Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Then one day gosling is coming back to me and it is walking like it is liking one leg more than the other. I am knowing that it is fighting with gander but I am never seeing it wounded like this. So I am bathing it and feeding it alone. Then I am seeing that it is going to bathroom and making strange color. Green but not like grass. Green like acid. And I am wishing to speak to it but there is no metal in it, and I hear humans talking about their yard and how they like it now when it is trim and how they are using chemical to keep it that way, and I am sadding because gosling is maybe eating grass with poison on it.

  It is moving slow and sometime not moving. It is not eating, then one morning I am finding it on its side and it is beating its wings trying to be standing right but it is not being able to stand. And it is trying and trying but nothing is working. And then I am picking up gosling in my arm and its head is making wild movement, then it is staring at me, then it is staring at nothing and I am knowing it is dead.

  I am digging grave for it and I am sadding and then I am walking away. Because it is paining me to be remembering him.

  It is paining me a lot.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  One day, I am climbing tree in the forest to be able to see better where I am, and I am climbing branch and branch and setting my foot, and I am moving fast and I am almost at the top when I am smelling metal and sulfur, then I am not seeing anything and I am waking up in the grass and face is staring at me.

  It is boy crouching over me. Before, I am wanting to be fighting person who is sneaking up on me, but I am not having the same feeling now. I am not wanting to be fighting and hurting this person. He is looking like me. He is having skin like mine, and I am knowing there is metal inside of him. And my brain is scanning him and seeing that he is made of different pieces. He is having one arm that is different from other arm, and he is having legs but they are not coming from same place as his arms, and he is having face but that is coming from somewhere else too. He is looking like regular boy but I am telling to myself that he is having seams like someone is sewing him together and making him.

  “Who are you?” I am asking him.

  He is not saying anything for a long time. Then I am scanning him again and I am looking for his story. His history. I am trying to find out where he is coming from and if he is needing help. Is he needing to eat? Is he trying to be eating me?

  Then he is looking up at tree, and I am thinking that he is wondering how I am opening up my eye after I am falling from big big tree. And I am wanting to tell him but I am coughing once twice, and black thing is coming out from my mouth.

  He is turning and he is seeing this, then he is touching me and he is feeling my face and my hair that I am keeping to cut because when it is big things are hiding in it. And then he is feeling my neck and then he is touching my outlet. Cord is coming from his neck, and he is taking it in his hand and he is putting it in back of my neck.

  He is not saying anything while he is doing this, but suddenly I am feeling thing swimming inside me. I am feeling it humming in my blood and I am feeling it crawling on my inside organ, and suddenly my heart is feeling faster. Stronger. And I am wondering what he is doing, but then I am feeling lighter and suddenly pain is leaving me and I am startling because I am not knowing until now that I am being in pain constantly. I am thinking how I am feeling is being normal and I am not knowing that I am hurting even though I am having bandage wrapped around my wrists and chemical from leaves inside the scars on my back and I am pulling my shoulder after arm is hanging loose when police and drone and juggernaut are chasing me and Xifeng through Lagos. But now all of that is just memory and my body is no longer paining me and I am starting to know that this is what nanobot is doing to me and then I am starting to know that boy is giving me nanobot.

  His cord is leaving me, and I am sitting up in leaves and grass. “What are they calling you?” I am asking him.

  “They are calling me Uzodinma,” he is saying in little boy voice.

  “Who is calling you that?”

  He looks to the forest, and many many boy and girl come out, and even though they are looking different and having different arm and leg and face and some are having scar on their face and some are having metal showing in their arm and some are not I am starting to know that they are same like him.

  They are same like me.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  As we are walking, I am wondering why Xifeng is giving me name like boy if I am girl, and Uzodinma is telling me that my name is Uzoamaka. Even though we are both being Uzo, we are different. And I am thinking that he is telling me this about our name but I am thinking he is also telling me this about something bigger. About who we are being.

  About what we are being.

  We are walking and I am finding myself asking why we are walking.

  One of the boys looks at me, even though I am not saying my question out loud. “We are walking because it is what we are doing.”

  “But why?”

  Then boy is shrugging.

  A girl next to him who is having scar on her face running from forehead to the opposite side of her mouth is saying, “In all of my rememberings, I am walking. Sometime, I am doing other thing, but mostly I am walking.”

  None of this is answer to my question.

  We are never eating or drinking or needing to bathe or make bathroom, but sometime one of us is sitting down and staring into space and I am wondering if this is how I am looking when I am dreaming. And I am wondering if dreaming is the word for this thing. I am thinking that they are remembering and maybe they are wondering if their remembering is belonging to them or if it is coming from someone else. I am thinking that all of us is searching for clue. We are being like puzzle or mystery. We are being question, and we are looking for the answer to ourself.

  I am missing Enyemaka because when I am thinking on me being question and not knowing who I am being, Enyemaka is telling me thing to make me feel peace. Enyemaka is telling me about purpose and about machine and what machine can do, and Enyemaka is making me not to feel strange in my body. Enyemaka is making me not to feel strange for being child of war.

  Boy who is being named Oluwale is sitting and looking at nothing, and no part of his face is moving. He is just sitting and crossing his leg like his body is being here but his brain is being elsewhere.

  When he is waking up, I am standing over him and watching him. “Where are you going when you do that?”

  He is looking up at me with no expression.

  “It is looking like you are leaving your body, and when you are doing this, there is peace on your face. I am wanting peace.”

  “I am remembering,” he is telling me in voice that is like song.

  “What are you remembering?”

  He is showing me holograph video of him being on hoverboard with other boys who look like him, and they are riding over water and twisting and turning and laughing, and there is being no expression on Oluwale’s face. Then he is turning it off. “Watching this thing gives me peace.” Then he is showing me other remembering: he is looking in direction of sun as it is sitting on the edge of the earth, and grass is tall up to his waist, and he is looking down and his hand is running through it slowly. And it is the same again where I am looking at him and seeing no smile on his face but I am knowing that he is feeling peace, and I am remembering that Enyemaka is not having mouth to smile but Enyemaka is still smiling. So it is with Oluwale. He is having mouth to smile but he is not using it to smile. But I am feeling him smiling still.

  “How . . . how are you doing this?”

  And he is knowing without my saying that I am meaning how is he calling specific remembering? Because when I am trying to find specific remembering it is all jumble in my head and I am not knowing what is new and what is old and I am seeing myself in place I have never been and I am rem
embering people I have never seen. Some remembering are from graves I find with Enyemaka and some are from after I am joining Xifeng and the Enyemakas and we are walking through desert and some are from before they are finding me at bottom of pile of bodies, but I am only feeling like everything from there is truth and the rest is mystery. Some days I am feeling like the rest is lie.

  Oluwale points to the grass in front of him. “Sit.” And I am coming in front of him and facing him and doing like he is doing.

  Then he is telling me to raise one finger to my face, and he is raising finger of left hand and I am raising finger of right hand. Then he is telling me to raise opposite hand higher, and I am doing this. Then he is telling me to take finger and move it across my chest, and I am doing this. He is telling me to poke under my raised arm, and I am doing it. Then he is telling me to put finger under my nose and inhale. I am thinking this is strange, but I am doing it. Then he is putting finger to his nose, and I am following him, and he is digging into his nose, and I am doing it. And then when he is watching me, he is laughing. He is falling back laughing and kicking his feet in the air. And I am getting ready to fall onto my back and do as he is doing, but then I am thinking that he is playing joke. He is laughing and laughing and I am angering, but I am not wanting to hurt him so all I am doing is to be kicking dirt on him while I am angering. And I am angering but I am also smiling. I am not feeling smile on my face, but I am feeling it inside me. And when Oluwale is finishing laughing he is looking at me like I am new creature.

  Like I am gosling that is coming from egg.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  When it is being night, I am going away from group of boy and girl like me and I am finding quiet place in jungle and I am sitting like I am seeing Oluwale sitting. And I am looking in front of me but trying to look how he is looking when he is finding peace, and I am thinking and thinking, then I am moving past thinking and feeling. And I am hearing thing move inside of me. Between my ear and behind my eye. And I am worrying that I am breaking something but I am then not caring because I am feeling like I am close to something.

  Then, I am seeing it. It is not blue like holograph. It is all colors. I am seeing geese and gander in field making chawp-chawp at grass.

  Then, I am seeing Xifeng’s face while she is holding me after I am having epileptic shaking. And I am seeing how she is putting finger to my face and caressing.

  I am controlling. I am guiding myself into rememberings. I am looking and I am finding them. I am making order.

  Then, I am seeing inside of tent where it is being dark. Memory is glowing blue at the edges but also green. I am seeing this color before but only with certain rememberings. And I am seeing shape moving softly in bed, up and down, up and down, under blanket that is having red splotch on it like coin but I am knowing it is from blood and radiation. And I am seeing my hand move and lie on bundle in bed, and I am moving forward and blowing on its forehead, and it is blinking eye at me and it is waking up and its eye is being so beautiful, like I am looking at two mornings.

  “Ify, it’s time to wake up. You will be late for school.” And it is sounding like my voice.

  CHAPTER

  21

  It’s been almost a month, and every time Ify walks through the streets of Abuja, she wonders if anyone will recognize her. They are all strangers, but she had once been a high-ranking student at the nation’s most prestigious academy. She had been an aide to Shehu Daren Suleiman Sékou Diallo, the Nigerian army’s most skilled and decorated mech pilot, the man who had given Ify his family name. She had overseen countless council meetings where policy that would affect the hundreds of millions of people in the nation was debated and enacted. She had been a Sentinel, charged with sitting in any number of watchtowers sprinkled throughout the capital city and conducting surveillance via the orb drones that lazily hovered over everyone’s heads. Now she looks around and there are no orbs. No drones. No watchtowers. Only hyperloop rail lines overhead, framed by walls of glimmering flexiglas, and giant advertisements for clothes and streaming football matches reflected on the shining surfaces of skyscrapers, and citizens whose silver-threaded outfits glisten in the sunlight.

  Beside her, Grace has her gaze inclined upward, taking in sign after sign after sign in Mandarin.

  Ify sees the frown developing on her face and says, “China was instrumental in the rebuilding effort during the ceasefire. Though they did not recognize Biafra as a country, they aided in the resettlement effort.” She knows that, if she were to close her eyes, she would see that refugee convoy again and the trailers around which walked or played little children and the little boy, the synth named Agu, who guarded them, and Xifeng. In so many of her memories, Xifeng is there waiting for her. Even now, with her eyes open, Ify finds herself glancing at the faces of those they walk past, and in so many faces, she sees Xifeng’s.

  Grace doesn’t ask where they’re going, and if she did, Ify would have no answer for her. Maybe she would tell her that this was some African part of the research process, getting in touch with the land before studying it, feeling it with one’s feet as a way of detecting illness, some juju to play into stereotypes. How to explain that, at the root of everything, is a desire to be caught? For someone to recognize her and declare her crimes for all the world to hear, then arrest her? How to explain that since she woke up this morning, she’s wanted that more than anything?

  I’m walking until the guilt goes away, she wants to tell Grace, but can’t.

  Ify cranes her neck and does not see a sky festooned with digitized Nigerian flags like she expected. Maybe her memory of that is false. Nor does she see the Nigerian president’s face projected onto the giant façades of glass-and-steel business centers. There are no soldiers patrolling the streets. When they arrive at Aso Rock and Ify sees the outcrop of granite rock, almost one thousand meters high, on the city’s outskirts, she expects to see a parade of military vehicles and parliamentarians surrounded by their bodyguards. She expects to see soldiers acting as leaders, generals assuming their places in government, but everyone wears suits, some of them more slim-fitting than others. They all look like businessmen. They all look alike.

  Using the Augment embedded in her neck, Ify scans them and notes on her holographic retinal display what districts they represent. This one represents Abia State and this one Bayelsa. Those three there are from Katsina State, and the two standing next to them are from Oyo and Delta. But were she looking at them with an unaided eye, she would see clones. Nothing but clones. Perhaps they are all cyberized and all outfitted with similar facial features and similar body structures. Maybe this is simply what is fashionable. And they are all shaking hands and joking. Some of the legislators who do not look older but talk as though their insides are older than their outsides speak in patronizing whimsy to the younger ones. But there is no military. Not a single bar denoting rank. Not a single soldier stiff at attention. She adjusts her scanner to see if perhaps the vehicles are cloaked. It could be that the air is swarming with drones, clouds of them thick enough to blot out the sun. All it would take is the right calibration for the massive ground mechs she’s sure are there to materialize out of thin air. To have the sky shimmer around them, then to have them revealed in all their violent, militaristic glory. If she squints hard enough, maybe she can even detect the outline of high-powered minimechs hiding in the shadows or strapped to the bottom of the maglev Land Rovers, ready to detach and fire at whatever needs killing.

  But nothing. The air is still. The chatter is soft; then, as the parliamentarians walk into the halls of the National Assembly to begin the session, the chatter is gone. And nowhere in this area is there a statue or monument or plaque—anything—to indicate that she had once been here, that Daren had once fought a war for this place, that millions had died. At the very hall of government, no markers of sacrifice. No sign of the vanquishing of villains.

  No indication,
even, that there had been heroes.

  “Were there this many Chinese during the war?” Grace asks.

  Ify turns to consider Grace for a moment before leading them back the way they had come. Enough walking for today. “No,” she says quietly, too harshly.

  There is no more war, Ify tells herself. Even as she can’t quite bring herself to believe it.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Ify finds an isolated stretch of gilded fencing along Jabi Lake and rests on her forearms. Jabi Lake Commercial Center is a hive of activity, and Ify turns and leans back on the railing to watch all the life happening in front of her. So much of her experience of the world can be filtered: by way of her external Augments, she can lower the murmur of voices and raise the volume of the lake lapping against stone behind her; she can increase the intensity of the new-grass smell, even as she knows how false this grass is beneath her feet. She can watch the setting sun splash colors like oil paint across the sky and twist the dialings on her settings to filter the colors, making them sickly or blurring the lines between the golds and the blues and the purples.

  It’s as she’s playing with the colors in the sky and as couples glide by with small silver balls strapped to their ankles, allowing them to hover above the ground, that Ify hears Céline’s reply.

  “You sound disappointed,” she says in her Francophone accent. “‘It’s not completely destroyed,’ so il doit y avoir un problème.” She clicks her tongue. “Something must be wrong, that is what you’re thinking.”

  “It doesn’t feel right.” Ify is grateful she doesn’t have to move her mouth to have her words beamed straight through space off three satellites and directly into Céline’s Whistle. Still, paranoia expands and contracts like a second set of lungs inside her chest. Something’s not right. And others could be listening. Her very next thought is that this is precisely what she used to do to others. During the war.