War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  What does it matter? The rage is real, and Onyii is the nearest target. “I will never forgive you,” she hisses, as Biafran soldiers kick her legs out from beneath her and force her to her knees. The first blow from someone’s shockstick is enough to knock her unconscious.

  CHAPTER

  61

  How quickly Enugu falls back into wartime formation, Onyii thinks.

  The city is still bathed in scaffolding. Streets littered with rubble, buildings still hollow and deformed. But now it is suddenly filled with military uniforms. Soldiers hurry past her with their rifles and their ration packs. Old officers who had seemed so acclimated to being civilians now revert back into their wartime selves with an ease that startles Onyii. Everyone has become hard again.

  Diggers are being retrofitted on the outskirts of the city for tunneling operations. Mechs, heavy with shoulder cannons and Gatling gun arms, appear aboveground for the first time in almost a year.

  People still mourn their fresh loss, but they weep for their dead lover or their dying children in the shadows. We will have plenty of time to cry when this is over. Or when we are dead. That is what Onyii wants to say as she makes her way to the hospital, but she can’t say those words out loud.

  Because her steps lead her straight through the still-charred front doors, down the hallways where the blood in places still has not been cleaned, to the recovery ward where healing baths lie in rows, filling the room. They look like coffins.

  The machines beep regularly and in unison. There’s no one here. Even though there is no darkness for Onyii to hide in, no shadows to mask her sorrow, she can mourn here with no one watching.

  There are no chairs, so Onyii stands. She puts a hand to the flexiglas surface through which she can see the mask fitted to Chinelo’s face.

  “We’re back at war,” Onyii says at last, because it is the only thing she can think to say. “I thought I would want this. You saw how awkward peacetime made me. How unused to it I was. I . . .” She takes her hand off the flexiglas to look at her metal fingers. “War is what I was built for. But I don’t want this. None of me wants this.” As she speaks, she digs inside herself to find that familiar hate, that power that had driven her in combat. She wants that rage, needs it. But she searches and searches and searches and finds only heartache.

  The console attached to the head of the healing bath shows Chinelo’s vital signs. As close to normal as one can hope for. But when Onyii looks at the brain activity, everything is a hopeless gray. There is no part of her brain that glows. She is not even dreaming. Just trapped. In a pitch-black slumber from which she will never wake.

  “Maybe it will always be like this.” Onyii’s voice is leaden when she speaks. Like it’s made of the same metal alloys as her arm. “Maybe neither of us will live to see what Biafra might become. This war. It . . . it swallows up everything.” And she knows that if Chinelo can hear her, Chinelo will know what she means. She means Agu and Chiamere. She means the sisters in their program who have died: Kesandu, Obioma, Ginika. And all of their abd. She means the camp where they’d made a life for themselves as girls. She means Ify.

  There are no tears when she thinks of Ify. There is no rage. Nothing.

  “She’s alive.” An emotionless chuckle leaves Onyii’s lips. “After all these years, she survived. I don’t know how she did it, but she did it. She survived. She survived, and I . . . I abandoned her.” Then the tears come. Her chest closes over whatever words she had left. Her shoulders shake. Her legs tremble. “I abandoned her. I . . . I thought she was dead.”

  The emotions rush in a wave through Onyii. Her legs buckle. She grips the flexiglas surface and just barely keeps from collapsing. Suddenly, her sobs turn to laughter. Bitter, acidic laughter.

  “I abandoned her, and now she is here to kill me.” Like an operating system rebooting, Onyii regains control of herself. She sniffs away a sob and wipes away her tears. “When I found her and brought her back to our base all those years ago, you never asked where she came from. You never asked why I had brought back this little girl who offered us no tactical advantage. She was too young to be a friend. She didn’t speak our language. She might have even been a spy. We had no time to teach her how to fire a gun. Not in those early years. I brought her to us, and you just accepted it.”

  No change in the rhythm of the beeping. Onyii knows it is foolish to hope that Chinelo might hear her, might respond, but she still hopes.

  “She will go on trial tomorrow. They’ll execute her immediately after.” She grits her teeth, clenches her metal hand in a fist. “I wish you’d asked me why I did it. All those years ago, bringing a stranger into our family. I wish you’d asked me. But you didn’t. Maybe you knew. You were smarter than the rest of us, so you probably did know. You knew that if you’d asked me, I would have told you, ‘I don’t know,’ and that would have been the truth.” Onyii stares into space for a long time, looking at nothing, seeing everything. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill her. And now our nation might die because of it.” She turns her gaze to the serene expression on Chinelo’s face. “I’m sorry,” Onyii says.

  * * *

  Onyii’s footsteps echo down the prison corridor.

  She stops when she gets to the last cell in the corridor.

  Ify sits cross-legged on the floor, her head bowed, her forearms bound by metal restraints that she lays in her lap. She doesn’t look up when Onyii stops in front of her. Her bed is untouched. The white of her prison jumpsuit is the same color as the walls around her. All that marks it is the dried blood along her collar and running down her front. She makes no noise.

  “Tomorrow, you will go on trial,” Onyii says. “You will answer for your crimes. And you will be executed.” She clenches her fists. “You will die by lethal injection.”

  Ify doesn’t move.

  “Consider it one last kindness.”

  At that, Ify looks up and sneers. Her sneer turns to a grin. But she says nothing.

  When did you become this? Onyii wants to ask her. Was it during her captivity? Was it before then? Did this person exist when Onyii had brought her to live with the War Girls? Was she always there?

  “One last kindness?” Ify growls in a voice Onyii does not recognize. “I am a Nigerian. A Yoruba. You gave me an Igbo name, but it was a lie. You gave me a life as an innocent girl, but it was a lie. You gave me hope for a future where I am some stupid little girl studying nonsense in America. But that too was a lie.” She looks up and stares Onyii in the face. Her left eye is swollen shut. “Even now, you lie. You have chosen lethal injection not out of kindness but because you are a coward.”

  Silence thickens the air between them, makes it more impenetrable than any concrete wall. Onyii waits for a denial, waits for Ify to tell her that she didn’t know she was being tracked, that she had no idea the bombing was going to take place, that she’d wanted only to shoot Onyii. Onyii waits.

  But there is only silence. Ify won’t deny the massacre. Perhaps she even wanted it.

  Ify won’t die tomorrow, Onyii says to herself, as she turns to walk away. Ify died a long time ago.

  CHAPTER

  62

  Ify’s body quakes when she watches Onyii turn her back.

  “Is this how it ends, then?” Ify wants the same hardness in her voice that Onyii has. But she can’t get there. When she speaks, she hears the note of pleading in it. And she hates herself for it.

  Onyii stops. “This is war. This is what happens. This is how it happens. No more, no less.” But she doesn’t move. She doesn’t leave, and that fact sends a shudder of hope through Ify’s body. She can’t let go. Not yet. “I . . .”

  “Tell me it was you.” The metal restraints are so heavy around Ify’s forearms and hands. “Tell me it was you who killed my family. I need to know.” She feels herself fumbling for that hatred she felt just hours ago.

  For a lon
g time, Onyii is silent. “It was July. The sixth of July. I remember because it was someone’s birthday. Someone in our group.” Onyii shakes her head. “I can’t remember her name. But we had celebrated earlier that day. We did night missions, so we had the mornings and the afternoons to ourselves. And we could be regular girls again. We hadn’t completely lost that. On the sixth of July, we celebrated a birthday. Then, that night, we crossed the border into Abia State, and we found an unguarded village. The girl whose birthday we celebrated didn’t want to attack it. She only wanted to fight soldiers. She didn’t want to kill innocents. But our commander kept telling us that, in war, there are no innocents. So, when we knew that everyone was asleep, we raided.

  “There was no armory. There were no weapons. There was just . . . food. Food and farming animals and calabash bowls. Nothing of military importance. But we took hostages. We didn’t know what else to do. This wasn’t a military outpost. This place wasn’t of any use to us. But it was our commander’s idea to make a broadcast. To give a speech that would be shown to the Nigerians. Justifying what we were about to do.

  “He made me and the other girl stand with the hostages. The rest of our squadron were young men, boys, and some older men. Some of them were reluctant. Some of them were hungry for blood. Maybe they had been wronged in the past. Denied a job or a wife. Maybe a Nigerian had treated them rudely. Maybe they just had a grudge. That was the thing about war, especially in those early days. It was a convenient way to settle a grudge. At the end of the day, you could say the person you killed was your enemy. You could say they were trying to kill you. Even when they weren’t.”

  She stops, like she’s run into a wall she can’t go around or climb over. Then she lets out a sigh. “While some of the others were setting up the recording, a woman with silver braids running down her back and a dress patterned with blue and red and gold flowers tried to attack the girl whose birthday it was. So I shot her.”

  Tears stream down Ify’s face as she listens. “You killed my mother,” she whispers.

  “I was a child!” Onyii roars. “I was just a child.” Now tears pool in Onyii’s eyes. “I was a little girl with a gun in my hands. I did what I was told. I had no one! No family—”

  “So you took mine.”

  “I . . .” Her voice lowers. “I was a child.” She sniffs and wipes her face. “That gave the others the courage. When they saw what I had done, they knew they could do it too. So our commander gave his speech, then lined up the remaining hostages from the village. And we shot them dead.”

  A single question haunts Ify. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

  Onyii’s eyes are soft again, and Ify reels from a memory of looking into them as she’s lying on her cot, waking up in a camp surrounded by girls her age, on any regular morning before she is to begin her lessons. That look. So many times, Onyii had given her that look, and so often Ify had wondered what was behind it. It seemed to hold so much more than love or gratitude or kindness. It seemed to hold . . . regret.

  “Why didn’t you kill me?” she asks again.

  Onyii’s bottom lip trembles. She shrugs. “I thought . . . We had just celebrated a birthday, and it was the first time I’d seen the girls smile in a long time, and . . . and I wanted to do that again. I thought maybe it could be your birthday too. And no one should have to die on their birthday.” Onyii wraps her arms around herself. “I’m sorry,” she mouths.

  Then she turns on her heel and hurries away.

  Later, when the guards arrive to take Ify to the courthouse for her trial, they will think her silence is defiance. Some of them will think that maybe she has taken a drug to fortify herself. Maybe they will think she’s praying. None of them will know the truth. None of them will know what Onyii has just given her.

  Peace.

  * * *

  Plaster covers the floor of the courtroom. Guards escort Ify to a booth in full view of the people assembled to watch the hearing. On the way from her prison cell, she’d seen the destruction wrought by the suicide bombers. Even though construction was under way, rubble still filled the roads, stone and concrete and metal piled on top of each other like small mountains.

  The large room fills with murmurs when they first bring Ify in. The hum continues as she’s sat down and the guards fit manacles to her ankles. She still wears the same white jumpsuit they’d given her when she was first brought to prison, marred by dirt and dried blood.

  Ify searches the crowd for Onyii’s face, even as the judge reads her charges. One count of terrorism; 259 counts of premeditated murder; five hundred counts of maiming; one count of the possession, acquisition, and use of explosives to commit an act of terrorism.

  The judge, who wears a military uniform, stops reading, then looks up from his screen. “Were this a peacetime incident, the penalty for these crimes would be life imprisonment. But the ceasefire does not qualify as peacetime. We are, unfortunately, still at war. Thus, the accused is not a civilian. She is an enemy combatant. As such, her punishment shall be death by lethal injection.”

  She has known this was coming. It still snatches her breath away to hear it. She is going to die.

  Her steely expression slips. Her eyes dart through the crowd, hoping for a chance to see Onyii’s face one last time. To take it into her memory. To have something to look at when she closes her eyes for the last time. But the room is too crowded. Onyii is nowhere to be found.

  She searches for Onyii in the crowds that flank her as guards take her from her booth, through the gathered mass of people outside the courthouse, to a van. And as they bring her out and lead her down into the basement of a nondescript building, Ify still searches. She glances from face to face as new guards wearing masks take hold of her and lead her into a room with a metal platform in the middle, shaped like a cross. Next to it is a small machine, as tall as Ify’s chest, on spindly metal legs. A man in a robe as white as the walls of this room stands by it.

  The masked guards strap Ify to the board, then the board groans as it rotates vertically. The man operating the machine taps Ify’s left arm, raising the veins, then inserts a needle and tapes over the injection spot with mauve-colored adhesive tape.

  With the board raised, Ify finds herself staring into a wide pane of glass. In it, she sees her reflection. Her wild afro, the red and black that stain her shirt in patches, the flecks of gold in her purple irises. Eyes that she has learned are beautiful.

  Maybe this mirrored glass is meant to give criminals one last moment of reflection. This is what Ify thinks when the man operating the intravenous injection machine pushes the button that sends it into action. Perhaps the mirror is there to remind the criminals of who they are, what their act has turned them into. Perhaps the criminals are expected to see a monster. Maybe they’re expected to see the child they once were.

  Why, then, is Ify’s last sight before darkness closes in of Onyii with that look in her eyes? That look she would give Ify every morning when Ify woke up. Another vision, then? One not conjured up by her Accent but made purely out of her fears and hopes and dreams.

  The image of Onyii blurs as tears fill Ify’s eyes.

  That look. As though Ify is the only thing in the world that truly exists. But it is different now.

  There is no more regret.

  * * *

  When Ify comes to, her face is pressed against carpet.

  The world is a mass of colors. Moving, battling each other. Piercing through the fog is a voice. Voices.

  Her body feels as though she’s been crushed beneath the foot of an ibu mech. But she manages to roll over so that she can stare upward.

  The colors stop their dance. Slowly, they grow shapes and edges until a face forms.

  A stranger’s face. Older. With gray in her braids and wrinkles along her forehead and cheeks. She wears a smirk.

  “She’s awake,” the woman says in a deep voice that Ify has
never heard before. The woman breathes a chuckle. “Is this revenge for how poorly I’ve treated you all these years?” the woman jokes to someone Ify can’t see.

  Ify hears a murmur. This voice is familiar, but she can’t turn her head.

  “So, you brought the most wanted person in both Nigeria and Biafra to my home. Always causing me problems, aren’t you, Onyii?”

  Ify’s eyes shoot open. With strength she did not know she had, she pushes herself up onto one elbow. She has to see. She has to. And when she finally comes up onto her knees, she sees it. That face. That look.

  Onyii.

  CHAPTER

  63

  When Onyii can tell that Ify is strong enough to eat, she brings her a plate of gari and a bowl of steaming egusi soup from the kitchen. Then she sits and watches Ify stare blank-faced at the food for a moment before digging in. Adaeze raises an eyebrow at Onyii.

  “It’s a wonder she didn’t clear out the pantry when she stayed in your camp.” Then she looks at Ify, and there’s a glint of wonder in her eyes. “Did she always eat like this?”

  “A side effect of the chemicals.”

  Ify pauses mid-bite, her right hand slick from the soup, covered in bits of gari. “Chemicals?”

  Onyii sees the questions swimming in her eyes. “I switched out the chemicals they injected you with,” she says to Ify. “That was where I went after we last spoke. In the end, I didn’t know if they would check and ruin my plans by switching them back. That’s why I had to stay and watch. It was the longest hour of my life.”

  Ify swallows the gari in her mouth. “I’m not dead?”

  Adaeze sucks her teeth. “Eh-eh! You think dead people are this hungry?”