Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  When the circles pass, I swim up and poke my head above water.

  They are stopped at the house where Xifeng is crouched. They will be finding her.

  I swim fast, and when I get to the stilts holding up the house’s platform, I climb. Xifeng is hiding at the back of the house, and when she is seeing me dripping with lagoon water, she is nearly making sound but I am putting my hand over her mouth and telling her shush.

  Then I am going around house and finding first police, and I am seeing the skin of his neck where it is showing beneath his helmet, and I am not knowing why this is important or what it means but I am fast fast putting my fingers there hard, and he is crumpling like he is losing his legs.

  I drag him back to where Xifeng is sitting, and I am taking his gun and I am feeling good with gun in my pants again. Then I am taking Xifeng and saying, “Climb on my back.”

  And she is doing this, then I am sliding over the edge of the platform but hanging by my fingertips. And like this, I am moving along the edge of the platform, and when I need to, I am moving to underside of platform and clinging to it while Xifeng is having her arms and legs wrapped around me.

  Like this, we move from house to house, platform to platform, until we get to Third Mainland Bridge and I am climbing over and we are blending into crowd again.

  I am dripping, and my shoes are making squishing sound when I am walking, and Xifeng is breathing heavy, then she is looking at me and she is giggling and I am giggling too, and I am wondering if it will be like this every time we are delivering rememberings to families.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  It is nighting outside and I am sitting on the steps to Xifeng’s trailer. We are on an empty span of shoreline, and some of the Enyemakas are coming with us to make sure to be keeping people away from us. I am not sure if this is to be protecting us or to be giving Xifeng privacy and a chance to be being alone. But I am sitting on the steps to the trailer, and I am drawing in the dirt with a stick I am finding on the beach. Stars are making the water shimmer, and I am drawing and stick is making scritch scritch sound until door is opening behind me and splashing light on what I am drawing, and I am actually seeing it for the first time when before I am not even paying attention to what I am doing.

  And Xifeng is standing in doorway and staring at thing I am drawing in the sand, and I am looking at it too and I am seeing face. It is meaning something to Xifeng. Maybe Xifeng is having rememberings.

  “Are you knowing this girl?” I am asking Xifeng. I am thinking maybe there was being one like me before me. A someone who Xifeng is holding and who she is telling you are good person.

  “Where did you see that face?” Xifeng is asking me, ignoring my question. She is not speaking her language to me anymore, so I am switching to my own language too.

  “When I am having epileptic attack. I am smelling sulfur and I am tasting metal and I am seeing her face. Not all of the time but many times. My body is telling me I am loving this girl. In my dreams, I am calling this girl Ify.” I am not knowing why, but air is choking in my lungs and my arms and legs are feeling heavy and I am wanting to know if this person is real. It is want that is deep deep inside me. “Are you knowing Ify?”

  After long silence, Xifeng is nodding her head. “I did. Once upon a time.” There is softness in her face, but then the light is changing and she is being lit from behind and is only silhouette in the night and I cannot see her face and what expression it is making. “But she died in the war. You should rest. We have more work to do tomorrow.”

  She is closing the door and taking the trailer’s light with her. I think she is wanting to hear me cry at news that Ify is dead, like what red-blood human is doing. Like woman whose loved one I am burying or like man and old woman who are seeing remembering of person who they are loving who is dead. She is wanting me to cry, but it is wasteful to cry for this. I am remembering how Xifeng is standing and holding herself when she is telling me about Ify, and I am remembering what my brain is telling me about how her body is talking to me when she is telling me words, and I am knowing that when Xifeng is telling me that Ify is dead, Xifeng is telling lies to me.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Ify walks up and down the rows of children, checking for the same thing—vital signs—while Grace strides at her side. “Have they shown any trace of plague? Or disease? If necessary, we will need to quarantine them.”

  Grace has her tablet out in front of her and clicks through tab after tab. “No sign, Doctor.”

  Ify doesn’t have the time or energy to correct her.

  “The first few cases were staggered. Some of them were children who had been living in Alabast or adjoining Colonies for several years. They were students at local primary and secondary schools. Their parents were employed locally, although many of them had jobs as unskilled labor. There is no sign in any of the scans of underlying neurological conditions.”

  Ify stops in her tracks. “Are they all red-blood?”

  Grace nearly runs into her. “Um, Doctor. By law, we are forbidden to check. I had just assumed . . .”

  “If they have brought a disease with them, perhaps it is something with a delayed fuse. Or worse, like cholera.” Ify stops at the bed of a boy who looks like he has just begun high school. Hair comes in patches above his lip and on his chin. He has a cleft lip, and his hair—grown long—is like a pool of ink on his pillow. She picks up his wrist, raises it a few inches over his forehead, pauses, looking for any reaction, then drops it.

  It lands with a smack on the boy’s face, and Grace winces. When she recovers, she returns to her tablet and says, “They are totally passive. Mute, unable to eat or drink, incontinent, and”—looking down at the boy while Ify leaves his arm draped across his forehead—“unreactive to physical stimuli or pain.”

  “When was the first case?” Ify asks, her voice devoid of emotion. She now has a puzzle in front of her to focus on. She’s been looking for this.

  Grace taps a sequence into her tablet. “Someone with similar symptoms appears in the system from six years ago.”

  “Is that the first?”

  “The first that matches up, Doctor.”

  “Let me see.” Ify snatches the tablet from Grace and scrolls through the information. There is a video file attached, and Ify opens it to a holographic projection of news camera footage. The camera follows a team of medical professionals around something on a stretcher as they hurry across tarmac to load it onto a shuttle craft. People dressed in worn-down clothes—the family?—crowd around the stretcher and follow it into the craft, some of them falling onto the tarmac in tears. The stretcher is loaded onto the shuttle and vanishes as the lid closes. “What is happening?”

  “Deportation,” Grace says, quietly. “The child was deported. His father’s asylum application had been denied, as had his brother’s. The three of them were sent back to Vanuatu.”

  Ify looks up in surprise. “Vanuatu? But there is no Vanuatu. That country has been underwater for . . .” The implications all hit Ify at once. She looks around her at row after row of beds and gulps. “Grace?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Pull up the immigration status of the patients’ families. And mark those who have received deportation notices within the past three months.” As she says this, she recalls the news broadcast of the government’s new stance on the migrants. And she recalls the feeling that had enveloped her, the idea that she’d solved a puzzle, that she’d found a way to get rid of a problem. And guilt grips her heart.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  After Grace leaves to do more research, Ify wanders the rows of hospital beds alone. Or almost alone. A few beds have family members crowded around them. Their clothes seem to reflect all manner of success or lack thereof. Some of the people attending to the comatose children or hovering over them wear slim-fitting p
atterned tunics with pleated pants. Others hold battered workers’ caps in grease-stained fingers. Some have small vacuum-sealed containers of food with them, aromatic scents wafting over to Ify and speaking to her of places filled with brown people, black people, on a floor crowded around a massive dish or a table and eating and talking and complaining and laughing. Food is forbidden in this part of the east wing, but Ify doesn’t stop them. Maybe that family is hoping the smell of home will waken their child. At one bed stands a child who looks only a few years older than the one in the hospital bed. They wear the school uniform of one of Alabast’s most prestigious secondary schools, and they are speaking in hushed whispers to the comatose child. It is not English. Ify scrolls through the options in her translator and finds it: Gujarati.

  They really are from all parts of Earth. From the scattered whispering and murmurs and prayers and quiet pleadings, Ify hears Tamil, Persian, Pashto, Javanese, Tongan, and half a dozen other languages. Including Igbo.

  She turns, and almost by the far wall, far enough to appear as a speck to the unaided eye, there he is. She uses the embedded camera on the Whistle attached to her temple to zoom in, and he appears in high definition before her eyes. Lanky limbs awkward, like he’s folded in on himself in the chair next to the hospital bed. She knows it’s him because of the bullet scar on the side of his head. There’s no one else it can be.

  Peter.

  A gasp catches in her throat. A cord snakes from the back of his neck into the cerebral monitor by the patient’s bed. How could she have not seen that outlet before? Ify thinks back to that time on Paige and Amy’s porch with him sitting next to her, then him jumping down a few steps and pleading, face to face, that she not reveal his lies, then him threatening to expose her past as a war criminal. Had he somehow managed to disguise it? There was no hair to hide it. Ify squints, then realizes her foolishness and zooms in further with her Whistle’s camera.

  The cord isn’t connected to a cerebral monitor. It vanishes beneath the bed. Ify’s jaw tightens.

  It’s connected directly to the patient.

  The patchy skin. The outlet. She’s sure that were she to cut open the skin of his forearm, she would see gears and pistons and oil.

  She’s seen a boy like him once before.

  Lying in a rattling truckbed, part of a caravan passing through dark and heavy jungle, refugees either sleeping in one of the trailers or walking alongside, children playing bulubu by moonlight. She has a tablet in her lap and a pistol in her messenger bag, and she’s on her way to kill the woman who murdered her family. And sitting across from her is a boy with a touchboard clutched close to his chest, patchy skin on his arms, voice hoarse with disuse, rifle in his lap. A boy she has seen kill an entire group of marauders and show no remorse because he claimed he was doing it to protect the caravan as it wound its way to the refugee intake center near Enugu. The boy’s vitiligo, the way he only spoke in the present tense, as though everything that had happened or would happen to him were always happening to him, as though the war was simultaneously a memory and a thing still raging in his mind, as though he saw the ceasefire as a thing that could never last, as though he knew war was returning. His name had been Agu, and he had saved the woman whom Ify had tried to kill, the same woman who had then abandoned Ify to a lonely future in the Colonies. Agu, who had loved to make music with his touchboard. Agu, who had been forged out of other people’s parts and made a killer.

  Ify sees it now.

  Peter is a synth.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  “He’s not human.” Ify has to keep herself from shouting. Still, the projection of Céline hovering by the window overlooking the refugee ward winces.

  In her office, Ify has a number of documents glowing at her in the form of holographic projections: Colonial human rights statutes defining enemy combatants and refugees, medical files for several of the most recent cases of patient coma, and the information page for immigration authorities.

  “I could call the number right now, Céline. I could tell them where to find Peter, that that’s the name he gave his sponsors, even though it may not be his real name. I could tell them that everything he’s said to them is a lie. Céline, he’s an enemy combatant.”

  Céline’s face has none of its usual sly frolic. There’s no joke at the edge of her lips, no mischief twinkling in her eye. She has her arms folded and frowns, an expression somewhere between disapproval and concern. “Ify.”

  “He’s a synth.”

  “Ify. Mais t’es pas sûre.” Céline swings her arm wide as though to indicate the vast number of questions awaiting Ify if she were to go through with this. “That’s what the deportation authorities will ask. They’ll ask, ‘How do you know this?’”

  “It won’t matter.” Desperation forces Ify to pace back and forth in a small orbit behind her desk. “When they see . . . when they see what he is, they’ll be forced to act. Céline, you don’t understand. He was built specifically for war. His body—his organs, his skeleton, his tendons, his muscle—all of it is entirely false. Manufactured. They made him in a lab, Céline. If I were to scan him, I’d see that his memories are nothing more than mnemonic and sensory data taken from other people and inserted into his braincase. Specifically to simulate human feeling!”

  “Ify, calme-toi. S’il te plaît.” She pauses. “You saw him plug into a patient. Maybe he’s only a partially cyberized boy—”

  “We have to stop him,” Ify cuts her off, lost in thought. Knuckle to chin, she resumes her pacing. “He’s clearly on some mission. Just masquerading as a human.” She looks up at Céline but doesn’t see her, sees only the completion of her own mission. “Maybe he’s even had a hand in the illness affecting the refugees. He was plugged into a refugee. I could pull the security footage from that hospital ward and show him plugged into the refugee in the bed he’s sitting next to. There. Done.” She wipes her hands of invisible blood. “There’s the problem, wrapped up in an airtight package and fired off into space to sit alongside the Refuse Ring circling Alabast.”

  “Ify, that’s not what they would do to him.” The tone in Céline’s voice stops Ify where she stands. “They’d send him to the Jungle to suffer until he self-deports back to Nigeria.” Céline takes a step toward Ify, but because it is a hologram projected by her Whistle, it looks only like more of Céline’s body has vanished off-frame. “You see what color he is. You know what they do to les noirs.” And Ify sees in a separate hologram what Céline encounters every day in real life because of her position as a Colonial administrator. Children playing in glass-studded mud, malnourished and with faulty Augments, weaving their way around crudely built zinc trailers and huts that stand no chance against the freezing temperatures when the Alabastrine administrators of the Jungle choose to open the vents and clear the waste that accumulates in the slum. Trailers slashed with yellow or blue or purple paint depending on which aid agency they represent, refugees waiting in lines that go on forever for a vaccination or treatment for whatever disease is rampaging through the population at any given time. Families wrapped in bubble coats; when they speak, their breath clouds before their faces and frost tips their eyebrows. Large pools of wastewater dotting the landscape. Drones ever circling, looking for crimes, whether committed out of malice or desperation, they don’t care. They swoop in and fire electric bolts at the target, then their claws retract and they drag the victim away, on the ground and through the wastewater, then into the air, where a jail transport van hovers. Or Augmented police, towering twice as tall as any human and muscled with steroids and gear oil, stomping through the tent cities, crushing homes, beating men and women. Hammering, always hammering, as people try to build their makeshift homes or legal aid clinics or mosques or churches or art therapy centers. Discarded sleeping bags, rotten food, broken shoes half-buried in faulty, recently re-poured concrete.

  The place Céline tries to rescue re
fugees from. The place too many of them don’t escape. The Jungle.

  “You would send him to this place?” Céline asks.

  Ify clenches her fists at her side, fighting the guilt that rises like bile in her throat. “But Paige and Amy. He could hurt them. I could have him sent away, and they would be none the wiser. They’d think it was simply the luck of the draw.” She waves away the concern. “Besides, Nigeria is safe now. It’s not like Vanuatu. It hasn’t been swallowed by waters. It is still there.” And she realizes then that she’s thinking of the deportation Grace had shown her, the child who had fallen into a coma, the family weeping in the aftermath of receiving their deportation orders, the unconscious child wheeled onto that aircraft to be spirited to a home that no longer existed. “The economy is rebounding,” she says, her voice faltering. “There’s peace. It’s a familiar place for him.” As she speaks, her voice loses conviction. “The rebel groups have been put down.” When she says, “There is peace,” one last time, she can’t bring herself to believe it.

  “They all deserve your help.” Then Céline ends the call.

  Ify tries to speak, but a sob catches in her throat. She remembers when she and Céline would walk to school and get stopped by the Alabastrine immigration authorities, and they would have to wait on the sidewalk, standing by the large, intimidating police vans while their classmates walked by and snickered. She remembers the aid workers who fed her in the dorm and those moments she would spend with Céline at the Viewer, looking out at the stars and seeing their futures plotted in them. She fights and fights for the resolve to move against Peter. To condemn him.

  Until she gives up, closes all the tabs, and powers down her devices.