By her hand is a keypad. Though all the lettering is in Mandarin, her fingers know exactly what to do, and with the push of a few keys, the map zooms out, the land appearing as though viewed by a bird that has shot itself high into the air. Here, she is able to see all of the Sahel. That region that stretches from Senegal in the west all the way to Ethiopia in the east, the old national boundaries overlaid with the regional alliance blocs. Dotting the map in certain rural areas, Ify realizes, are space ports. Launching shuttles to the Colonies above. When she closes her eyes, she can see and feel and smell the observation tower from which she’d watched the shuttle launch with Daren. It seems like a lifetime ago.
She zooms out further until the entire African continent is in view, then out further and now the swaths of red are larger. They cover large portions of Europe. Nearly all of what was once North America. To the east, a sea of blue beats back the tide. Most of China glows a healthy aquamarine, and the glow encases Japan and Thailand and all of Southeast Asia, doubling back over India. Before now, these places were simply names to her. Now the entire world is spread before her, and divided into red and blue. It feels like she is looking at a world divided into the dead and the living: red with radiation and poisoned air and hard, unyielding ground; blue with breathable air and vegetation and drinkable water.
Something stirs in Ify, a small stalk sprouting out of a seed, and that’s a sense of anger at the injustice of it. She remembers the shuttles that would ferry precious minerals into space for the Colonies that only seemed to exist to tax them. To take and take and take and never to give.
Before she can turn this new feeling over in her hands, she senses motion behind her. Ify turns slowly to find Xifeng lounging against a console pressed up along the wall. She seems completely at ease, as though she’s seen girls like Ify many times before. Ify bristles against it. You don’t know me.
“Welcome to my cave,” Xifeng says with a smile. “I apologize for the mess. Here, let me bring you a seat.” She heads around the corner of the table and returns, stooped over a large, bouncing ball that she rolls to Ify. “Here, sit, please.”
Ify stares at the huge sphere for a long time, trying to figure out how it works.
“It’s a seat,” Xifeng says excitedly. “For sitting. Better for my back than stiff-backed chairs.”
She’s doing that annoying thing where someone thinks that if they speak more slowly, you will understand them. But then she catches herself. She turns her wrist upward toward her, and a series of buttons glow red and orange above her skin.
Ify holds out her hand. “Stop,” she says. Xifeng’s fingers freeze in mid-motion. “I understand what you are saying.”
Ify bends down to sit on top of the ball. It takes her a moment to find her balance on the wobbly thing.
With nearly infinite slowness, Ify rests her hands on her lap.
Xifeng stifles a chuckle. Barely.
When Ify feels secure enough, she lets herself bounce on the ball. Only a little, lest she toss herself off and hit her head on the table and embarrass herself more in front of this woman.
“You’re from China,” Ify says.
Xifeng’s eyebrows shoot up. “Your Mandarin is really good. Where did you stud—”
Ify points to her temple. “I downloaded a language patch when I was young. It began my education. The rest, I learned in school.”
“Ah, so you can practice on me, then.”
“I speak it just fine.”
Xifeng sits back. Not hurt by Ify’s abruptness, but taken aback a little. After a moment, the soft smile returns to Xifeng’s face. “You were looking at my map earlier.”
“Why do you mark the graves?”
“The graves?”
“On your map. I figured out what the numbers are.” Ify squints. “What are you doing here?” Resentment, quiet at first, starts to boil in her. So many people, the oyinbo and now the Chinese, place themselves on Biafran and Nigerian soil and try to interfere in Nigerian affairs and take and maybe give but always take, and Ify wishes they would just leave Nigeria alone.
“I am an aid worker. With the relief effort. My organization has the sanction of the Chinese government as well as the East Asian Earth Federation. We have an agreement with the United World Council as well and—”
“I did not ask you about that.”
Something happens to Xifeng’s face. Like she is feeling sad, then angry, then mournful, then hopeful, then sad again, all in less than two seconds. “I am a filmmaker. I work in VR. Virtual reality. Immersive experiences. I am helping with the refugee resettlement. But I am also compiling footage. I am making a record of what has happened here. And I am listening to everyone’s stories. Everyone who is willing to talk to me.” She lowers her gaze. “Where I’m from, not enough people care about what happens in Africa. Many of them see a black person, on a screen or in real life, and they do not believe they see a human being. And I am trying to change that. My videos create immersive experiences that I will bring back to my country. And people there can relive what you have experienced. They can see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.”
“And smell what we smelled?”
Xifeng chuckles. “Yes, that too. I want them to feel empathy. And maybe that will result in more aid.” She looks off into the distance. “We have no problem sending soldiers. But sending mechs to help rebuild irrigation tunnels, ugh. Asking for that is sometimes like pulling teeth.”
“You still have not told me why you mark the graves.”
“There needs to be a record.”
“Why?”
“To help with the healing.” She pauses. “One of the things that must happen for there to be peace is an investigation. Crimes were committed, and they must be punished. It’s not about revenge. Please don’t think this is about revenge. It’s about . . . it’s about order. And balance. So I am not just making a record to help my people feel empathy and give more money for aid.”
“You are gathering evidence.”
Xifeng nods. Oddly enough, she has a look of guilt on her face.
“You are not worried we will try to stop you?”
Xifeng folds her arms. “I had helpers. Androids that . . . that turned into something else.” She smirks and looks off into the middle distance. “But they are gone now. They went to form their own community, can you believe that? I wanted to go with them. Someone has to document it all. I mean, artificial intelligence growing into sentience right before your very eyes and . . .” She calms down. “I think, when they were finished with their task, they wanted only to be left alone.”
Now it’s Ify’s turn to be surprised. Droids. Like Enyemaka? Ify remembers the last time she saw Enyemaka, a burnt husk kneeling over Onyii, protecting her from the blast of the suicide bomber all those years ago. Had Enyemaka survived too? Ify permits herself a slow, soft smile at the thought.
“You killed the man who led those boys, didn’t you? The ones who attacked us?” At Ify’s surprise, Xifeng forges forward. “The ones who attacked the caravan. I tried to stop Agu, but he went off to do the same. You are both children of war. You have been made to bear things that—”
“War does not care about any of us,” Ify says, surprised at the anger in her voice. “It does not matter how rich or how poor you are, how light or how dark, how old or how young, anyone can die. Anyone can be killed.” Her thoughts are a jumble. She sees the detention center with the Biafran boys, the commander that had led the synths in the attack on the caravan, then she sees Onyii, and finally she sees Daren. She calms herself. “It is what it is.”
“I can study your land and read about your conflict, and I can ask to hear stories, and I can plug into your braincase and relive your memories, but I can never truly know what you experienced. What Agu has experienced. I am not you. Another thing I cannot do is watch someone suffer needlessl—”
Xifeng jumps back against the console.
Why am I so upset? Ify is standing now. She realizes she’s kicked the ball away. It careens against a standing monitor, nearly knocking it off its magnetized base, before disappearing behind the table. Her chest heaves, but she takes several deep breaths and calms down. She looks at her hands and remembers what it was like in her cell. When sometimes the only constant was the pain. While everything else swirled around her, while her world was turned entirely into confusion, the pain was always there. The hurt. Like a beacon of light toward which she could always turn in the darkness. The hurt that is now driving her to Enugu and the end of her journey. “I have lost everything. All I have left is hurt.” Her bottom lip trembles at the thought of her mother. Her father. Her nose begins to run. She tries to wipe them away, but tears stream down her face.
Xifeng makes a move to hug her but then stops and thinks better of it. Sometimes, it is enough simply to be there, waiting for those suffering to pass through their private sorrow. “The young woman whose picture you showed me. Is she someone who can help you?”
Ify sniffs and nods.
“May I ask who she is?”
The lie comes easily to Ify’s lips. “Yes. Her name is Onyii. She is my sister.”
Xifeng raises her eyebrows, like she is just now figuring something out. “Onyii,” she whispers to herself. Then, louder, “She is Biafran, and your hair, your skin . . . you’re Nigerian.”
Ify composes herself, shakes her braids away from her face. “I was an orphan when Onyii found me. She took me to her camp. The Biafrans treated me very well.” She wipes the last of the tears away with the palms of her hands. “If I do not find her in Enugu, I will leave the city and continue searching for her.”
“By yourself?”
The look Ify gives Xifeng is answer enough. Her skin itches. Her chest feels tight. She wants nothing more than to be out of this room. Where, earlier, she could let memories of her past wash over her, now they threaten to drown her. She can’t find the composure she used to have, the stillness. The peace. So she heads for the door.
“Wait. Ify.”
She stops at the door. But when Xifeng says nothing, Ify tells her, switching to Igbo, “Maybe we do not need the oyinbo. And maybe we do not need the Chinese. Maybe Nigeria can handle its problems on its own.” The door opens into the night, and the humidity that instantly weighs down on her skin feels like an embrace. Heat she once found oppressive she is now grateful for. Familiar, hateful heat.
CHAPTER
49
Onyii has never left the country. So when Chinelo asks her to come along on a mission to space, Onyii’s first reaction is to shake her head no. “I don’t know space,” Onyii had said. Chinelo had caught her in a bunker deep beneath Enugu, where the Igwe stolen from the Nigerians stood, polished and repaired and ready for mission orders they would now never receive. But Chinelo had given her that pleading look Onyii found it increasingly difficult to refuse. And she’d said the mission would be brief. A day’s work at most. A diplomatic mission to establish relations with Colonies and other countries. To build in peacetime what had been destroyed by war. While Onyii had been sitting in the dark aching for wartime, Chinelo had been working as a government aide to various ministers, shuttling back and forth across the atmosphere, convincing the rest of the world Biafra was a full-fledged country.
“You gonna go up to space with your girl or not?” Chinelo had said at last, cocking her head to the side and mocking the oyinbo.
That had made Onyii laugh, and now she’s sitting in a window seat on a ferry that has just left the bustle and activity in Port Harcourt behind. Port Harcourt had been one of the first targets the Nigerians had bombed at the outset of the civil war. Though it would take a long time to rebuild, the place was already alive with people. People selling news bites, people selling water-filtration systems, people selling VPN devices powerful enough to disguise your IP address with one a whole country away . . .
The ferry takes them into international waters, choppy where they encroach along the shore but calmer once they get farther out. And as they ride along the coastline, they see where the walls bordering Benin and Togo have gone up to beat back the tide.
The ferry docks in the city of Cape Coast in Ghana. And, immediately, Onyii notices the organization. The major transit hub is filled with people in motion, but all of it comes together seamlessly. The main receiving station is all sleek metal and rounded edges, and a banner hangs from the ceiling that says: WELCOME TO GHANA.
Past the border-control station and the friendly but businesslike guards, Onyii sees the boards listing all the times for the ships and trains and buses leaving and arriving. Nobody seems to bump into anybody else. There is none of the patchwork Onyii has for so long associated with home. It all comes together. It all works.
Chinelo smirks at her as they make their way through security and are escorted to the high-speed rail station. Over her comms she says to Onyii, This is what Biafra will look like when we are done with it.
Onyii starts, only now realizing that she had let Chinelo share her mind. They smile at each other and, in short order, board a bullet train destined for Niamey in Niger, where the space station is waiting for them. It overwhelms Onyii. So much travel, so quickly. Whenever she finds a stable surface, an armrest or sometimes Chinelo’s wrist, she grips it fiercely.
The landscape changes so quickly. The choppy water along bustling coastline, then calm ocean water farther out, then sleek metal halls where the cascade of thousands and thousands of footsteps echoes and a mass of too many people hug and greet and say goodbye. Then the quiet of their train car as they blast their way into the desert landscape of the Sahel, the train encasing itself in a protective shield as it enters irradiated land . . . it’s enough to make Onyii dizzy.
Chinelo sits next to Onyii in their private car. Even though they’re alone, Chinelo speaks softly when she leans in. “As fast as this is, once the border with Nigeria is properly opened and we can cut straight through to the station in Niamey, it will be even faster.”
Onyii chuckles nervously. “Does anyone stand still in peacetime?”
Chinelo giggles and slaps Onyii’s shoulder. “We are Biafrans. We never rest. Too busy being the best.” She laughs and tousles Onyii’s hair, then holds her face, staring into her eyes, before kissing her. When she lets go, she leans back in her chair. “Just wait until we get on that space shuttle and you see what the moon looks like up close.” Her eyes soften. “There is nothing like it.”
CHAPTER
50
Whistling wakes Ify.
When her eyes open, she moves about the crush of bodies in the flatbed and sees Agu on top of the big truck’s cab with his rifle propped against his shoulder. Most of the other refugees are still asleep. A few of them stir at the noises. The others remain motionless, caught in their dreams.
With the whistling comes a breeze. A canopy of trees blocks Ify’s vision of what lies ahead, so she climbs up onto the cab to sit next to Agu.
“The receiving station is just up ahead,” Agu says. “The refugee camp is just beyond it.”
“Can I see your rifle?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Agu hands it to her, and, with deft fingers, she unscrews the scope, then puts it to her eye. Still, she sees nothing but green. She tries to adjust the vision, maybe catch a glimpse of something beyond the leaves. But still, nothing. The flora blocks her way. Dispirited, she hands the scope and rifle back to Agu, who reassembles it slowly, not as though he’s figuring things out or learning how to do it but rather as though he enjoys it.
The jungle opens suddenly to reveal the Enugu receiving station. It looks, from the outside, a lot like a prison, with concrete walls that rise up and towers with snipers on top. Ify can tell the barrels of the rifles a
re pointed in their direction. She wonders what the guards think as the caravan slowly reveals itself, coming out into the sun bit by bit.
Between sections of wall stand chain-link fences against which presses a small crowd of bodies. Anxiety makes their faces sweat, and some of them look feverishly at the caravan as more and more of it emerges from the bush. When the head of the caravan gets close enough, some of the people on the other side of the fence start ululating and frantically waving and shouting names. A child sprints out from the shadows of the jungle to the fence and is the first to be greeted by a pair of Chinese aid workers, who sweep the boy into their arms and bring him past the Biafran soldiers.
Sections of concrete wall rise, and out step more aid workers and soldiers. The caravan parts in a semicircle and forms lines along the perimeter. Some of the refugees are antsier, bouncing from foot to foot, having forgotten their earlier fatigue. A man falls to his knees at the edge of the forest and begins weeping into the soil. Ify can’t tell if he’s crying because he’s happy or sad. A few of the children, without parents, play around and tackle each other, while the others stare in wonder at the walls that loom over them and cast a shadow that nearly reaches the edge of the forest.
The lines pass quickly through the gates.
Ify sits with Agu on top of the truck cab as it comes to a stop and more refugees spill out from around it. Pretty soon, the only people who remain are those who have grown so attached to the caravan that the thought of leaving it behind paralyzes them.
“You are not going?” Ify asks Agu, in part to put off her own decision.
Agu shakes his head. “My sister is not wishing for me to come back.”
“Enugu is a big city. You could spend the whole rest of your life avoiding her.” She grins. “Sneaking into alleys whenever you see her on the street walking past.” She realizes she wants him to come with her. She does not know why. She barely knows him, but it feels like the most important thing in the world that he come with her.
War Girls Page 28