War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Ify chuckles at his joke, but her heart’s not in it.

  On their way back to the garage, she thrusts her hands into her pants pockets. The fingers of her right hand smush something, and she pulls out the paper crane, crumpled beyond repair.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Onyii wakes up hanging by the straps in her cockpit. She hears the sawing sound of a lightknife cutting through the hull of her mech. Sparks rain down on her as the laser blade screeches into the metal above her. She is a child. This is a dream. But she cannot escape it.

  She scrambles for her buckle and falls to the ground just as the first piece of metal above her head peels back. Somewhere in here there must be a rifle, a pistol. Anything to defend herself against the Nigerians who shot her down. Or to make sure she’s not taken alive. Above her, metal tears free, and there’s a rush of air as they pry her mech open, and suddenly hands grab her and yank her twisting body out of the downed machine.

  Sweat has made her entire body slick. She feels the type of warmth under her skin that means a fever is on the way. Ada. Where’s Ada?

  She tries to fight the soldiers, but they are bigger than her. Practically giants. One of them rams the butt of a rifle into the back of her head, and her legs buckle, sending her to the ground.

  They drag her to a spot where several more soldiers wait, among them the pilot who had cut her down. His mask is off, so his full face shows. Onyii knows what this means. She will not leave this place alive.

  Already, some of her comrades writhe on the ground in pain. Some of them twist and squirm wordlessly. Someone howls. Onyii looks to her right to see a splash of red and a sizzle before Nigerian soldiers toss another Biafran to the ground. Her heart races. They’re going to torture her. Her gaze flits back and forth at the waists of the Nigerian soldiers, trying to see if any of them has a weapon she can steal.

  They drag her to a tree stump with a sheen of red already coating it.

  One of the bigger soldiers pulls her arm forward while the other holds her still. The first soldier slams her arm, outstretched, onto the stump. As much as Onyii struggles, she can’t break free.

  The pilot who slammed her out of the sky steps forward. He flicks his lightknife to life. The blade is as long as his forearm. His steps are slow, deliberate. The grin on his face belongs to an animal.

  Onyii strains her neck to look up at him. She bares her teeth in a snarl. She still struggles in the grip of the bigger soldiers, but she knows resistance is futile. Still, she can’t let them see that she’s given up.

  “You better kill me, Nigerian dog,” Onyii hisses. “If you leave me alive, I will hunt you down.”

  “Udene,” the pilot says in a pitying voice, shaking his head. “With what arms?”

  He raises his blade.

  * * *

  Something jostles Onyii’s leg. If it’s a rat or some other tiny animal, she won’t swat at it. She can’t be bothered with punishing it for obeying its nature. And if it’s some sort of snake, let it bite her. Fog floats in her brain. The world is a mess of blurred colors. The nudging doesn’t stop. Instead, it grows more insistent. It’s a boot. Someone’s boot.

  The world’s edges sharpen. Everything becomes clear. The fog dissipates. She’s being attacked. She rolls on her back and spins to her feet and has a knife out in one hand. But she moves too quickly. Vertigo hits, and the world spins again. Just as she’s about to fall, a hand latches on to her wrist and pulls her upright. Onyii blinks. Even though the sun is shining brightly enough to turn the other person into nothing more than a silhouette, Onyii can tell who it is.

  “When is the last time you showered?” Chinelo asks her. “They call you the Demon of Biafra because anyone who gets close to you can find out what hell smells like.”

  Onyii tries to blink the dizziness away. Chinelo slings Onyii’s arm over her shoulder. She smells like the perfume made out of crushed flowers. And her uniform is crisp, the lines straight and ironed, her patches without a speck of dirt on them. When they leave the shadows cast over the alleyway and come out into the sun, Chinelo’s skin glows. No sweat on her body. No stains at her armpits, no sheen on her brow. Onyii lets her head rest on Chinelo’s shoulder as Chinelo nearly carries her forward, and Onyii hears the machinery whirr just beneath Chinelo’s skin. A cooling system? Onyii wants to ask her. That sounds like cheating, she wants to say. If only to see once again the wry smirk Chinelo would give her in return.

  “We’ll have your Buru Ibu transported back to Enugu.” Chinelo talks like this is a regular conversation, even though the opiate haze has returned to Onyii, blurring the edges of her world. “I’ve been speaking with the brigadier general. He took some convincing, but I managed to communicate to him that you could use a break. You have almost single-handedly cleared our way to the Middle Belt. So, we will give you a sabbatical.”

  Onyii’s feet drag. She can barely feel her legs. She glances behind her and sees a child keeping step with a gun over their shoulder. A hat obscures the child’s face. The child doesn’t walk, the child marches. Like a machine. Onyii can barely keep her head lifted. Her mouth feels as though it’s stuffed with cotton. She can’t even muster up the saliva to spit on the ground. But she wants to call out to the child. Ify . . . Ify . . . It can’t be. It must be the Chukwu in her head, short-circuiting her machinery and tugging at memories. No. Ify is dead. Buried in a mass grave.

  Chinelo shifts her grip. A door opens, and suddenly Onyii finds herself inside a maglev Range Rover. She’s the dirtiest thing in it.

  A hazy voice calls out and, if Onyii understands correctly, asks her if she wants any water. Onyii, silent, leans back against the cushions. They mold to her body. She could sink into them.

  She’s sober enough now that if she closes her eyes, she knows, nightmares will greet her. She’ll find herself hunched over the tablet the brigadier general gave her all those years ago, staring down into the thing that had cast the very light out of her world that day.

  Bodies, mangled and maimed. Limbs piled haphazardly on top of each other. Some of the bodies are riddled with bullet holes. Others show disconnected wiring where arms have been severed, while others show bone that hasn’t yet bleached in the sun. There’s a moment when the bile rises in Onyii’s throat, but cold follows right after it. Her body shutting down. Something deep and necessary inside of her freezing over.

  On top of the pile, maybe the freshest kill, lies what remains of Ify, disfigured beyond recognition.

  Onyii knows the proper thing is to weep. But she cannot mourn, even now. Mourning won’t bring Ify back. Neither will killing. But Onyii knows how to do the latter. So she clings to it like a piece of driftwood in oil-coated ocean. It is all she has left.

  When Onyii drifts out of the memory, she looks out the window and sees the one- and two-story shops of Enugu’s central business district. Enugu. The capital of Biafra. Igboland. Occasionally towering over the shops are the microflats: one-room living spaces where the residents share a communal kitchen. The flats face each other and form a square into which the compound’s entrance leads visitors and residents. “Face-me-I-face-you,” she had once heard them called.

  Flags wave in the breeze that descends from the surrounding hills.

  People fill the streets but part when they see the military convoy coming. Then come the cheers. Onyii can see their mouths moving as they shout what she assumes to be praise at them. Children run alongside the jeeps with their flags held high. Ojukwu, nye anyi egbe ka anyi nuo agha! Ojukwu, give us guns to fight a war!

  Chief Chibuikem Moses Tunde Ojukwu. Prime minister of Biafra.

  Onyii can’t tell if Chinelo’s been speaking at all. And she can no longer detect the presence of that ghostly child she’d seen earlier, that spirit of Ify. The drug has worn off. Chukwu has left her.

  The jeep eventually rumbles to a stop in the courtyard of an apartment comple
x. The towers surrounding the courtyard rise stiffly into the air. At some of the large windows, people stand and watch her. Onyii’s door opens, and Chinelo reaches in to get her out, but Onyii waves her away, takes a moment, then hops onto solid ground. It takes her a moment to gain her bearings, but soon she is upright.

  Chinelo leads Onyii through the courtyard, where children tend to a garden, watched over by a white-bearded man. He must be a teacher of some sort. Then they get to an elevator that whisks them up several floors.

  The only light in the hallway shines through a window at the end. When they arrive at the last unit in the hall, Chinelo presses a keycard against the pad. The door slides open.

  Inside is a bed and nothing else.

  “I told them luxuries like a wallpaper TV and a fruit basket would be wasted on you,” Chinelo says, smiling. “The people here, they don’t see too many warriors from the front.” She pats Onyii on the back. Softly. “I am telling you to rest. Not just as your friend, but as your commanding officer.” She then slides the keycard into Onyii’s palm and closes her friend’s fingers over it. “So you don’t get locked out.” Chinelo steps back past the threshold. “One of the girls will come find you in the morning.” Her face softens. Some of the humor leaks out of it, so that sadness shimmers in her eyes. “It’s good to have you home, my sister. The shower is down the hall.” Just as Chinelo’s lips curl into a smile, the door slides shut.

  Onyii’s limbs ache again. When she finally lies down on the bed and her head falls onto the single pillow, she feels relief.

  There’s soft pounding up and down the hallway outside her door. She’s too tired to move. Then she hears the voices of children.

  “Doot-doot-doot-doot-doot!” one child shouts.

  “Brrrah-pa-pa!” from another.

  Then comes: “Yahk-yahk-yahk-yahk!”

  And all throughout, giggling while they bound up and down the corridor. Onyii tries to force herself to smile, to enjoy the sound of children playing so close by. But she knows what sounds they’re making.

  They’re mimicking gunfire.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Ify slips beneath her bedsheet wearing a skinsuit whose warming and cooling systems can be adjusted with the press of a few buttons along her collarbone. She sets it to auto-detect mode, and it connects to her nervous system. This way, it can adjust her body temperature without her having to wake up and input a new set of commands each time she grows uncomfortable. Her hair is newly washed and collected in a wrap. Her body is clean from ablutions, and her heart is cleaned by the night’s prayers. But she doesn’t deactivate her Accent just yet.

  In bed, she twirls a bead on her bracelet, and a hologram appears before her face. At first, the image shimmers with blue, then a layer of gold flashes over the strands of light that form the outlines of people in a room. Then the colors fill out, and Ify finds herself looking at the men in the observation deck.

  With a thought, she’s able to dim the light of her bedroom, a single in a dormitory full of doubles and the occasional triple. But it’s not like Ify has a whole lot to decorate it with. No family ’grams or old artifacts like books made out of paper passed down through family lines. No jewelry, no clothes or decorations from older siblings. So the light from her hologram casts its colors over a nearly bare desk with a few tablets on it, some kimoyo-bead bracelets and anklets she’s been experimenting on, and several paper cranes, long since browned and crinkled by time.

  However, no one else can hear the dialogue she can.

  The air around them steams with their forced ease. They’re trying so hard to feel comfortable around Daren, but they’re too stiff or they’re too floppy and loose, and when they do laugh, they laugh a little too loudly.

  But one of them speaks with confidence, just above a whisper, as though he were actually worried Ify might overhear, about mineral deposits and corporations. He mentions something about making Daren very wealthy, and that’s when Daren stares down the man, and Ify wonders what has happened between them that turned Daren’s mood so quickly. Then she sees it in his stance, the way his chin is held high. I am not like you, he is saying with his body, with his aura. She doesn’t have to hack his brain to know it. Not everything I do is for myself.

  There is nothing new to be gained from watching them like this. It’s only an opportunity for Ify to see how well she was able to hack the nearby surveillance camera to get this downward-facing angle of the group. It also pleases her that the audio quality is as good as it is.

  One of the oyinbo says: “You have a word for them, don’t you? Udene? Vultures?”

  That silences the group. It is the man who spoke with confidence before. Ify remembers his vital signs being healthier than the others. He seemed fit, even though it was clear that much of his body is mechanized. His eyes are the color of ice, and his hair looks like the sun has leached all color out of it.

  Daren frowns at the man and is quiet for a very long time before he says, “That is what we call them.” In the ’gram, he is utterly still, like he is tensed to leap at the man and grab him by the throat. And Ify can tell from the way everyone else waits that they are nervous he’ll do exactly that. “And I can tell you,” Daren says, taking a single step toward the man, “that you do not want to know what they call you.”

  The recording freezes in that moment. Daren is inches from the man’s face. The oyinbo’s features twist just a little bit, eyes on the verge of growing wide with fear. It makes Ify proud to see that Daren has this effect on strangers.

  Then her thoughts turn to images of Biafran mechs flying through the air, engaging Nigerian forces in battle. Vultures.

  All of Ify’s earlier joy has evaporated. She looks at the shimmering scene before her, then, without another thought, deletes the recording. She doesn’t want to be tempted to watch it again. Her bodysuit cools her skin and regulates her heartbeat, preparing her for sleep right on schedule. But her mind won’t stop working.

  It still troubles Ify to hear someone say udene and mean someone like Onyii.

  CHAPTER

  19

  It takes Onyii a few moments to remember where she is. She tries to get up, but stiffness has her glued to her bed. She realizes this is the most rest she has gotten in at least a month, maybe in the past four years. So much fighting and moving from camp to camp. Onyii is used to sleeping standing up with her rifle leaned against her shoulder. Or she’d close her eyes in her mech and catch a minute or two of slumber before orders arrived to head out to the next battle.

  Onyii looks around the room and can’t find her rifle anywhere. There’s no change of clothes, only the jungle-camo combat pants and the torn dark-green shirt she slept in. Sunlight pours through the window. She can tell from the angle that it’s morning. But her mind still feels fogged. Her body aches, like it’s eaten too much sleep too quickly, and now she must sit with the indigestion.

  But Onyii pushes herself upright, through the pain and the creaking joints, and flexes the fingers of her metal hand. With her human hand, she touches her cheek and feels the bumps and impressions left by the metal. She can’t help but chuckle at herself. Some habits never die.

  When she’s able to get to her feet, she stretches her back. Then she stretches her human arm and bends down to touch her toes. Popping sounds run all down her back. She takes her time with each stretch, even when she sits down to continue them. It gives her time to reorient herself, to remember her last battle and clearing the Nigerian camp, then Chinelo coming to find her in an alley snorting God, then the ride in the jeep. Enugu comes to her in flashes, like a glitchy holo recording. And all the while, that specter of a child that felt like it was hovering behind Onyii just out of sight. Ify’s ghost.

  After her stretches, she sits on the ground and presses the heels of her palms against her eyes. Her head is clearer now than she remembers it ever being.

  T
hen she leaves the room.

  She wanders down another hall and finds herself at the edge of a larger common room. The furniture here is in disarray, moved and angled every which way with boys draped in all sorts of configurations over it. One boy lies upside down on one couch, his legs wagging in the air while he tosses a ball up and catches it. Others are sprawled out with one leg over a chair’s armrest and the other angled toward the floor. Onyii counts fifteen of them, almost all teenagers. But still just children. The brigadier general would have found work for them.

  A little boy arrives at an entrance just next to Onyii and is about to enter when one of the boys on the couch, without looking, says in a deep voice, “Toluope, switch on the light.”

  The little boy, a plate of food in his hands, obediently goes to the light switch and makes it halfway before another boy, on an opposite couch, says in a deeper voice, “Toluope, if you touch that light, I will kill you.”

  A bunch of the teenagers laugh, and one of them, the one sitting upside down, says, “Don’t bully my brodah. Otherwise, you will receive a courtesy slap from me.”

  “Oya, go, go!” says one of the bullies, and the little boy joins the upside-down one by the couch.

  A loud clack clack clack gets everyone standing at attention. In a doorway not far from Onyii stands a young woman with a stick in her hands. She bangs it two more times against the doorframe. Everyone, even the little boy with the food, is upright and at attention.

  “Hand combat training in five minutes, which means you need to be dressed and outside in two!” says a familiar voice.

  The boys scramble, some of them still smirking over a shared joke, and scatter down various hallways. All around Onyii is the whisk of doors opening and closing and the thump of bare feet against the floor.