Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Paige nudges Ify forward, and Ify skids to a halt just far enough away that Amy, without pausing, can turn and put the spoon right to Ify’s lips.

  “Too hot! Too hot!” Ify leaps away and flaps at her tongue and lips. “Mrs. Reed!”

  Paige puts her fists to her hips. “Oh, there she goes with that Mrs. Reed nonsense again! Well, Ify, if Amy’s Mrs. Reed, then what am I, huh?”

  Ify instinctively ducks her head amid the chaos of their playful shouting. “Can I at least sit down?”

  Amy shoos Ify away with her dripping spoon, and Ify takes a seat in one of the faux-wooden antique bistro chairs by the rectangular table. Paige sits at the head and gazes lovingly at Amy as her wife cooks.

  Ify snatches the woven basket of warm bread rolls from beside Paige’s elbow and stuffs one into her mouth. “What’s with the sign?”

  “The sign?” Paige asks.

  “Yeah, out front.” She rests her hand on the table, and up from her gloved palm floats a holographic snapshot of the sign above the front door. “Wir schaffen das?”

  “Oh, that was Amy’s idea. It’s German. Right, Amy?”

  Amy, back turned to them, nods.

  “It means We will do it, or something like that.”

  Ify swallows the rest of the first roll but takes her time with the second. “Do what? Is it like in a football game? Or getting high marks on an exam?”

  “No, more like . . .” Paige considers the ceiling.

  “Like doing your homework,” Amy says, gliding to the table and placing a steaming plate of pasta covered in marinara sauce before Ify. “Or finishing your plate.” She winks at Ify in that annoying and obvious way that, Ify has realized, is Amy’s way of being charming. “It’s sort of like a duty. What you’re supposed to do. Like how Paige is supposed to go upstairs and tell Peter that dinner’s ready.”

  Paige lets out a loving purr-growl, then smirks and gets up from her chair. She lights a soft kiss into Amy’s hair before vanishing around the corner.

  Amy sets places for the rest of the table, then crouches by Ify. “The words on that plaque? They were spoken by a woman named Angela Merkel. Long ago, back when there was a Europe to speak of, she was what they called the chancellor of Germany. Their leader. Near the beginning of the previous century, in 2015, there was a massive refugee crisis. Because of war, many people had to flee the countries they were born in, countries they’d spent their entire lives in. Many of these people came from countries in Africa and the Middle East.”

  “I know about the migrant crisis, Amy.” She makes sure her voice is soft so it doesn’t sound like too much of a chastisement.

  “Well, when most of the countries with means were refusing refugees or trying to make life as difficult as possible for them, Chancellor Merkel said those words you see on that plaque. We will do it. You know what else she said? ‘Wenn wir uns jetzt noch entschuldigen müssen dafür, dass wir in Notsituationen ein freundliches Gesicht zeigen, dann ist das nicht mein Land.’”

  “If we must now begin to apologize for having, in dire circumstances, shown a friendly face, then this is not my country.”

  “Exactly. She was a real leader. She was kind when everyone around her thought it was better not to be. It didn’t matter where these people came from, what color they were. They were in distress, and she had the power to help them.” She lowers her voice, grows serious. “It means a lot to me that you would help us with Peter. He’s . . . broken.”

  Like I was . . .

  Ify’s heart softens. She puts her hand on top of Amy’s. Their fingers intertwine. “I am happy to help. Wir schaffen das,” she says, which gets Amy giggling.

  “Oh, there he is!” Amy scurries off into the hallway, and Ify rises to her feet.

  The smoke is nearly gone. Tendrils steam from every plate, but the air is clear. So clear that once Peter steps into the light, Ify can take in all his features at once.

  Her heart stops. It can’t be . . .

  Paige looks down at Peter, as dark as Ify, with a small single scar on each cheek and what looks like a sewn bullet hole near the top of his head. But those eyes. Ify has seen those eyes before.

  In a detention center, on the other side of an invisible electric field. His hands were bound by metal restraints and rested in his lap. A collar ringed his neck, and Ify stood on the other side of the electric field, dressed as a Nigerian official with Nigeria’s best mech pilot beside her, deciding whether or not those eyes deserved to see more grief because of the war the boy was caught fighting.

  Five years ago, that boy had been Ify’s prisoner.

  Paige, her hands on Peter’s shoulders, grins at Ify. “Peter, meet Ify. Ify, this is Peter.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  After the robots are finished downloading and their cords go back into their necks, they begin burying the bodies in the holes in the ground that they are making earlier. I am asking Enyemaka if they are doing this often, and Enyemaka is saying, It is our task. It is our programming.

  You are being made to do this thing? I am asking it.

  I was made to protect. But I failed that mission, so I have given myself new programming. We have made our own purpose.

  You are saying I am child of war. Is this possible for me? To make new purpose?

  Enyemaka is staring at me for long time, and light is moving in its eyes, and then Enyemaka is saying, in voice of woman, “Yes.” And even though Enyemaka is having no mouth, I am thinking she is smiling.

  So that is how I am helping Enyemaka to bury the bodies. I am smaller than them, but I am able to carry many bodies on my back so that when they are done downloading, I am picking up the bodies and laying them in front of the graves the other Enyemakas are digging for them. And we are doing this for many days. And one day, when the sun is bright in the sky and I am having pack for water and for fruit that we are picking by river the day before, I am asking Enyemaka how they are locating these graves.

  Enyemaka is hunching in front of me so that our eye is on same level. Then, in front of me is hologram map the same color of blue that is sometimes shading my rememberings. And it is showing map with squiggle lines that are supposed to be mountains and valleys, and there are red dots that are pulsing, and I am knowing that these are being people like I am seeing in my rememberings. And around every red dot is pulsing like waves of circles coming out then vanishing, and I am remembering a stone skipping on the water of a pond, and someone is throwing it to be doing this thing, and that someone is me.

  We discern the location of the graves from the speech of nearby humans residing in villages not far from the burial grounds. And the map is zooming in on one of the red dots, and the squiggle lines are turning into buildings and huts and gardens, and the red dot is turning into a man who is having water falling from his eye and who is sadding.

  “When are you talking to these people to be knowing where the graves are being?” I am asking Enyemaka.

  And Enyemaka’s map zooms out so that I see the red dots gathered in clusters, and I am knowing now that where there are many red dots to be sadding, that is where bodies are being buried or left outside for rotting. Then Enyemaka is showing me hologram of satellite photo, and in the photo is upturned dirt like scab, and it is awkward and without order and sometimes it is just one square that has not been flattened properly. Or it is like someone is wounding the earth and then being messy when sewing the wound back together.

  That is how the Enyemakas are finding the graves.

  One time, an old woman is coming from village to watch us work, and there is water brimming in her eyes, and no one is making sound, except for the digging. And then she is seeing me carrying body and she is screaming that this is no work for a child, and this is the first time that someone is calling me fifteen-year-old girl, and I am looking to Enyemaka, and she is looking at me like, yes, I am fifteen years
old, but I am feeling older and younger at the same time, so I am moving the bodies I am carrying to their graves and then I am walking to the old woman who has red dirt on the hem of her gown.

  When I stand in front of old woman with water in her eyes, she is not saying anything but her lip is trembling like she is holding something in her face but she is still sadding. So I reach my hand and touch her arm, and she is shaking with holding back sobs.

  And I am asking her, “Is there someone you are knowing who is being killed here?” And my voice is scratching like knife in my throat because I am not speaking too much with Enyemakas and I am not used to using my voice like this, but, for some reason, this woman is not being able to speak to my brain the way Enyemaka is, or she is not wanting to. Maybe she is wanting to think that I am human being and not child of war. As I am speaking to her, I am scanning with the metal that is being inside my head and I am seeing that she is having metal in her head too, and Enyemaka is calling this a braincase, and I scan and I am knowing where to look to see her rememberings, and I am seeing that she is thinking of gold tooth and brown slippers, and I am walking back to bodies in front of Enyemakas and I am looking and looking and looking until I am finding one with gold tooth and brown slippers. I am bringing this body to old woman and she is falling to her knees and beating the earth and making it dark with the water from her eyes. And I am just standing there without smile or frown, just face like stone with body of person she is loving in my arms.

  When she is finished beating the earth, she is trying to smile and say thank you but no word is coming out. But I am looking down where she is coming from. And then she is walking and I am following her and we are arriving at her home and in backyard of her hut with blue dome around it to protect from poison red air. I am digging with my hands and digging and digging until skin is peeling away, and she is seeing that my fingers and my hands are made of metal. And I know she is thinking me disgusting, but I am not caring. I am only caring about my duty, and my duty is to help with the rememberings. So I dig hole and I look to woman, and she is nodding to me like she has forgotten that I am disgusting thing, and I put the body in hole and fill it back up again.

  Then I am walking back to Enyemakas, and they have finished downloading the rememberings and have buried the bodies in neat rows.

  It is good that I am able to be bringing the woman the whole body. Sometimes, when we dig, there is only a bag with pieces in it. Just a mess of clothings and blankets and hair pressed into strange shapes all with no smell. And the skull is only two pieces: the jaw and everything else. And sometimes the teeth are clean inside the bag but there is no outlet on the skull so we see no braincase. Sometimes there is braincase inside the skull and the Enyemakas are plugging into it to download the rememberings but it is difficult to bury the body again because it is already in many pieces.

  At the end of a day of work, we are all walking back to the workstation. It is a few trailers linked together, and they follow the Enyemakas like a caravan. In the beginning, they were all always moving moving never stopping, but the caravan is needing to rest, so the Enyemakas make to rest as well, but I know it is just pretending like how I am pretending.

  I am learning with this work that I am not needing rest like normal people.

  Enyemaka are following me to the first trailer, where light is glowing, and they are walking in one at a time and passing few moments, sometimes whole minute, then walking back out and the next one is going in, and so on and so on. Every time Enyemaka is going inside, they duck their head so they are not banging it on doorway, and this is making me giggle for some reason.

  Then when they finish, I am walking up the metal steps to the inside of the trailer, and everything is metal, and the door is sliding shut behind me like whoosh, and the air is cool in here and not paining me with fire like outside.

  I am closing my eyes when I am suddenly smelling sulfur like rotten egg, and then my head is paining me and I am falling to the ground like the woman I am giving dead body to and I am seeing nothing, then all I am seeing is white, then I am seeing little girl with pigtail on both side of her head and barrettes in pigtails and I am crouched over girl, then I am seeing girl covered in blood but still alive and looking at me with blank face like face carved from stone, then I am back in trailer and I am shivering but not from cool air.

  When this is happening before, Enyemaka are telling me that I am having what is called temporal lobe epilepsy and that it is wounding in my brain from when I was child of war. Most times but not always, I am waking in trailer and I am receiving medicine in my arm, then I am better. But they still come and my body is shaking shaking.

  And I am trying to remember the mission. I am trying to be remembering why we are downloading all these rememberings, and I am seeing the hard drives that the Enyemakas are transferring the information to, and it is these hard drives that we will give to people when we return to the city, and I am trying to think of my duty, but then Xifeng is holding me and not letting me move.

  I am wanting to tell Xifeng thank you, but my tongue is not moving in my mouth, so I am just letting her hold me until my head is no longer paining me.

  CHAPTER

  7

  “In the beginning,” Peter says around a mouthful of spaghetti, slurping a noodle so that it smacks his nose with sauce, “we were on the side of the government, and we were against the rebels. I was a child, so I didn’t know sides, but we had government stations broadcast on our BoTas and iFlexes.”

  Amy sits to Ify’s left and twirls pasta around her fork. She leans toward Ify as though to whisper some conspiracy and says, quite loudly, “Peter’s father worked in the mining industry and was apparently very high up in the food chain.” She looks at Peter, and Ify worries she will wink at the poor boy. “On a first-name basis with the president, right?” When Peter nods, Amy nods too, satisfied with herself. “Tell Ify about the bakery.”

  Peter turns his eyes to Ify. “When you’re a child, you don’t know what revolution is or what a regime is. You only know who puts suya in your wrapper on the street or who turns off the light to your room when you go to sleep.” He talks of these things to Ify as though she were oyinbo just like Amy and Paige. Like she hadn’t spent so much of her life in exactly the same place he is describing. But she grits her teeth because something is strange about this boy. “I had everything I could ask for. I wanted for nothing.” Where did this boy learn his English? His accent is gone. “Electronics, trips into town by rail or bus. We were wealthy. So wealthy that I would be brought to the front of the line when I went to the bakery to collect bread for my family. But then fighting came closer and closer to our village and we couldn’t go out and play as far as we would before.”

  Both Paige and Amy have furrowed brows focused on Peter, like he is both an equation to solve and a fascination, some strange and exotic animal from another planet that they’ve come across. Ify has seen that look before, and every time, she’s struggled to find the words for what boils in her chest, what she wants to say to get them to stop. He is not a shiny foreign object. He is a boy and quite possibly a liar. But she just remains silent, twirling sauce-drenched spaghetti around her fork and trying to look as though she’s enjoying the meal while listening to Peter’s story.

  “There was one rebel group, they were called Angels of Heaven, and they were inching closer into the countryside. And getting closer and closer to where we lived. The morning they came, I was asleep in the guest room at a cousin’s house. It is tradition for us to—how do I put it—swap relatives from time to time. Our houses have many stories, and cousins come to live with you or you go to live with them. For a while, my grandmother stayed with us, and I had to give her English lessons because she was too old to be cyberized, and she only spoke the kind of Igbo that I couldn’t use my software to translate. But the heart knows.” He smiles, and charm sparkles in his eyes. It repulses Ify. The manipulation is so blatant. She ca
n tell immediately that he is doing everything he can to take advantage of them. But why? What is his agenda? “Anyway, I was in my cousin’s house’s guest room when we hear this huge BOOM!” He leaps from his chair and Amy and Paige shriek in unison, so that when he sits down again, he’s fighting back a grin. “Glass everywhere. Pshhhhhhh! Imagine how the ground would be shaking beneath you. It would be terrifying, right? I wasn’t terrified. Maybe I was numb. Maybe I knew I was protected. The sound of the explosion told me that it had been a vehicle bomb. Maybe a car. More likely a truck. There’s a very particular sound to a truck bomb. Once you hear it, you never forget.”

  Ify’s frown deepens.

  “So, I went outside. And everywhere, pieces of building were falling down. It was like weather, the way stones and shrapnel and pieces of metal fell from the sky. That is what the violence became in my country during the war. It was like the weather.” He doesn’t look to Ify for confirmation. Indeed, this whole time, it seems as though he’s been making a conscious effort to ignore her, to pretend she doesn’t even exist at this table. “I walked past a building that had been cut in half by the bomb. There was shooting. Katakata. Katakata. Everywhere, bullets flying. Even pinging the walls around me.

  “Then I hear this poor man moaning. I look around, and that’s when I see him. Lying on the ground in a government uniform. He’d been shot in the stomach. Soft moans. That’s what he’s letting out. Very soft moans, but I can hear very well, and I hear him. As soon as he sees that I am not the enemy, he begs for my help. Not in sewing up his wound, but in escaping. And I tell him it is absolute foolishness to try crossing this main street wearing a government uniform when there are rebels shooting katakata everywhere.” Peter leans in toward Paige and Amy and lowers his voice. “So I tell him I have an idea. And I go back into what’s left of my cousin’s home, and I open the dresser in my aam and aamee’s room, and it is just as I have hoped. The clothes are untouched. Not even a speck of dust on them. So I take one of her dresses and return to the soldier, and I say, ‘Hey, put this on, it will be very helpful.’” He bursts into laughter.