War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  She had never seen anything like it.

  Chinelo wraps her arm around Onyii. She has grown more affectionate since the war ended and since she has had to spend more and more time behind a desk. And it has taken some getting used to. Those nights when Chinelo would trace the scars lining Onyii’s shoulders or those mornings when they would sometimes bathe together.

  One afternoon while they were unloading food crates, Onyii had asked Ngozi about Chinelo’s behavior, if something was wrong with her. Maybe she was as anxious without war as Onyii was. And Ngozi had smiled and stared into space for a few seconds, thinking of something, of someone, and when she had turned to face Onyii, she had said, “Love.”

  Love always makes Onyii think of Ify, which inevitably makes her think of the mass grave in which she had last seen Ify’s dismembered corpse, the grave the brigadier general had shown her on his tablet. So she had stopped thinking of love. For years, she had shut it out. And here it is again. Love.

  “If you love someone, you kill and you die for them,” Onyii had told Ngozi.

  Ngozi had lowered the crate in her hands, then put her fists on her hips. “That is what love looks like in war. But sometimes, in peace, love wears different clothes.” When she stares off into space again, Onyii realizes she is thinking of Kesandu and their last moments together, that kiss they shared in the Okpai oil facility.

  “Love.” Onyii had tasted the word on her tongue. That is what she had felt when she and Chinelo had wept in each other’s arms all those months ago. It’s what she felt back at the War Girls camp, when she would go on a run with Chinelo and hope they’d take the long way back to camp, just so she could spend a little more time in Chinelo’s company.

  And now with Chinelo pressed against her, she mouths the word again.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Chinelo says, as the beginnings of the caravan come into view. “We have some work to do.”

  And Onyii lets her lead her away from the fence, Chinelo’s hand warm in hers.

  CHAPTER

  46

  Ify uses her pack for a pillow. She bunches it up so that it cushions her neck and hides the sharp edges of her tablet and other devices, but still she is unable to sleep. Even though it’s barely dusk, others sleep like the dead, piled in the back of the maglev truck, on top of each other. Many of them are likely strangers. Ify looks at them now. Makeshift mothers holding orphans, other people’s children. Kids stretched out on opposite ends of the flatbed, their feet touching, unknowingly tickling each other in their sleep. A few people huddle by themselves. Some of them have the shell-shocked expression of survivors unable to process any more information.

  Ify knows that look. In the months since she left Nigeria, she has seen it often. People wandering through the forest, unheeding of the fact that they were walking through a minefield. And when a shorthorn or some other animal nearby stepped on one and it exploded, they didn’t even flinch. They just kept walking. Like they were half-dead.

  On the road next to the slow-moving truck, two boys play a game they call saraya in which they take a ball small enough to fit in their palms—like the baseballs Ify has seen in pictures of the old nations of the earth, like the Philippines and the Domincan Republic—and hurl it as high into the air as they can. Some of the boys step back and forth, trying to see the ball in the sky, sometimes shading their eyes to protect from the sun. Then, they reach their arms up and open their hands to try to catch the falling sphere. Sometimes, they let it bounce on the ground, its elasticity snapping it back into the air, and one boy leaps over the other boy to catch it. Boys with Augments direct the ball with their metal arms or legs, activating its magnetic charges to sweep it in an arc along the ground before sending it up in the air again. Like this, they dance in the setting sun. And when the caravan passes through more forest and the older men and some of the Chinese soldiers hack through the bush, the boys play in the shade.

  The one named Agu watches them with that battered touchboard in the crook of his arm.

  From time to time, he brings it out and sits it in his lap, whether he’s sitting upright or reclined, and he’ll lightly tap the keys. There’s no hesitation with him, no tentativeness. It’s not as though he’s relearning the instrument. It’s as though he were born a professional and has never stopped knowing how to play like a virtuoso. His head sways to the sound of the music as it takes hold of him.

  When it ends, he lets out a heavy sigh, his shoulders slumping.

  The scars on his body, where they show through his shirt, have hardened and dulled. Fleetingly, Ify wonders how he got them. What kind of child soldier was he? Was he like the bandits she rescued the caravan from? Did he struggle to carry a Gatling gun with his frail body? Did a shock-machete slap against his thigh whenever he ran through the bush looking for whatever he was going to eat next? He starts to play again.

  Xifeng exits her trailer a few car-lengths behind their flatbed and walks up the makeshift bridge made of pieces of metal bolted together until she gets to the platform attached to the end of the flatbed.

  “Agu!” she calls out.

  In the middle of his song, he stops playing, gathers up his touchboard, and walks with her into her trailer.

  Ify squints at the boy. As much as she can imagine his history, he remains a mystery to her.

  Evening descends and brings with it a breeze.

  When Agu emerges from Xifeng’s trailer, he shakes a little bit, tiny, barely noticeable tremors running through his body. Then, a new peace comes over him. The only free space in the flatbed is next to Ify, so he sits down and resumes his song, right from where he left off.

  Ify is in that groggy space between sleep and wakefulness and only belatedly notices the shift in movement beside her.

  The descent is what wakes her. Fast and loud like the beginnings of a storm or a battle. Her eyes open, and she raises herself on her elbows. The moon is just peeking through the canopy of leaves overhead, the sky still blue with dark. Lying still, she listens. The last note lingers.

  She sees him out of the corner of her eye, and now he seems calm. He lets out a sigh, then leans against the flatbed’s frame.

  Ify pushes herself up onto her elbows. “Where did you learn to do that?” she asks him in a whisper.

  He starts when he hears her. But instead of shuffling the musicboard where she can’t see, he clutches it to his chest. Like it’s the most precious thing in the world. “My sister made me learn how to play this musicboard.” He pauses and looks at the instrument he hugs to his chest. “She told me it would make me better soldier. If I am moving my fingers, I am better able to manipulate the thing I am holding. I am taking apart guns faster and faster. And putting them back together.”

  “Is that who you are going back to? Your sister?”

  For a long time, Agu is quiet. “I stay with the caravans because I can protect the people. Sometimes, when nothing is happening, I feel fire in my head. And it is like ants are all over my skin. My clothes are becoming wet with my sweat, and I am not knowing what is happening. But when I am having gun in my hands, I am calm. I do not know why it is this way. I am thinking it is my programming. I was made for war.”

  “Made?”

  A shadow falls across his face. Shame curls his lips in a sneer.

  “You’re a synth.”

  He nods. “We are the same. Me and those boys who attacked us. I looked at them and even though their eyes are red from chewing qat and not being in their own minds, I know they want the same thing I am wanting. To lie in the wet mud and let the earth swallow me when it rains.”

  Synths only do what they are programmed to. Flashes of memory flit before her eyes. A woman on a bed in a health clinic in the camp where Ify was once a child. The woman playing with a mound of clay molded into a thing with stubby, waving arms and legs. The woman cradling it close to her chest. The woman detonating the bomb insi
de her. A synth. But, strangely, Ify is not scared of Agu. He could probably kill her easily enough, even though she would fight him. She could make him pay for it, but he would still end her life. She knows this and is still not scared of him.

  “It is good, what you are telling me. I am synth. I am soldier. I am doing horrible things, but Xifeng tells me I am also boy and that, once upon a time, I am having mother and father and they are loving me.” A slow smile creeps across his face. “When I am telling her what is going on inside my head, she is looking at me with water in her eyes, and I am feeling like old man because I have seen so much war, and she is only looking at pictures and holograms of war. But she is telling me I am little boy, so I am trying to be little boy. But it is tough. Being little boy.”

  She smiles at him but resists the urge to put a hand on his shoulder. She doesn’t want to touch him, not because he is a synth but because maybe she should leave him to his moment of peace and quiet.

  So she pushes herself up to her feet.

  “Are you okay?” he asks her. The pistol at his waist glints in the moonlight.

  “I’m fine. Thank you.” She looks to the trailer from which Agu had come earlier and adjusts her satchel. “Do you know if Xifeng is sleeping?”

  He giggles, and it’s the strangest sound in the world to Ify’s ears. But it makes her smile. “Xifeng is never sleeping. Too busy helping all of us.” He picks up the rifle that was lying at his side and raises it against his shoulder. To provide watch over the sleeping refugees.

  Ify spares him one last glance before heading down the walkway to Xifeng’s trailer.

  CHAPTER

  47

  The campus below, an hour’s drive from Enugu and even farther from the nearest receiving station, stretches out before Onyii and Chinelo, silent and ghostly. From their perch on the hill, they can see the firing range; the domed arena where the abd practiced their hand-to-hand combat; the spare, spartan building where they had all taken their meals; and the dormitory where they had slept. Or tried to.

  Below her, she sees ghosts. She sees the abd lined up behind their tables at the firing range, wispy specters, with their sisters behind them, directing their gunfire at the plastech targets in the distance. She sees them then huddled in small circles, comparing notes, sometimes with their heads bent in silence while they communed through their comms systems. She sees herself and Chinelo and Ngozi and Obioma and Kesandu and Ginika relaxing on wooden ammo crates someone has dragged into the courtyard.

  “Are you crying?”

  Chinelo’s voice startles Onyii out of her reverie, and she hurriedly wipes the tears from her face, metal arm scraping against the metal frame around her eye. “I’m fine.”

  “If you ask me, I think we could do without this Truth and Reconciliation Commission nonsense. It’s a shame we have to destroy this place.”

  Onyii remembers the day the ceasefire was declared.

  Biafrans in the capital had whispered about the imminent announcement. No one but Chinelo and members of the military leadership knew when the declaration would be made, what day, what time. But new hope had filled the city. And as day turned to night, people set up monitors on their roofs and in the streets, and people filed out into the roadways, stopping all traffic, to watch the Biafran prime minister with a military commander beside him address the Nigerian president while oyinbo from the Colonies stood around them. Then the prime minister and the president shook hands, and the secretary-general of the United World Council announced in several languages that a formal ceasefire in the Nigerian Civil War had been declared.

  The city had erupted. Biafrans cheering, hugging, weeping.

  And Onyii and Chinelo, in their military uniforms, had stood apart from it all. Even though bodies crowded them in the street, jostling them, embracing them, even, at one point, hoisting them into the air, Onyii had felt numb, and when she had looked over to Chinelo, she saw the same numbness. They had lost their closest friends—their loved ones—in order to bring about this moment. And all the while, a single question had repeated itself in Onyii’s mind: What happens next?

  “We will be targeted by the commission,” Onyii says to Chinelo now as they look down on the campus where they had trained their warriors, those boys the Biafrans will never hear about, the ones who had helped to engineer the birth of their nation. “Because of the hostage incident.”

  “That is how it works, right? We are the ones in the dirt, digging in the ground and planting the seeds. So when the authorities come by and ask ‘Who is dirty from all this work?’ there is only us, while everyone else has been watching.”

  “It is not like we are taking a shower, Chinelo. We will go on trial. They will hang us.”

  Chinelo shrugs. “Maybe they will hang some Nigerians too.”

  Onyii looks to the ground and whispers, “I should volunteer myself. Once we wipe this place out, the only traces that remain of our work will be us. The last pieces of evidence. I will say that I was the squad commander that led the raid on the facility. I was the one responsible for the deaths of the hostages. If they want to blame someone, let it be me.”

  Chinelo smacks Onyii on the back of the head. “Stupid goat! There was surveillance. You cannot say, ‘I was the leader’ when it is clear from the footage and their records that I was the captain of this ship.” She laughs. “Do you think I will let you take credit for my work? We are not in primary school-oh!”

  But I can save some of us, Onyii says to herself, remembering how she had found Agu sitting by his bed in his dorm room, his touchboard in his lap. Then the walk up the mountain. And, when she finally ordered him to leave, the human hurt in his face that he tried not to let her see.

  “You will wear your eyes out with all that crying,” Chinelo says, with forced playfulness.

  Onyii doesn’t bother wiping the tears from her face. But at least she has stopped crying.

  Chinelo waits a few more moments for Onyii to collect herself. “Are you ready?”

  Onyii nods.

  Chinelo pulls out the detonator, gets ready to press the button, but stops. She looks at it, then hands it to Onyii. “You do it.”

  Onyii shakes her head. “No. It is you who should do it.” She forces a smile. “I cannot take credit for your work.”

  Chinelo smiles without irony. “Okay.”

  Then she presses the button.

  They both look out over the campus as explosions ripple through it, and the buildings collapse, falling inward, and the earth opens up beneath it all to swallow it whole.

  Onyii reaches out with her human hand. When Chinelo touches her palm, Onyii squeezes. Their skin glows in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER

  48

  Even though Ify steps as lightly as she can, the beams of the walkway still creak beneath her. A few of the refugees stir in their sleep as she passes, but she continues until she gets to Xifeng’s trailer. It’s so big it takes up nearly the entire width of the trail. The fat leaves from the trees overhead whisper in the breeze.

  There are no windows to it, so she can’t tell if there are any lights on.

  Ify feels around for an opening. A latch, a keypad, anything. Her fingers find grooves in the metal, nuts and bolts, edges where the metal plates overlap, but nothing that suggests an opening. Frustrated, she digs in her satchel for her tablet, powers it on, and inputs a sequence. A series of nodes and edges rises before her: the trailer’s security system. In a second, she hacks the thing, and the area of curved steel before her hisses open. Steam billows out, and a rush of cold air washes over her. It’s a blessing in the humid night. She peeks in to see a space that looks much bigger than its outside suggests. Consoles everywhere, and headsets that hang from the ceiling. There are old tablets and papers all over the place. Drawings and ledgers cover the floor.

  Her feet track in mud. She tries, as best she can, to not leave an
y prints on the scattered paper, to disturb nothing, to not leave a single trace that she was here. In the center of the room is a table with a surface that glows blue. When she gets closer to it, she sees that it’s a map. Of Biafra. The coastline and the jungle inland, marked by a faint green. Red indicates pathways, even where trees and other foliage would disguise them from above. Some of the paths lead into open field, into clearings. And some of those clearings have a series of question marks next to them. The others bear numbers: 2, 7, 12, 89. She wonders what those numbers mean, then she gasps. Each field, each clearing, when she squints, reveals turned earth. Graves. People are buried in these places. Many people.

  Beyond Biafra is a stretch of red that cuts across Nigeria like a wound. The Redlands just below the Middle Belt, the land taken by radiation. There’s nothing to mark it, no recently turned earth to indicate mass graves, no markings of where battles had happened or where villages had been razed or where tent cities had erupted into being. No markings where troops from either side had been stationed. Just untouched redness.

  She finds herself leaning over, focusing on the red. And looking for that site that has by now most likely been covered in sand from new dust storms. There’s no reason to believe it would still be visible after all these years, but a part of her wonders if she’ll be able to pinpoint that spot in the desert where her aircraft had crashed. The aircraft that had held her and Daren and Daurama. After she had been kidnapped—rescued—from Onyii and the Biafrans.