War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

A moment passes where nothing happens, then it sits. It cocks its head to one side, considering her. But now it no longer looks like it wants to turn her into goat stew.

  “Okay. Um. Fetch me that stick.” And she points to a tree branch behind it. It retracts its legs to get into the smaller part of the cave, then grabs the branch in its teeth before returning to Ify. It’s working. She can barely get a laugh out before another blast collapses the tunnel’s ceiling where the branch had been. The ground above her continues to shake.

  It’s going to cave in.

  The beast glows green again, then charges toward Ify. She wraps her arms around its neck and swings herself up onto its back just as the cave crumbles behind them. They crash through what had been the entrance in a splash of dirt and brush and metal, and suddenly, the world is louder than Ify has ever heard it before.

  With her Accent on, all the camp structures glow with blue outlines. Ify looks up to see mechs, also threaded through with strands of blue light, streak through the sky like stars. The only things that don’t shine are the explosions when missiles hit a mech and blow it right out of the sky, when a crabtank smashes through the mess hall and sets off the generator, knocking one of its own legs out but setting the whole building on fire. When enemy Green-and-Whites accidentally step onto a gravity mine that swirls them into the air in a burst of energy before splitting their mechanized bodies apart.

  Ify’s beast gallops through the katakata. She looks behind her to find other mechanized half-beasts chasing her. With greater confidence than last time, she twists on her animal’s back, then zeros in on the CPUs of the beasts chasing her. A few tweaks to their coding, and they break away to attack their former masters.

  Hooves thunder in the distance, getting closer. A shorthorn smashes through a stack of crates, swinging its head back and forth. The crates splinter. Food supplies and rations spray through the air. Stray metal dings Ify right in the head, hurling her from her beast. The world spins around her before she finally comes to a stop. The shorthorn is a mass of meat and metal. Plates and circuitry screwed into it, wires disappearing in its rotting flesh. A corrupted thing poisoned even further by the Green-and-Whites. Kept alive by tech and coded to kill. It looms over Ify, nearly as tall as the Obelisk, then charges forward again.

  She narrowly dodges its hooves.

  Gunfire from just over Ify’s shoulder pings against the shorthorn’s armor. Ify turns to find Chike firing with her rifle. Those bullets can’t do any damage, even though they draw blood from the shorthorn. It’s ping-ping-ping until Chike detaches a launcher from her waist and screws it onto the bottom of her rifle. With practiced motion, she slips a grenade out of her chest pouch, then loads the launcher and aims.

  “Down!” she shouts, then fires.

  The shorthorn’s head disappears in a mass of blood and smoke. Ify dashes out of the way just as it falls onto its side.

  “Chike!” Ify barely knows the girl, has only seen her from time to time acting as a sentinel for the camp, a guard. She has sometimes seen Chike on the beach in warmer weather, practicing the moves Onyii had taught her and the other girls earlier. But now Ify squeezes Chike in an embrace. “Thank you.”

  Chike breaks away and nods.

  “Onyii,” Ify breathes. “Where is she? Is she safe?”

  “None of us are safe.” Chike whirls around and shoots down another mechanized jungle cat. “They have colonized the animals, even.”

  A mech swoops down and riddles the ground with machine gun fire. Chike grabs Ify, and they dive for cover. The grass shoots up in chunks with each volley. When Ify looks up, through the crack in a set of fallen crates, she sees one of the girls who had tormented her earlier swinging a metal beam at one of the beasts. It snaps its fangs at her. Each of her swings misses. Emotions duel inside of Ify. That girl has hurt her so much. Has beaten her when Onyii wasn’t looking. Has demeaned her. Has made her feel like she could never belong here. But Ify can’t watch her die. Not like this.

  Ify squints, focusing on the half-beast’s circuitry. The green glow at its core changes to blue. It stops. The girl swings and catches it right on the jaw and sends it toppling onto its side. She staggers forward, too tired to raise her weapon for another strike. The beast rises on its haunches, straightens, then gallops in the opposite direction.

  Chike puts a hand to Ify’s shoulder and leans in close. “What did you do?”

  “I can hack them,” Ify says back.

  “But . . . but how?”

  There’s no time to explain the Accent, the tech she had dreamed up and put together, the tech she used behind Onyii’s back to surf signals and ride wireless connections and see the insides of things, of people. “It’s complicated.”

  “Can you do more than one at a time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Terminal.”

  Then it hits Ify just what Chike is suggesting. The Terminal. If she can find a way to amplify her Accent, she can control bigger machines. She can hack them. “The Terminal . . .”

  “Let’s go!” Chike pulls Ify along. Ify scoops up a fallen pistol and tries to keep pace with Chike as they cut a line through the camp. Chike leads the way, firing at enemy soldiers while Ify sweeps behind them, firing at whatever may try to cut them off from retreat.

  Then the platform rises before them. A console station set up on a small dais, a staircase winding around it to the center, where the control panel stands. The Terminal.

  “I’ll cover you,” says Chike, spinning around to fire at beasts and soldiers approaching from behind.

  Each boom in the sky nearly throws Ify to the ground. She can barely keep her feet under her, but she makes it to the staircase and, holding the railing, climbs her way up. When she looks at the keys on the touchboard, though, she frowns. The characters. She doesn’t recognize them.

  “What is taking so long?” Chike shouts from below, her rifle letting off small bursts of fire. She’s trying to conserve ammo, Ify realizes. She’s running low.

  Ify squints at the touchboard, then, tentatively, puts her fingers to it. It hums beneath her, then she feels it. She doesn’t have to look at the keys in the board. She can feel them. Her brain knows. Suddenly, she’s filled with muscle memory, as though she’s done this a million times before. Her fingers blaze over the keys, faster than she’s ever typed in her life. And then it’s like all the doors in her mind, one after the other, open. Looking at the touchboard, she can see it all. Can see inside the mechs, the crabtanks, all of it. The connection pathways are as broad as rivers.

  She jumps from one node to the next, powering down their cores so that all around her, enemy mechs fall from the sky. The cries of their confused pilots are a whisper in her ears. But she can hear the cheers of her comrades as clear as morning birdsong. The crabtank stomping through the greenhouse stops in mid-attack, its top sizzling and sparking before it lets out a fiery puff. Then the thing collapses onto the remains of their garden. Ify scans in a wide circle around her, touching each node she comes across. Then she closes her eyes, inputs a key sequence into the touchboard, and feels a massive wave of energy pulse out of her. Like an ocean tide with her at its center. The wave expands and expands and expands, and each enemy mech it hits sizzles and sparks before collapsing. A wave of command inputs to alter their coding in mid-operation. They drop like mosquitoes sprayed with antiseptic.

  We’re winning, Ify says to herself. And all because of her. Because of her tech. Her Accent. She swims through the wireless network she can see in her mind. Dances through it, leaping from comms system to comms system until she stops at one. Onyii. She is inside Onyii’s mech. She can hear her. Issuing commands, naming formations. Laughing. Sister, I am saving us—

  An explosion rips the ground out from under Ify and sends her arcing through the sky, limbs flailing, until she hits the earth. Bones crack. She screams out in pain, clutching her ri
bs. Her head is a thunderstorm of static and machine-whine. Pain swallows her whole. When she manages to turn around, her eyes widen with shock. The Terminal. Fire gobbles it. The console melts in the flames.

  Three soldiers make their way carefully toward her with large rifles Ify has never seen before. Sleek, black, almost plastic-looking. They have masks over their faces, and their eyes glow green beneath them. Night-vision lenses. Ify tries to get away but can’t even move. She tries to claw her way back, but they’re gaining on her.

  Tears leak down Ify’s cheeks. They’re going to get her. She looks around, wildly, for anything, anyone. But then she realizes why everything seems so different. Her Accent. It’s disabled. But how . . .

  She has no time to figure it out.

  The soldier in the center fires a net out of his gun that wraps Ify and pins her to the ground with magnetic charges. She has no breath in her lungs to scream. Otherwise, she would cry out for Onyii, whose face is still fresh in her mind. And whose laughter still rings between her ears.

  They cinch the net with a collar around her throat.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Swallowed by fire, Onyii’s mech spins and strikes. Pressing down on pedals and pushing and pulling her gearshift, she feels as though she’s become one with the metal encasing her. Her mech rams its fist into the body of an enemy mech and hurls it in a wide arc at several others, ripping out its core. Her mech headbutts another mech. Closes its fist around the rifle barrel of another and crushes her free fist into the enemy’s cockpit. Charging forward, she gets her hands on another mech and, in one swift motion, rips it in half. The armor on her own mech shrieks. Pieces of it fall away. A blast hits her from behind. One of her engines cuts out. She turns, and someone’s spear sticks her. A volley of gunfire pits her windshield with bullet holes. Then, suddenly, it all goes dark.

  Onyii hears nothing. Her console stops glowing. Her comms are dead.

  Suddenly, her weight shifts. Something pins her back to her seat. Her controls slip out of her hands. Everything’s sliding.

  She’s falling.

  No no no no no.

  She can’t remember how far up she was or what position she’s falling in. But she must be facing down. She fumbles behind her for a cord, praying it’ll be where she needs it to be. Her seat straps dig into her chest. The velocity keeps pinning her arms back. She doesn’t have much time left.

  She fumbles with her human hand. Can feel the bones close to snapping, the joints already popping. New tears spring to her eyes. Pain needles every inch of her body. Her mech catches on something, throwing her whole body forward, then back. Her thumb jams against a button and snaps. But a panel bursts loose behind her head, and a wire uncoils. She grabs one end through the pain and jams it into a socket on her Augmented forearm, turning herself into her mech’s battery. It might kill her. But then, so might the fall.

  Her mind explodes with sensation. All the noise and smell and texture of the world hitting her at once. Blood spills from her nose. But then everything powers up. Her console comes to life, and she pulls at her joystick and gearshift. Pulls and pulls until she’s about to dislocate her shoulders. Her windshield display powers on to show her the fast-moving ground. She pulls and pulls and pulls, tries to get her mech to move against the wind.

  One last jerk and she’s upright. Her fingers blaze over her touchboard, and thrusters open on her legs to slow her until she comes to a shuddering stop. A hundred feet above the remains of the school building.

  Through all the noise in her head—the amplified buzzing of cicadas, the whimper of wounded girls, the hiss of emptying gas tanks—Onyii searches for the sound of gunfire. Nothing. She turns her mech to the sky. The enemy mechs fly in an arc toward the massive aircraft carriers floating at the camp’s edge.

  “Where are they going?” Without warning, she pitches forward in her seat and vomits. Her belt still holds her back, so it all ends up in her lap. Dizziness slams into her like a missile. “The forest,” she murmurs.

  Her mech first leans, then floats slowly into the trees. The sound of elephant grass whispering against the mobile suit’s flanks settles the beating of her heart. A few minutes later, she finds a charred clearing, shattered tree trunks forming a blackened circle around the space. She tries to land but can’t get her thrusters to do what they’re supposed to, and the mech collapses into a heap, its legs bent beneath it.

  Onyii lets herself hang sideways in her seat for several seconds. Blood drips from her cheek. She tries to reach and wipe away the vomit on her pants, but her arms refuse to move. Strength leaks out of her. But she fumbles for her belt. A click.

  She falls onto her human arm and yelps. For a few moments, she lets herself lie there, curled in a ball, shivering. Her teeth chatter. The forest is quiet around her. And for that small bit of time that she has to herself—that she doesn’t have to share with anyone—she can hide and feel her pain. Where no one can see.

  She does not know how much time has passed, but the cold slowly lifts from her. She struggles to sit upright, but when she twists, she sees her legs: a mangled mess behind her. Useless. Strangely, there’s no pain.

  Ify. She has to get to Ify.

  Gritting her teeth, she pulls herself to her disabled console, fishes under the board for the latch, then nearly collapses with relief when the hatch hisses open.

  Outside, the mist makes a wall of gray she can barely see through. She blinks. Something’s wrong. She crawls through the open space and falls onto the grass, and that’s when she finally puts her hand to her face. Her right eye is gone.

  Panic tightens its grip on her lungs. She knows things have happened to her body that should bring pain, but she feels none. Only numbness. She remembers Ify, and all thoughts about herself vanish, like mist evaporating. She has to find Ify.

  Leaves whisper around her. Movement. She stills.

  Shapes form in the fog. Black silhouettes. Shorthorns? No, people. Soldiers. It does not matter to Onyii that she has no gun, that she has only one arm, that her legs are broken beneath her. That her right eye is gone. She will fight with whatever she has to get Ify back.

  The shapes break apart. Three of them. And something behind them. Being dragged.

  Onyii grits her teeth. With her good arm, Onyii tries to push herself up but fails and falls into the mud. They’re heading straight for her. The world blurs. She’s dying. Onyii knows it the way she knows the direction of gravity. But she must save Ify.

  They stop. Their shadows darken her ruined body.

  She tries to push herself up, fails, and tries again, each time splashing into the mud until it has gotten into her nose. The Nigerian soldiers standing over her talk in hushed whispers to each other. One of them chuckles.

  Then one of them kicks Onyii onto her back, flips her over like she’s just a piece of brush. But now she can see their faces. They hide behind masks that cover everything but eyes that glow green from their night-vision lenses.

  But one of them, when it sees Onyii’s face, squints. Its whole body tenses, then it leans in while another has its gun trained on her. The first one’s face draws close to Onyii’s. So close the puffs of air that filter through its mask with each clean breath brush radiation-thick frost onto her bloodstained cheeks.

  Onyii strains to see the bundle they had been carrying behind them. Enough of the mist has thinned for her to see that it’s a body wrapped in a net. Metal binds the body’s ankles together, another collar closed around its neck. It must be a trick of the light, or Onyii’s missing eye playing with her mind. But she sees the bundle stir. Sees it come to life in its restraints. That brown cloth isn’t a bag. It’s a mud-splotched shirt. A shirt so big it nearly reaches the bundle’s ankles. The only size of shirt Onyii could ever find for Ify.

  With her good hand, Onyii reaches out.

  A boot presses onto her chest. The one that had b
een examining her before steps hard on her and points its gun at her forehead. This is how it’s going to end.

  “I know this one,” it says in a voice Onyii recognizes as human. “We’ve met before.”

  “How do you know?” asks one of the others, annoyed.

  “I’ve killed many udene, but only one have I maimed.” With its rifle, it gestures to Onyii’s crushed metal arm. “I took its arm.” It cocks its gun, ready to fire.

  The other one puts its hand to the first one’s rifle barrel and pushes away. “Let me. You, take her to the ship.” The figure nods back at the bundle, attended to by another Nigerian. The bundle twists and writhes. Ify. “I will be with you shortly.”

  Their eyes catch. And that’s when Onyii knows in her heart that Ify sees her. That Ify knows she tried. She tried so hard to save her. Onyii won’t let herself cry. She can’t give the Nigerians the satisfaction of seeing her weak. So, even as the one who’d called her udene goes back to Ify and drags her away, even as Onyii is left alone with her executioner, even as her vision blurs and the world fades away, she doesn’t let herself cry. She allows herself one last thought. A word. A name.

  Ify.

  Her dear sister’s face is the last thought in Onyii’s head before she hears the gunshot ring out.

  Onyii opens her eyes.

  The soldier is still standing over her. But its gun is aimed into the tree branches. Smoke twists from its barrel. The soldier lowers its rifle, never taking its eyes off of Onyii. It taps the side of its head, then Onyii hears words buzz into her brain.

  “Do not thank me for sparing your life.” A woman’s voice. More Nigerian mimicry. It only sounds like a woman. “You will not live much longer anyway. But know that I am not like him,” she says, gesturing in the direction of the Nigerian soldier who left. “Daren and I share blood and a mission, and that is it.” Then, for a long time, silence. “I will not apologize for what he did to you the last time you two met. You must have been children, but this is war. And we will win it.”