War Girls

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War Girls Page 31

by Tochi Onyebuchi


  Before them lies a metric ton of broken stone and brick. Onyii calls and points to specific people and directs them to various spots along the edge of the rubble. “Start digging!” To a man who looks dressed in the clothes of an engineer, she turns and says, “Go to the barracks and bring out the Diggers. Radio, if you can, to let your colleagues know. And pray to Chukwu that the doors open.”

  Onyii leads the others in attacking the rubble at the edges. Lifting stones and tossing them out of the way. Many of the Augments here don’t have increased strength built into their machinery, so they’re as weak as red-bloods, but they dig with the intensity of people in crisis. Pretty soon, the skin has been worn away from fingertips, and everyone is awash in dust and plaster.

  The Nigerians have broken the ceasefire. Stunned by the devastation, by its suddenness, this is all she can think.

  A dozen paces away, Ngozi runs with a group of androids carrying a body on a stretcher. Onyii’s heart sinks.

  “Chinelo!” she screams as she dashes after them.

  The group doesn’t break stride as they rush Chinelo’s body to the hospital. Onyii runs faster than she ever thought possible to catch up to them. She runs alongside them and tries to get a glimpse, but the flexiglas shield over the stretcher is covered in dirt. Dried blood smudges the surface in splotches.

  Ngozi says, “We found her under the Central Flats.” She’s out of breath, but she continues to push her body. “She was still in the building when it collapsed. She was in one of the upper floors that fell last. It took us over an hour to get her out.”

  “Is she breathing?” She can’t stop the panic in her voice. “Is she alive? Ngozi, tell me. Was she breathing?”

  Ngozi just shakes her head at Onyii’s questions.

  Even as they rush through the jammed-open ground-floor doors of the hospital, outside of which wait many wounded, Ngozi says nothing.

  The first-floor corridor is so crowded they can’t get through.

  “Let us through!” Onyii shouts. “We have a commander in the Biafran Army! Let us through now!” She does not care that there are others just as grievously wounded as Chinelo, maybe even some on the verge of death. Onyii can’t remember the last time she wanted something so badly as she wants to get Chinelo into a healing pool.

  At a set of double doors, a doctor in a bloodstained smock holds his hands out. “You can’t go in there. We’re beyond capacity as it is.”

  Onyii bares her teeth in a snarl and snatches Ngozi’s pistol from her waist, then aims it at the doctor’s head. “You will let us pass.”

  “There is a child in there!” the doctor pleads. “A child.”

  Onyii’s hand wavers. Her shoulders heave.

  “A child,” the doctor whispers, one last time. When Onyii doesn’t move, he gestures to the mass of people behind her, crowding every inch of the ground floor. “All these people are in dire need of medical attention. The blasts decimated our wireless systems. We’re operating on generators now. We’re strained past our limit. There’s no telling how long they’ll hold out.”

  Onyii wavers. The gun shakes in her hand. She grits her teeth and hisses, “This woman has valuable intelligence about who committed this terrorist attack. If she dies, it dies with her. This is a matter of national security.” Her arm stiffens. She cocks the hammer back. It is a lie, but the lie is all Onyii has. “As an officer in the Biafran Army, I order you to step aside.”

  After a moment, the doctor sighs and gets out of the way.

  The group rushes through the swinging double doors to find two doctors holding a limp child in a bodysuit, positioning her over the healing tank. Onyii points her gun at them.

  “Away from the tank!”

  The doctors’ eyes grow wide. “What is going . . .”

  Onyii breaks away from the group and presses her gun to the protesting doctor’s forehead. “Step aside.”

  After a moment, the doctor does as ordered, and Onyii and Ngozi strip off Chinelo’s bloody clothes, hurry her into the tank, fit the breathing mask to her face, then slam the tank door shut. Onyii turns the lock.

  When the machine hums to signal it’s working, tension seeps out of Onyii’s shoulders. She wants to collapse but knows that she can’t. Not yet. She lowers her gun and wants to say thank you to the doctor she threatened but knows that the doctor is just as likely to spit in her face as she is to accept her gratitude without a word.

  If she stops moving, the thoughts racing through her mind will catch up with her, and she’ll have to deal with Agu’s death, how he died protecting her after she had tried and failed to protect him. She’ll have to deal with Ify’s betrayal. She must have been behind the bombing. Did they not trust the attack alone to kill the Demon of Biafra? Did they think they really needed to send someone once so dear to her heart to make sure the job was done? Did they need a visual of her body to confirm the kill? To know that they had cut the head off the snake? She turns to leave, but Ngozi grabs her wrist.

  “Where are you going?” The look in Ngozi’s eyes turns the question into: Please don’t leave.

  But Onyii shakes her wrist loose. “This was a violation of the ceasefire. I’m simply going to give them a chance to explain themselves.”

  “Alone?”

  “I’m the one they want.” By the door, syringes sit in a cabinet drawer on top of dozens of steroid packets. With her metal fingers, Onyii takes a syringe, punctures one of the packets, draws the fluid into the syringe, then plunges it into her damaged shoulder. Instantly, strength returns to her. She flexes her fingers, curls her arm, and smiles grimly. Then she gathers up the remaining packets and stomps out. It won’t last forever, and the crash, when the boost wears off, may cripple her, but the packets will last long enough for her to do what she needs to do.

  She leaves the hospital in a hurry. The crowds of injured people in the halls and outside become a blur. No more fires rage outside. Instead, it is oddly silent. An eerie quiet, punctuated by the occasional collapse of rubble.

  But she walks with purpose, ignoring the cries for help and the sobbing of those who have just lost loved ones. In her mind, she is telling these people, Do not worry, I will take revenge for you. I will punish them for what they’ve done.

  And when she arrives at the bunker on the outskirts of the city, she is glad to find that the elevator down to the basement has escaped damage.

  Her footsteps do not slow in the darkness. Motion-sensor lights pop on to light her way until she gets to the grand room, where what she is looking for is stored. She stops, and for several moments she looks up at her Igwe. The aquatic capabilities have been stripped away for increased mobility. One of the plates has been refashioned as a shield with a sword clapsed inside it for easy release. The shoulder cannons are attached to the ammo packet on its back. A retractable spear is bound tight at its waist. Though the metal plating of the arm seems unbroken, Onyii can see the joints that, upon command, would open up to reveal the Gatling guns at her elbows.

  Amadioha. The name she has chosen for her Igwe. The ancient god of thunder and lightning, whose governing celestial body is the sun and who represents the will of Chukwu. Amadioha. Of the people. Before there was a Biafra, before there was a Nigeria, there was Chukwu, Supreme Being. Daren had mocked them by calling his mech an Alusi, naming it after the spirits of Igbo religion. Well, Amadioha was the Alusi of justice.

  She presses the lift button by the wall, and a platform descends. She walks onto it, and it rises to bring her to a bridge right in front of where Amadioha’s cockpit will open. She takes a moment to touch its chestplate. Her body tingles, as a prelude not to the pain that will soon engulf her if she does not take another steroid packet but to the fact that soon she will be where she is most comfortable, where she was born to be.

  Whatever was done to Ify during her captivity among the Nigerians, this is what it turned her into. A t
errorist who brought death to an entire city.

  They had tried to kill the Demon of Biafra, first through peacetime, then through direct attack. Familiar feelings grow in Onyii’s chest, and she lets the warmth spread through her entire body, filling her face with heat.

  She gets to fight once again.

  * * *

  When Onyii arrives at the fortified Nigerian border, their army is waiting for her.

  Smaller ibu land mechs and, behind them, larger models. They see the dust trail her Igwe kicks up in its wake, and they aim their laser cannons at her. She comes to a stop in full sight of them. They form a line that stretches for miles in both directions. She licks her lips. Her steroid packets sit in a container at her side, ready for her. Her fingers don’t twitch on her gearshifts or her directional pad. Nor does her hand shake when she grips her joystick. She is as calm as she has ever been. This is where she belongs.

  Amadioha rises to its full height.

  She turns on her comms and programs her sound system to broadcast her voice loud and clear over the sparse plain, with the expanse of redland just behind her. Now that she has passed into territory protected from radiation, the rust on her Igwe heals. Its red and green and black paint glows in the unforgiving sun.

  “The Biafran capital has been attacked,” she proclaims, “by an insidious Nigerian element. Dozens have already been killed and hundreds injured. We have not yet finished counting the bodies. It is a terrorist attack in violation of the ceasefire and in violation of the human rights accords your nation, in its hypocrisy, claims so proudly to support. The attack is a wickedness that one can only attribute to your kind. And I hereby demand that the enemy agent who plotted and executed the attack be brought before me, so that she may face justice in a Biafran court of law.” She has no idea if Ify is here or whether she lies crushed beneath a building the Nigerians blew up. Ify could be riding through the Sahel or she could be dead. But Onyii does not care. This demand is a mere formality. “If you will not forfeit the enemy agent, then we shall be forced to take her ourselves. So speaks Onyii, the Demon of Biafra.”

  She can sense the tremors that ripple through the line of pilots. Maybe they had thought the Demon of Biafra had vanished once peacetime had arrived, whisked away into obscurity now that she was no longer needed. But here she is. It pleases her to see them cower before her.

  “Her?” The voice beams into Onyii’s comms network, and a face appears on her screen. It wears a mask, hiding the features behind it, but that voice . . . she will always recognize that voice. The pilot who had decimated their forces during the attack on the oil facility. The pilot who had taken her right arm. “How do you know the agent was a ‘her’?”

  The line of mechs parts at its center, and through the opening walks a mech that she never thought she’d see again. Why should she be surprised? Of course they were fated for this very moment.

  “Daren.” She says his name below her breath, tastes it on her tongue.

  “Out of my way, pilot,” she says.

  He’s holding his massive energy cannon in his hands. It’s aimed directly at her. “You speak of a little girl, no? Who called herself Ify?”

  He admits it.

  “Hand her over.”

  “Ify is no longer under our command. When she revealed herself to be a traitor to the republic, she was exiled. Whatever she has done since, she did on her own.”

  “Typical liar.” Amadioha grabs the hilt of its sword and slides it out from inside its shield.

  “We too believe she has committed a heinous act. As I speak, we have forces now tracking her down. She will be brought to justice.” His mask does not hide the lower half of his face. He’s smiling.

  So she is alive. Very well. “She does not belong to you. Out of my way, or you shall be accused of harboring a terrorist, and I shall have no choice but to cut you down.”

  “There is no need for all of that. I know that I’m the one you’re after. After all, I taught Ify everything she knows. Let us battle alone. Whoever wins shall have the pleasure of capturing the traitor. I will enjoy taking your head.” The transmission ends.

  I will cut you down. Then I will find Ify and have her answer for her crimes. All Onyii has left is herself. Chinelo lies in a coma. Agu lies dead and unburied in a city on fire. Everyone she has ever loved is dead or dying. She remembers that shuttle flight back to Earth from the Colonies. Her hand trembles on her joystick.

  She tears open another steroid packet and pours it into the sieve that connects, by way of wires, to her metal arm. Her mech is plugged into the back of her neck. She is as connected as she can be.

  Amadioha gets into its fighting stance.

  Daren’s Igwe powers up its cannon. The air between them shimmers with energy.

  Then he fires.

  CHAPTER

  58

  It’s night by the time Ify emerges from the forest and sees it all laid out before her. What had once been her home and the home for so many others is now a rusted ruin. The War Girls camp.

  Elephant grass grows over paths that had once been hardened into dirt roads by the passage of so many feet. She remembers the girls on their way to school or on their way to the health clinic or on their way to whatever open spaces allowed them to congregate and joke and make fun of each other and play. She pushes her bike until it can go no farther, then stops at a rusted tank that had once been their filtered-water supply. Some of the pipes that had run underground to pull moisture out of the soil or to provide a conduit for what came down in the monsoons now poke through the ground in parts, the wiring exposed where some scavengers have carved away the metal sheeting for barter.

  Her bike catches on a piece of exposed piping and won’t move. She jerks it once, twice to try to get it free, but it’s gone. She kicks it, then bites back a yelp. Pain shoots through her toes. She stumbles a few paces, one-footed, before settling into a limp.

  There’s nothing left of the greenhouse, just a few vanishing indents in the ground where they had made space for groundwater and the shattered glass that crunches beneath her boots. A memory flashes before her eyes. Onyii picking mangoes from the trees, while, many rows down, Chinelo fingers the petals in a bed of roses. Chinelo glances at Onyii when she thinks Onyii’s not looking. In the memory, Ify watches all of this from an upturned crate, her school tablet on her lap as she swipes through the day’s lessons and tries to work through the polynomials she had learned that morning.

  She shakes the memory away, then limps toward the center of the camp, where the Terminal once stood. It’s now a single hunk of metal, a broken thing with sharpened edges that poke into the air. The metal stairway hangs off its side. It used to loom over her when she was little. Now she can nearly see over the edge of the standing platform.

  In her mind, explosions sound and the chaos of war surrounds her. She closes her eyes and lets the scene swirl around her. Dodging figures in black, sliding through grass and dirt and leaping over fallen half-mech panthers and boars. Defeated mechs crashing down from the skies and crushing buildings beneath them, thundering when they land on the ground. A crabtank stomping through the camp, its turret guns swiveling and shooting at anything in its path.

  When the memory threatens to overwhelm her, she opens her eyes.

  This is where she stands. The ruined remains of the place where she had grown up.

  She gets to a small field where a platform had once stood with walls shielding one end. There had been piping, but their bathroom was still a rickety structure, and, when they were children, the distance between the stalls and the dormitory seemed like forever in the dark. Now Ify walks that distance in a few dozen paces. She stands where the dormitory had once stood. Only a few broken wooden beams and supports remain strewn over the ground like fallen tree branches.

  One night, they had all gathered together on one of the few occasions when Ify was allowed t
o spend time with them. And someone had pirated a vampire movie, and they’d all sat or lain down as best they could to get a view of the small tablet screen, their faces bathed in its glow. And Ify had watched the horror on their faces, had heard the stifled screams and the giggles, had felt how the girls shook with fear afterward and how, at one point after the movie, one of the girls whispered to another that she needed to pee. And the older girl had brushed the littler one aside. Another had told the girl to just go by herself, that it wasn’t that far. Then Ify heard another girl shiver beside her, trying to hold it in. And she still doesn’t know where the idea came from, but she remembers standing up suddenly and saying, “Toilet parade!” And she gathered the girls together and told them that they’d make a parade, like those celebrations they watched on the holos sometimes, so that they could all go together and no one had to be alone. Some of the girls looked at Ify with admiration, the same ones who had stayed quiet while the older girls had tormented Ify for her hair or her skin or the way she sometimes sounded when she spoke.

  Ify’s fists clench at her sides. Angrily, she wipes tears from her eyes.

  A dozen steps later, she stops. The grass is so tall it nearly hides the pieces of metal bent into crosses and arrayed in neat rows before her. Weeds grow in patches over the land. Ify walks forward until her foot hits the first mound.

  Graves.

  Who did this?

  There are so many of them. Maybe some passing aid worker, someone like Xifeng, had come through and buried the dead. They could not have found this place after the raid more than four years ago. War was still happening. Maybe it was a soldier. It does not matter which side. Ify does not linger. She continues on.

 

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