in whatever capacity you see fit. Then, from him, silence. A wire emerges from the outlet at the back of his neck, and he pulls it out with his free hand, then plugs it into the outlet by the chamber of his rifle. Now what his rifle sees, he sees. The rifle is no longer an extension of him, but he an extension of it. Just another weapon.

  Onyii’s comms buzz. She blinks away tears she had not realized were forming. She hears Kalu say, “My position is blocked by foliage.” Then she digs into her pack and pulls out a mound of putty.

  Muscle memory takes over, and her fingers rip off a piece, then mold it into a small doll. With her nail, she digs small crescents into its face for eyes. Then she pulls a cord out of the outlet at the back of her neck and plugs in. Blood and fluid rich with nanobots flow into the putty, filling it out. Like DNA inserted right into its form. After a moment, its extremities wiggle. Then the lumps become small arms and legs. It squirms in her hand, and she sets it on the ground. In short order, four eto-eto join the one wiggling its stubby arms in the air. Once they are all lined up, they nod at her mental command and fan out, beaming all the information they encounter into Onyii’s tech. Radiation levels, heat signatures. Footprints that glow in her sights to reveal patrol patterns.

  She grabs the loose end of her cord, then connects it with a second outlet just behind Agu’s ear. That way, she is able to beam the information she receives to him, and he can then relay it to the other abd. As soon as the network is established with Onyii as the router, Onyii notes the change in the air. She doesn’t detect any movement from where they are all stationed, but she can tell that enemy patrols are dropping, taken out by the other abd.

  “Finished,” Agu says.

  They pack up and hurry, moving in silence over deflated soccer balls and broken wooden boards that look like they’d once been fashioned into something you played a game with. Maybe, once upon a time, children came here to play. Or they came to siphon off oil from the nearby pipelines. Onyii can tell from simply sniffing the air that no child has run through this dirt in some time.

  By now, the Makoko slum outside Lagos must be humming to life. Pretty soon, it will be fully awake.

  Onyii and Agu find shelter near a small trailer, and Agu pulls out a small hard drive that unfolds into a tablet. Onyii rises slowly to peek inside the trailer’s windows, scan for activity with her rifle slung behind her back and her pistol in her hands. Nothing. Through the smudged window, she sees a few scattered pieces of tech, some retail electronics, what looks like a music player. But no one has lived here recently.

  Small shapes wiggle in the distance. Onyii’s eto-eto. They scramble through the scrub brush and into her arms, where she deflates them, then puts the clay back in her duffel bag.

  A hologram map rises out of Agu’s tablet. It shows the floor plan, then breaks open to reveal multiple floors, but then, close to the tablet’s surface, static.

  I can’t plug into any of the surveillance cameras in the facility, says Golibe over their connection. Closed circuit. Which means no piggybacking.

  Agu folds his tablet and puts it away. Onyii is about to dash ahead of him when he grabs her wrist.

  “It is too quiet,” he whispers.

  Onyii frowns. “That is because they want us to ignore this place.”

  He shakes his head. “Too quiet even for that.”

  “What do your sensors detect?”

  He frowns at the earth. “Is not my sensors. Is something else. Deeper.” Instinct. His human parts.

  She kneels down to meet his eye level. “Hey. We will survive this. We will complete the mission. We will expose the Commonwealth Colonies, and we will force a ceasefire. Then there will be peace and no more of th
is.”

  “This does not matter to me.” His voice is no longer even. Something is fighting inside him. “If you tell me to fight, I fight. If you tell me to kill, I kill.” He’s struggling to find the words he wants. Then he settles. “I will protect you.” And that seems to calm him. “I will protect you,” he says again, almost like a mantra he needs to repeat to himself.

  “You will protect me.” It’s not a question when it comes from Onyii’s lips. She feels her heart lift. That’s when she realizes what just happened. Her whole life, she has fought for others, protected others. Agu is a child, but he is willing to die to protect her. He wants nothing more than for her to stay alive. She wants to pat his head or scratch his scalp, but she realizes the gesture will likely confuse him. However, she does let herself smile. A fleeting twist of the lips before she turns and leads him to the shelter of another trailer, then to a large shipping crate stranded in the middle of the field, and finally past the rusty smokestacks that tower over them to a side entrance hidden in the shadows of a metal staircase.

  They stand on both sides of the hidden door, rifles at the ready. Agu’s fingers detach and plug into the keypad by the door. The lights blink rapidly over the keypad, the door whispers open, and she charges in.

  CHAPTER

  28

  Ify races out of the conference hall and winds her way down the halls until she’s out in the bustling streets. She doesn’t see Daren anywhere. People walk around like normal. It’s early in the morning. They need to shop and eat and flirt and go to school just like they always do. That’s when Ify remembers that what she saw is secret. It was stolen from inside Daren’s comms. Hacked. That, in and of itself, could be a punishable offense. But Daren would understand. He would always understand. Ify has always just wanted to be close to him, to understand him. She shouldn’t have heard it. She should have disconnected. But he had let her in. That is what love is, she tries to tell herself as she races to the building where the officer corps holds its meetings.

  She punches in the code to the front gate and enters, then remembers she can’t look watchful. Without an escort, however, she draws suspicious glances from the guards at the front gate.

  “I need to find Daren,” she says to the impassive soldiers.

  They answer her with silence.

  “I am—”

  “We know who you are,” one of the soldiers cuts her off. They don’t even sweat, which is how Ify knows they are Augments with cooling systems built into their cybernetically altered bodies. “This building is forbidden to anyone who does not have the required security clearance.” There’s a hint of a sneer on his lips, like he can’t believe Ify’s audacity in even coming here.

  But how many times has she walked into this very building? Seen its halls and wandered its corridors and studied her lessons while Daren took his meetings in secured rooms nearby?

  “Officer Diallo is away at the moment,” says the other soldier, this one kinder.

  He must be on his way out of Abuja already. But maybe he’s still somewhere in the city.

  “Thank you,” she says absently, before hurrying back the way she came. A Terminal. She needs a Terminal.

  She turns on her Accent, and the world glows with gold thread lining every edge, connecting every node in the city of Abuja. Everyone connected to the network is revealed to her. And among the nodes are the surveillance orbs moving slowly along every boulevard, every alleyway, scanning every rooftop. Guiding them are the Watchers in the towers dotted throughout the city. If she can access the same tech as one of those Watchers, she’ll be able to find Daren.

  In a few minutes, Ify finds the nearest tower, an obelisk-like structure made of gleaming metal and transparent flexiglas, like an old-fashioned watch whose glass surface reveals all the gears and motors within, the intricate latticework that makes the whole thing tick. At the tower’s back is a lift, a transparent cylinder that comes down around her. She puts her thumb to the keypad, praying that her status as a Sentinel will grant her access. Sweat slicks her thumb so it slips, and she wipes it on her shirt and tries again. “Come on, come on.” She’s not officially a Watcher, only sometimes involved in the surveillance operations of Abuja, but she is close to Daren. And being close to Daren has gotten her into more places than anything else she’s done. The keypad blinks green, and the chamber swivels open. She boards a platform that provides her a view of the entire quarter as it raises her higher and higher.

  Her heart races, completely at odds with the placid scene before her, the people milling around the Sahad Stores and hanging out by the Millennium Tower in the city center. If only they knew what she knows . . .

  When she gets to the top, the opposite side of the cylinder opens, and she passes through a gateway to the station where a Watcher sits before a Terminal with a helmet on, connecting him by way of wires to the fiber-optic cables that wind their way through the tower and patch him into every surveillance orb. Ify needs that helmet.

  She doesn’t want to disturb the Watcher, but she’s running out of time. So she walks to the Watcher’s side with purpose and puts a hand on the young boy’s shoulder. He doesn’t seem to register any surprise. Maybe he’s that locked in, but Ify senses beneath her fingers a tension in the boy’s back.

  “Shift change,” she says with a small catch in her voice. “They are running tests in Katampe Exterior Zone and need another Watcher to provide backup.”

  Ify expects resistance, expects the Watcher to push back, to ask her when the order was given out. She expects him to check on the Watcher in the Katampe Exterior Zone and see that nothing is amiss. It’s a stupid, simple lie, but Ify can think of nothing else.

  A moment of silence passes. Up here, everything is quiet. She cannot even hear the wind whipping the Nigerian flags scattered throughout the central zone. Then comes the sound of wires unhooking. The boy slides the helmet off his head, and his afro puffs out. He wears flowing green-and-white-striped robes over a black bodysuit, and when he stands to his full height, he’s even smaller than Ify.

  “Okay,” he says, smiling. As soon as he unplugs, he’s a kid again. He hands Ify the helmet, then scampers away.

  Stunned at her luck, Ify blinks after he vanishes.

  She settles into the seat, then fits the helmet over her braids. She doesn’t need to connect, so the wires in the floor stay where they are. But she activates her Accent, and suddenly, the entire world goes white. It’s too much. The helmet amplifies the reach of her Accent, so that where, before, she could only see what was in front of her, she can now see in all directions.

  Her body seizes. There are no safeguards against all the information crashing into her. Every smell, every flash of color, every murmured phrase or piece of chatter. It’s too much. She grips the edges of her armrests, her nails digging in. Blood leaks from her nose.

  She hadn’t erected any filters before plugging in, and now the entirety of the city’s sensory outputs beams directly into her skull. If she doesn’t stop this quick, she’ll lose consciousness. It’ll eat away her brain, fry her neurons, and she’ll be a vegetable.

  IP addresses flash before her, glow, then wink out of existence. Hundreds at a time, thousands per second. She needs to find Daren. A single pulse widens her range. The orbs allow her to go even farther, taking her Accent’s abilities with her. Where the orbs see and smell and hear, she too can see and smell and hear. Suddenly, nodes pop up in a line through the city. Places where Daren logged in or connected. Like footsteps. Closer. She leaps from one location to the next, fast as lightning, until she finds empty space to the south. He’s heading south. In a mech.

  She focuses and makes one final leap, bounding over acres and acres and acres of sparsely networked land to find Daren leading a formation of mechs flying low over forest. They’re heading for the oil derricks. They’re heading for Onyii.

  His signature appears in front of her face, and
she latches on to it.

  Ify’s chest heaves. When she raises a hand to wipe the blood from her nose, her fingers tremble. Then her eyelids grow heavy. Oh no. What’s happening? Her hand falls to her side. She can feel her body going limp. What’s happening to me? No. No no no no no.

  As she goes under, she sees before her a blinking red light, tracking over the electronic map of Nigeria accessed by her Accent. She tries to send Daren a message through his comms, the most important message she has ever written, one that could save lives. But she can’t remember what it is.

  “Daren,” she whispers aloud, not realizing it. “Daren.”

  She goes limp.

  CHAPTER

  29

  They open the door and enter a storage room filled with unmarked crates and discarded bodysuits. Air filtration masks hang from hooks in the wall. The dust is so thick that each step leaves a footprint. Onyii adjusts her mechanical eye to account for the new darkness and sees no heat signatures. They have to find a way underground. She tests the floor with her heel. Everything sounds solid.

  A door in the far wall opens out onto a corridor.

  They proceed as a pair, then Onyii points one way, taps Agu twice on the shoulder, then proceeds the other way, and they break away at the corner to regroup at the opposite corner. As Onyii moves, she switches to her pistol and holds her knife at the ready. In close quarters, her rifle will only get in her way. She hears a pained grunt and a thud, but calmly continues her circuit. When she finds Agu again, he’s stooped over the unconscious Nigerian security officer dressed in all black with a Nigerian flag patch on his left shoulder. A cord leads from the back of Agu’s neck into the back of the guard’s. Agu’s eyes glaze over as he downloads the man’s contents, then disconnects. The cord slithers back into the outlet in Agu’s neck, and the seal closes over the opening like a scab healing. Together, he and Onyii carry the body back into the storage room, where it will collect dust out of sight.