War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  They find a bedroom in another part of the submersible, and Xifeng lays plastic sheeting on the ground while Onyii ties her braids back. Xifeng has more chemicals with her and sterilizes all her knives and blades, as well as Onyii’s hands. Then, Xifeng takes a signal reader, the same size and shape as a brick, and runs it over Ify’s body until, arriving at her chest, the beeping turns into one long whine.

  Ify’s breath quickens. Just beneath her left breast. That’s where the tracker is.

  Xifeng turns the thing off. “At least it’s not on her heart. That would have made it impossible to remove without damaging the organ.”

  Small mercy, Ify thinks to herself as she lies on her back. She angles her head toward Xifeng. “Do you have anything? For the pain?”

  “Your body and brain have not fully recovered from almost drowning. Anything I give you might stop your heart completely. I . . . I’m sorry.”

  Ify holds Xifeng’s gaze for a long time before turning to Onyii. Their eyes lock. When Ify’s breath quickens, she breathes through her nose. Onyii gestures to her belt. Xifeng, understanding, unclips it from Onyii’s waist, then folds it and slips it between Ify’s teeth.

  She sterilizes Onyii’s hands one last time, then hands her the first of the knives.

  The first cut, an incision along Ify’s rib and just below her breast, is bearable, but the knife digs deeper and touches something in Ify that sends bolts of lightning into her brain. The belt muffles her scream, but her cry is loud enough to make the knife hesitate. Onyii pauses. Then the knife moves horizontally. Cool liquid slides down Ify’s side, and she knows, even though pain blocks out almost all rational thought, that this is her blood.

  Then something presses into her wound, pulling the flesh apart. Ify nearly bites through the belt. Her eyes flare wide. She sees nothing. Hurt turns the entire world white. Her back arches against the floor. She screams and screams around the belt in her teeth.

  Onyii’s hand slides out of the wound, and Ify slumps. Her screams turn to moans. Tears waterfall down the side of her face. She looks away as other hands busy themselves sterilizing her wound and sealing it with MeTro sealant.

  As these hands wrap her in bandages, Ify’s breath slows, and the world dissolves into a haze.

  It’s this haze that blankets her as something coarse is wrapped around her to keep her warm. The haze raises her above water, through the top of the submersible, and into the open sun. Voices swim around her as the haze carries her into the back of a truck and rolls another blanket over her.

  Time collapses.

  Onyii’s face is suddenly before hers. Her sister is on one knee, grabbing the strap hanging from the ceiling of the truck’s carriage. “We’re almost there,” Onyii whispers.

  Ify can barely make the words out, but that’s what it sounds like. We’re almost there. She blinks herself awake, but confusion knits her brow. “Why are you wearing a military uniform?” But it comes out as an incoherent murmur. She knows this, because Onyii smiles at her words.

  “Just rest, little one. I love you.” Then she blows softly on Ify’s forehead, like she used to do when the sun grew too hot or the weather in the camp became suffocating. A small piece of relief from her suffering.

  I love you too, Ify tries to say, but it comes out as one long, jumbled sound. Then she falls asleep.

  CHAPTER

  67

  It was easy enough to knock out the Gabonese border guard on the periphery of the border station and steal his uniform while Xifeng rolled her truck through. Simply flashing her Xinhua Aid Agency ID and telling the remaining guards that she was coming from war-torn Cameroon got her through. Then, when they were far enough ahead, Onyii had leapt into the back of the truck. She had cut off her braids and shaved her head before leaving the submersible to make their plan run more smoothly. It would expose her face, but the more like a man she seemed, the less likely people were to give her a second look. Xifeng had sprayed skin shielding over the metal on her face, and when Onyii saw her face in a mirror, she gasped. Her fingers had gone to her eye. It glowed yellow, but there was nothing else to indicate on her face or her arm that she was an Augment.

  “Cosmetics,” Xifeng had told her, in response to her shock. “Aerosol skin cream from China. Some use it for burn wounds. Others use it instead of standing beneath the sun to tan.”

  “They want to get darker?”

  And that’s when Xifeng had suddenly looked at Onyii, then blushed and grown shy. “We find you attractive,” Xifeng had said, as though she were responding to an order from a commanding officer.

  The trip to Libreville is brief. Before them lies a long and wide seafront boulevard populated with parks bearing a multitude of marble sculptures. The open-air Mont-Bouët market spreads out away from the coastline. In the distance looms the presidential palace. The whole place seems so wealthy. So carefree.

  It’s too risky to chance a ride on the Trans-Gabon Railway to Franceville in the country’s interior, so Xifeng and Onyii take the roadway running along the rails.

  Night nears by the time they see glistening Franceville in the distance. And past the river, peeking over the horizon, is the space station. It’s a small hub, but with so many wars in neighboring countries, it has begun to expand. Money finds its way to stable countries, countries that can take advantage of the chaos around them.

  At the bridge crossing, two guards amble to the back of the truck and make a show of inspecting. When they see Onyii, legs hanging over the end of the flatbed, trying to look as calm as possible and not open her mouth, they start chatting. One of them asks the other a question, then arches an eyebrow at Onyii, waiting for an answer.

  If she says a single word and they hear her accent, they will be able to tell she’s not Gabonese. Then it’s all over.

  She snorts a laugh and looks away, like she can’t be bothered to answer. That gets one of the soldiers belly-laughing. While the other fumes, the first one waves them along. As they pull away, Onyii tries not to let them see the mountainous sigh that shakes her shoulders.

  They pull over into a vehicle lot. Not far from them is a large warehouse structure. Closer to the station, aerial mechs stand guard around the shuttle. Passengers have formed a line by the escalator leading up to the shuttle’s entrance.

  Xifeng turns the truck off, then joins Onyii at its back. Together, they tie back the curtain, pull away the plastic sheeting, and lift the bundle holding Ify into a cylindrical container just barely large enough to fit her. Inside the opening is an oxygen pump connected to a tank. From it dangles a mask. Onyii fits the mask to Ify’s face, inputs a command into the machine to begin pumping, then takes one moment to memorize her face, so soft and serene in slumber, before closing the lid.

  As wrapped up as Ify is, she should avoid detection from any scanners. And her tracker lies at the bottom of Lagos Lagoon, so neither the Biafrans nor the Nigerians will be able to find her.

  Onyii and Xifeng hoist the heavy cylinder onto their shoulders and bring it to the shuttle. A woman in a pilot’s uniform idly swipes at her tablet.

  “Storage?” Xifeng asks.

  “Are you scheduled to be on this flight?” the woman asks in French. “Is your name on the manifest?”

  “No, I’m not on this flight, but—”

  “Then I cannot take your package.”

  “But there are aid materials in here. Desperately needed where this shuttle’s going. Please, it’s time-sensitive.” Indeed, Ify only has a finite amount of oxygen before the compartment is timed to pop open and release her. “I’m with the Xinhua Aid Agency.” She awkwardly tries to fish through her pockets with one hand. “My name is Dr. Liu Xifeng. I—”

  “This is heavy!” Onyii barks in her best imitation of Gabonese French. “Take her package now! What are you wasting our time for? You have space, don’t you?” Complain loudly enough while wearing a militar
y uniform and people will generally do what you ask. Onyii has seen it enough times to know it works.

  At that, the woman lowers her tablet, sucks her teeth, then points in the direction of a carousel that sends suitcases and oddly shaped containers into the shuttle’s baggage compartment. When they finally lay the cylinder down, the carousel beeps loudly from the weight and stops. Onyii glares at it, and it starts moving again.

  The two of them watch until the whole cylinder is swallowed by the shuttle and the storage compartment closes shut.

  It’s done.

  An alarm blares as all the compartments shut, and the shuttle becomes a single, sleek craft that will spirit every soul onboard into the stars.

  Onyii starts when she feels tugging at her sleeve. Xifeng. Around them, launch station personnel busy themselves, clearing the launch area, and Onyii and Xifeng hurry back to their truck. A coughing fit takes Onyii. She struggles to keep up. Even as the ground beneath them begins to shudder and the metal supports running along the shuttle’s vertical frame fall away, Onyii keeps looking back over her shoulder. As the jet propulsion process begins and smoke billows like a skirt under the shuttle and Onyii’s coughing threatens to double her over, she keeps looking back. The main walkway detaches and moves away on its own. All the while, station personnel mechanically direct the traffic. Like this is something they see every day.

  But Onyii can’t stop staring.

  “Why aren’t you going with her?” Xifeng asks softly when they get back to their truck.

  For a long time, Onyii is silent, her face inclined skyward, watching the shuttle grow smaller and smaller and smaller until it escapes the earth’s atmosphere and every war being fought beneath it. “In less than two weeks, I will be dead.” Onyii squints into the stars. “We rode through the Redlands before we made it to Lagos. For much of the journey, Ify had on a bodysuit to protect her from the radiation. I did not.” Onyii can feel Xifeng’s eyes on her back, but she doesn’t turn. Her gaze remains fixed on the stars. “The shower we took in your submersible only helped to ease the pain. But the cancer is already taking over my kidneys. Another cancer has metastasized on my throat. Soon I will be unable to speak. Then it will take my lungs. I couldn’t let Ify watch me die like that.” She looks down at her hands, wet with the blood she coughed into them. Rust swallows the metal. Static breaks her vision. “I want her last sight of me to be of me whole. That’s how I want to be remembered.”

  Xifeng says nothing, merely takes a step to Onyii’s side and stands close, closer than anyone worried about radiation poisoning would stand. She doesn’t touch Onyii, only smiles and raises her chin just as Onyii does, to watch the stars against the darkening sky.

  Bursts of static chop up Onyii’s view of the constellations. Just as she pieces one together, static obliterates it. A shorthorn. Static. A crown. Static.

  “Keep her safe,” Onyii says to the sky.

  A girl. Hand raised to wave goodbye to her sister.

  Then static.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, began on May 30, 1967, when Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, then a regional governor in Nigeria, declared the Eastern Region of Nigeria to be the Republic of Biafra. In July of that same year, Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon, Supreme Commander of the Nigerian Armed Forces, declared war on the fledgling republic.

  Nigeria had gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, inheriting a colonial administration that held little regard for the nation’s cultural and ethnic diversity and privileged some groups over others, leaving large swaths of the country disenfranchised. Thus, the Igbo people, who lived largely in the Eastern Region, saw almost none of the riches generated by the oil that foreign companies took from their shores. When Biafra seceded, it was believed that the Igbo people would be properly compensated for the resources that lived, all this time, beneath their houses.

  What followed was three years of war, starvation, and disease. By the end of the conflict, two million civilians had died of famine during a blockade established by the Nigerian government. Between two million and four and a half million people had been displaced.

  While it could be said that the conflict was over oil, the spark had landed on a mountain of tinder made up of years and years of resentment fueled by lack of representation in government and in the military. Prior to the declaration of secession, pogroms put into place in Northern Nigeria saw up to 100,000 Igbo people, almost half of them children, murdered. In that time, nearly two million Igbo refugees fled to the Eastern Region. Massacres and coups and counter-coups, all of these preceded that fateful May 1967 declaration of secession.

  My family is Igbo, and my mother was preparing for grade school when the war broke out.

  As a child, I only heard of the war in conversational asides when uncles and aunties would come to visit or when Mom was on the phone with relatives from Nigeria. I’d always tuned them out when conversation turned to Nigerian politics; they all always expressed that same content exasperation that seems to come with being immigrants who still maintain ties, however tenuous, to the land they came from.

  As I grew older, the stories became more and more detailed, and my mother began to appear in them.

  To write this novel directly referencing perhaps the most painful episode in Nigerian history, I drew most heavily from my mother’s recollections. She was my central resource in learning what it was like to live as a child through the political conflicts I had read about as a political science major in college.

  War Girls is also a commentary on the wars that ravaged the African continent in the 1990s and 2000s; wars in which children were drafted as soldiers, drugged and assaulted and manipulated and given guns as tall as them; wars in which millions upon millions of people were forced to leave their homes; wars in which mass propaganda greased the wheels for the systematic slaughter of innocents simply because they belonged to a tribe that was not yours.

  For my research into the Biafran War and these additional conflicts, Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was a Country, was invaluable. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s chronicle of the war, Half of a Yellow Sun, revealed not only the ways in which war can touch the lives of individuals but also the frightening lack of literature that exists about this period in Nigerian history. The Nigerian Civil War is not taught in schools, nor is it generally written about aside from nonfiction histories from military commanders or politicians, each with the aim of exonerating themselves and putting forward their own political agenda. War Girls aims to be a corrective to this dynamic.

  A Moonless, Starless Sky by Alexis Okeowo painted portrait after portrait of Africans in Mauritania, Somalia, Nigeria, and elsewhere fighting extremism in their own way, whether through civil rights campaigns or aspirations to play professional basketball. How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyimana and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah were both heartrending chronicles of surviving war and massacre and trying to find life after.

  The earliest seed for this book was planted, almost without my knowing, a decade and a half ago when I came across the novel Beasts of No Nation by my fellow countryman Uzodinma Iweala. I was forever changed by that book.

  The Biafran cause did find its champions outside of Africa’s borders. Novelist Frederick Forsyth, most famous as the author of the acclaimed thriller The Day of the Jackal, was a staunch advocate. His book The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend has been held up as a hallmark of war reporting, not only for its detail but also for the outrage he felt at the violence perpetrated against the Igbo people during this brutal conflict. And he takes to task the uncaring and dishonest attitudes of the British and American governments that actively aided in that violence. The outrage is palpable in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Biafra: A People Betrayed” as well.

  There has been writing about Biafra, but not nearly enough. And not ne
arly enough of it by those who can still feel the imprint of the conflict on their lives. Even now, as calls for secession grow anew, an entire generation has been raised in ignorance of the conflict. It is my hope that War Girls, in directly referencing this past, can act as some sort of salve to the national wound and keep it from growing into something worse and, worse yet, inoperable. It is my hope also that War Girls will become only one of many such books. And that it will exhibit that emblematic Nigerian quality of taking pain and despair and dysfunction and transmuting it into something heartier, more fulfilling, more nourishing. Of sifting poison out of the water drawn from the well.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I pitched my agent, Noah Ballard, about a book I wanted to write, and I told him I was thinking Gundam in Nigeria, he did not hesitate for one second before saying, “Yes, go write it.” And for that, he has my immense gratitude.

  Ben Schrank and Casey McIntyre helped rally the House behind this book and were among its first cheerleaders.

  And I must thank my editor, Jess Harriton, for believing in this book, pushing and pulling where necessary, steering me away from my own excesses and urging me forward when despair threatened to derail my efforts.

  The significance of this cover is not lost on me. Many have remarked to me what it has meant to them to see a dark-skinned black girl staring daggers at you from the front cover of a young adult novel, a protagonist, a hero, a badass. Though there is much work to be done in the publishing industry with regards to better, more inclusive representation on both the inside and the outside of a book, I look at this cover and I see a victory. The people responsible are Tony Sahara and Kristin Boyle, our in-house designers, and, most importantly, the esteemed illustrator, Nekro, talented beyond measure. They have spoiled me with their work.

  I will be forever indebted to my copyeditors, who wrangled this book into readable shape.