War Girls Read online

  “Because neither of us has bathed in a week.” Onyii tries to say it with a straight face, but a smile curls her lips, and she can’t hold back anymore, and their laughter echoes into the trees.

  Chinelo rolls around in the wet grass, clutching her stomach, as the bees fly back into her hair. Onyii wants to tell her to be quiet, to stop laughing before they alert whatever Nigerian patrols may be nearby. But the sound of Chinelo’s laugh warms her too much.

  “Let me say goodbye to the little one at least,” Onyii says. She pushes herself upright and hauls Chinelo to her feet.

  “And maybe we can find some napkins too,” Chinelo says, looking at the repaired well to see if it’s properly working again. “Some of the girls have begun to bleed.”

  * * *

  How many years has it been? Even after all this time, it still moves Onyii to see Ify sleep so peacefully. The ratty, coarse blanket rises and falls, rises and falls. Sometimes, Onyii wishes the two of them had ports, rounded outlets at the backs of their necks that some half-limbs have, so that she could plug a wire in and connect it to Ify and see what the little girl dreamed. Maybe dancing and a cool breeze and a pretty dress. No mosquitoes.

  Onyii shuffles to Ify’s side. The inside of the tent is still awash in blue from a morning that has not yet fully arrived. And she knows Ify will try to resist being woken up so early before her classes, but the girl can stand to learn a little industriousness. So, Onyii sits on a crate by Ify’s bed and gently shakes her awake.

  The girl’s eyes open a little, then grow wide for a second before settling. Even in the darkness, Onyii can see the purple of her irises, flecked with jagged shards of gold, and her breath catches in her throat at the beauty of it.

  “Hey, little one,” Onyii whispers.

  Chinelo waits at the tent’s entrance, and Onyii can feel her impatience, but Onyii has made it her mission to spend as much time with Ify as she can. You never know when you might lose a loved one in war or even who that loved one might be. Her days as a child soldier are still fresh in her mind. Too fresh. So Onyii spends several long seconds running her hand along Ify’s bald head before Ify turns and pulls the blanket over her entire body.

  “Hey.” Onyii shakes her, more roughly this time.

  “It’s too early,” Ify whines.

  “I have to go on a run.”

  At this, Ify turns. The girl is learning toughness, Onyii can tell, but there’s still a pleading look in the purple and gold of her eyes.

  “We have to look for some more supplies. Chinelo is coming with me, so don’t worry. I have a buddy. And Enyemaka can keep you company.”

  “While I do what?”

  Onyii frowns. Is that spice in your voice, Ify? “While you go over your lessons.” Onyii pulls a tablet from a shelf and powers it on. The screen flickers, and Onyii slaps it against her knee, a little too hard, before it casts its light over the inside of their dwelling.

  “But, Onyii, I already get high marks. Let me sleep-oh!”

  “Fine.” Onyii puts the tablet on the bedside table. “Don’t study. And in class, when the teacher is teaching, if you like, don’t listen. Don’t pay attention. Be on your tablet. Play your games. Talk. Chaw-chaw-chaw-chaw-chaw.” Her voice rises. “But if you come back to this tent with anything less than first position”—a pause for dramatic effect—“we shall see.”

  Ify spends one last, brief moment under the covers before she throws off the blanket and swings her legs around.

  Onyii gets up and turns before Ify has a chance to see her smile. Chinelo stifles a chuckle.

  In the corner, Enyemaka stands, hunched over and powered off. If someone wanted to be charitable, they would say her multicolored armor gives her character. The faded purple metal of one forearm, the pitted orange of one breastplate, the patchwork of green and red and yellow and orange and blue wires that make up her ribs. They’d say it was like a dress sewn out of choice fabric and made into this beautiful gown. A riot of color. But, really, it’s just a droid made out of whatever tech Onyii and the others stumbled across on previous runs and during skirmishes with the Green-and-Whites. The metal plates on her legs are rusted at the corners. The sockets for her eyes are dark with grime. Moss runs along her backside, and other parts are fuzzy with fungus.

  Onyii stands on her toes, inhales deeply to unlock a series of chambers and valves in her artificial internal organs, and spits a mucus-encased stream of nanobots into Enyemaka’s ear. When Ify used to ask how Enyemaka came to life, Chinelo would joke that it was like a wireless connection, with Onyii as the droid’s router. Enyemaka’s eyes light up. Her gears hum, and she stands upright, squares her shoulders, and scans the room.

  “Watch her while I’m gone,” Onyii commands.

  “Yes, Mama,” Enyemaka says back. As she powers all the way up, her voice sounds like two voices at once. Then she walks over to Ify. “So, little one. Mathematics.” When she says that part, Enyemaka sounds too much like Onyii for her own comfort.

  Onyii grabs her pack from by the tent’s entrance and hefts her rifle with her prosthetic arm. “And make sure she shaves,” she calls over her shoulder. “Clean. I don’t want to see any missed spots on her head! We have a heat wave coming.” Then Onyii is out into the chilly morning.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Ify waits until Onyii leaves the tent before reaching under her pillow and fumbling around for her Accent. The tiny piece of tech, a ball small enough to fit on the end of an ear swab, has nestled itself in the folds of her bedsheet. When she finds it, a grin splits her face. Enyemaka hovers over her, and Ify instinctively turns her back while she fiddles with the Accent, then fits it inside her ear.

  The darkness of the little hut evaporates. Peels away like the skin of rotten fruit to reveal the lines and nodes of net connectivity that bind everything—and everyone—together. Her pillow sprouts a series of pulsing blue dots. The metal beams supporting her roof glow with aquamarine lines. Enyemaka turns into a forest of nodes and vectors. Ify can see inside her and watch the gears turn and the core in her head thrum. She can see how her movements are enabled by the wireless connection from the Terminal that helps power the camp. Enyemaka’s rustier parts glow a shade of red that worries Ify, but the rest of her is a healthy blue. With her Accent, Ify can see all of this. All these things happening in the camp’s closed network. Bright as ocean water under the sun. Data.

  “Remember, Enyemaka. You promised not to tell Onyii,” Ify says, frowning at her minder with as much sternness as she can muster. Onyii had forbade her from tinkering with any tech that might interfere with the wireless. And after the second time it had disrupted Onyii’s comms while she was on a scouting mission, Onyii had nearly thrashed her senseless. Only at the last moment had Onyii returned to herself. There was a change in her eyes. When she got that angry, a cloud came over them and Ify could tell the storm was coming. But Onyii’s eyes had cleared, and she had given Ify only an extended tongue-lashing.

  Ify never meant to disobey Onyii, but she would look around at her life to see nothing but questions. And whenever Ify inserted her Accent into her ear, the world exploded with answers. Almost every piece of tech and even unconnected items like her bed and her pillow and the biomass the scouting parties brought back to make their meals with—all of it was explained to her through the Accent in a way that made sense. And right now, she’s not messing around trying to hack into Chinelo’s comms or into the Obelisk that takes the special minerals from the ground to power the camp. She’s just watching. Surfing the connections. Riding the waves. The Accent also lets her talk to Enyemaka without needing to make a sound.

  She remembers where she is and that Onyii is still probably near enough to sense her, and she shifts her jaw to put her Accent into sleep mode. Then, shrugging on her shirt, which looks and feels more like a burlap sack than anything a human being is supposed to wear, she takes a seat on
the crate before her mirror. Or, rather, shard of mirror.

  Okay, Enyemaka, she says cheerfully through her Accent. I’m ready.

  There’s a little bit of hair on her head, just a small shield of silver fuzz, but it’s enough to make her itch in the warm seasons. So she sits as still as she can manage while Enyemaka runs the razor smoothly over Ify’s scalp. With each stroke, Enyemaka sprays a small puff of alcohol on the nearly shiny space. Ify winces. Sometimes, Enyemaka isn’t as smooth as she’d like, and Ify’s left with a cut or two that she has to put adhesive over. Then she has to endure the taunts of her age-mates.

  “Ow!”

  “You should not have been moving,” Enyemaka says in her half-robotic voice. “My reflexes are not fast enough to account for your constant shifting.”

  Always my fault, Ify thinks to herself. “Ugh, I’m finished,” she says, without even having Enyemaka inspect her. “You wait outside the classroom this time when we get to school, okay?” There’s an extra bite in her voice today, and all that good cheer she felt upon finding her Accent has left her.

  By the time she gathers her tablet and her rucksack, daylight shines through the slit in the tent’s opening. She’s going to be late for school. Again.

  * * *

  The cooling unit must be broken, because they’ve retracted the roof on the warehouse where the teachers hold their classes. Ify sneaks in through the back, but sees that the only free seat, of course, is in the front row. The thought runs through her head to turn back and just skip class for the day, but Enyemaka is blocking her path through the side entrance, so she has no choice but to duck her head and hurry to her seat.

  Everyone has their tablets out in front of them with holos displayed, but Ify can’t tell what page of the downloaded lesson they’re on and so has to stumble through image after image after image of nonsense until her holo matches the others. Some of the girls around her snicker, which makes Ify duck her head even more. She’s tempted to turn on her Accent and have the secrets of each of these girls revealed to her. The Augmented ones with their stored search histories not yet deleted, showing the sites they visit to look at barely dressed men and boys. Ify can see all of that and expose them with just a turn of her jaw, but Enyemaka’s still in the doorway, and there’s no doubt that Onyii would find out. And it’s not even the beating that Ify fears so much as the look of disappointment in her big sister’s eyes. So Ify focuses on the holo, which is a 3-D projection of a parabolic curve on a graph.

  The teacher is explaining basic algebra, not even anything useful. Not like the orbital physics in the ancient textbooks and archived sites Ify studies on her own.

  She grits her teeth, and suddenly the world explodes with blue. For a panicked moment, Ify sees the gears and wires inside her teacher and can feel the information from other people’s tablets run through her head. She senses Enyemaka’s distress, and far into the distance, on the periphery of her vision, a familiar signal: Onyii. So fast she hurts herself, she clicks her jaw and shuts off her Accent. She looks around to see if anyone noticed the shadow signal in their devices, the little blip or moment of static in their tablets or in their teched-up bodies. But no one seems to have noticed. She lets out a sigh and listens to the teacher drone on about how algebra originated in Biafra among the Igbo peoples. How the knowledge was stolen by the Fulani tribe when they invaded from the North centuries ago. Ify wonders what it must have been like to live in a time when Nigeria was newly independent and no longer a British colony, when the Igbo lived alongside the Fulani monsters the teacher is talking about. But before she can follow the thought, everyone’s tablets buzz, and the lesson’s over for today.

  The girls stream out already giggling, some of them playing with their tablets and turning them into music boards to play songs they made and recorded. Ify slips her tablet into her sack and shuffles toward Enyemaka. She reaches up to scratch the top of her head when something slams into her from behind, and she topples forward. Enyemaka’s gears groan as she moves to try to catch her, but Ify tastes dirt and turns to find several girls standing over her.

  “Eh-heh,” says one of the girls, with her hair braided in two dark pigtails coming out the side of her head. The ridges of the tribal scars on her cheeks glisten. “Without her big sista around, she is just a skinny oyinbo.” The others snicker and point at Ify’s skin, lighter than theirs, so that mosquito bites show up redder and her bruises take longer to fade. She tries to hide her bare arms in her shirt. Her skin the color of sand, theirs the color of firm ground. She grits her teeth. Turn on your Accent, she tells herself. Hack them. Mess up their systems. And she could do it. She gives herself a moment to imagine the girls screeching as their tablets explode in their hands or the tech in their braincases short-circuits, making them go blind. Then she pushes herself up to her feet. Whatever she would do to them would get Onyii’s attention and, worse, her anger. So she lets it go, just like she does every time.

  “She looks like jollof rice gone bad,” another of the girls sings. And that gets the others going. “Maybe she thinks just because she has no real family, we are supposed to pity her.”

  The girl with the pigtails sucks her teeth. “Just some skinny goat Onyii found in the bush all alone.”

  Ify’s cheeks burn. Tears spring to her eyes. The anger is right there, close enough to touch, and she has to fight against it. But if one of them pushes her, if they even touch her, then Ify will give herself permission to lash out. She will tell Onyii afterward that she had no choice, that she had to defend herself, that she had to be strong like her. And that’s why the girls will be squirming on the ground wondering why they suddenly can’t see or hear or walk.

  But the girls relent.

  They turn to go, and one of them picks up a stone and flicks it at Ify’s head as their group walks away.

  Enyemaka stands before Ify, and that’s when she realizes she’s shaking. Rooted where she stands, hands balled into fists, brow knit into a frown, a soft growl growing in her throat. But the shadow Enyemaka casts over her brings her back to herself, and she takes in a ragged breath.

  The android kneels down and raises a hand to Ify’s face. The palm opens up and sprays alcohol on the cut above Ify’s eye.

  “Ack!” Ify slaps Enyemaka’s hand away. “Get away from me!” And that’s when the tears come. Suddenly, she’s running and doesn’t care what direction she heads in, as long as it’s away from school, away from camp, away from Enyemaka always hovering over her, away from the girls who keep pointing out how different she is.

  She stops when the hum of camp activity grows quiet. The small patch of forest she ran into opens out onto an outcropping, and, below it, a beach. Waves of blue-green water whisper against the shoreline. A few heavy breaths later, Ify has calmed down. The noise and fog in her head dissipate. She sits in the grass, hugging her knees to her chest, and stares off into the distance. The mineral derricks are black silhouettes on the horizon. With her Accent on again, their shapes glow bright against a darkened blood-red sky. Even the enemy Nigerian mechs that hover over the derricks shine with pulsing blue light. They swim through the sky in widening oval patterns and leave trails of what looks to Ify like blue stardust in their wake, but Ify knows it is the pathway that’s been programmed into them. She can tell the reach of their comms too, and she knows that she and the camp are just outside their grasp. Invisible.

  She fishes her tablet out of her sack and programs her Accent to pirate an enemy connection so that she can access the lessons she’s been sneaking in outside of school. The headline reads: ORBITAL PHYSICS. And springing out of the text are holographs of parabolic curves and Space Colonies spinning slowly on their axes. She picks up where she left off: Lagrange points and the spaces between planets and moons where the gravity from both bodies can hold a colony in place. Then there are the mechs and the small, nimble jets that fly through asteroid belts, dipping and rising and twirling. But no mat
ter how hard she zooms in, she can’t see the pilots. The resolution gets too bad. She knows they’re there. She knows there are people in those cockpits, maybe women like the type she’ll grow up to be. And her heart thrills at the idea.

  Enyemaka appears at her side and stiffly sits down next to Ify.

  Ify waits for Enyemaka to chastise her for hopping onto an enemy connection, for going behind Onyii’s back and using her Accent, but Enyemaka peeks over to examine the holograms that emerge from the tablet. Ify holds it out for Enyemaka to get a better look at and smiles at the android.

  “You already have a very deep understanding of orbital physics,” Enyemaka says in her double-voice. “And yet you do poorly in your mathematics class.”

  Ify snatches the tablet back. “That’s because the algebra we do in class is boring. It’s so basic, and they keep wanting me to show my work. So I always get low marks. But in America, they reward you for getting the right answers. That’s how you become a pilot.”

  Enyemaka can’t smile. Ify knows this. There’s no real face on her head, no lips, and her eyes don’t light up to show happiness but to signal that she’s been powered up and her battery life is full, but when Ify looks up at Enyemaka, it feels like Enyemaka is smiling at her. “Is that what you want? To become a pilot?”

  “More than anything,” Ify breathes. She has never said it out loud before, and it feels dangerous. But it feels like commitment. She has to do it now that she has said it. And she’ll find a way. Maybe when the war ends and there’s a free Biafra, they’ll get a launch station built, probably somewhere in Enugu or maybe right here where the camp is, and the station will fire shuttles deep into space, where they’ll join the rest of the world. Another superpower like America among the Space Colonies.

  Enyemaka chirrups. A bell rings inside her. Ify’s shoulders sink. Mealtime. But she realizes how hungry she is—she doesn’t remember having eaten anything all day. “We must head back if we are to avoid the end of the line,” Enyemaka says.