A ping sounds from the elevator, and then footsteps, then doors closing. Then nothing.
Ify waits a whole minute before peeking her head out from around the corner. Nothing. No movement. The air is still. She forces herself to move and peels off of the wall, then walks at a crouch, not caring that she would look ludicrous to anyone watching her now. She’s so close.
She walks the way Chinelo had come, retracing her steps until she gets to a door that she knows to be the one. She doesn’t know how she knows. She has no Accent to see past the metal. Her tablet is off. She has only her naked eyes and the body she was born with. And the certainty that grips her heart. This is it. Blood pounds in her ears.
She pulls her gun out, tries to still her restless hand, then takes a heavy breath. With her free hand, she knocks.
The soft sounds on the other side of the door stop, and Ify realizes someone must have been talking inside the room. Her heart hammers in her chest. She forces herself to knock again. This time, more insistent. She can’t hesitate. She can’t lose her nerve. She has been moving toward this very moment for what seems like an eternity. It guided her to freedom when she was a captive in her prison cell. It led her through the tangle of forest to the caravan months later. It has driven her in the aftermath of war now that she has lost everything and everyone she has ever loved. Propelled her. Become her engine. Imagining this very moment.
Footsteps.
She plants her feet, moves her bag so it’s out of her way, and waits.
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In her room back in Enugu, the memory of outer space is still fresh in Onyii’s head.
After she and Chinelo separated at the transpo station, Onyii came back to the apartment Chinelo has set up for her.
Experiencing the city as a civilian still takes some getting used to. In the face of the capital’s expansion, flight paths for the maglev cars haven’t yet been figured out. And everywhere, half-built stuctures—towers, university extensions, shops—are draped in scaffolding.
During the war, the city was sparsely populated, mostly a military town. Its outskirts were the perfect place to hide the training camp for the Abd Program. The city was a place soldiers would sometimes come to when they were on furlough or if they had been relieved from duty by a really bad wound. Not the type of place where someone could get into trouble. Nor was it the type of place to make you forget there was a war going on, but that’s what it feels like now.
It looks like a place in a hurry to forget.
But in her room, with sound sheets muffling the noise from outside while she’s able to keep her window open, she finds peace. Something like what she felt with Adaeze on that hill on the border with the Redlands.
If all goes well, it won’t be like this for much longer. This military dorm will be turned into some other type of building, and, with talk of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission dying down, Onyii will transition fully into diplomatic work. Money will carry this place into the future. Stores will pop up, people will walk down these streets dressed in the most shimmering fabrics and studded with the brightest stones. And music. Everywhere, music. Thumping through the sound systems of maglev cars, blasting from the speakers set up on back balconies and front porches, crackling out of the speakers of mobile devices.
She’s not ready for it yet, all that life buzzing and humming and shouting around her. But the thought does put a smile on her face. Just like you can tell the level of an Igboman’s prosperity from the size of his belly, so you can tell a nation’s prosperity from the amount of noise its capital makes.
This is what she did it all for. This noisy, crowded, beautiful city, bursting with life.
She walks over to her desk, slides open a drawer, and powers on the tablet she keeps inside. Returning to her bed, she swipes until she gets to the folder she’s looking for. She opens it and plays the first video. In it, Agu is on one knee, drawing with his finger in the dirt of the courtyard. He looks completely absorbed in his task, not even noticing the camera aimed at him. The camera holder inches closer and closer, until he senses the person, then snaps upright and stands at attention. Onyii doesn’t snicker in the video, but she snickers now, on her bed, watching it.
“What are you drawing?” the camera holder asks. “Battle formations?”
“No, sister,” says Agu, foot sneaking toward the drawings to dash them out.
The camera swings down, and the camera holder says, “Oya, let’s go. Time for your diving training. You like diving training, right?”
“It is a necessary part of my training.”
Then the camera cuts out. When it had swung downward, Onyii was able to catch a glimpse of what remained of the drawing: it was her face. In profile, etched into the sand, an almost exact replication.
Just as she’s about to open another file, her finger freezes. Was that a knock at the door?
She waits, then hears it again. This time louder.
She slips the tablet under her pillow, then walks to the door and presses her thumb against the keypad.
The door slides open, and Onyii’s heart seizes. The world goes fuzzy. Blood pounds in her head. Her mouth dries. She can’t swallow. Can’t breathe. It can’t be.
“Ify?” Her body trembles. “Ify, is that you?”
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The sight of Onyii, close enough to touch, snatches the air out of Ify’s lungs. For a nanosecond, she stands there, frozen at the sight of the tech over Onyii’s right eye and the way it connects with her Augmented arm, at the new wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, at the scars on the fleshy part of her cheeks, at the curliness of her hair, at the entirety of her beautiful, weathered face.
“You killed my family,” Ify hisses. Her arm swings up, gun in hand. Everything moves at once. Onyii opens her arms and takes a step forward. Ify puts her finger to the trigger, pulls. A bang, and something hard smashes into Ify, knocking her all the way down the hall until she lands just under a window. The apartment door slams shut, leaving Onyii on the other side. Her gun is gone.
Ify pushes herself to her hands and knees. When she looks up, she sees Agu at the other end of the hall. He spares her one expressionless look—Ify can’t tell if it’s a glare or confused frown—before he dashes toward her.
She scrabbles away, forgetting the gun, but then a deep rumble shudders through the building. It feels like an earthquake.
Everyone stops.
Then again. Faint thunder getting closer, like a stampede. Suddenly, the building pitches to its side.
The window above Ify shatters. The building shudders again. Wood bursts into splinters above her. Concrete breaks apart. The floors are collapsing. The door to Onyii’s room crumples, then goes flying across the hall. The shifting building tosses Agu against a side wall. His gaze doesn’t leave Ify. It stays locked on her like a self-guided missile.
He pushes himself off the wall and uses the shifting momentum from the collapsing building to spin himself into Onyii’s room.
The stone behind Ify cracks. Then the wall bursts in. She shields herself from the flying debris, then clings to the ground as the building rocks. The new opening in the wall opens out onto the chaos of Enugu. Suddenly, the ground is getting closer. The angle of the floor gets steeper, and Ify tries to scramble up to the corner, where she can get a grip on the wall, but the building is falling too fast, and suddenly, she is flailing, trying to grab at bits or pieces of shattered wood or stone, then she’s flung into the air.
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Onyii has been shot before. She’s had bullets graze her, pass through her, lodge themselves in muscle tissue, miss vital organs just barely. She’s even had them ping off the metal of her arm. But never has a gunshot burned with such fire as the one in her shoulder does now. It hurts so much she can’t even get up off the floor to see the tussling outside her
door. It sounds like two bodies wrestling. She tries to move, but the wound has her paralyzed.
It has to have been a ghost. There’s no way that was Ify standing outside her door. With a gun in her hand. There’s no way that was Ify aiming her gun squarely at Onyii, then vanishing at the last minute as it went off, knocked off-balance by something too fast for either of them to see. It couldn’t have been. Ify is dead.
A pool of blood spreads beneath Onyii’s shoulder. She can feel the warmth blossoming. Radiating outward with the hurt. The bullet has ripped through her human shoulder. Her flesh-and-blood shoulder. Her weak shoulder.
She tries to get up on one of her elbows, but the pain is too great. That couldn’t have been Ify. It couldn’t have been.
I saw you in a mass grave. I saw your dismembered body.
But a tremor of doubt runs through her. Had she truly seen Ify’s body? Most of the faces had been disfigured beyond recognition. The victims had been turned from people with full lives and hopes and fears into nothing but mangled bodies. Numbers. Flattened out into a single horrific sight. Had Ify really been there? Lying on top of the pile or even buried beneath the mountain of corpses? Had Onyii truly seen that?
All these years, and Onyii had not dared hope. Had not permitted herself even a moment of wondering. The thought of Ify had always come with thoughts of bloody revenge. The thought of Ify was what had driven her in every battle, what allowed her to forget herself in combat and let instinct take over. It had turned her into the feared Demon of Biafra, so fierce and unrelenting and skilled a mech pilot that word of her had crossed enemy lines. Known through both Biafra and Nigeria as the most skilled warrior on either side. And it had been because of Ify’s death.
The ground shakes again beneath her, this time throwing her to the other side of the room. The jolting sends new shock waves of pain through Onyii’s shoulder.
Another short rumble, then, faintly, in the distance, a small whisper of thunder getting closer and closer, like waves rushing toward the shore, until she recognizes the sound. Explosions. Even after all this time in peace, she knows that sound.
It’s an attack.
Struggling, she manages to get up on one elbow. She grits her teeth against the pain in her shoulder, and when she feels the wound, she sees her sleeve is soaked. Her left arm has gone numb. But just as she’s about to stand, the building pitches to the side, slamming her over her bed and against the wall. She grunts in pain, then tries to get her legs steady beneath her. The building sways, and she looks around for something, anything, to grab on to. She takes a step toward the door, then another, but the building pitches again in a different direction, and she flies off her feet toward the window. She flips and scrabbles at the floor for any purchase, but her fingers just slide against smooth wood until she smashes backward through the window with the full force of her body.
Wind buffets her, and she prepares to curl into a ball to help minimize the damage to her organs when she hits whatever she’s going to hit, but something latches on to her leg, stopping her fall. It holds her still, and she swings, banging into the edge of the building, but hanging now upside down.
She looks up. It’s Agu.
This time, Onyii takes no time wondering if this is a ghost or a vision. The truth is that she’s hanging from the edge of a building on the verge of collapse. And something is keeping her from falling to her death. Whether it’s an edge of broken metal that her pant leg has caught on or the hand of a little boy she had fought in war with, right now it doesn’t matter.
She bends at the waist to reach up and grab his other hand, her stomach on fire with the effort. He’s leaned over the window’s ledge, broken glass all around him. Just as he’s about to pull her up, the building shudders again. There’s not enough time.
“Sister,” Agu says in a low, insistent voice, and Onyii knows from that tone exactly what he means. Let me protect you.
So she lets him swing himself around and wrap his synthetic body around hers, shielding her head and vital organs before letting them both fall through the open window.
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When Ify wakes up, it looks and feels and smells and sounds like the world is ending.
Screaming and shouting and pleading. Brimstone and smoke. The taste of copper in her mouth.
Everywhere, collapsed buildings. Food stalls, shopping malls, school halls. Fires rage. Bots fight to extinguish the blazes. People run, and traffic bots try to steer them. The katakata has disrupted the flight paths so that maglev cars and buses crash into each other, their burning shells littering the streets of Enugu.
Gritting her teeth, Ify pushes herself to her feet, and that’s when she notices her right arm hanging limp at her side.
A short distance down the way, flames lick the glass inside a fabrics store. The windows burst open. Ify skips into the front display and tears at the dress on a mannequin until she is able to rip off a long enough piece of cloth. Using her teeth, she ties a sling for her broken arm, then heads to the bus depot.
It’s strangely empty, but on the way, Ify sees the telltale marks of destruction. In open stretches of street, craters sit like perfectly formed half-circles in the concrete and metal. Towers stand with nearly entire spheres cut out of them. Who planted those bombs?
While a few of the buses remain standing, the depot itself is little more than shattered flexiglas and twisted metal.
She sees, in the parking space beyond, a row of mismatched hoverbikes. No one else is around. Once she’s on one of them, she looks for somewhere a thumbprint is supposed to go but finds nothing. The fingers of her good hand go to her bag for her tablet, and that’s when she realizes her bag is gone. She has no idea when she lost it or her tablet, her key to the world.
Panic grips her heart. She looks around. Her gaze settles on a dead Biafran dressed in a multicolored agbada. His upper torso sticks out from under a pile of rubble. She rushes to him and yanks and yanks until she’s able to get him partially free, then, taking a guess, she brings the bike over and lifts his bloodied hand until his thumb reaches the catch for it.
A tense moment of silence follows, then the bike hums to life. She hops on. It rises off the ground. Its wheel spokes unfurl to create magnetized bases, then she’s off.
She wonders what happened to Agu. A chill runs through her. He was a synth. How many more synths had there been in that caravan? How many of them had been carrying in their stomachs or in their chests or in their braincases the bombs that had ripped through Enugu? That had left Onyii crushed beneath a mountain of steel and rubble.
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Onyii closes her eyes and prepares for impact.
They hit tree branches first. She hears snapping and hopes that it is a tree branch instead of Agu’s ribs. He lets out the tiniest grunt when they land on top of a maglev car. The thin exterior crumples beneath their weight.
A moment passes, then Agu lets go.
She unfolds her limbs and rolls off of Agu and the top of the car to land on the ground. The pain in her shoulder has subsided, but she still struggles to move her left arm.
She waits for Agu to get off the car, but he doesn’t move.
“Agu?” She creeps closer. “Agu, get up.” She nudges his shoulder, then grabs his arm, shaking him. “Agu, oya, get up!” Her breath comes in short gasps. She climbs back on top of the car and feels along his neck for a pulse. “Agu?” She listens for breath, squeezes his wrist. “Agu! Agu, wake up!” She can’t stop shaking him. She knows from the coldness in his body, the way his limbs hang limp, the way no machinery hums in his frame, that he’s gone, but she can’t stop shaking him. Not now, not after everything. “Agu, please.” No no no no no. Then the tears come, and all she can bring herself to do is press her forehead against his motionless chest and sob.
Agu.
Screams. Sharp and piercing.
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She gets up from where she kneels and slides off the car. She wants, needs, to do something for him. Prepare him for burial, fix his clothes, something. But the wailing in the city grows louder, more urgent. She can’t just leave him like this.
Fire bursts through the windows of the collapsed apartment building above them.
She glances at him one last time, his eyes frozen open, his lips turned up into the faintest smile. She was the last thing he ever saw. He died happy.
He died happy. That’s what Onyii tells herself as she rushes into the chaos.
Buildings groan on poor supports all around her. Church spires tumble to the ground. Markets cave in on themselves. Onyii strains her ears to hear a familiar noise. She searches and searches and searches but doesn’t hear it. No gunfire. If this were a proper attack, they’d set off the explosives, then follow through with gunfire. Onyii looks up. Though smoke clouds much of her vision, the blue sky bears no chemtrails. Of all the sounds to assault Onyii’s ears, she does not hear the screech and boom of aerial mechs ripping through the sound barrier. Nor does she hear the ominous growl of that special mech’s beam cannon charging for a shot that would turn half of Enugu into dust.
Nearby, a building’s struts snap, and its columns hit the ground, raising monstrous clouds of dust thick with shards of concrete. Onyii does not give herself time to hate, to feel anger toward the Nigerians or let herself give in to the thirst for vengeance. That will come later. For now, she runs toward the building, a section of an apartment complex, and waves over others, some of them too stunned to know where they are. Many of the pedestrians on the street, covered in dust, some of them bleeding from wounds they do not even realize they have, stare blankly at Onyii.
War Girls Page 30
