War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  With the room emptied, the leader walks in and shakes her head at the mess. She turns. That’s when Onyii sees her face.

  Kesandu.

  Kesandu’s eyes become wide. Whatever hardness was in them before vanishes, and she runs to Onyii and wraps her tight against her chest.

  She holds Onyii out at arms’ length and looks her up and down. Even now, in the midst of joy, her grip is firm. “Oh my goodness, Onyii. I heard you were here, but I couldn’t believe it. We’ve heard so many stories of you on the front, but Chinelo is always telling us that half of them are made up. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. It’s really you.” The words tumble over each other. It’s like Kesandu is a child again.

  And that’s when Onyii notices the boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, who stands just taller than Kesandu’s hips. His skin where it’s exposed is patchy. Discolored in places. Like he has vitiligo.

  “Oh!” Kesandu says, following Onyii’s gaze. “This is Kalu. My abd.” She puts her hand on the boy’s head. “Kalu, this is your Auntie Onyii.”

  The boy is stone-faced. Not afraid, not curious. His eyes betray no emotion. He wears a shoulder holster and has a knife in a scabbard at his waist.

  “Say hi to your Auntie Onyii.”

  The boy sticks out his hand. Fast, like he’s drawing a gun.

  Onyii takes the boy’s hand, and his fingers squeeze. Too hard. The gears in Onyii’s hand whirr and hum with activity until the boy lets her hand go.

  “Let me bring you to the others,” Kesandu says while Onyii rubs her hand. “They are at the firing range. They will be happy to see you.”

  As they leave the common room, Onyii can’t take her eyes off the boy. “Your abd?” she asks Kesandu quietly.

  “Yes. He is very skilled. I will show you when we are outside.”

  Onyii tries to find the word in Igbo, but it does not exist. She has only heard it spoken by the Fulani and other Nigerians in the North.

  In Arabic, abd means slave.

  * * *

  Wind takes the staccato sound of gunfire up into the hills, then through the mountain ridges that surround the firing range. Kesandu drives the jeep up the barely covered magnetic rails leading to the field. When they get there, Onyii sees the young women scattered about, some of them clustered together, while little boys just like Kesandu’s abd stand at their stations with their boxes of ammunition beside them and fire at targets Onyii can’t yet see.

  Before they crest the rise, Onyii can hear their voices. They sound older, which makes sense, given it’s been four years. But how much can a person change in four years?

  When the jeep comes to a rest, Kesandu and her abd, Kalu, hop out. Onyii’s a bit slower, but as soon as she gets out, her legs falter. She leans against the hood of the jeep to stabilize herself, then looks up to see Kesandu and Kalu up ahead, Kesandu saying something Onyii can’t hear and gesturing back toward Onyii.

  Some of the girls drop what they’re holding. Some of them run toward Onyii. Some of them simply stand where they are and smirk. Satisfied. Like they won a secret wager. Obioma is the one who comes running. She stops halfway and shouts back over her shoulder, “Who said you could stop shooting?” The pistol shots that had ceased start up again.

  When Onyii and Obioma meet, Onyii takes a few seconds to look her over. Obioma slaps Onyii’s shoulder with the back of her hand and says, “Eh-HEH! The prodigal daughter has returned! We heard stories-oh! We heard stories about you!” She drapes her arm over Onyii’s shoulder, and Onyii’s left wondering who this new woman is. She seems worlds away from the shy, trembling leaf of a girl who barely survived the raid on the camp four years ago. It is as though something has been unlocked in her. She walks Onyii to the center of the range. There stand a few women Onyii’s age, but she doesn’t recognize them. They could have come from the camp, but the years in between then and now, Onyii realizes, can make a person unrecognizable. She knows she should feel joy at the reunion, at having found a friend alive and well. But when she reaches inside of herself, she finds nothing. Only numbness.

  Obioma brings Onyii to their circle, and they introduce themselves.

  “Ngozi,” says the one with box braids coming down to the small of her back.

  “Ginika,” says the one in a sleeveless combat vest with half of a sun tattooed on her left shoulder.

  They each shake Onyii’s hand, then step back, as though they’re waiting for her to say something. Waiting for her to be like all the stories they’ve heard of the Demon of Biafra.

  There is no Demon of Biafra, Onyii wants to tell them. There’s just a War Girl.

  Onyii nods over Ngozi’s shoulder at the little boy with the assault rifle pressed against his shoulder.

  “Ah,” Ngozi says, smirking, “Nnamdi.” She walks toward the boy, and the rest of the girls follow.

  Nnamdi has his rifle ready and aimed, while the abd to his right arranges the semiautomatic pistol rounds on his table. His hands and neck have the same patchwork discoloration as Kalu’s.

  “All right, begin,” says Ngozi.

  Nnamdi lets loose a series of three-round bursts aimed at targets five hundred meters away. The targets rattle each time he fires, shaking as if possessed. Then, after each burst, they right themselves. He calmly sets the Beretta AR70/90 on the table and waves to someone far in the distance. A spotter. On the table lie a box of ammunition and two spare clips.

  “Nnamdi!” calls the the spotter in a clear voice that rings over the field. “One, clean shots to chest and head. Two, clean shots to chest and head. Three, clean shots to chest.”

  Onyii expects the boy to smile, but he has the same expressionlessness as Kesandu’s abd. Mechanically, Nnamdi detatches the butt of his rifle, hefts it once again, and holds it at his hip. Ngozi puts a hand to his shoulder.

  “That’s enough for now,” she says.

  The boy’s hands fall to his sides, and he stands still, like an android waiting to be told what to do.

  “What is he?” Onyii asks.

  “He’s a survivor,” Ngozi says, smiling.

  Ginika calls back over her shoulder. “Golibe! Oya, come here!”

  From not far away, a young boy walks, a Benelli shotgun resting against his shoulder. “Yes, Mama,” Golibe says, his near-bald head scratchy with newly grown hair.

  “Oya, go and clean up some of the ammo. And help your spotter bring in the targets.”

  With that, the boy dashes off toward the field into which Nnamdi had been firing earlier. He moves fast, with regular strides. Onyii can’t help following his movements.

  “The abd are special,” Ginika says, taking her gaze from Golibe. “It helps to not see them as boys.”

  “What?”

  “They are weapons. It’s a new program Chinelo put together. Each of us is paired with an abd. We train them for special missions. Clandestine operations. The things too delicate for a mech pilot to bash her way through.” She doesn’t raise her eyebrow at Onyii, but Kesandu can see the tension in Onyii’s balled fist and moves to stand between them, all the while pretending all is well.

  “After the Nigerians bomb a town or a village, we sneak in to see who can be rescued. Some of those we rescue are alive enough to survive cyberization. We give them new bodies, repair their minds, and hand them an opportunity to serve their country and fight for Biafra. We condition them, and we train them. As you can see here.”

  Onyii watches it all, and maybe it’s the extra rest she’s had, but she sees the images too clearly. She can picture the rubble left behind after an aerial bombing campaign launched by the Green-and-Whites. She can picture the families buried underneath, the Biafrans whose cries for help are choked by dust. She can picture the rescue teams racing from location to location, trying to pull bodies from their makeshift graveyards. And among those rescue teams are the girls here, looking for boys whose bodies
can be salvaged. Whose bodies can adjust to someone else’s arms or someone else’s legs. With skin grafted on from over a dozen people. A collection of body parts fused onto an artificial skeleton. A collection of other people’s memories thrown into a single braincase. The skin discoloration makes sense now.

  “They’re synths,” she says bitterly. It was a synth that bombed their camp all those years ago, a body implanted with just enough neural data to fake being a person, then sent on its mission. No soul. No thought to call their own. She had only seen adult synths. Androids fashioned to resemble fully grown humans. These are something new.

  Kesandu draws closer to Onyii. “We’re giving them a chance to strike back.” More quietly, she says, “This is what they would want.”

  “How can a synth want?” Onyii looks at her metal hand, then flexes. So this is what Chinelo meant by sabbatical. She’s just preparing Onyii for a new type of mission.

  “Where’s Chinelo’s office?”

  Obioma puts her hands to her hips and laughs. “Oh, you will see her just like that?”

  “She thinks she can just throw me in a boys’ dormitory and forget about me, eh?” Onyii smirks, then reaches in an ammunition crate for a pistol she tucks into her belt. “Never mind. I will find her myself. You continue playing with your children.”

  She tries to sound like she’s joking, but she still feels ill at ease. All the while, one of the abd has been firing his pistol. Even now, the sound of gunshots firing at regular intervals follows Onyii all the way off the range.

  CHAPTER

  20

  When Daren had told Ify about Biafra’s child soldiers, disgust had been her first reaction, rumbling in her stomach and her heart. But in the days that had followed, the disgust gave way to something else, a realization: she was almost one of those children. A child trapped in war-filled southern Nigeria. This is what they would have turned her into if they’d had enough time. This is the thought she carries with her as Daren takes her on a tour through a camp filled with detention centers for recently captured Biafran soldiers. To everyone else, she is an aide to a senior officer in the Nigerian Armed Forces, Kato Mobile Defense Unit, dutifully documenting the war effort and assisting the officer in administrative matters. An honor no other student at the Nigerian Consortium for Social and Technical Sciences has been given. But she knows this is just Daren’s way of making sure they spend time together. It’s always nicer when Daurama’s not around, despite how much Daren seems to delight in his blood sister’s company.

  The concrete startles her. All of the buildings are made out of it, not of the glass and steel she is used to seeing in Abuja. Everything here is blocked off from view, where, in Abuja, everything is available for everyone to see. Here, even the guards wear masks.

  “Why don’t they show their faces?” Ify asks Daren. Their robes flow around them, shimmering. In Ify’s helmet, radiation readings roll down her screen. A Terminal has not yet been installed here. As this had been previously unconquered territory, the poisonous air has not yet been totally cleared. But Ify doesn’t worry. The helmet is just an extra layer of protection. Her Accent reassures her that levels here are low enough that a quick bath in the regeneration pools back home should be more than enough to clean away any dust or chemicals carrying residual radiation.

  The pathways between the concrete buildings are still unpaved, and little clouds of dust puff up around Ify’s ankles with each step she takes. The hem of Daren’s robe is red-brown with irradiated grime, but he seems unbothered.

  “Can you show me?”

  “Show you what, Kadan?” He looks ahead like he’s staring far into the distance past anything she can see.

  “One of the rehabilitation centers. For the children.” She wants to tell him so many of the things roiling inside her, so many of the thoughts running around in her head. Her memories of her time in the camp with the Biafrans, how she almost shared the fate of these children, the possibility that they might someday share hers. It heartens her to think of the children as fellow Nigerians. To clean them up, give them proper showers, provide them with proper hygiene, proper education, to give them homes and to teach them how to behave in them. “I want to see them.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to see the school we are building farther down the way? It is a basic structure, but that is only because this camp is meant to be temporary.”

  “I want to see what they look like.”

  Daren hesitates, then smiles and looks around for the nearest detention center. Inclining his head, he makes a turn and leads Ify down another dirt pathway.

  It’s only after he nods to the two masked guards outside and they enter a dark anteroom that Ify realizes that Daren never answered her question about the masks. One of the guards inside the anteroom approaches Daren and looks down at Ify for a moment before looking back at Daren.

  Daren smiles at the guard. “We are just conducting a tour of the facilities. This young one is one of our brightest students from Abuja, and she is interested in studying the rebels. She thinks when she grows up that she will become an anthropologist, but I personally believe she’ll grow into a desire for space exploration.”

  Ify frowns at Daren. Why is he telling these lies? She doesn’t want to “study” the Biafrans. But then she turns the thought over in her head. Isn’t that just what she intends on doing? Talking to them, observing them, tracking their habits. How is that different from the physics she studies in the classroom or the half-mech animals she watches in the fields and tries to hack? To understand?

  She doesn’t have the time to reach a solution before the guard barks a few orders to others who man the station, then looks down again at Ify.

  “I’m sorry, but I will have to take your jewelry, miss.”

  “What?” Instinctively, Ify clutches her kimoyo beads. The thought of entering a new space without them chills her. Her Accent is so much lesser without their amplifying power. There’s so much data she’d be missing out on. And she’d have no way of reading the children, of getting their health levels and gauging their mental agility, of seeing what effect, if any, that sustained contact with the radiation has meant for their bodies. She backs into Daren, who puts his hands on her shoulders, almost like an embrace.

  “It’s okay, Kadan.” He rubs warmth and reassurance into her. “We will retrieve them when we leave.”

  “But why do they have to keep them here?”

  The faceless guard steps forward. “Even though the rebels are caged, they may try to use our technology as a weapon. They are very clever, despite their lack of intelligence. And we must not give them any means to bring about an escape or to cause any harm to Nigerians in this facility.” Behind his mask, his face seems to soften. “It is for your protection. And ours.”

  At that, Ify looks at her bracelet, then reluctantly twists one of the beads to power it down. Then she slips it over her hand, twists a bead on her necklace, and detaches the magnet fasteners at the back of her neck. She hands them to the guard, who puts them somewhere Ify can’t see, and Ify almost reaches for her Accent, then stops. Removing that would be too painful. It is clasped to her skin, like an earring but inside her ear. She would be utterly lost without it. She stops herself just in time. The guard doesn’t notice.

  When the guard is satisfied, he leads them through a skinny passageway that opens out onto a wider corridor. The whole place is made of stone, and when Ify tries to turn on her Accent, she realizes why. To block signals. To keep people from connecting to larger networks. She tries to imagine what it must be like to be shut off not only from the net but also from the possibility of it.

  They turn a corner and head down another corridor, this one lined with one-room cells, some of them empty. The thresholds to the rooms look clear, transparent, as though there is nothing there, but Ify sees the shimmer in the air and the beeping light above the doorways that tells her a force f
ield keeps these children in their cages.

  “The rebels wear collars around their necks,” the guard tells Ify and Daren, “so that any unpermitted movements will result in an electric current being run through their body. Some of them, however, have adapted to pain and can withstand more. So we have a fail-safe device installed. If a rebel strays too far from their designated location, the collar detonates.”

  Ify recoils in horror. When she looks into the cells, she sees individual boys, many of them dressed in unclean rags. Brown with mud they must have crawled through at some point. Unwashed. Most of them keep their heads bowed, their bodies utterly still. She can’t tell if they do this out of shame or out of something else, a more violent impulse. Others look their captors straight in the face, expressionless and defiant at the same time. These have a hollowness in their eyes.

  “Are they all like this? Held separately?”

  The guard does a scan of each cell, turning his head back and forth regularly, like he is on patrol. “The older ones who have undergone Augmentation, we keep apart. They may try to form closed neural networks and plot an operation.”

  “Are they all boys?” Ify sounds more like a scientist than a concerned human being, and it bothers her.

  The guard sneers. “The Biafrans do not value their women.” And he leaves it at that.

  Ify frowns. She knows that’s a lie, but what will she say? That she used to live among them? That the soldiers who raised her were among the fiercest she ever saw? That, in the camp, women were leaders and teachers and gardeners and soldiers? To speak of the Biafrans that way would probably mark her for treason.

  “Their families send them to war, because they believe it to be a patriotic duty,” Daren says, his voice calm and level. Like he’s talking about how a caterpillar walks. “Some of them go feral in the jungle. These are only partially cyberized.” Daren steps to one of the cells and looks down on a boy who curls in on himself. “And the work is sloppy.” It’s as though Daren has to keep himself from spitting on the boy. Ify has never seen him like this.