War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

Which gets Onyii chuckling.

  Onyii gestures in Ada’s direction. “Ify, this is Adaeze. She . . . she trained me. When I was a child.” Ify’s face darkens, and Onyii knows that Ify is remembering that when Onyii was a child, she had murdered her parents. “She took care of me.”

  Adaeze shrugs, as though the whole thing were nothing to her. “And now I am taking care of a fugitive.”

  “I had nowhere else to bring her,” Onyii snaps.

  Adaeze raises her hands in self-defense. “This is just typical Igbo hospitality.” Ada grins, and for a second it feels like they’re young and full of energy again instead of older and chewed up by war. “So. What will you do now? Onyii, I know it is out of character for you to have a plan.”

  It’s true. There is no plan. Onyii hadn’t thought beyond saving Ify from execution. She had switched the chemicals, hoping they would only render Ify unconscious and not kill her. Then she had watched them cart Ify’s body away. Later, Onyii had snuck into the mortuary to find her and had wrapped her in a separate body bag stuffed with insulation to warm her body back up. Then she’d stolen a hoverbike and come here. Far enough away from Enugu to give her time to breathe.

  “Or were you just going to let this little one eat me out of house and home?”

  “Get to Ghana. Apply for asylum, maybe? Go anywhere that’s not here.”

  “You didn’t hear? With the ceasefire broken and war now happening, Ghana has closed their overland border. No more refugees.”

  “We could go east, then. Sneak into Cameroon. And figure out a way from there.”

  Adaeze shakes her head. “Jumping from one war into another. Besides, Cameroonians have no love for Nigerians these days.”

  “Space,” Ify says.

  All heads turn her way. Onyii has been so focused on figuring out how to get Ify to safety that she’d forgotten Ify was sitting right there.

  “We need to get to a space station.”

  Onyii’s eyes light up. The route! “That’s it. We don’t have to go to Cameroon. As soon as we get into international waters, we’re safe. We get to the nearest available coastline to the west, then book passage to the station in Niamey.” The memory of Chinelo and their trip to the Colonies bites at Onyii’s heart, but she stuffs it down.

  “Niger?” Adaeze shouts. “That’s fifteen hundred kilometers from Port Harcourt. By land! And you want to go around?”

  “Ada, what choice do we have?”

  Ada holds up a finger to silence her. The room goes quiet. Then they hear it. Jet propulsion engines. Mechs. “Get down!” Ada dives for them just as bullets blast through the window and ricochet off the far wall.

  “How did they find us?” Onyii asks, her body pressed over Ify’s. Egusi soup stains the carpet. Another volley of bullets. The engines are closer. If Ify’s marked for death, then they will have no problems blowing this whole place into splinters. “We have to get out of here.”

  Ada rushes into another room, then comes back out and tosses a shotgun to Onyii. Onyii grabs it and spins, just as the first soldier appears at the window. A single boom sends him flying back. Ada posts up by another window, an assault rifle at her shoulder, and fires in short bursts. Between rounds, Ada shouts, “There’s a bag in the other room. Money, guns, bodysuits. And fuel cells for your bike. Take it.”

  Those must have been for Ada. Maybe she’d always known a day like this was coming. Maybe she’d planned on leaving alone. Maybe she thought she was the only one she would need to save.

  She fires another round, then takes a concussion grenade from the belt at her waist. Bootsteps sound up the path along the cliff. Ada tosses the grenade through the window. She shouts, “Go!” But the rest is swallowed up by the roar of the explosion.

  The force hurls Onyii and Ify back.

  “Little one, there’s a gun in the kitchen. Get it.”

  At Ada’s command, Ify vanishes.

  Onyii rushes into the other room and sees the duffel bag ready. This was Adaeze’s escape. And now it’s Onyii’s. And Ify’s.

  Onyii snatches it up and, when she finds Ify crouching in the middle of the room with a pistol in her hand and a jacket whose pockets bulge with ammo, she grabs Ify’s hand and hurries for the back exit. She turns to say goodbye to Ada, but Ada has moved to another location. An explosion takes a chunk out of the front wall.

  She will survive. That’s what Onyii tells herself as she runs, then skids, down the backside of the cliff face into the shadows, where she’d hidden her bike. When they land at the bottom, Onyii pulls out the bodysuit and thrusts it at Ify.

  Ify quickly undresses, then slips into the suit and presses a button that fits the whole thing tightly on her skin. A paper-thin visor slips over her face.

  Another boom.

  When Onyii looks up, Adaeze’s whole cottage is in flames.

  A soldier rounds the corner of the hill. Onyii sees him just in time to blast him. “Grab the bag and start the bike.”

  Ify runs and does as ordered, while Onyii picks off more and more soldiers. They swarm the hillside. Onyii fires, turns, fires, turns, fires. Until she hears the familiar revving of the bike.

  She fires one last time, then darts for the bike. Bullets tear apart the grass at her feet. She leaps on, Ify in front, grabs the handlebars, and they’re gone.

  As they escape, Onyii cranes her neck to look behind them. Three mechs crest the hill, leap off, and crash onto the ground, cannons trained on their vanishing silhouette.

  CHAPTER

  64

  Ify has the duffel bag in her lap as the bike guns forward over the plain.

  Bullets rip into the ground in their wake. A moment of silence, then a soft fwoomp. Onyii swerves the bike to the right just as a column of red sand shoots into the air. A sound like thunder booms overhead. The force of the blast nearly knocks them sideways, but Onyii, without a word, gets them straight again. Onyii pushes the bike to go even faster and get out of range of the heavy artillery.

  Ify ducks under Onyii’s arm and peeks behind her to see small shapes growing larger along the horizon behind them. More soldiers. They’re on their own bikes: armored hovercrafts that cut through the air and raise walls of sand as they speed through the desert. Ify and Onyii are no match.

  “Drive!” Onyii shouts, then slips the shotgun out of the holster by her thigh and reloads it. Another boom sends sand spraying at them. The soldiers have shotguns of their own.

  Their bike leaps off a ledge. The landing jolts Ify and she nearly flies off, but with her free arm—her human arm—Onyii grips her tight.

  One of the soldiers appears right next to them. Onyii twists and blows him off of his bike. Blood explodes from his chest as he backstrokes through the air and onto the ground.

  Their bike dodges shrubbery that breaks apart with each gunblast from the soldiers right behind them.

  Something large drowns them in shadow. Ify looks up to find an aerial mech right above them. It makes a sound like a thousand snakes hissing at once. Then missiles rain down on them. Ify swerves back and forth, screaming. Onyii’s legs lock on to her seat, but she sways so much she nearly drops her gun. The soldiers on bikes have fallen back, but as soon as the missile volley ends, they appear through the smoke and draw closer.

  Ahead of them, the land is a deeper red. Instinctively, Ify slows down. The Redlands.

  “Ify!” Onyii shouts. “Keep going!”

  “You’re not wearing a bodysuit!” Without one, the air might kill Onyii. The radiation in the Redlands is so thick it has even supposedly made monsters out of ordinary animals, twisted and contorted them into unimaginable beasts. It mutates the flesh. It burns the mind. She might go mad in an instant. But if Onyii hears Ify over the boom of her shotgun, she doesn’t respond.

  Their bike skirts the side of a ridge. A soldier on his bike leaps into the air above them. Onyii angl
es her shotgun up and fires. The explosion swallows the soldier whole.

  “Keep going!” Onyii shouts again, so Ify obeys. “It’s the only way to shake the mechs!”

  And Ify realizes that Onyii’s right. The radiation would rust the mechs and disable their comms. Even if they are foolish enough to follow, they won’t get far.

  The three aerial mechs chasing them all open their shoulder cannons. Then that hissing sound again. Ify crouches over the handlebars. Just a little bit farther. The missiles move faster than they can, but suddenly, they arc downward and detonate just behind them, explosions blowing the soldiers behind them in all directions and sending Ify and Onyii flying into the air. The homing beacons must have short-circuited.

  Pieces of bike and soldier, all in flames from the explosions, bounce and fly around them, the enflamed frame of a bike arcing just over them before rolling to a stop a hundred meters ahead.

  That’s when Ify looks up and sees the wild expanse of red before her. The Redlands. No one comes out of this place the same way they went in. If they come out at all. Its borders are invisible, but you always know when you’ve crossed them. No matter how much protection you wear, there is always a tightness in the chest, a prickling on the skin so sharp and intense it brings tears to the eyes. And the sudden drying out of skin. Ify can feel her bodysuit working with extra energy to moisturize her skin.

  Nearby, an outcropping looms. In the shadows, they won’t find any protection from the poisonous air, but maybe it can afford Onyii enough time to slip into her own bodysuit. Already, rust has swallowed half her metal arm. The only sign she shows of the pain she’s in is a tightening of her features, like her face is struggling to hold itself together.

  Ify steers them toward the shadow cast by the outcropping and powers down the bike, though she doesn’t turn it off completely.

  Onyii falls off.

  With fumbling fingers, Ify goes through the duffel bag, careful not to expose too many of its contents to the elements, then, as fast as she can, she slips Onyii out of her clothes and into the bodysuit. As it tightens around her frame, Onyii lets out a sigh, and her face loosens again. The suit bulges awkwardly around Onyii’s Augments, and her visor has trouble shutting completely, but when Ify looks at her, for some reason, she can’t help but laugh. Onyii joins her, lying on the ground, clutching her stomach, then calming down as Ify pulls her to her feet.

  Ify’s about to ask Onyii where to next when she senses movement to her left. She squints. Far along the shoreline, a shape moves. She stands to her full height to get a better look at it. Then the silhouette turns into two, then three, then four.

  A bullet whizzes by her face. Her mask cracks at her cheek. She falls to the ground. When she looks up, she sees them. With white-and-red bandannas over their faces and bikes beneath them, hurtling straight for her. Bandits.

  Ducking, Onyii hauls Ify onto the bike, then gets on.

  Bullets stitch the ground at her feet.

  Onyii inputs her sequence in the bike’s console, but it fritzes, sending sparks into the air before going dark. More gunfire pings toward them.

  The radiation.

  Ify slides off the bike. Her fingers search for a side panel, any sort of groove in the metal. When they catch, she yanks the plate open to reveal blackened fuel cells. That’s what it was. The radiation drained their battery. Ify rips the spent fuel cells out of their slots and hurls them behind her before jamming in the new ones. They don’t glow as much as they should. But it’s enough to get the bike roaring again. A green confirmation light blinks at them from between the handlebars.

  Cannon fire explodes near them, tearing a chunk out of the outcropping. Ify holds on tight to the handlebars and guns it into the uncovered plain. She lets instinct govern her. Nothing matters but getting away from them. A heavy weight presses onto her back. Onyii, unconscious. That’s why she hadn’t been shooting back. She hasn’t yet healed completely.

  Ify manages to glance behind her. There are eight of them in total, swerving through the hills and leaping into the air, belting out war cries. The sound chills her. They’re going to kill us.

  Everywhere, red. The dirt, the rocks, the sky. Ify, with Onyii on her back, darts through the sand. Massive clouds of red dust rise in her wake. A shot pings off the back of her bike. The left side dips, and she swerves left to right, right to left, not daring to slow down. She careens up a hill but can’t stabilize. They fly through the air. With one hand, she grips the handlebars. With the other, she wraps Onyii’s metal arm around her waist. She can’t let go. She can’t fall off. She can’t lose Onyii. She can only pray that when she lands, it won’t be on her back. The bike rights itself and lands so hard that it jolts her teeth together. Onyii flies off the side of the bike, but Ify reaches out just in time to grab her wrist.

  “Come on, Onyii,” Ify whispers. “Come on! Wake up!” The extra weight slows Ify down. Their bike speeds forward. The ground tears Onyii’s bodysuit.

  A new sound reaches her. The thundering of hooves.

  Shorthorns.

  The bandits hear it too.

  Behind the herd of shorthorns, a sandstorm looms.

  An idea comes to Ify. She stops the bike, then pops open the bike’s front console and pulls a cord out. Her fingers tear at the back of Onyii’s bodysuit, just at the base of her neck, and Ify plugs the other end of the cord in, praying it fits.

  Click.

  Then she jams her foot on the pedal, sending electrical currents straight into Onyii and jump-starting her sister.

  Onyii jolts awake. She takes a nanosecond to note her surroundings. Then she snatches an assault rifle out of the duffel bag, gets on one knee, and fires. Short bursts that hurl the bandits off their bikes.

  She climbs onto the back of the hoverbike, disconnects, and they’re off again.

  Ify presses her foot harder on the pedal, tries to will her bike to go faster. Behind the bandits, shorthorns three times as tall as her, made into giants by the radiation, emerge from clouds of red dust. A whole herd of them.

  One of them ducks its head, then catches a biker from behind, flinging him into the air. Dust clouds swallow him and his cries.

  Another shorthorn catches up to two bikers and swings its head from side to side, the bikers skidding, then crashing, the explosions so loud that the sound rumbles across the plain. Fuel tanks. They’re not just using minerals to power their bikes. They’re using old tech. Oil.

  She hears a fwoomp behind her. Something small shoots into the air behind her, flying in a parabola straight for her. It gets larger as it closes in, then opens up. A dozen small missiles crash into the ground around them. Onyii hugs her tight, pushing her against the bike’s frame, protecting Ify’s body with her own. Ify screams as she swings her bike back and forth to avoid the detonations. Explosions boom all around her, covering them in fire and thunder. She closes her eyes against it all and races ahead, astounded when she gets through it that she’s still alive. Smoke chokes her lungs. Even through her visor, her eyes burn.

  Ahead of them, the land is gray with fog. Moisture? In the Redlands? Ify bats aside her questions and urges the bike faster.

  Mutated jackals appear behind them, some of them keeping pace while others nip at her heels. Their ridged, black backs glisten like the stones that suddenly cover the desert floor. If this can still be called desert.

  The rusted carcasses of mechs and airships long reddened and decayed with radiation poisoning rise like fingers out of the ground, bent and twisted and broken and brittle.

  All of a sudden, it’s quiet. They’re in the fog.

  More bandits burst through the mist, their bandannas turning them into ghosts beneath the newly darkened sky. Fog swirls around some of them, forming small cyclones that drive sinkholes into the earth. The ground collapses beneath one bandit. It ripples beneath them all in waves, loose rock shuttling toward th
em, bruising shoulders and toppling more riders.

  Other jackals materialize out of the mist, barking and baying.

  Onyii spins in her seat and shoots one jackal through the forehead, while one of the bandits, so close Ify can see his black eyes, shoots another that had leapt up to try to take him from his bike. Oil-colored blood spurts from the thing as it loses its life in midair and crashes to the ground.

  Sand whips about them in walls, and the men wrap their scarves tighter around their faces to keep the dust out of their mouths.

  Sand.

  That means they must be close to the end of this place.

  There’s light up ahead. They race toward it. Brown sand turns to ash that swirls and corkscrews around them and up into the sky.

  A massive screech tears through the air, a sound worse than when her captors had manipulated her Accent. A screech and a roar at the same time. It nearly pierces her eardrums as it falls on her whole body like a wave, scattering the mist in all directions. It stops just as suddenly as it started. Ify looks up to find dark clouds swirling. Farther down, she sees the same. Then a funnel cloud dips out of the sky and touches down, and wind whips so hard around Ify that she nearly flies off her bike. One by one, more and more spiraling clouds touch down. Then, to her left, a wall of smoke like a sandstorm but made entirely out of mist. In it, shapes move, then suddenly a winged aerial mech so large it could blot out any sun emerges. It is all metal, like any other mech. But its eyes glow an otherworldly green. Is there a pilot in there? Has the machine grown its own mind? Has the radiation mutated the metal into a whole other monster?

  The first of the aerial mechs swoops down, then bounces back into the air, another following in its place.

  There’s no gun in their arsenal big enough to take that thing on. So Ify wills her bike as fast as possible toward the light.

  The bandits are close enough that she can hear them now, shouting orders at each other, then another screech, and in the wake of it, they all grow silent. One of the mechs is practically on top of all of them. With each pulse of its jets, it clears away the mist around it. The tornadoes get closer, tearing through the stone on the ground.