War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  A railway-like groove holds the sphere and swirls its way to the other end of the chamber. As Golibe pushes, he has to keep changing the ball’s path. It groans against the metal grooves.

  Red digital numbers on monitors in the observation room record his level of force, as well as his vital signs. A few technicians and doctors, sent in to monitor the group after the mission at the oil derricks, hunch over their consoles. Others stand with their arms behind their backs. The data is beamed directly into their tablets.

  One of the doctors shakes his head. There’s a number panel in Golibe’s room, and he glances at it before lowering his head and bringing his shoulder into the effort to increase his leverage. He grits his teeth. The sphere moves faster. His brows knit together, and Onyii doesn’t have to look at his vital signs to know he’s in physical pain. The look on his face is enough.

  What is he thinking? Onyii crosses her arms. She wonders if he is busy reliving his last moments with his sister. Before that Nigerian pilot disabled her mech, then caved in her cockpit with his hammer, smashing Ginika into the watery depths of the lagoon. Is he replaying her last words? Does he hear it all, or is the memory soundless?

  Or has he blocked it out entirely?

  He pushes until an electronic beeping sound signals for him to stop.

  “Proceed to Station Two,” Chinelo orders, her voice level.

  Chinelo seems just as opaque. Shut off.

  The mission broke all of us, Onyii lets herself think before returning to Golibe’s training.

  Several of his wires detach from him, but others stick despite the layers of sweat and grime that coat his skin. Golibe moves to the other end of the room, arms stiff at his sides, toes resting against the edge of the red line that shows the fifty meters he has to run.

  Chinelo gives him a moment to pause before saying, “Go.”

  Legs pumping, Golibe darts to the opposite red line, exactly fifty meters away, taps it with the tips of his fingers, then cuts through the air to arrive at his starting point, going back and forth for exactly ten minutes. For a human, it would be punishment of the most extreme order. But Golibe is a synth. Just like Agu. Just like Chiamere. Just like Nnamdi was. And Obioma’s abd. And Kalu.

  “Stop,” Chinelo says in that mechanical voice of hers. “Station Three.”

  Golibe heads to a two-handed bar attached by its middle to a cable. The cable lies coiled in a neat circle on a space shorter than the distance between his shoulders. He sets his feet apart, bracing himself.

  “Pull,” says Chinelo.

  With all his strength, he pulls, the length of cable tightening against his effort.

  “Harder,” says Chinelo.

  Maybe Chinelo is punishing him. Is there any other reason to strain him this much? What could she be looking for by putting him through this?

  Golibe’s hands tighten on the bar, knuckles cracking. His eyes glaze over as his body seems to move without him.

  “Enough,” Chinelo says.

  But Golibe doesn’t move. His body continues to shiver with effort.

  “Enough,” Chinelo says, louder.

  He’s still pulling.

  “Golibe, that’s enough!”

  He doesn’t hear her. Can’t. Suddenly, a loud pop sounds, and he staggers backward, a stunned look in his eyes. His left arm hangs limp at his side.

  Behind Onyii, the doctors recite numbers and record their results. Another one enters Golibe’s training room through a side door and fits him with a sling before leading him out to the personal physician waiting for him.

  Chinelo heads off to another room without a word. Onyii follows. It disturbs her to see her war-sister like this. It is as though Chinelo has been turned into her complete opposite. Where before there were laughter and jokes, now there is only angry, determined silence. Onyii recognizes the anger, the need to hit things while being surrounded by things you’re not supposed to hit. But it seems so strange to see it in Chinelo.

  In the smaller surveillance room, Chinelo takes a seat beside one of the technicians and focuses on one of the screens. It reveals a doctor’s examining room.

  “How’s your arm, Golibe?” the doctor asks, with what sounds like actual concern in his voice.

  “It is fine, sah.”

  The man gestures to an empty swivel chair, and Golibe takes the seat. A small window of silence opens between them before the doctor pulls a tablet out of his drawer. Chinelo zooms in to see the tablet opened up onto a photo album. The doctor enlarges the first photo, then rotates the tablet for Golibe to see. Each face has a number beneath it, and immediately following each face is a picture of hands or eyes or the closed lips of a smile. Patiently, the doctor scrolls through them.

  “Which ones do you know?” the doctor asks.

  “Number one is Chinelo. Numbers three, seven, and fifteen are Kesandu, Ngozi, and Obioma. Numbers four, eight, and sixteen are their abd. Number twenty is Onyii. Number twenty-three is Agu.” He pauses. “The rest, I do not know.”

  Onyii can’t tell if Ginika’s face is among those on the tablet. Did Golibe see it and not recognize her? Has he already forgotten her? Has he chosen to?

  “How did I do?” Golibe asks.

  “You did fine,” the doctor replies, as though Golibe were an actual boy.

  But Golibe’s shoulders slump. “I’m getting worse.” He lowers his eyes.

  “Just try not to exert yourself too strenuously over the next few days. Watch your arm. And remember to record your dreams tonight.”

  Well after Golibe leaves the examination room and heads back to his dorm on campus, Chinelo stares at the screen.

  Onyii wants to ask Chinelo if they are all like this, if this is how they mourn, how they deal with loss.

  Is this what Agu would do if he lost me?

  * * *

  In the mess hall, Onyii watches Chiamere and Agu eat in silence. Chinelo sits down across from her. Onyii wonders if Chinelo notices the silence that hangs over the abd too.

  She catches Onyii staring and glares. For a moment, their eyes meet. After a beat, Chinelo’s face softens. “With the program suspended indefinitely, we may not be able to rebuild our teams.”

  “The Biafran government or whoever gives the orders here, they must still need us for something.”

  “You see what condition we are in, Onyii. What mission could we possibly accomplish?”

  That silences Onyii until she looks up at the abd again. “Is Golibe in his room?”

  “Why are you so fascinated with him?” Chinelo barks without looking up from her rice and stew.

  Onyii gives Chinelo one last look before wordlessly busing her tray.

  She doesn’t know why Golibe’s behavior bothers her so much. They were never close; he was Ginika’s. In fact, she should be lucky Agu is alive and well after everything that has happened. Maybe she needs to know what happens after a sister dies. Maybe she needs to know what Agu would do.

  “Maybe I’m just drawn to orphans,” she mutters wryly to herself as she approaches the hall where the abd sleep.

  Golibe’s bedroom looks like it could have belonged to any of the abd. No decorations on the wall, no toys or tools scattered across the made bed. No holographic photos rising from devices on the windowsill. The table is empty of ammunition and weapons.

  Onyii goes to the window and opens it to allow some fresh air. That’s when she notices something peeking out from beneath Golibe’s pillow. It looks like some sort of disc. She lifts the pillow to find four shiny metal discs laid out in a row on the bed and some sort of outdated player with a small screen. She picks up the first and turns it over in her fingers. The discs are tiny and old-fashioned. These days, data would be beamed or collected directly in a recording device. No need for external hardware. Onyii slides the disc in the player, and Ginika appears on the screen.

&n
bsp; Her tribal scar lines her cheekbone. Her chin rests in her palm, her gaze focused on something outside the photo’s frame. The picture seems more interested in her hand and her fingers than her face. Her face seems blurrier, more out of focus than her chewed fingernails and her smooth knuckles. Onyii never saw Ginika smile like that.

  She slips each disc into her pouch.

  Agu’s room is just down the hall. She doesn’t know why she’s been avoiding him. Part of her wants to make sure he’s okay, but another part of her is afraid of what she’ll find. And yet another part of her is furious that she’s allowed herself to grow this close to him.

  A distress signal blares over her comms.

  No words, just the continuous roar of a red alert and the thunder of bootsteps in the direction of the chapel.

  Onyii runs as fast as she can out of Golibe’s room and down the halls of the dorm.

  By the time Onyii arrives at the chapel, a crowd has already gathered.

  No one has their weapons drawn, but a murmur hangs over the crowd. At the center of the circle is Golibe’s body, laid out on his back with his arms slightly spread, like a boy lying in the grass and staring at the sky. A single gunshot has taken away half his face. The gun is in his hand.

  But what chills Onyii is the smile.

  The only time Onyii has ever seen that look on his face.

  CHAPTER

  38

  Ify doesn’t know how long she’s been in this cell alone. But it’s long enough for the visions to have become a regular occurrence. It always begins with a buzzing. Then a sharp pain in her jaw. Then she is plunged into a distorted hallucination plagued by static and blurring images. Smells that move from one extreme to another, day that turns to night then day again before her very eyes. Katakata.

  She squeezes her eyes shut and grips her head in her hands and screams. She does not know how long the howl erupts from her throat, but when she stops, she hears soft singing, her mother’s voice, lilting and swaying in Yoruba, like elephant grass in a gentle breeze:

  Ekun meran, mee!

  O tori bo igbo, mee!

  O torun bo dan, mee!

  O fe mu un, mee!

  Ko ma le mu o, mee!

  Oju ekun pon, mee!

  Iru ekun nle, mee!

  The leopard stalks the goat, baa!

  It searches the forest, baa!

  It searches the bush, baa!

  It wants to capture it, baa!

  No, you can’t capture it, baa!

  The leopard’s eyes are red, baa!

  The leopard’s tail stands on end, baa!

  And Ify’s mama holds Ify by her wrists, bouncing her on her lap, and every time she imitates the goat, she puts her nose to baby Ify’s nose and scrunches her face, and baby Ify giggles without control.

  Ify watches the scene play out with tears brimming in her eyes. She lies on the floor and tries to push herself up to her knees. Her mama and her younger self rest against the far wall, and she reaches toward them. They feel so real.

  “Mama,” Ify whimpers from the floor, knowing the vision isn’t real but unable to stop herself. “Mama.” Her mother’s hair comes down past her shoulders in thick, silver locs, and her face is lined with only a few wrinkles, not marks of age so much as marks of wisdom and strength. Beneath her gown are muscles, but her skin is so soft it glows in the natural light that shines in the memory. “Mama.”

  Ify crawls closer and closer until she can hear the song clearly. Her mother twists her in the air with each bounce, and now baby Ify can’t stop giggling, and halfway through her mother’s fourth time singing the lullaby, she clutches baby Ify tight to her chest and whispers in her hair, then she pats her back, and baby Ify lets out an unselfconscious burp. Ify can’t stop crying. She gets closer to the vision, close enough to touch the hem of her mother’s garments, but as soon as she puts her hand down, the vision is gone. There is nothing but her empty, too-white cell.

  “Make it stop,” she whimpers.

  Her bottom lip trembles, then pain explodes in her head. She collapses to the floor. Her Accent. It feels as though her Accent has lit the inside of her skull on fire. “Take it out! Take it out!” she cries. “Take it out!” She climbs to her feet and stalks toward her door and bangs, each blow gathering strength. “Take it out! Take it out! Take it out! Take it out, take it out, take it out! Take it OUT!”

  The door slides open, and guards dressed in black with green-and-white patches on their arms snatch her off her feet. She struggles in their grip, but secretly, she’s glad. Their grip feels real. And during the interrogation that awaits her, she knows she will be speaking to a real person. She knows she will hear a real voice. Maybe a real hand will slap her or figure out some other form of torture. But it will all be real. In that interrogation room, the smells, the sounds, the sights, all of it will be terrifyingly, gratifyingly real.

  CHAPTER

  39

  In Chinelo’s office, the recording of the surveillance footage plays without sound. It reveals a view from high up: the bell tower. Much of what it watches is cast in shadows, but Onyii, sitting with Chinelo behind her desk, doesn’t need to change any of the settings on the tablet out of which the hologram footage emerges to know what she is watching. She has watched this, alongside Chinelo, at least a dozen times already.

  Golibe stands half in the moonlight, half in the darkness. For a long time, he is still, as though he’s nothing but a tree or a small boulder. Then, in one motion, he brings the gun to his eye, arms just barely long enough to aim it correctly. A silent explosion of light from the muzzle flashes. Then the boy topples onto his back, his arms splayed out just like how they’d found him.

  “Ritualized,” Chinelo says to herself. “A double tap through the left eye.”

  “Who pulled the trigger the second time?” Onyii asks.

  “He did,” Chinelo replies, powering off the tablet and turning in her seat to look at Onyii. “Muscle reflex before his brain shut down. He’d calculated the muscle reflex to kick in and get his finger to pull the trigger one more time.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and lets out a sigh that seems to deflate her. “We thought we could do it ourselves.”

  “Do what?”

  Chinelo sobs. Onyii can see in the way her body tightens that she’s struggling to keep from crying. “We’d imagined this as an elite unit, and the Abd Program was to be an extension of our own family. Those are the strongest bonds, so, it follows, we would fight hardest for those we considered family. We would operate in secret, do those jobs the government or the army couldn’t take credit for. Those jobs that the people behind the peace effort could still disavow. We would get dirty so they didn’t have to. Anything to free Biafra. It was . . . it was a way to keep the War Girls together. To let us run our own way. And now . . .”

  “It’s dangerous,” Onyii says, “what you’ve been doing.” Her mind works through the pieces she’s figured out so far: the intense relationship between the sister and her abd, the conditioning, how much the synths look and sound and move like humans. Like little brothers.

  Chinelo barks a hurtful laugh and gets to her feet. “And who are you to tell me what is dangerous?” Her words have turned sharp, bladed. “What do you know of what is dangerous and what is not? You’ve wanted to die ever since you lost Ify. Every single day, I’ve watched you try to kill yourself. You fly into battle and leave your team behind, even when you do have backup. But most of the time, you don’t even bother with a team at all.” She draws close to Onyii, so that they stand nearly nose to nose. “Don’t think I didn’t read your field reports. I know all about how you’ve been fighting these past four years.” She snarls. “If I’d waited a month to find you, you would’ve been dead.” Then she steps back, her teeth bared in a sneer. “You. You’re mostly metal anyway.”

  Onyii’s fist cracks Chine
lo’s jaw so hard that Chinelo staggers to the floor. Onyii can only stare stunned at where her prosthetic fist has swung. Her arm is still extended, frozen in the motion. She’d moved without thinking. All body. Her mind had evaporated. She had struck her best friend. She could have killed her.

  Chinelo gets to her feet, rubbing her already swollen jaw. It takes her a few seconds to catch her breath. Then she wipes the stream of blood running down the side of her mouth and turns to go.

  Onyii is too stunned—by Chinelo’s words, by the punch—to follow her out.

  * * *

  Onyii finds Ngozi sitting on a bench in the central courtyard of the campus. Weeds fill the cracks between the cobblestones. Fallen leaves from the trees that line the paths litter the ground. This is just another sign of the absence of the abd. No one around to clean.

  Ngozi stares at a spot on the ground. She has that look in her eyes that Onyii has already seen in so many. Staring at nothing, but seeing everything. She has the look of someone reliving the worst thing that has ever happened to them. Nnamdi’s death. Her cheeks are slack, the tribal markings on them sharp against the dulled color in her face.

  With a start, Ngozi notices Onyii, then settles. In another time, Ngozi, startled, might have reached first for the pistol at her side and fired at whatever had surprised her. But now there is no battle-readiness. As though her training has left her completely.

  She returns to that spot on the ground. “Maybe this is why Obioma never named her abd.”

  Onyii stands a little behind the bench Ngozi sits on and thinks back to that kiss she had shared with Kesandu before Kesandu and Kalu had gone off to their deaths. Ngozi had seemed so alive with Kesandu’s body pressed against hers. Filled with fire. As though when their lips touched, Kesandu had breathed her own spirit into her lover’s body.