War Girls Page 24

  Maybe he’ll want to see the sun one last time, Onyii tells herself. For some reason, it feels wrong to end his life in darkness. This needs to be kind. Not like the others. This killing is different.

  A sunlit pathway leads out of the forest and curves around the edge of the mountain, out of sight. Agu, perhaps sensing Onyii’s thoughts, looks back, and Onyii nods. He bounds ahead, holding his satchel at his side. Onyii follows at her deliberate pace.

  She finds him on a small shelf, open to the sun, that looks down on the whole campus below. How small it all becomes from this far away.

  He’s sitting down, his satchel at his feet. Onyii stands behind him. Close enough to know she won’t miss. Far enough away that Agu won’t be able to reach her in time if he decides to resist.

  She knows he won’t resist.

  She slips her pistol out of the holster at her waist in one motion. Flicks the safety off. And she waits. For what, she does not know. Maybe for a crow to caw loud enough to hide the sound of the gunshot. Maybe for another animal to stir and startle Agu out of this moment of marveling over the view. Maybe she’s waiting for an Agba bear to charge out of the forest, and the two will battle it, and Onyii will return to Chinelo to tell her that Agu is still fine, that he hasn’t been broken, that his prime directive is still in working order.

  But there is only silence.

  She raises the pistol, sighting the back of his head. It should be instant. Painless.

  She feels Adaeze near, as though her trainer stands a mere few feet to her side, just out of her field of vision. It’s a ghost, she knows. Maybe a malfunction in her Augmentation, tickling that side where belief in the gods comes from. Maybe the mission broke her too, and this is how.

  But she decides not to fight it. Without turning to the vision of her handler, she asks, What do I do?

  The ghost of Adaeze is silent.

  What did you do? You left me, but before that, what did you do? How did you stop? And Onyii knows that the ghost understands that she means stop killing.

  In the silence that follows, Onyii’s gun hand wavers. Her mechanical arm has never shaken like this. She frowns. It’s stupid to wait for a ghost to respond to you. She is just delaying.

  Just as she tenses to pull the trigger, the ghost says, I stopped killing.

  And that’s enough to still Onyii’s hand. It falls to her side. She bows her head. Sobs threaten to erupt from her, but she grits her teeth, steels herself against them.

  “Leave,” she says at last. “Run away, and don’t ever come back.”

  Agu grows unnaturally still. Like how he is when he is in a sniper’s nest waiting for a target to appear.

  “I don’t care where you go or what you do. I just never want to see you again.” She does not holster her gun. “You have twelve hours to get as far away from here as possible.”

  He doesn’t move.

  Don’t make me shoot you.

  Then, slowly, he stands up and faces her. There is no expression on his face. “May I take this with me?” He brings the touchboard to his chest and hugs it.

  The question startles Onyii. And just like that, tears pool in her eyes. She nods.

  Something like a smile curls Agu’s lips, then vanishes. He walks past her back down the trail and into the forest.

  She turns to where she felt Adaeze standing moments ago and shakes her head. No, just a ghost.

  * * *

  Onyii is nearly finished packing when she sees Chinelo in her doorway. After a moment, Onyii resumes packing, refusing to look her in the face. Quiet hangs in the air holding the motes of dust that float in the beams of sunlight cast through the windows.

  “Where will you go?” Chinelo asks in a voice so low Onyii almost doesn’t hear her.

  “I don’t know. Anywhere.”

  Then nothing.

  Onyii finishes, then zips her bag shut. She rises to her full height, and Chinelo’s head tilts, and there’s a beseeching look in her eyes that Onyii can’t remember ever having seen. Ask me to stay, Onyii wants to tell her.

  “It’s official,” Chinelo says. Her hands shake at her sides. Her fingers are covered in blood. Chiamere’s. Did he fight back when she did it? “The ceasefire. They are going to make the announcement in a week. A broadcast.” The words come out of her haltingly. “We won.” Tears burst out of her. “Onyii, we won.”

  Just ask me to stay, Onyii hopes her eyes say. Please.

  “We did it.” She takes a step closer to Onyii and slams a hand on her human shoulder, trying to smile through her sobs. “You and me. We get to build a . . .” She struggles. “We get to build . . .” Then she falls to her knees and wails. She buries her face in her bloodstained fingers and wails and wails and wails, and her body convulses, wracked by a pain Onyii cannot imagine. “What have I done?” Chinelo says, when she’s finally able to look up at Onyii. “Tell me it was worth it. Tell me all of this was worth it. Please. Tell me. Please.”

  How many times has she asked herself those very same questions? Just as much blood stains her fingers. The special sorrow of survivors. That is what Onyii hears in Chinelo’s sobs.

  And that is what finally convinces Onyii to get down on her knees, take Chinelo in her arms, and open the gate. So that Chinelo can hear her anguish too.

  Crying, they hold each other until well after the sun sets. By the time the stars appear and they’ve fallen asleep, they are a blissful tangle of limbs, at rest at last.

  CHAPTER

  42

  Ify lies on her back in a field of light and slowly sits up. All around her is white.

  Suddenly, the world turns into static, like what would happen to her screens if someone’s signal interfered with hers. Then it’s night. Everything is evening-blue. And quiet.

  She looks around to see that she’s in some sort of dwelling. A home. It came out of nowhere: the mud-and-stone walls, the windows, the roof. Then, slowly, furniture forms, first as pixels, then as things that she can reach out and touch. Like it’s building itself. First an overturned couch, then the remains of a shattered table. Glass litters the floor of the room she sits in.

  Then she hears the whimper.

  She turns and sees a shape curled against the far wall. She squints, then lets out a gasp. It’s her. She’s in . . . a dream?

  Sound comes in short bursts. But all she can hear is gunfire. Short, staccato fits. Bullet casings clinking against each other as they fall into the grass outside. This . . . this is her home. She doesn’t quite know how she knows. She recognizes none of it. But she knows. In the deepest parts of her, she knows. Her gaze darts back and forth over what used to be the living room, taking in the damage. Then she looks back at that other vision of herself. This Ify is younger. A child. And she’s holding something in her lap. A dog. Its fur is uncombed but slick with wet darkness.

  Someone screams. The voice, so strange but so familiar, brings Ify to one of the windows, and she peers out into the dirt courtyard. Someone small, as tall as her maybe, drags someone else along the ground. A woman. The woman kicks and screams and claws at what Ify realizes is a metal arm. The hand, whose steel glints in the moonlight, holds firm onto the woman’s braids as clouds of blue dust rise to trail them.

  Ify’s heart pounds in her chest. More faraway gunfire.

  The attacker brings the woman over to an open area where more people are huddled, their backs to each other, their hands and feet bound in metal restraints. They weep around the cloth used to gag them.

  Dread curls in Ify’s stomach. Her heart beats even faster. That face. She’s seen it before. The small attacker joins others clustered nearby. They’re soldiers. But they wear no uniforms. Just baggy clothes, their rifles, and masks. The young soldier stands over the hostages. She’s just a child. The rest are adults. Ify can’t stop looking.

  Then, without warning, one of the prisoners pu
shes forward and rams one of the soldiers in the knee. The child soldier steps to the side, aims its rifle, then fires a single shot.

  “Mama!” Ify hears herself scream. The word comes out of her before she knows what’s happening. “Mama,” she whispers. The realization comes rushing in after the word. She’s not in a dream. She’s in a memory. She’s trapped in a memory.

  The prisoner stops moving. The others wail.

  Someone clad in all black, almost rags, holds a small recorder up to the face of a man who stands behind a row of children, all of whom have their rifles aimed at the backs of the heads of the hostages bound before them. The man speaks in words Ify cannot hear. But then he stops speaking. Ify cannot bear to keep watching. But she cannot keep from listening. Gunfire lights up the night. Then comes the clinking of the last bullet casings. Then silence.

  Moonlight falls through the window, illuminating the feet of the little girl still in the room. Ify knows it is herself. Can tell in the utter stillness of the child, the vise grip she has on the dog bleeding against her chest. Bootsteps draw closer, and Ify watches the child soldier burst into the room and sweep it with its rifle. The soldier stops when it sees the younger Ify. And for a long minute, the soldier just stares, then lowers its mask to reveal a face Ify can’t believe she’s seeing.

  The girl is younger. The scars are fresher. But the face is the same.

  Onyii.

  After what seems like forever, Onyii walks over to the younger Ify and grabs her arm. The girl doesn’t budge, but Onyii is too strong and pries her arms apart. Then Onyii lifts the dog into her own arms. The younger Ify’s robe is covered in blood. For a moment, Onyii looks at the now-dead dog, then she walks back out of the room and into the field surrounding the compound. Ify turns away from her younger self and follows Onyii out of the room but stops and can only watch as Onyii carries the dog to the shallow grave dug just on the edge of the forest. She doesn’t drop the dog in but rather kneels, then slowly rolls the dead animal on top of the bodies already gathered there.

  One of the soldiers sidles up next to her, but she doesn’t face him. She merely stares into the grave. “Anyone else in there?” he asks her, in Igbo, his mask muffling his voice.

  “No,” says Onyii.

  The other soldier chuckles with his belly, then heads Ify’s way. Onyii’s hand shoots out. Her fingers wrap around the man’s wrist. “Hey! What now? What is wrong with you? Hey! Let go! You are squeezing! Ow! Jeezos!” He falls to his knees with Onyii bending his arm awkwardly behind him. “What is the matter with you?”

  “I checked,” she says in a voice drained of all emotion. “There is no one left in that house.”

  After a few more seconds, Onyii releases her grip, then walks toward the other soldiers. She doesn’t even bother looking to see if the man believes her. She knows that he will simply trail behind her, nursing his broken wrist.

  When Ify looks at her younger self, she sees a girl unmoving with her arms at her sides, as though she were already dead.

  But Ify knows what happens next. Onyii will return, alone, and find her in that same spot. And Onyii will carry her just as she’d carried that dog, and Onyii will bring her to camp and raise her and tell her that she is Biafran, that she had been captured by the enemy and that she has been rescued. That she has finally been brought home.

  * * *

  When Daren disengages from Ify’s Accent and she finds herself back in her cell, she can’t move. Tears stream down her face.

  “It is a lie,” she says. Then her voice hardens. “It is a lie.” Anger courses through her. “It is a lie! That is not what happened! You implanted that memory.”

  Daren’s extended fingers retreat and reform. He takes his time slipping a glove over his hand. “Even if we did possess the technology to fabricate memories, I would not have done that to you. I can only pull what data already exists.”

  “But how? If it was my memory, how could I watch myself? It’s not real!” She seizes on that hole in Daren’s explanation, tries to force it open even wider. “I could not have remembered all of those things.”

  “The rest of the data was pulled from the surroundings.” He looks at his hand when he speaks, smoothing out the glove’s wrinkles. “She was the one who took your family from you.”

  He rises to his full height, still more like a shell of his former self, and leaves before Ify can shout at him. Even if she had called out to him, told him that he was evil for telling her these lies, that he was doing this only to hurt her, she would not have fully believed it. She had known.

  A piece of her had known all along.

  * * *

  The doctors arrive to remove her Accent.

  They will put Ify underwater to prepare her body, bathing her in the healing fluids that will strengthen her system before they operate. Then they will use their tools and technology to remove the cursed device from Ify’s ear. It feels odd to think that this is how they will blind her. They will remove her second sight by pulling something out of her ear. But she will, from then on, see the world differently. She wonders what it will look like. Whether it will still have the same colors, whether she will see light differently, whether shadows will be deeper or paler. She wonders if the world will be blurrier or if she will be able to tell a smile from a frown with the same quickness she used to have.

  Afterward, they will place her unconscious body back in the water and fit a breathing mask to her face while her body heals, then they will free her.

  Questions race through Ify’s mind about what awaits her. But she finds a way to still them. She conjures up a face. A single face. The one she will search for. The one she is sure to recognize. The face of the person who began this cycle of hurt. The face of the person she will kill in order to end it.

  As the water from the healing chamber passes over her face, she thinks of Onyii.

  * * *

  Daren doesn’t ride with her to the border.

  Except for the guards, she’s the only one in the van. None of the soldiers they pass on the winding road to the edge of Nigerian-held territory pay them any mind. The closer to the front lines they get, the quieter things become, as though all that Nigeria cared for was war. Without that engine, the war machine sits still. How much of the energy that powered Nigeria, that made its citizens active, that drove its scientific advances was drawn from war?

  The border station is small. There is a large gateway for vehicles and a smaller one next to it for individuals. Both are connected to a metal trailer that sits comfortably in the shade of a hovering roof.

  The guards stop the vehicle and escort her out of the van. She’s passed off to another set of guards who walk her to the gate. The air between the two metal poles of the gate shimmers. A scanner. When she leaves, they want her to have truly left everything behind, to take no piece of Nigeria with her into whatever wilderness she walks.

  The border station feels like the last living thing before the desert spread out ahead of her.

  She does not know where she is, only that there are patches of green somewhere along the horizon. The world’s colors are sharper, the humidity of the oncoming monsoon season heavier. But her body feels harder. Her insides, tougher.

  She will need to be those things to do what she knows she has to do: Find Onyii. Avenge her mother’s death.

  She clenches her fists at her sides and takes her first step forward.

  INTERLUDE

  Enyemaka’s eyes open onto darkness. But the inside of its face fills with rising heat. The ground in front of it, sheathed in night, grows bright. Spotlight. Enyemaka’s eyes are like spotlights. The rest of the metal body hums to life, and the droid straightens out of a crouch. Bits of rust flake off of it. The world comes to it in a rush as its systems power back on. Sight, smells, sounds. Images that are not from the present intrude on its vision. Fingers fondling flower petals. Mechs half-submerged i
n the grounds of a camp, sideways after having fallen from the sky. A girl’s shaved head. Warmth blossoms in Enyemaka at the memory of her face. It does not know why. It has no more memories attached to the girl. When the droid tries to reach for them, it finds only emptiness. And that is when it remembers it is in the desert. The Redlands. The radiation has corrupted its memory files.

  “WOO-HOO!”

  Enyemaka turns at the sound.

  A figure leaps up and down and flails its limbs. Arms. Legs. The words come back to Enyemaka piece by piece. Then comes the word human. When the human stops pumping its fist into the air, it starts babbling. A moment passes before Enyemaka realizes that the sounds coming from the human are familiar. The human is speaking Mandarin.

  “I thought you were done for!” the human exclaims. The expression on its face reminds Enyemaka of the little girl whose head it once shaved. A smile. “Hello, my name is Dr. Liu Xifeng. I am a scientist.”

  Enyemaka looks down and sees a cable extending from a slot in its side and ending in a device the human holds. The human glances at the device’s screen, swiping and tapping at it. After a moment, Enyemaka realizes that the cable glows in the night because it contains its data. It contains Enyemaka. As power flows into Enyemaka, it feels the nanobots coming back to life. They are not as they were. They don’t carry the same whisper. The commands they feed Enyemaka are automated. They latch on to the bits of memory that remain. Then, suddenly, visions return to Enyemaka of the camp where it buried the soldiers. That is the last task Enyemaka accomplished.

  The android straightens with purpose. That is what Enyemaka must do. Enyemaka takes a step forward, then another.