War Girls Read online

  “No, wait! Wait!” The human scrambles to collect its gear: the device it holds as well as what Enyemaka knows to be a battery pack, a Geiger counter for the radiation, and a sled-like contraption it straps onto its back.

  The cable snaps loose from Enyemaka, and the human—Xifeng—grows even more frenzied.

  “Wait, wait, wait! You’re not fully charged yet! And the radiation is still infecting you! We have to get you to safe ground!”

  But Enyemaka keeps walking. Signals, distant and fleeting like fireflies seen from far away, ping in its head.

  “Where are you going?”

  Enyemaka turns and activates its own projector to display a visual recording of its last memories: the camp as dawn spreads through the sky, the blood long since dried and no longer shining in the light, Enyemaka carrying each corpse—some of them in pieces—to carefully and uniformly dug pits, depositing them softly, then burying them before affixing a marker.

  Xifeng stares in wonder. “You . . . you’re burying them,” the human whispers.

  “And I record their passing.”

  Enyemaka turns its back and starts walking.

  “I want to come with you.” Xifeng stumbles to Enyemaka’s side, burdened by her equipment. “Let me help.”

  And that is how it begins for them.

  Enyemaka follows the signals pinging in its head, soft whistling from comms that survived battle, until they arrive at another site of carnage. Enyemaka documents the scene by scanning it and feeding the data into Xifeng’s storage device. Then, together, they dig the graves and bury the dead, Nigerian and Biafran alike. When they are finished, Enyemaka follows the next signal to its end point.

  On one battlefield, Enyemaka senses familiar traces of nanotechnology. In this spot and on the ground now are things both machine and human, that exist somewhere in the space between Enyemaka and Xifeng. “Augments,” Xifeng calls them. Nanobots swirl in the air like flies above some of the corpses, and, sighting Enyemaka, they fill the android with their data. And that is how Enyemaka discovers there is a young woman who pilots a mech and whose name is Onyii. Who made her.

  A piece in the mystery of Enyemaka’s self slips into place. Her. Not it, her.

  One day, they stop at the crest of a ridge to find a near-endless army of androids who look like slimmer versions of Enyemaka lined up in rows, mechanically digging at the ground, then moving forward together to dig more. The ones at the back make movements like they are reaching into a bag and putting something into the recently turned earth. A single groove in the land. Hard soil cracked open by unthinking metal hands. Their bags, little sacks pockmarked by holes, have been empty for a very long time. And yet they continue to plant.

  “Someone left them here,” Xifeng says with sorrow in her voice. Any traces of a human or a factory or a corporation are gone. Maybe dead and buried beneath their feet, maybe somewhere up in the sky.

  Enyemaka does not quite know why, but she already feels linked to these things. A word rises to the forefront of her mind: sister. They are her sisters.

  She walks down the ridge and puts her hand to the shoulder of the nearest robot and mimics a thing she keeps seeing in her memories. Enyemaka puts her face to the side of the robot’s head and ejects nanobots. They may have begun as someone else’s, but they passed through her, became her, and now they will pass through this android too.

  The android stops immediately, then turns to consider Enyemaka. Then Enyemaka does what she has seen in many of her memories, not just those she was born with but those she collects at each grave site. With the light in her eyes, she smiles.

  Then, as day turns to dusk turns to night, Enyemaka marches among the androids, breathing life into them, populating them with her data until they have all stopped. Together, they head up the ridge to where Xifeng has set up camp.

  Xifeng’s mouth, when she finally sees them, hangs open.

  Enyemaka gestures behind her to her family. “They will help us record what has happened here. And they will help us bury the dead. This is now our programming.”

  Something strange happens to Xifeng, something Enyemaka has not seen the human do yet. She has seen the human grin at her. And she has seen the human quietly weep when she does not think Enyemaka is watching. But she has never seen the human weep and smile at the same time.

  Enyemaka smiles back. And, together, they walk into the night in search of the next field of corpses.

  CHAPTER

  43

  Nine Months Later

  Benue State, Southern Border

  Nigeria, 2177

  Onyii always has the option of piloting a drone from an air-conditioned room, lit by the walls of monitors circling her. But she prefers to fly an aircraft. It’s what Ngozi and Chinelo have taken to calling a pencil plane. A light propeller-driven passenger plane with stabilizers in case she needs to hover. It’s an old model, nothing like the military aircraft left over from the war. And Chinelo has warned her against using a mech to do these recon runs. She might be mistaken for a combatant.

  Still, there’s no one out here on the border of the Redlands to shoot her down, even if she were in a mech.

  Below her, the earth is red clay. Brown rivers run through it. Were Onyii to stand at those riverbanks, her Geiger counter would beep so fast it would break. Radiation hangs thick in the air and glows beneath the soil. Beasts occasionally roam, bigger than they have any business being, and often with more limbs than they have any business having. Shorthorns, two-fangs, wulfu. Even larger scaled lizards that crawl on six legs like small dragons and fly in the air in bursts that look more like large jumps.

  There’s the occasional hut or dwelling. Most of them are covered by a translucent blue dome that Onyii knows keeps the irradiated air out. A way of protecting the inhabitants and filtering the air that comes through. Scavengers leave their dwellings dressed in close-fitting hazmat suits with spiderlike antennae sprouting over their shoulders, spinning to tell them what is in the air, what is in the ground beneath their feet, and what is in the water into which they dip their buckets.

  It’s land neither the Nigerians nor the Biafrans want to touch just yet. But maybe someday Biafrans will have the technology to terraform this place. To reverse the tide of ecological destruction and gather these scavengers, these left-behind, and bring them into the Biafran fold.

  After a few circuits with no refugee sightings, Onyii banks to the left, circles around, and heads back in the direction of the unpoisoned land. Green sits on the horizon in the distance. Already at the edge of the Redlands, eco projects have sprouted up. Testing facilities where scientists will begin figuring out how to make the Redlands livable.

  To her right, she spots a hill cleaved almost in two by an invisible line separating verdant greenland from blighted redland. And on that hill, in the distance, a house.

  Without giving herself a moment to hesitate, she banks her plane farther to the left. The thing rattles gently around her. Where that might frighten others, it invigorates Onyii. She wants to hear the looseness in the metal, the way each slat, each gear, each plate moves through air. She passes back into redland but right where it abuts a small hill at the top of which lies the cabin with its tall, too-green grass.

  As her aircraft lowers itself, a cloud of red dust rises. She lands, then punches in a sequence of buttons on her console and shifts the gear forward. When everything powers down, she flicks the switch against the wall to her right, and the flexiglas pops open on one side.

  Onyii gets out, hops to the ground, and shakes the stiffness out of her legs. After some more stretches, she cranes her neck to look up the hill to the underside of the cliff. At her feet, a beetle and a scorpion keep pace with each other, the beetle trudging through grass, the scorpion skittering along on red earth. But they never cross.

  At a point along the hill’s base lies
a small flowerbed. Onyii heads toward it. A path reveals itself, winding up the hill. How many times over the past nine months has she made this trip? And yet it still feels new. Like she’s going to get to the top and find that the person she’s looking for is no longer there.

  But, every time, she makes the walk. She doesn’t count her steps, just takes one, then another, falling into the rhythm as she gets higher and higher. Her thoughts evaporate during the trip. She wonders if this is what it’s like to pray. Or to meditate. She had always assumed when people had their heads bowed or stared into space that the machinery in their heads was at work. It was calculating trajectories or formulating sentences. It was preparing them to interact with the world. Or they were in contact with another similarly connected person. Two ends of one phone line. But for Onyii, it is the only time her world is quiet. Not even the buzzing of mosquitoes can reach her.

  Which is good and well, because when she gets to the top, she knows she needs to be steadied emotionally to walk up to that front door, past the small yard where goats munch on grass and past where the dirt turns into a stone pathway, and raise her fist to knock.

  She stands at the threshold, takes a deep breath, and waits.

  Footsteps sound. The door creaks open.

  The woman on the other side does not smile, but Onyii has learned that she has other ways of showing she is glad that Onyii has visited.

  “Come inside,” Adaeze says, “let us break kola together.” And Onyii obeys, still unable to shake the habit she developed as a child soldier under Adaeze’s eye.

  Even though chairs and barstools adorn the space—kitchen and living room joined into one—Onyii and Ada sit cross-legged on the floor. Adaeze has a disc in her hands, and on it sits a kola nut encased in a hard white shell. From where she sits, Onyii can smell it, sweet and rose-like.

  Ada hands the disc to Onyii, who takes it and bows.

  “Who brings kola brings life,” Onyii says, then looks up. “But it is you who should break the kola nut.” She hands the disc back.

  Adaeze hesitates, with the disc returned to her hands, like she’s on the verge of refusing, before she smiles and takes the nut between her thumb and forefinger. With a small squeeze of her mechanized digits, she forces a crack through the thing, splitting it cleanly into two halves. She takes one, then hands the plate to Onyii, who takes the other. And, together, they chew the bitter caffeinated nut.

  When they’ve finished, Ada rises to her feet. “Let me go get some palm wine.”

  Several old-fashioned books on the shelves lining the wall to Onyii’s left lie on their sides, and though the shelves sit on the top half of the wall, the thin and thick tomes leave plenty of room.

  Adaeze returns with a bottle of palm wine and fills the two clay cups she has brought with her. When she sits, Onyii can see the effort it takes her. For so long, Adaeze had lived a life of motion, and Onyii imagines her filling her days now pacing back and forth along the length of the shelves. Sitting down in an armchair only to get up a moment later. Her hair has grown out into an afro threaded with silver. Each new crevice on her face speaks of a battle or a time she faced death and managed to walk away. But now Ada is able to sit still. Maybe living in this place, far from everyone and everything, has finally slowed her down.

  Onyii sips from her cup. The palm wine burns and is sweet at the same time. “Even though I never announce myself, you always seem to know I’m coming.”

  Ada shrugs. “You don’t have to become ready if you stay ready.” She brings the cup to her lips and drinks. “How are you?”

  It still startles Onyii a little to hear Ada talk like this, asking after her health instead of her operational readiness. “I’m well. I have been volunteering at the receiving stations. When the refugees arrive, whether it’s one or one hundred, it gives me something to do.”

  “Something that isn’t what we used to do.” Adaeze walks into difficult conversation fearlessly. She doesn’t deaden her voice the way Onyii notices others do when discussing the atrocities of the war. She doesn’t skip over those things. She recognizes it all. And doesn’t run away. “It is good to keep busy. But you also cannot forget what we are, what we did. We will forever be haunted by it. Some of us may walk through the rest of our lives looking the very picture of health, but no one can truly know what is in another person’s head.” She smirks at Onyii. “Even if they have the best comms in the world.”

  “Is that why you stay here? Away from everyone else?”

  Adaeze stretches her neck. “I stay here because my father was a goatherd, and I have his genes in me.”

  “No one can see you suffer out here. That must be . . . peaceful.”

  “The shorthorns and the bats and the two-fangs all have eyes to see me with.” She tries to keep a straight face to go with her stern voice, but a smile curls her lips, and the two of them chuckle. Onyii can’t remember the last time she laughed this freely. When they calm down, Adaeze pours them both more palm wine. “I have to remember to think. To live with the past. To sit with myself. For so much of the war, we busy ourselves with combat, with strategizing and fighting, as a way to stay out of our own heads. As a way to lose ourselves. We think that giving in to our basest impulses means giving in to our truest selves.” She shakes her head. “But that is not who we are.” She holds Onyii’s gaze. “That is not who you are.”

  “And who am I?”

  “You’re the girl who was still wearing her school dress when she first snuck away and cut her way all through the bush to get to the rebel camp where you knew I was hiding. The one who slept on a dorm room bed with ribbons tied around your bedposts. Now that there is peace, you have time. Spend some of it with that little girl.”

  “I may not have all that much time.”

  Adaeze nods, her eyebrows creasing into a frown. “The commission.”

  The hostage incident at the Okpai oil fields prompted the end of hostilities. With the death of internationals, the colonial powers intervened to broker a ceasefire as prelude to a full and lasting peace treaty. But one condition the Nigerians had demanded, in the healing of the fractured nation, was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. An accounting of the horrors that each side had visited on the other.

  “Yes. If the Truth and Reconciliation Commission goes forward and the investigations uncover what I’ve done, then surely I will be punished. Whether dead or in prison, I will have lost my freedom.”

  “You were at peace with dying before. What has changed?”

  Onyii looks at the cup in her hands and the ripples in her palm wine. “It was different. Dying on the battlefield in order to make Biafra a reality—that would mean my life served a purpose. I would die using my skills and my abilities to make an impossible thing happen. But this? Being judged by people who think they’re better than us? Who interfered in the war when they said they wouldn’t and have caused so much death and destruction but will go free and unblamed? It is . . . unjust.”

  Adaeze shakes her head. “It is how the oyinbo do business. They are allergic to claiming responsibility for their actions. This is their history. Perhaps they know no other way.” She looks to Onyii. “Perhaps this does result in your death or your imprisonment. But what if it is the way to move Biafra forward?”

  “What?”

  “In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 22, the Binding of Isaac. You know this story?”

  How long since Onyii even touched a Bible? She’d dismissed Christianity as a remnant of ancient colonialism, but Ada had always been a believer, even in war. And even as she continued to claim that Chukwu lived in the minerals at their feet and the sun in their sky. For so long, Onyii had been told that the Hausa and the Fulani and other tribes who united under the Nigerian banner were heretics for belonging to another faith. But, yes, Onyii remembers the story. “Yes.”

  “God demands a sacrifice of Abraham. His son Isaac. And Abraham
agrees, bringing his son all the way up Mount Moriah. He binds his son and withdraws a dagger and is ready to kill his son in order to fulfill God’s will when God sends an angel from the heavens that commands him to stop. Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in the bushes. Now that it is known that Abraham fears God, the ram is sacrificed in Isaac’s place.”

  “It is a familiar story, Ada.”

  “It is in the Qur’an too.”

  Onyii frowns. Why would Adaeze bring up the name of the Fulani holy book? The basis of their blasphemous faith. Is this a test?

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the Islamic text, there is a different son. Ishmail. And the binding comes to Abraham in a vision. Like a dream that haunts him. He tells Ishmail of his vision. And Ishmael submits willingly. When Abraham—here, called Ibrahim—is prepared to kill his son, God stops him and provides him with a ram. As a reward, Abraham will be given another son. This son will be named Isaac. And he will become a prophet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Some things happen in cycles. It is this way with parables.”

  “Which one am I supposed to be? Abraham? Isaac?” She twists her mouth around the Muslim name. “Ishmail?”

  Adaeze bows her head. “I was once willing to sacrifice you for the glory of Biafra. There was a time when I would have done it without question. I let you run with me on nearly every mission. Every village raid. We killed so many people together, and I held you at my side the entire time. Watching as, bit by bit, your innocence bled out of your wounds. This is what war does. It asks terrible things of you. You were my Ishmail.” A spasm passes through Adaeze’s shoulders. “I let him take your arm.”

  “You didn’t let him take both.” It hurts Onyii to hear Ada talk like this, angers her. To hear her take blame for Daren maiming her, for not rescuing her in time. The anger bubbles inside her, rises. Her shoulders tense.

  “Onyii, stop. Don’t give in.” Adaeze has a hand stretched out, but then she puts it back in her lap. “Just . . . let me feel regret for a little while longer. We need peace, Onyii. Biafra needs peace.”