Chinelo glances at Onyii. Before Onyii knows what’s happening, Chinelo steps forward. Onyii realizes she hears buzzing. Her good eye darts back and forth. Chinelo’s bees. She’s armed them with flares to blind the soldiers if they get ready to fire. It may not save the girls completely, but it would give Onyii and the others time to gun down a few of the soldiers and find cover.
“We were just minding our business,” Chinelo says, spreading her arms. “Making our jollof rice, not being a bother to anyone.” She waves behind her to indicate the camp. Even though it lies destroyed and sparks spray from the Obelisk and the Terminal is a pile of rubble and twisted metal, it is still impressive. They had built a beautiful thing.
Onyii wonders if any of the men arrayed against them can imagine what the camp must have looked like before the Green-and-Whites arrived.
“We’re just a camp on the outskirts of the Republic. Collecting refugees fleeing the war and teaching them to be good citizens for the Republic of New Biafra. See, we are even teaching them the proper war songs.” Chinelo turns around and raises her arms like a conductor. Onyii glares at her as if to say, Do not make this a game! Chinelo smirks, lowers her arms, and turns back to the commander. “I would have them sing for you, but we have not had much time to prepare. If we’d known you were coming, we could have gotten ourselves ready to make a proper welcome.” Onyii hears the rebuke beneath it, and she’s sure the commander hears it too. If we’d known you were coming, we could have saved our camp. And the girls in it.
“Refugees, eh?” the commander says. “It seems like you are keeping just the girls. What do you do with the boys? Kill them?”
Chinelo doesn’t answer the question. Instead, she nods to the soldier who had that earlier outburst. “They seem to have found something to do with themselves.”
The commander sucks his teeth and looks past Chinelo and the others. He juts his chin out, puts his hands on his hips, and starts walking like a slow chicken. “So. A school. A greenhouse. Even an armory.” He makes like he’s walking to Chinelo, then he turns his head to Onyii. “But you are using Biafran resources to power all of this.” He stomps his foot. “This is Biafran soil. Everything under it belongs to Biafra.” Still looking at Onyii. “And you have not even asked my permission.”
“We do not know your name,” Chinelo calls from behind him, still joking. “Tell us your name, and maybe we can properly ask your permission, sah.”
The commander leans in toward Onyii. “My name.” Then he walks away, toward his soldiers, and turns. Everything is a grand gesture with him. On the battlefield, he would have been shot at least thirteen times by now. “My name. Is Godswill Ugochukwu Emmanuel Chukwudi. Brigadier General of the Free Biafran Army. Middle Striker for the Biafran Super Eagles Football Team and Current Record-Holder in Goals Scored during the League Season. But that is too long a title, and if I send you into battle and you say yes, you will be killed before you can finish saying the whole thing. So. You may call me General.” He whirls around to face Chinelo, his pistol aimed at her temple. “But you. You talk so much. Tell so many jokes. Just chaw-chaw-chaw-chaw. Tell me.” He presses the barrel of the gun into her hair. “Does this get you out of trouble or into it?”
Onyii moves without thinking. A single, fluid motion in which she ducks, scoops a bit of shrapnel from the ground, and has its tip pressed against the man’s neck. She can feel every gun pointed at her.
Chinelo is completely still, but she glances a command at Onyii: stand down.
Onyii already knows. If any hurt comes to Chinelo, then it will be over for this Brigadier Eagle or whatever he calls himself.
Chinelo’s bees buzz, but none of the soldiers seem to notice them.
“It is too bad my army has no need for court jestahs,” the brigadier general sneers. “You can and you will serve the war effort, however.” He holsters his gun, and after a moment, Onyii drops the shrapnel and steps back. The brigadier general smirks, then raises his voice so everyone can hear. “This camp and its contents are being seized by the Republic of New Biafra. This is now our property.” He nods to his soldiers, several of whom break away and begin rummaging through the camp for anything that can be salvaged. The remaining soldiers still have their guns pointed at the girls, so it feels like yet another violation they can do nothing about. “This camp is being requisitioned so that it and those who have maintained it can serve the war effort. An inventory will be made of what is recovered. In the meantime . . .” He sweeps his arm in the direction of the forest.
Maglev trucks with long backs rumble into view. Tarpaulin covers their back shelves. Onyii’s heart plummets.
The backs of those trucks are like black holes that would suck Onyii and the others in and never spit them out again. The last time Onyii found herself staring at such an entrance, she was a child. A child swept from the bush and given a gun. A child no older than Ify . . .
At the thought of her little sister, Onyii turns back to the camp and starts walking, but a hand grips her wrist hard. Obioma. Her eyes, which used to be young and watery and unsure, have turned hard. She no longer looks at Onyii as though she were a ghost.
“Our sister is gone,” Obioma whispers. “If she is even still alive.”
Onyii tries to shake herself free, but Obioma’s fingers dig into Onyii’s wrist. “She is not your sister.”
It is meant to hurt Obioma, but Obioma frowns as though she has no time for this. “If you leave now, they will find you, and they will shoot you. And they may shoot some of us while they wait. We must stick together.”
And Onyii searches for the moment that finally hardened Obioma, the moment she went from quivering child to quiet strategist.
“Together, we can plan our actions. Together, we can bring back our girls.”
And that’s when Onyii realizes there is more to this than Ify. If girls were kidnapped instead of killed, then there are more than just Ify out there. Waiting for their sisters to come get them. Onyii can’t get them all on her own.
“Chop-chop-oh!” the brigadier general shouts, clapping his hands together. “Come with me, and we will keep you safe.”
Kesandu speaks through gritted teeth. “We were safe here.”
The brigadier general raises his head to acknowledge the voice he has just heard, sniffs the air, then looks to the demolished camp and the husks of detonated mechs that litter it. “Does not look so safe now.”
Every nerve in Onyii’s body aches to go search for Ify, but Obioma is right. She can barely stand, and even if she were able to make it to her mech, she’d have to power it with her own body. She’d barely be able to leave the forest.
“Let us bury our friends-oh!” a girl cries from the crowd. Onyii doesn’t recognize her. She might have been one of Ify’s schoolmates. Other girls kneel down by the child and console her while she wails into her hands.
Onyii is the first to step forward, toward the trucks.
“New Biafra thanks you for your service,” the brigadier general whispers as she walks past.
Onyii hops onto one of the flatbeds and crouches by the edge while the other girls follow. Some of them go with Kesandu into a separate truck. Obioma calls for the others to come with her in a third.
When all the girls are loaded and the scavenging troops have returned, bags laden with the tech the girls had put together, the brigadier general slaps the backs of the flatbeds like horses, and they start off into the forest.
A few fires still smolder. A few pieces of machinery still crackle and pop. And somewhere amid the dead bodies are Amaka and Chigozie. Onyii hasn’t even been given the chance to bury them.
CHAPTER
12
When Ify opens her eyes, she sees Daurama’s face. Daurama holds Ify so high off the ground that her feet dangle. The visor attached to Daurama’s mask drops, so that Ify can see the full hatred in the young woman’s eyes.
“She did this,” Daurama says to Daren.
“No.” He struggles to stay upright, gripping the straps. “It must have been the other one.”
Ify remembers the girl they killed in the forest. She must have attached an explosive to the craft before they caught her. That’s what she was doing, not running away. Guilt spikes through Ify’s heart that she’d ever doubted the girl. But then the aircraft dips into a sharp somersault. Ify slips from Daurama’s grip, and Daren leaps and holds her against his chest as they hit the ceiling.
Everything is too loud. Daren pulls something from the ceiling, and Ify realizes it’s a mask.
“I don’t have enough time to put the whole suit on you,” he says almost quietly. Too calmly. “But slip the mask on, and it will help with your breathing.”
Ify finds the opening and slips it on, and all of a sudden, the world fills with numbers and percentages and color bars. Data.
“Do not worry, little one. Those are just your vital signs. You’re okay.” He hugs her tighter and reaches behind him and slips something out of a fold in a container that flew to the ceiling. A blanket. Beneath Ify’s fingers, it feels sleek like the skin of their suits. Oily.
The spinning aircraft flings them against a wall. Daren grunts but manages to keep wrapping the blanket around Ify. “Stay still, little one.”
More shouting from the cockpit.
Daren continues to wrap her up, and as the blanket comes over her shoulders and arms, it hardens. She can move inside it, but she can’t get her arms out. Can’t break free.
“It’s okay, little one.”
“What about you?”
He says nothing as he wraps the last bit of blanket over Ify’s head and it hardens into a cocoon. Then he manages to reach for a strap and holds fast as he brings Ify closer. Her body tenses. Too many feelings war inside her. She hears pieces of the aircraft’s armor fall away, engines blow out, consoles fry themselves into oblivion. The shouting grows fevered, then ordered.
Then there’s nothing but silence. As though everyone inside, even the Nigerian soldiers she can’t see, has come to peace with what’s going to happen.
When she looks up, Daren’s eyes are closed.
The window he had opened still reveals the world outside, now a blur of red ground and blue morning sky. Swirling and swirling and swirling.
Daren’s breathing slows. “Trust me,” he whispers.
Ify hold his gaze, shivers.
A wall bursts open. Wind sucks Ify straight into the open air, where she spins so fast the world turns into a mass of colors around her. Blue, brown, red.
Then, nothing but darkness.
CHAPTER
13
The road has smoothed out.
Onyii can tell they’ve left the forest and the farthest reaches of their camp because the roads are actual roads. No potholes, no swerving to avoid mine traps. No low branches slapping windshields, and no elephant grass choking the underside engines and the magnetic charges of the maglev trucks.
It makes things better for the girls in the back of the flatbed truck. Even in the darkness cast by the tarpaulin stretched overhead, Onyii sees some of them squirming, holding broken limbs and trying not to cry. Some of them have let the rocking of the truck lull them into sleep. A few of them even sleep peacefully, and Onyii is grateful they’ve found a few moments of quiet. Others hold themselves tight in their sleep and murmur and thrash their way through nightmares.
With a piece of metal she breaks off of one of the metal beams supporting the tarpaulin, she digs into her prosthetic arm. Her sleeve has peeled away in places, revealing the clockwork underneath. Gears and energy packs connected by tendons; pistons lined up with joints. Her hand is still intact, but her forearm is exposed to the elements. She tries to flex her hand into a fist, but stiffness in her fingers stops her. With the piece of metal, she digs around in her forearm. Sparks jet out. The sound of sizzling reaches some of the others. Onyii’s skin where it lies in flaps on her forearm starts to char. But then she hears the clink. A piece of shrapnel lodged between two cylinders, pressing against a bed of nerves. Onyii taps at it. She grits her teeth as pain shoots up her arm and shoulder. Reflexive tears pool in her closed eyes. But she forces them back open and digs around, tapping, each tap sending needles of fire through half of her body, until she hears the shrapnel come loose. A massive sigh escapes her. Halfway there.
She hooks it with her piece of metal and drags it back until she can find an opening big enough for it. Then she pins it down, raises her arm, then lets it go. The piece of shrapnel falls into her lap. Onyii’s metal arm follows. That took too much energy out of her. Sweat beads her forehead and makes her back and shoulders shine. Her shirt is dark with it.
She glances at the other girls and wonders how many of them are thinking of escape like she is. Some of them squint at the ceiling as the truck moves, working out plans in their minds. But relief simmers in the eyes of others. For them, all that matters is that the battle and the dying are over. For now.
They had tried to hide. Onyii had tried to make a peaceful place for them, a sanctuary where they could stay and avoid the fate that she had had to endure. And just like that, the swirl of memories returns. In some of them, both her arms are flesh and blood. In others, she is already mangled. Scarred. But in all of them, she has a machine rifle in her hands and a machete strapped across her back over her bandolier of bullets. The gun is nearly as big as her. She is eight years old.
Onyii remembers cutting her way through the bush, knowing how to look for the depressions in the earth that mark improvised explosive devices buried beneath the soil. Moving under cover of night to the villages on the outskirts of Nigerian towns and leaving behind a trail of bodies. Her leader had called it liberation, but there was no freedom for the enemy farmers who had lain in pools of their own blood. The weeping families, the people who filled the graves. After a while, her leader had forbidden the digging of graves. Takes too much time, he had said. But they had moved. In an ever-widening semicircle.
The Green-and-Whites had tried to bomb them out of hiding, but the forests were too thick, and they were too good at hiding in them. When the troops would try to fish them out, Onyii and the other militia teams could ambush them easily and steal their gear. Then the Green-and-Whites had been foolish enough to send mechs after them. Mechs that Onyii and the others captured with far too much ease.
Those were the early days of the war, when victory came with the snap of a finger. When everyone had underestimated the strength and the determination of the Biafrans. The War for Independence.
She remembers the joy with which everyone had cheered when they’d secured the airfield with its spaceport and had gained shuttle access. Some had cried in celebration. Others had remained stoic, but by then, Onyii could read the interior emotions of everyone around her. She could tell who was happy with the progress they had made. She could tell who was still thinking of all that they had lost to get there.
She remembers the bombing campaign that took the airfield from them, and she remembers the battles in which they barely managed to hold on to the port.
Her memories come back to her as strategic maneuvers, as troop movements her leader had commanded her and her group to follow. She remembers why they had to do the raids they did. But sometimes she remembers the raids themselves, the people begging to be spared. But her leader had told her, “They attacked us first.” And that was enough for Onyii.
Another memory sneaks up on her.
This time, she’s back in school. Still a child. And all the girls in her class are lined up in a row at the front of the room, in front of Teacher’s desk. Teacher walks up and down the line of girls with a switch in his hands, absentmindedly tapping it against his skinny calf muscle. In the haze of the dreamy memory, Onyii does not remember Teacher’s voice, nor does she remember Teacher’s face, but she r
emembers his gnarled hands, where the knuckles seemed more like swollen bug bites than what should exist on normal human hands. And she remembers Teacher asking them why they were at church when they should have been sleeping, preparing for afternoon class. And Onyii knows this is not a question they are meant to answer. She knows that either way, answer or not, they will be beaten. So the girls say nothing, and Teacher goes down the line and commands each girl to stick her hand out, and Teacher swats their hands in a single swift motion that makes each girl yelp and hold her hand. One girl bounces from foot to foot, biting her lip against the pain. They are all around Onyii’s age, except for Kachi, who was so gifted in school that she skipped several grades. Kachi, who is so small that a single blow would break her.
So when Teacher gets to Kachi, Onyii sticks her own hand out.
“I will take Kachi’s strike,” she says, head bowed. “If you shall do it, do it to me.”
And she remembers her Hausa teacher standing over her, looking at her in shock, before a wide smile stretches across his face. “Okay,” he says in the memory, before winding up and giving Onyii two of his strongest strikes, blows so powerful that they bring Onyii to her knees.
Her hand had gone numb for the rest of the day, and it was a full week before she was able to properly move her fingers again. A week of bathing her hand in ice water every night. A week of not being able to dress herself quickly. A week of having to learn how to write with her other hand.
In the back of the flatbed truck, Onyii flexes her metal hand into a fist. So much of that memory remains vivid in her mind. She can still hear the whistling of the switch as it cut through the air.
The flatbed truck makes a sharp turn, and some of the sleeping girls are jostled awake.
Where Onyii sits, she can see all of them.
I would stick my hand out for all of you, she wants to tell them.
War Girls Page 8