Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Also by

  TOCHI ONYEBUCHI

  War Girls

  Beasts Made of Night

  Crown of Thunder

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Razorbill,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Razorbill & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Onyebuchi, Tochi, author.

  Title: Rebel sisters / Tochi Onyebuchi.

  Description: New York : Razorbill, 2020. | Sequel to: War girls. | Audience: Ages 12+ | Summary: Living a comfortable life in the Space Colonies, Ify, now nineteen and a medical administrator, must return to wartorn Nigeria, where she last saw her sister, to investigate why young refugees from that nation are carrying a deadly virus.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020023214 | ISBN 9781984835062 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984835086 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Science fiction. | War—Fiction. | Refugees—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. |Cyborgs—Fiction. | Blacks—Fiction. | Nigeria—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.O66 Re 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023214

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  To Chinoye and Uchechi

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part II

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Part III

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  1

  Centrafrique, Outer Alabast Colony:

  2181

  Wesh? Je suis enjaillé de toi. Ça avance ndank-ndank. Je wanda . . . deuxieme bureau . . . Il est sorti nayo nayo. Je vais te see tomorrow.

  The words mingle and the voices echo inside the receiving station, shuttles docking with a whoosh and clank, passengers alighting with their checkered nylon-canvas bags. Ify squints and touches her temple, activating the Whistle, the communication device linked to the Augment embedded into the base of her neck, and flips through the languages in her translation software—Arabic, Wolof, Finnish, French. Yet it all comes to her as gibberish. A riot of words to mirror the mess of colors before her in Porte Nouveau, the capital city at the center of Centrafrique and, according to Céline, the brightest jewel in the crown of Outer Africa’s future. Ify looks to her friend, who grins at the bustle of the city on the other side of the receiving station’s entrance, at the Adjogan drums and singsong blaring from street speakers, the teenage boys—all arms and legs—lounging on hoverboards with dishes of chicken yassa balanced on their chests, chuckling and speaking around mouthfuls. The scotch bonnet peppers are so hot Ify’s eyes start to sting from several hundred paces away. Someone shouts a string of words, and Ify hears “shoga,” and two older men—cyberized—walk over to an old woman crouched over a misfiring broadcast transmitter. The men walk with the ease of people in love. The taller one gazes admiringly at his partner, who stoops to help the woman fix her BoTa and hear the rest of the football match. Farther down the broad thoroughfare, Ify sees the spires of chapels and the domes of mosques and, past that, the tops of what look like broad-based swirling cones with antlers sticking from their tops to absorb solar energy. Centrafrique Polytechnic Institute.

  “What are they speaking?” The whole time, Ify has been scrolling through languages. Xhosa, Mande, Sandawe, Vandalic. “Is it French?”

  Céline turns her smirk on Ify and slaps her shoulder with the back of her hand. “Ah-ah! You think these people would sully their tongues with such a bankrupt language?” Then she laughs and loosens up, her eyes softening into an apology. “It is everything. You know how we Africans are. We don’t choose, we collect.” She mimes opening a cupboard and picking out ingredients. “Some onions, some olives, okra, sofrito, and whatever else is in the cupboard.” Then she mimes pounding on a surface. “Grind up some maggi cubes.” She spreads her arms. “Then throw it all in the pot.” A glint of seriousness flashes like a comet in her green eyes. She lowers her voice to a kind murmur. “When was the last time you saw this many Africans in one place, eh?”

  Shame warms Ify’s cheeks.

  Céline puts a gentle hand to the back of Ify’s neck. “Come. Let me show you the rest of my kingdom.” After a beat, she starts giggling.

  And Ify does too.

  “Spend too much time around those whites in Alabast and you’ll forget who you are.” Céline says it with a smile to soften the rebuke.

  Together, they leave the shuttle-receiving station behind. The deeper they walk into Porte Nouveau, past the communities that have sprouted up around the massive, shimmering, raised pentagram-shaped prism that somehow manages to accommodate traffic from railway trains, maglev matatus, and space shuttles, the less the city seems like chaos and the more it feels like something familiar. Something ordered. A feeling of recognition hums in Ify’s bones, and a single word whispers in her head.

  Home.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

 
The lights are off in the room that is to be Céline’s new office. For now, the room is barren, a white box cast in shadows so deep that her skin and Ify’s both glow blue. Behind Ify, Céline paces its length, fingers tapping her chin. With a thought, Ify adjusts the temperature of her bodysuit a few degrees warmer than the room’s temperature. Ease floods into her and loosens muscles tensed against the soft chill of the central air conditioning.

  “I think my desk will go here.” Céline stands in the room’s center. “With two chairs here in front of it. And a chaise longue by the wall there. And plants! Plenty of plants.” She turns to see Ify staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the stars outside. “Ah, Ify. Never one for interior decoration, eh?”

  Ify’s mind jolts back to the room with a start. She throws a smirk over her shoulder, then returns her gaze to the inky jewel-studded black outside. “There’s no Refuse Ring.”

  Céline joins her. “We’re not like Alabast,” she says with pride. “Outer space, ce n’est pas une poubelle.” Pride fills her face. “It’s insulting to treat space like our waste basket. Our compost is harvested into energy that powers the Colony. In case the sun were ever to die, we’d be safe. And, well, you know how I feel about plastics.”

  Ify remembers the horror that had stricken Céline upon watching their classmates at the Institute in Alabast drink from one-use plastic bottles, toss away their plastic iFlexs as soon as an upgrade was available, even seal their dead in metal coffins lined with a special plastic supposedly meant for preservation before being shot out into space to join the rest of the Refuse Ring that circled the Colony. They never finish what’s on their plates, Céline had said to Ify, over and over with a mournful shake of her head as they walked from class to class. Even the campus transports were riddled with plastics.

  “And the Gokada hoverbikes I saw on the way here?” Ify asks, remembering the motorbikes laden with two, sometimes three passengers, weaving their way around bigger matatus and sometimes even city trains, all noise and rude shouts and giggling responses, cutting through the otherwise well-ordered traffic. Powered by some bootleg energy source she couldn’t detect. “More jujutech?” she jokes, invoking those items, objects, and wonders that seemed to make science and magic indistinguishable.

  “Eh, sometimes a city grows faster than you can regulate it.”

  Ify keeps her gaze on space. “You sound more than ready to become a Colonial administrator.”

  “Four years I’ve trained and studied. But I will not do like they do in Alabast. For once, Centrafrique will have an administrator who looks like them, who understands them. Not one who constantly tries to fit them in an Alabast-sized cercueil. Their coffins are too small for us anyway. And you? You’ll continue in medicine?”

  “Doctor, lawyer, or engineer,” Ify says, laughing. “Those are the only career options for us. Anything else is a failure to the tribe.” She resists the temptation to adjust her Whistle and have the mix of languages around her translated into something she can understand. “But I’ve grown to like it.” She smiles. “I think it suits me. The refugee population in Alabast is only growing. And someone needs to care for them. Like you, I think it is important that they are cared for by someone who understands their struggle.” She squints. “Someone who understands where they are coming from.”

  “And in four years, they will graduate at the top of their class, just like you.”

  “I hear the playing in your voice, Céline. Four years is a long time. Plenty of time to work, to grow, to become myself. Though the Biafran War is over, other wars continue. All over Earth, it is the same. Pain and death and destruction. Here in space, you can find peace. Your struggles will not chase you here. And if there’s anything I can do to help these people move on, I will do it.” She realizes she’s grown serious, so she forces a smile. Any mention of the war she had fled prompts memories of her arrival in Alabast all those years ago, alone, wrapped in a rug in the cargo hold of a space shuttle, shivering, with dried tears streaking her face, constantly asking for her sister, Onyii. She scoops up the memory and tosses it into a mental lockbox out of habit. She turns to Céline. “I must get back. Medical directors get even less leave time than their subordinates.”

  Céline smiles, and in it, Ify sees all the camaraderie that has built up between them over their four years studying and living together. Céline had come from Francophone West Africa only a year before Ify’s arrival and had lived with an Alabast family but was the only Earthland African in their neighborhood unit. She’d only spoken in occasional snatches of story about what she’d had to endure from her white classmates, from her white neighbors, from the authorities—always white—who would hound her family and check her immigration status. It had not been easy. But it had made Céline the perfect companion for Ify. Four years had made them family, so close that they shared every defeat and, together, basked in every victory.

  “J’suis fier de toi,” Ify says, without the aid of her translator. I’m proud of you.

  “Ah, look at you, meeting me where I live.” Céline shows her teeth, then pulls Ify into a soft but strong embrace. When she breaks away, she says, “Promise me you will visit. You will not find better fried plantains in all of outer space.”

  Without warning, tears brim in Ify’s eyes. “I promise.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  I am telling this story to you, but I am telling it to myself too. I am telling it to myself because it is important to be remembering. That is what the robot say who pull me from underneath the mountain of bodies where it is so hard to breathe that my chest is paining me fierce. It is like knife in my chest over and over and over, and I am not knowing for how long I am lying like this. But I am remembering that the first thing I am seeing is tiny hole of light coming from sky. Everything is shadow, and this is how I know I am being covered. And I am first thinking that this is what night is. That it is just blackness with tiny hole of light. But it is bodies. Many bodies piled on top of me. And then I am remembering the bodies are falling away. It is sounding like someone is dragging their foots on the dirt road, then it is sounding like a shirt rustling in wind, like someone is wearing a shirt too big for them and running down dirt road, and when I think of this thing, I am thinking that the person wearing this shirt should be giggling. I am liking the sound in my brain.

  As more and more body is coming away, I am seeing that light is bigger. Big big. So big it is paining my eyes to look at. I am wanting to raise my arms to block out the light, but I cannot move them because there are more bodies on top of them.

  I am not hearing any words anywhere, not even wind, just crunching of stones and rustling like clothes and shuffling like feet wearing slippers on road until many bodies tumble away at once and I am seeing blue and white and gold and red, and I must close my eyes because it is too much. And air is feeling cold on my skin because there is no more pile of smelling bodies crushing me. But air is also paining me like many many knife on my skin. It is burning, and I am hearing sizzle like meat is cooking.

  Then, hand is pulling me out of where I am lying and I see robot for the first time. It has arms and legs and a big round chest like an upside-down belly. It has no lips, just two lines on the sides of its face for where the plates are coming together. They are like grooves, and I am wanting to reach and touch them, because some memory in my bones is wanting me to do this, but I cannot raise my arm, because I am too weak.

  Robot is raising me up and down so that my feet just touch the ground, but when it is letting me go to stand on my own, I am falling like sack of yams. Small small stones on ground are digging into my cheek, and I am trying to push myself up. But I must try many many times before I am able to sit on my knees. And that is when I am seeing them.

  Many many robots. Not like army of robots. But family of robots. They are all looking the same, and they are the only thing I am seeing in this place that is moving. Not even beetle or bla
de of grass is moving here. Only the light in the eyes of the robots. That light is like single bar of white moving back and forth. I am thinking that this is how they are speaking to each other. With light.

  My teeth are chat-chatting but I am sweating like it is second skin, and, even though there is quiet everywhere, there is noise like jagga-jagga inside my head. Like train is running back and forth between my ears.

  One robot is walking to me with crunch-crunch footstep and is lowering themself to me. And long wire is coming out of its back and I am seeing that it is hose, because it is opening at its end and sliding past my teeth and into my mouth. And water is swimming down my throat.

  I am coughing so hard my chest is paining me again, but I am wanting water, so my body is scrambling like mouse to take hose, and I put it to my mouth and it is feeling like entire world—like sun and earth and sky—is smiling on my body, because pain is leaving me.

  Another robot is close to me and it has a different hose. I am thinking I will be drinking more water, but this one sprays me in shower so hard it is knocking me back on ground. It is like raining all over my body, but pain is leaving me, and I am smiling, and suddenly, I am seeing vision of child in too-big shirt running down dirt road. The shirt is flapping like flag is wrapping around them, and there is water everywhere in this vision, and the child is shining with the rain. Suddenly, I am back in the desert and all around me is dead bodies, but I am feeling like it is raining on my body, and I am hearing sound, and it is me giggling and giggling and giggling.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Without Céline in one of the window seats or in a desk chair, Ify’s private first-class cabin in the shuttle heading back to Alabast seems cavernous. Ify has shut the windows and adjusted the interior lighting for the perfect amount of brightness to keep her awake and focused on her work.

  She sits cross-legged on her king-size bed (again, too big) with a series of tablets arrayed in a semicircle around her, holographic images and charts springing up from them in glimmering blue. In one display, a three-dimensional diagram of a human brain rotates with annotations spitting out from it, noting which part of the brain controls which functions. On another tablet, she scrolls through a number of memory disorders: amnesia, hyperthysemia, Korsakoff’s syndrome. With each, a part of the first image grows red. On a third tablet, a newscaster drones through the catalog of daily updates on Alabast: the upcoming graduation ceremony for the latest class of students at the Institute and the preparations being made on the street level, the rising rate of homeownership given the recent influx of Colonists from the Nordic bloc Colonies. A small blip of news about an attack involving a recent immigrant from one of the outposts that served as home to fourth- and fifth-generation Earthland refugees from what was once Southeast Asia on Earth. It bothers Ify how the descendants of some Earthland refugees tend to live only among their own, as though clinging to the memory of the tragedy that befell their ancient homes is some act of bloody solidarity. Wars, rising waters, invasions, nuclear disasters. Too many catastrophes to count. Carnage caused by other humans and by the Earth itself. You’ve already left Earth behind, Ify wants to tell them, leave behind the past as well. She thinks back to the people of Centrafrique and the half-built structures, how so much of the capital seemed under construction, all gilded in possibility. Glowing with potential. Be like them, she wants to say to them, to those other migrants from Earthland who insist on speaking Ixcatec or Mayan in honor of a homeland that’s now nothing but deforested, irradiated desert. Be like them, she wants to tell those from the Russian Federation who insist on building monuments in their Colonial enclaves to heroes that, in Ify’s mind, should remain lost and forgotten.