War Girls Page 23

  “It was her second,” Ngozi says. “Obioma had lost an abd early on. A mission gone wrong. Afterward, she’d tried to act as though everything was the same, but we knew she had changed.” Ngozi shakes her head. “She’d grown too close.” She turns in her seat and looks at Onyii. “That’s what happens when you name them. You get close.”

  We’re falling apart, Onyii says to herself. Golibe’s suicide, Ngozi’s sorrow. Chinelo’s rage. The mission broke us.

  “Now they’re all gone.” Ngozi says it without emotion. She grits her teeth. Her body tenses. “Why don’t those Green-and-Whites just blow up another village already? Maybe we can find some more bodies. Make some more abd, eh?” When she looks back at Onyii, tears stream from her eyes.

  Take care of her, Kesandu had commanded Onyii.

  Onyii sits on the bench next to Ngozi and holds her shuddering frame in her arms while Ngozi weeps into her shoulder.

  She remembers the discs in her pouch. The photos Golibe stealthily took of Ginika. The photos he hid for himself, maybe to look at before bed or in quiet moments between training sessions. His sister. Whom he loved.

  * * *

  Onyii and Ngozi stand at attention in Chinelo’s office, their hands clasped behind their backs. Anything to maintain a sense of order after so much has changed.

  Chinelo stands behind her desk and looks out the window that opens out over the courtyard.

  She must have seen Onyii comforting Ngozi. Onyii wants to be angry at someone else witnessing a moment so private. She wants to stay angry at Chinelo for saying what she said earlier. But the anger slides through her fingers like so much red desert sand.

  Chinelo turns to face them. “I called you into my office today, as the two remaining sisters in the Abd Program, to tell you that I’ve been ordered to shut the program down. As of this moment, the unit is dissolved. Permanently.”

  Ngozi receives the news with a stone-faced expression.

  “That’s all. You are dismissed.”

  Onyii and Ngozi are headed to the door when Chinelo says, “Onyii, stay.”

  Onyii and Ngozi share a look, and there’s a kindness in Ngozi’s eyes that Onyii has never seen before. “Thank you,” Ngozi mouths before leaving and closing the door behind her.

  Onyii balls her fists as she faces Chinelo. “Yes, captain?” She spits out the title like venom.

  “The remaining abd have grown unstable, and we cannot let their aberrant behavior continue. We have been ordered to terminate them.”

  “By whom? Agu is fine!”

  Chinelo’s voice is as cold and hard as the metal in Onyii’s fist when she speaks. “Have you spoken to him since the mission? Even once?”

  It’s true. There was so much to do in the three months after the attack, after the doctors and technicians and other personnel had been sent in to watch over the unit. Being put on hiatus should have meant more downtime, but Chinelo had always been away on meetings with Biafran leadership, and Onyii had spent almost all of her time learning her Igwe. Was Agu going to end up like the others?

  “Who knows what damage an unbalanced abd might do? To you? To anyone else? This is an order.” She turns her back to Onyii and stares out the window. Looking at nothing. Seeing everything. Maybe she’s imagining Chiamere’s final moments. Maybe she’s already planning how she’ll do it. “They’re just synths anyway,” she says to herself, as though she’s forgotten that Onyii is standing mere feet away. “They’re just synths.” She looks over her shoulder. “You’re dismissed.”

  CHAPTER

  40

  Daren is not coming for her.

  The moment Ify realizes this crystallizes in her mind. Her lip is split, and she shivers from the ice water her interrogator has been dumping onto her in buckets. The room is filled with cold, unforgiving chill. The freezing floor numbs the bare soles of her feet.

  Her interrogator walks around her with orbs of light circling his head so that only his eyes show. Sometimes, he wears a mask; other times, he doesn’t bother to. When she can muster the energy, Ify locks eyes with him.

  But now the realization hits Ify like a fist through her chest. Daren isn’t coming to save her. She is alone. She doesn’t feel bottomless sadness. Instead, she feels freedom. Liberation. I am the only one who will care about me, she realizes. I am the only one who can save me. I am all I have. She clenches her fists at her sides, rattling the chains that bind her to the chair. I will survive this.

  She sits on the chair now and lets herself shiver while freezing water soaks her through. It is only by letting go of her body that she can protect her mind. She has walked through so much of her life believing the flesh and meat inside bodies so easily hackable and broken, so easily understood and manipulated, but now she sees that she was wrong. Her skin is hard. It endures. It grows scar tissue to make itself stronger. It molds itself. It adapts. It persists.

  “When you visited the detention center in Nasarawa State, how did you communicate with the Biafran rebels?” the interrogator asks.

  Ify stares straight ahead. “I was never in contact with Biafran rebels.”

  “How did you coordinate the attack on the Okpai oil refinery?”

  “I knew nothing of the attack on the Okpai oil refinery.”

  “But you knew who was leading the attack on the Okpai oil refinery.”

  “I knew nothing of the attack on the Okpai oil refinery.”

  “You recognized the face of the one known as the Demon of Biafra? Who is this woman?”

  “I knew nothing of the attack on the Okpai oil refinery.”

  “How were you in contact with the Demon of Biafra?”

  “I knew nothing of the attack on the Okpai oil refinery.”

  “Why would you betray your people for the terrorists who attacked the Okpai oil refinery?”

  I knew nothing of the attack on the Okpai oil refinery. It is a lie. She had peered into Daren’s comms. Then she had climbed a surveillance tower and hacked into his mind while he flew toward Onyii. But she remembers nothing after that. She never reached Onyii.

  “We traced the signal to you. When the broadcast went live on our screens, we traced the transmission back to its source. A single watchtower. With you in it.”

  The interrogator stops and stares at her in silence for several long minutes. Ify doesn’t raise her gaze to meet his. The orbs cease their revolution around his head and hang steady in the air, lighting only portions of his face. A chair appears out of the shadows, guided by magnetized strips beneath the floor, Ify has surmised. The man brings the chair to him by holding his hand out, and that is how Ify figures out that he must be an Augment. He can probably read all her vital signs on his visual display: her blood pressure, her heart rhythms. It is probably how he knows when she is telling the truth, when she is lying, and when she has given up on thinking her way into an answer.

  But when he sits down in the chair, his body unstiffens. He has the chairback in front of him and rests his arms over the top, then places his chin on his crossed arms. And he stays like that for several more silent moments, staring straight into Ify. “Your screams,” he says. “You scream because you are seeing things?”

  The question startles Ify. Is this part of the interrogation or something else? “Y-yes.”

  “You are seeing the things that are in your mind?”

  “Yes.” She thinks of the visions. Of her mother.

  He taps his temple. “It is because of what is in here. Your device.”

  “My Accent?” But it can’t work in there. She has lost her second sight. She can see nothing inside her cell but what anyone else with working eyes can see.

  “So that is what you call it.” He rests his arm on the chairback. “The walls in your cell are thick. But we can detect your device from the outside. And we can change its signal.”

  Ify lets out a gasp tha
t surprises even her.

  “You may think the torture happens here. But really”—he points out past the room—“it happens there.”

  Ify doesn’t know what to do with this new knowledge. She knows she can use it somehow, twist it to her advantage, but she can’t figure out how just yet. So she straightens in her seat and raises her chin.

  “Eventually, we will go through enough of your memories to find what we are looking for.” He shrugs. “Or you could tell us what we need to know now, and it will stop.”

  For a moment, Ify feels a fluttering in her chest. A promise to end her torture, to stop the visions from consuming her. All she would have to do is tell them what they want to hear. It doesn’t have to be the truth, the whole truth, and it may just buy her time instead of freedom. But she salivates at the promise. Then her will kicks in again, and she stills herself. She becomes as cold and unfeeling as the chair on which she sits.

  Her interrogator notes the change in her posture and sighs, like he is disappointed. Then he gets up from his chair and, with a flick of his wrist, sends Ify’s chair out from under her, pitching her onto her side. She can’t move with her wrists bound to the chair’s back, so she is forced to lie there with her cheek to the cold, wet floor while the interrogator walks over to her and undoes her restraints.

  Her arms fall limp around her. She knows better than to resist when the guards come in to bring her back to her cell. It is like she is going to be thrown back into water and left to drown. But she is grateful for this chance to speak to someone human. It is like coming up for air. And even if her mind knows that she will once more go underwater, she is grateful for the breaths she was able to take.

  * * *

  When Ify, her back stiff from all the time she has spent on this bare bed, opens her eyes and sees Daren, she thinks this is yet another dream. She waits for the scene to play itself out. Will this be Daren consoling her after the girls at school have finished bullying her? Will this be Daren bringing Ify to the laboratory where Nigeria’s premier scientists work to build the weapons that will secure Nigerian victory? Will this be Daren in a field watching Ify try to hack animals, then, growing bored, turning her gaze to the stars?

  But this Daren doesn’t move. He just stands in the opened doorway to her cell. And he looks haggard. His cheeks have hollowed out. His skin has paled. One of his hands trembles and, with the other, he holds it still until the tremors cease. This is Daren as she has never seen him before. He looks like he has been reduced, like he has been made into just a fraction of the Daren she has known her whole time in Nigeria. He’s real. This is not a vision.

  “Where were you?” she hisses through her teeth, surprised she still cares about his answer.

  He takes a few steps into her cell. The door closes behind him. There’s nowhere for him to sit, so he takes a seat at the end of Ify’s bed.

  Ify recoils.

  “I heard about what happened,” he says in a voice that sounds, like the rest of him, reduced. Weakened. While she has been busy making herself strong here, he has been out there growing soft. “After the hostage incident at the oil facility, I was demoted. I let the architects of that tragedy get away. I’d killed so many of them, but the one truly responsible, the Demon of Biafra, I had let her escape. And, for that, I can never be forgiven.”

  She holds back a sneer at his self-pitying tone.

  “Then I heard that you had been jailed. And since my removal from the combat field, I have been working furiously to clear your name.”

  Ify’s face remains impassive at this news. When she was first captured, she longed to hear these very words from Daren. But she’s moved past that. Right now, on this bed, staring at the back of the young man who had once been her protector—her brother—she sees only the weakling who abandoned her in her time of need. “How long have I been here?” she asks in a voice that wants information and nothing more.

  “It has been three months since the hostage incident.”

  It sounds like no time at all. It feels like forever. “And what are you doing here?”

  He turns so that, when he looks over his shoulder, he can see her, and she can see a portion of his face. “I am here to tell you that you got your wish.”

  She frowns at him.

  “A ceasefire will be declared. There will be peace between Nigeria and Biafra.” He looks to the floor. “All it took was for me to lose Daurama.” That self-pitying tone again.

  For some reason, it hurts to hear Daren say it that way. He never accepted me as a true Nigerian. She stuffs the feelings of regret and hurt down where they cannot be reached. Then she sits up on her bed. “And the crimes I’ve been accused of?”

  “Political crimes. You are a political prisoner. But now that the war is over, the charge no longer applies.” When he says, “We must move forward,” Ify hears no conviction in it. He cannot let go.

  Ify contemplates his words, then looks up straight into his face. “Before I leave, I want one last thing.”

  A new sadness shines in his eyes as he realizes that she has made her decision. “Yes?”

  “I want you to take it out.” At the question in his eyes, she continues: “I want you to remove my Accent.”

  “But why?”

  Because it has made me vulnerable, she wants to tell him. Because it led to all of this. Because I can’t control it. Because others have learned to use it against me. But instead, all she says is, “It is what I want.”

  Daren lets sorrow remain on his face as he nods. “I will grant your wish.” He rises from the bed and heads to the door. “Our doctors will be with you shortly,” he says in the doorway. “Before I go, there is one thing I must show you.”

  Ify wants to refuse him, wants to snarl and spit at his feet. But he looks so broken. So small. She doesn’t nod or say anything, but she softens her expression enough to welcome him.

  He puts his hand next to her face. Then a digit plunges into her ear. Her Accent hums. The world bursts into golden light.

  CHAPTER

  41

  Onyii wanders the campus. It feels as though everyone is hiding. Nothing moves. Not even the wind stirs.

  Maybe if she looks everywhere and cannot find Agu, she can go back to Chinelo and tell her that her abd ran away or that he simply could not be located. That maybe it would be too much trouble to track him down, that maybe he sensed what was coming and took care of their problem for them. But when she gets back into the dorm and walks down the halls of the boys’ quarters, the only sound she hears is a touchboard playing piano music. Softly.

  Normally, there would be joking and talking and bare feet stomping down the corridors. And it would have been enough to drown out the sound. But now that there is nothing else to mask it, it is all Onyii hears. Her heart sinks.

  She walks to his room and stands at the door for a long time, simply listening. She presses her forehead to it and closes her eyes, trying to think her way into what she needs to do.

  Instead, she sees that last battle playing out in her head. So much death. She sees flashes of every raid she led, every battle with Nigerian mechs. Every mobile suit she sliced through or shot down or decapitated. Every pilot or soldier she gunned down. She sees the sisters and the abd in that room in the oil facility in their last minutes together. Their faces appear, one by one.

  Is all this death punishment for all the killing Onyii has done? Everyone close to her seems to lose their precious thing. She lets herself remember the camp of War Girls and her last moments with Ify. Then she lets herself remember the first time she saw Ify. How small she was in that dark, empty home. Maybe this is the true power of the Demon of Biafra. Everything she touches turns to dust. Everything she strikes. Everything she caresses.

  That’s it. She’ll leave. She will do this one last thing, and then she will run.

  She will begin the process of erasing Agu, the
campus, the War Girls camp, and the missions that led her there from her memories. She will journey to the Redlands, live there so that the poisoned air and the blood-red sun will peel away at her mind, corrode her braincase. She wants to remember nothing.

  She just needs to do this one last thing.

  She presses her thumb to the pad next to Agu’s door, and the door slides open.

  Agu is on the floor by his bed with a small touchboard in his lap. His fingers stop. When he looks up into Onyii’s face, he smiles.

  “Is it time for training?” he asks.

  Several seconds pass before Onyii comes out of her daze. “No, Agu. We’re just going for a walk.”

  He’s up on his feet in the next moment and pulls a satchel from the bed. In it, he stuffs his touchboard. He opens his drawer and begins to pull out a pistol and a box of ammunition.

  “Don’t,” Onyii says. Too harshly. “You won’t need that today.”

  He does not hesitate to put it back. Together, they walk out into the late afternoon sunlight.

  * * *

  Onyii has only ever seen these mountains from afar. The closest she has come is looking at their cloud-shrouded peaks from the valley in which the teams conducted their firearms training. There was always a band of rocky terrain just below the summits, but green was the primary color. Layer upon layer of forest.

  Now, with Agu a little bit ahead, she walks through to find it all just as lush as she has imagined. But quieter. No beasts like those that roam the jungle outside the War Girls camp. No two-fangs or wulfus or whatever radiation-poisoned monsters roam and terrorize the Redlands. Not even mosquitoes.

  Some of the fat leaves have fallen from the trees. But most of them provide a canopy to protect people and insects from the rains of the oncoming monsoon season. It’s cooler here. The sun, where it casts bars of light through the trees and their foliage, is kinder.