Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

Static distorts the voice for a second. Then a brief image of jungle, then a sunbathed road filled with pedestrians and vendors shouting their wares from their stalls. Then static.

  Ify’s vision becomes clearer, and she sees that she is in a dark, dank room. Somewhere underground. Maybe abandoned. Water drips into a puddle somewhere outside of her vision. When she looks down, she sees that she’s bound to a metal chair. She’s in Peter’s body. Sounds echo, but she believes this is the type of place where sounds are made that aren’t supposed to be heard aboveground.

  “Well, let’s get this over with, and we can bring him back to his cell upstairs.”

  Two men, the speakers, walk into the room, and Ify feels Peter’s fingers clench into fists, where they’re bound behind his chair. They wear all black and don’t bother hiding their faces. Their hands are gloved. One of them is older, his face like it was carved from obsidian it’s so expressionless. The other is already grinning, and Ify, in Peter’s body, feels their heart race. Their jaw clenches. Tears spring to their eyes. Even though their legs are bound to those of the metal chair, their feet scuffle madly against the ground.

  Static. A kitchen. Stew is cooking over a pot. A woman stirs with a massive wooden spoon. A hand—Ify-Peter’s hand—reaches over. The woman smacks it. Static.

  “So,” says the first man, pulling at the gloves on his hands. “Let’s talk about that higher purpose of yours.” He walks to a side wall and comes back with something buzzing and sizzling in the palm of one hand.

  Ify-Peter squirms in their seat, then thrashes as the interrogator comes near. When the interrogator is close enough, they see that there are bees buzzing in the man’s hand, their metal carapaces glistening with light from a source they can’t find. “Please.” More thrashing. “Please, please no more.”

  Static blitzes out the vision, then everything comes back.

  “We don’t believe your story,” the second interrogator says.

  The first kneels before Ify-Peter. “If this group massacred your village, then why would you join them? Why did we find you in their camp?” His voice is low and almost playful. “It doesn’t make any sense. A proper victim would seek revenge against those who wronged him. Like a man. Are you a man?”

  Ify-Peter chokes back a sob.

  “I asked you a question. Are you a man?”

  More wordless weeping.

  “Very well then.” The interrogator pulls a knife out of a pocket on his vest and cuts away Ify-Peter’s pant legs, exposing their thighs to the cold. Then the interrogator upends the swarm of metallic bees onto their legs, where they burrow beneath the skin, and pain sears through their entire body, spiking at the base of their brain, turning everything to gray static, and suddenly—

  Ify is back in the hospital room, gasping. The other end of her cord lies on the floor. She staggers into the chair and forces herself to take several deep breaths. She presses her palms to her eyes, trying to block out the vision and the experience she’s just had, racked by sobs that shake her shoulders. She should have been prepared. She curses herself, for not expecting to intrude into a painful memory. Then she straightens. That memory could belong to anyone. Peter is a synth, a combination of other people’s neural data cobbled together to generate enough information to simulate humanness. It’s all fake. That couldn’t have been Peter. With this, she’s able to take the pain she experienced and box it and stuff that box deep in her mind. She puts her fingers to her nose, and they come back red. Hurriedly, she snatches tissues from the dispenser above Peter’s bedstand and dabs at the nosebleed.

  Then she takes off her Bonder, folds it, and stuffs it back into her pocket.

  When she looks down, Peter is staring straight at her. His eyes didn’t flutter open. One moment, they’re closed; the next, they’re not. The more she observes him, the more like a machine he seems. “You lied,” she says, trying to make her voice as hard as possible. “Your family is not Igbo. You are Efik. Or you would be if you weren’t a synth. But you were a synth, made for war and aligned with rebels. Then you were captured. Who’s to say that you were actually tortured?”

  He says nothing. His face doesn’t move.

  “Because you are a synth, you are not subject to human rights protections under Alabastrine law. Your very existence is a danger to everyone here.” She searches his face for a reaction. “You are not human. Once the authorities are notified of your presence, you will be arrested and deported.”

  “Please,” he says, and his voice sounds just like it did in the memory of his torture.

  Ify steels her heart against him.

  “You made them torture me.”

  “What?”

  His words are weightless. Breathy things that a strong wind could blow away, yet Ify feels as though each one could pulverize her. “It was beneath the cell where I was being held where I saw you.” He licks cracked lips. “I remember. I know it was you.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Please.” He raises a hand limply, as though to stop her. It immediately falls back onto the bed. “I know it was you. The men obeyed you and the pilot you were with. If they are torturing me, it is because you are making them.” His words don’t match his tone. The words should be coming from someone angry, someone threatening vengeance. But his voice is one of resignation and soft certainty, the type of voice with which the elderly speak when they know they don’t have much longer to live. Tears brim in his eyes. “But I am not hating you. I should be hating you, but I am not. I should be wanting to kill you, but I am not. Even while others that I am with are wanting to be killing you and doing horrible thing to you, I am not.” He holds her gaze. As weak as he looks in that bed, he refuses to break her gaze. “You are leaving the war. You are surviving and leaving. And you are coming here. Why am I not able to do the same? You are doing horrible thing during war, just like I am doing horrible thing during war.”

  “We are not the same.”

  A tear slides down his face, drops from his chin. “But I survived. And I left. And I came here.”

  “You are a weapon. You will always be a weapon. You can’t change. And this?” She gestures at the entirety of the hospital room. “You doing what you did? It changes nothing. I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to manipulate them into caring for you. You want them to hold on to you even tighter, so you do something like this.” She’s getting angrier than she intended, and tears spring anew to her eyes. This isn’t my fault, she tells herself. “But it’s not going to work. Because I”—she jabs a finger into her chest—“I am here to protect them. I know what you are, and I won’t let you hurt them.”

  She leaves before she can say any more, stomping to the door and waiting frustratedly for it to slide open. When she stops outside, she remembers that Paige and Amy are on the bench right next to her. She wipes the wetness from her eyes and stuffs her bloodstained tissue in her pocket.

  “Oh, Ify,” Amy says, rising to hug her.

  She thinks I’m in mourning over Peter, Ify realizes. A part of her wants to tell her the truth, that she just lived through what may be Peter’s very real trauma, that she was transported back to a time she’s done everything in her power to forget, when she was complicit in exactly those same acts of torture. She wants to tell Amy that she believes a part of her, however small, is responsible for the boy in that hospital bed, for turning him into what he is, for creating him in the first place. War does that. It is the pot and it is all the ingredients for the stew, and what gets spooned out and put on the plate is Peter. But she says nothing. Instead, she accepts Amy’s hug in silence.

  It is not her fault.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Except for a few attendants making their rounds up and down the rows of beds, Ify is alone in the ward housing the refugee children. The lights have dimmed. Ify figures it’s part of a power-saving measure now that the k
ids have been marked down as unresponsive to light. She makes sure that the attendants are far enough away that they won’t see what it is she’s about to do.

  It’s against all protocol to perform an invasive procedure without the patient’s consent. But curiosity has taken hold of Ify like never before. She must know the answer to the questions stirring inside her: What happened between her and Peter? Is there something in there that can help Ify figure out what’s been going on with these children?

  When she’s certain she’s in the clear, she takes a seat next to the child she’d seen Peter with earlier, the one she now knows for certain is cyberized. She pulls her Bonder out of her pocket and checks to make sure it’s in working order. She dares not put it on, but she calibrates it to download instead of stream. And like that, she plugs her cord into the outlet at the base of the child’s neck. There’s no way to know what memories she’s downloading, whether they’re peaceful or painful, whether they’re of family or torturers, whether they’ll provide coherent snapshots of an episode or whether they’ll be a chaos of disparate puzzle pieces.

  Satisfied with the data she’s downloaded, she disconnects and stands up. Just before she leaves, she smooths out a wrinkle in the motionless child’s bedsheet.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  She knows, even as she’s cleaning her room, that she’s avoiding her device. The Bonder sits like an accusation on her desk. It’s even connected to a projector so she won’t have to actually live through the recorded moments. If she closes her eyes, she can still imagine, in her entire body, the suffering that Peter remembers. Whether or not the memory was false, it still rattles her bones.

  For several minutes, she stands in the center of her now-pristine workroom, staring at the device. Finally, before the urge leaves her, she rushes to her desk and inputs the set of keys on her tablet to fire up the Bonder.

  It hums, then prepares to send the data to the projector when, suddenly, sparks pop out of it. The projector shuts down and the Bonder goes dark. Ify frowns, then tries to turn the projector back on, but nothing changes. She disconnects the Bonder, and nothing she does will bring it back to life. She turns the thing over in her hands, and, before she knows it, she’s got her tools out to repair it. Her desk is festooned with all shapes of pins and chips and pliers and scalpels, pruning shears and tiny torches. And above it all hovers a small group of nanobots to help hold parts of the metal open while she works.

  By the time she looks back up, the false light from the Colony’s lighting system has started to spill through her windows. Wisps of smoke still curl from the device. Her rotation starts in two hours. She’s close—she can taste it like the beginnings of blood on her tongue from chewing through her cheek.

  Finally, she’s got it. She lets out a sigh. The next instant, her fingers blaze over the table to put the thing back together.

  With her Bonder reassembled, she takes a moment. Then she plugs it into her tablet to read its data and perform a system diagnosis.

  Her tablet registers the device. Victory.

  Its internal data unfurls down the system monitor. The scroll continues, down and down and down, until it stops. The cursor blinks, then starts to move in the opposite direction, gobbling line after line of code.

  It’s erasing its own data, eating its own organs. Frantic, Ify inputs recovery protocols, trying to revert the Bonder to an earlier version of itself and regain what was lost. But nothing. The massacre continues.

  She pulls the cord out and forces closed both the tablet and the Bonder. But the damage is done. Almost all of that data, gone.

  What just happened?

  CHAPTER

  16

  Surveillance drone that is having police markings is passing under broken stone bridge, but people who are living here are sending their own drones that they are making, and they are attacking the surveillance drone and beating it into pieces then picking at its corpse like they are vultures. While the people are laughing and cheering at this, I am pretending to be sleeping. But I am always sensing thing that is happening, even if my eye is not being open. I am knowing how people are coming together to protect themself from enemies like the police or bandits. I am knowing that this is being called community.

  When I am pretending to be sleeping, I am leaning against pillar like someone who is sleeping or doing drug or both, but I am not sleeping. I am watching. When I am watching, I am seeing what people are bringing into this home where we are living under the bridge. One night after water is coming in from lagoon and washing over everything like big big flood and breaking tent and sometime grabbing people and pulling them back out, we are bringing up sandbag and people are digging and building wall to keep lagoon out when it is rising and becoming big big and trying to eat us. Sometime they are bringing stick, but sometime they are bringing metal. Small piece of metal to help making stronger the wall but also bigger piece of metal like shield. One night I am recognizing piece. It is like chestpiece of Enyemaka. It is chestpiece of Enyemaka.

  Man with chestpiece is bringing it into shadow under bridge, and I am walking fast to him.

  “Sah, what are you using this for?” I ask him, pointing at the chestpiece.

  “Child, how you dey?” the man asks, smiling.

  “I dey fine, sah.” And I am trying to be nice and polite and learning that it is not good to be speaking like robot to people. They are liking when you are speaking like human, and when they are liking you, they are doing what you want. “Wetin dey?” I am asking him and pointing to the chestpiece.

  He is looking at it and scratching his chin and looking at me like he is trying to decide how much to tell me. “Ah make boat am.” He is nodding his head, and his afro is bouncing when he is doing this. “Part of my boat. For when water fi eat us again.” And this time, he point to the lagoon, and I know he is talking about flooding and how every time the lagoon comes in, it is coming closer and closer, and the water is rising even though we are building wall for protection. Eventually, the water will eat us.

  “Where de rest of de boat, sah?”

  He is quiet one moment, then he is looking at me different. He is looking at me like I am no longer little girl or friend but like I am stranger or wild animal. “You be wayo?”

  “No wahala,” I am telling him, and I am holding my hands out, palm up like saying, Please, sah, my hands are empty, I have no weapon. “I wan no vex you. Just where are you getting metal from. I no wan take it, I just wan know where it is coming from.”

  He is looking at me with wild eye, then he is calming and he is pointing to Lagos proper. My heart is thumping in my chest and I am feeling blood rise in my face because I am not wanting to go to Lagos even though I am going every day and looking for Xifeng and not finding her. But I am thinking, then I am asking him, “Where in Lagos?” because Lagos is big big city as big as many jungles.

  He is looking at me like man with secret, and then he is dropping to ground and he is drawing map in the sand and moving stone to make building. And like this he is making noise and moving thing without speaking. Then he is looking at me and pointing and saying that this is Falomo Bridge. He is saying Falomo Bridge again and pointing above our head, and I am seeing what he is saying: that we are eating and sleeping and making bathroom under Falomo Bridge. And he is drawing Falomo Bridge long and long then he is stopping, and I am asking him why he stop and he is saying that there is nothing but water.

  Then he is drawing rest of map and he is telling me what is Ikoyi in eastern part of Lagos Island, and I am seeing map in my head and suddenly I am knowing what is Ikoyi and what is Lagos Island and even Victoria Island and Iddo and Mainland Lagos. I am seeing it all. Like light that is flashing in my head. Man is showing me that he is getting chestpiece from man in Ikoyi and, too loud, I am asking him man’s name, and I need to know but other people is turning and seeing us and maybe thinking I am attacking him, so
I am lowering my voice.

  For many seconds he is looking at me silent and not saying anything, like he is doing calculation in his brain, then he is telling me, “It is very dangerous where I am get the metal from.”

  “I am feeling no fear.”

  And he is telling me that close to military barracks is yard of abandoned scrap metal. It is place like rubbish bin for broken things. They are putting broken weapons there like gun and tank and mech, and that is where he is finding this piece of metal he is using for boat. And I am thinking of Enyemaka in that pile of garbage, and I am thinking that she is at bottom of pile and maybe she is already broken in many pieces and they are just putting more and more metal on top of her. They are maybe burying her beneath old carcass of ground mech or drone or juggernaut, and I am remembering what it is like to be buried under bodies and I am remembering not breathing and seeing small hole of light like single star in the sky and I am wishing to be there with Enyemaka, and suddenly I am remembering where I am and man is looking at me like he is scared and sadding at the same time. And I am thinking that he is knowing that someone or something is dead that I am not wanting to be dead, and maybe he is wanting to tell me words to make me not sadding but he is saying nothing. He is only continuing to be drawing in the sand and make arrow from where we are to where I need to be, and I am saying thank you. I am making note in my mind and I am saying thank you and I am following arrow.

  CHAPTER

  17

  “Time of death?” Ify says, trying to sound as clinical as she can. She shouldn’t be this rattled. But the sight of the woman in the hospital bed—unconnected from the machines monitoring her vital signs, and with the helmet monitoring her cerebral activity settled on a pillow behind her—has unsettled her.

  The attending nurse says in an even voice, “Nineteen hours, forty-one minutes.” She’s been looking at Ify the whole time, and Grace has been at Ify’s side, alternating her gaze between the woman and the tablet clutched to her chest. Grace has seen the deceased before. She’s certainly worked in this hospital long enough. Some of the patients she’s seen have even died of violent wounds. Blunt force trauma to the head or gangrenous limbs. Some of them came in with internal bleeding too far along to stop, or their internal organs had been so damaged they would not have withstood replacement. Even people who had died during the cyberization—Ify is sure Grace must have witnessed those as well. But for reasons Ify can guess, Grace can’t look at this Cantonese woman and muster the clinical distance she’s had to build in this occupation.