Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Ify struggles against the door, then bursts out and runs into what she sees now is an empty field. Wind turbines spin lazily before her, well in the distance. She runs forward until she’s in the midst of them and whirls around. This has to be some illusion. This was where she and the other refugees had passed through. This was the spot. She is certain. But she looks, and everywhere she looks, she sees a lie. Clean air and soft breeze and verdant plain and clear sky. All of it a lie.

  “No,” she whispers, over and over, looking desperately for something to tell her she’s right. “No. No, no, no, no.” Rage fills her. “WHERE IS IT?” she screams to the sky, before collapsing.

  She feels Grace at her side, face close to hers, hand on her back, trying to soothe her rage away.

  “It was here” is all Ify can say. “It was right here.” The rage collapses. Only numbness is left. “I was a refugee, and there was an intake station right here. All of us, we went through it. They gave us blankets, processed us, put us in the database so that we could be reunited with any living family. They . . . they gave us food. And showers and . . .” A sob catches in her throat. “It was right here.” The fingers of her right hand fumble for the button on the neck of her bodysuit, which she presses, sending chemicals into her bloodstream, slowing her heart rate, dulling the pain constricting her chest. Fog clears from her mind.

  Are you avoiding a solution because you have to walk through some pain to get there?

  Céline’s words ring like a proverb through her head. Like an alarm. Like a command.

  She knows where she has to go.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Open field greets Ify.

  Her minders wait by their jeep. Initially, Grace waits with them. In moments like this, Ify finds herself reverting to her old thinking. Familiar suspicions arise. Grace, so meticulous with her note-taking, ostensibly there to provide documentation of their progress and assist in Ify’s research, but probably there to spy on her. Her minders are probably beaming their reports to Alabast as she stands here. Searching for any misstep, cataloging any mistake, and gathering all the details so they can be sent in a post straight to her superiors. Ify turns her thinking elsewhere. She thinks about the fact that where there had once been concrete buildings with unpaved roads between them and cells with electrified openings designed to sizzle into amputation anything that touched them and where there had once been young boys in those cells with collars around their necks, bodies limp from having given up on fighting back, there is now field. Nothing but open field and the biomech animals that graze on it.

  Grace materializes at her side, a little behind her, tentative. Unsure. Ify knows that Grace wants to ask what they’re doing here, what this place is or, rather, was. But Ify wants just a few more moments to herself here. Just a few more moments of her private grief.

  She wants to walk through. Feel the grass against her ankles, make sure it’s not all a ruse. She almost reaches out a hand to touch the air where one wall had been. And in her mind, she hears the boom of a loud explosion and feels the wash of imaginary dust on her face, all from the memory of a suicide bomber’s detonation just outside another building. And she then sees in her mind a boy, even younger, who had, just before, been playing with blocks and telling Ify about his dreams of becoming an engineer. And this boy is telling her about the roses painted on the wall, and Ify is hearing him and realizing that he is talking about blood from the boy who’s just detonated the bomb he’d been carrying inside him.

  She wants to put one foot in front of the other and see if she actually passes through air or walks straight into a wall or a room or an entrance or the end of a hallway. She squints and wonders again if maybe it’s just a trick of the air that is hiding the phalanx of black-suited guards from her. They have to be here somewhere. There had been so many of them before, and now there are only horses and small bulls and a few deer, none of them completely natural, all of them false. All of them lies. Big or small, all lies.

  “Doctor?” Grace’s voice, fire melting the ice encasing her.

  Ify opens eyes she had not realized were closed. “Yes?”

  Grace pauses before speaking, as though she is testing potential sentences out in her head, trying to match words in increasingly complex and sensitive combinations. When she does speak, the words halt and start back up again and tumble over each other. “At the hospital . . . when we were in the doctor’s office . . . did you . . . what—”

  “This was a detention center,” Ify says, cutting Grace off and, Ify imagines, answering half of the dozens of questions swimming behind her assistant’s eyes. Something in Ify has broken. She knows what she’s doing, and she recognizes the desperation driving it. If every remnant of the war, every trace of the carnage and trauma, is being washed away, she will plant her flag, be a living testament to the fact of the horrors that happened. They will not erase her experiences. It was not all a dream. It happened. She happened. “In a section of the compound was a room holding children only a little older than the ones in Dr. Ezirike’s office. They were enemy combatants.”

  A sharp intake of breath from Grace at what Ify is implying.

  “They were held here after their capture. Some of them fought with militia forces. Some of them fought directly for the Biafran rebels. But here is where we held them.”

  “And . . . what did you do to them?”

  Ify says nothing. Instead, she steps forward, then forward again, then forward again, and stops. When she looks down, she feels she’s arrived at the center of the thing. Certainly the center of something. And she wonders if she is standing above the spot where Peter had been tortured. She wants to close her eyes but can’t bring herself to relive those moments. So instead she stands in that spot and turns and turns and turns.

  She’s reminded of visiting Aso Rock and the sight of those parliamentarians, those government leaders, completely devoid of conflict, not even arguing. She’s reminded of how pristine and stainless all the buildings had been: the presidential complex, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court building. How she’d been expecting a statue, something large and hulking and made out of marble or obsidian, some massive, tragic thing to commemorate the unfortunate deaths Nigerians had suffered or to make reference to the unfortunate necessity of killing during wartime. Or a plaque with names on it, even just one name. A hero. Thinking back on that now, she knows what she was looking for.

  She was looking for the man who had taken her from a Biafran camp and brought her to Abuja and raised her as his little sister. She was looking for the man who had taken her with him through the ranks of Nigerian society, dressed her in the finest robes, enrolled her in the finest schools, made sure she had a front row seat to the workings of government.

  She was looking for the man who had killed and killed and killed and had taken her—a little bush girl—in as his own. Her adoptive brother. The man responsible for so much that was good in her life.

  Who then became the man who took all of that away. Who let her rot in a Nigerian prison, who was too weak to save her.

  The man she’d abandoned. The man who’d let her abandon him. Daren.

  It all comes washing back over her.

  She remembers walking the corridors of this facility with Daren at her side and strolling down a hallway to look in through a large window at an aid worker trying to coax adolescent child soldiers out of their trauma with toys and colored styluses. She remembers walking past cells where older boys, collars glowing around their necks with deadly red lights, would hiss at her. She remembers feeling nothing but a clinical distance. They were puzzle pieces in a larger project to be figured out. Puzzle pieces that screamed and bled and fought and cried out for their loved ones. But still just puzzle pieces.

  Please don’t walk away from your memories.

  You don’t know my memories, Ify wants to tell Céline.

  Wha
t does she do now? She doesn’t know exactly what she was expecting, but perhaps what was waiting for her, she hoped, was completion. Or absolution. Or something to take the guilt growing in the pit of her stomach and scoop it out of her. This is what she ran away from. This is what she has tried so hard to forget. And if the past month has proven nothing else, it’s that everyone else has forgotten it too.

  Except Peter. Who is still in a hospital bed in a Colony high above her head, comatose and trapped in dreams whose horrors Ify can very well imagine.

  Around her is pasture. Animals too mechanized to know that she should be feared walk by and sniff her and chew grass and process it in their multiple stomachs. Mechanized bees flit from flower to flower around her ankles. The night sky’s blue has deepened into black. Stars hang above her, and Ify even starts to doubt those. How does she know a giant dome doesn’t hang over this rural patch of Kaduna State, over all of Kaduna State, maybe over all of Nigeria? Who is to say that someone hasn’t built a false sky and painted false stars on it to watch over false animals in a false field at the center of which stands . . . a false doctor?

  Who is to say that anything she looks at now is anything other than a lie?

  Including the dark thing, like a moving shadow the size of a small boar, coming straight for her in the distance.

  CHAPTER

  24

  It is feeling strange to me when we are leaving forest. Good thing is happening to me in forest. I am finding gosling, and Uzodinma is finding me. It is like I am wishing to be spending the rest of my life under ceiling made of leaves that is blocking out the sun when it is being too hot and I am wishing to spend the rest of my life being able to lie down in the cooling mud when it is raining and thing is crawling and slithering all over me but I am not minding because it is feeling like I am hugging the earth and the earth is hugging me. When I am seeing red-blood, it is reminding me that there is metal inside me and that I am killing and that I am doing bad thing.

  In forest, I am not doing bad thing. In forest, I am not bad person.

  So I am standing at the edge of the forest while others are going on ahead of me, but Oluwale stops and turns to me and waves me to him, and even though I am not saying any thing to him, I am thinking that he is knowing that question lives inside me, so much question it is feeling sometime that I am made of question, that if you peel my skin, you will find question spilling out. So I am walking with him.

  Very quickly, land is flat and turning to pasture. It is easy to be seeing where they are having home made out of clay that is built and government building that is stone and clay and glass and plaster. It is looking like this is older place than rest of country. Like it is being left behind. I am seeing, in the distance, farmer sitting on chair beneath Piliostigma thonningii tree, which is also being called camel’s foot tree and monkey biscuit tree, while he is having droid machine picking his rows of plants, and the rows are not all straight or even but some are crooked like the grave me and Enyemaka and Xifeng are sometime finding before we are fixing them. But farmer is far away and he is not seeing us.

  Is this where you are from? I am asking Uzodinma, who stands next to me. When I am asking like this, it is being more than words. It is being images of laboratory where he is being plugged into machine and made to lift big thing and fire weapon and they are scanning his brain. It is being images of hospital where he is waking up with no leg and they are giving him leg but it is first belonging to someone else. It is being images of him seeing new arm and new leg for the first time and looking in mirror and seeing face and him saying to himself, “This is my body.” It is being Is this where you are from? but also Is this where you are learning that you are mystery?

  I don’t know, but when Uzo is telling me this, it is like his word is being colored with hope. I don’t know, but I’m getting closer. And I don’t know, but there are answers here. And I don’t know, but I am glad that you are here with me. All of these thing he is saying to me when he is saying I don’t know.

  Sound is beeping and clicking inside my head and suddenly I am knowing that we are in Zaria, in Kaduna State. Suddenly, map is filling my head and I am knowing where is Ahmadu Bello University and the palace of the emir. I am knowing where is the old city and the adobe houses where people are living and I am knowing where is being mosque and mass graves. I am seeing all of these thing at once.

  Against the darkening sky, I am seeing Kufena Hills. My brain is telling me the geological formation is being made out of metamorphic rock, that it is looming tall and is wide too and is having old wall built around it that is crumbling now but that is telling me that people are living there once. I am also hearing faraway splashing sound of waterfall, and I am knowing it is Matsirga waterfall, and I am seeing in satellite photo that is being beamed into my brain that the land around it is green and it is supposed to be impossible that the land there is green with all the radiation that has been happening in the world, but they are saying it is because this land, this country, is being blessed.

  And I am feeling like all of these thing around me is beautiful, and it is like it is all being untouch by people, and I am wondering if maybe this is what people are calling paradise. Then, I am turning off all these thing in my brain that is showing me what everything is called and where it is, and I am just letting earth and night sky talk to me, and I am closing my eyes and smiling.

  When I am lowering my head, I am seeing ahead of me specks moving along the base of Kufena Hills. They are being deeper pieces of black against the larger black of the mountain. The stars make light on the ground so that the grass is silver and glowing, and it is like this with some of the tree and some of the animal that is roaming and making chawp-chawp on the grass. And one of the speck is walking and it is not seeing me, I don’t think, but it is moving to me and it is walking and it is passing beneath a beam of light and I am seeing its face and I am gasping like someone is reaching down my throat and squeezing my lungs tight so there is being no air in them.

  I am standing still, not being able to move, and others are spreading out around me, and they are exploring and learning the land, and some of them are walking ahead of me but my eye is frozen on the face I am seeing, and it is like face is jumping straight from my dream, from my remembering, and sitting right in front of me. I am saying, It can’t be, it can’t be. Even as I am turning my braincase back on and being able to hear the beeps and the whirrs and know the name of all things, I am saying to myself, It can’t be, it can’t be.

  Because now I am shivering and I am running and I am not paying attention to anything because there she is ahead of me at the base of the mountain, walking back and forth, then standing still like she is waiting for me, like she has been waiting for me my entire life.

  Ify.

  The ground is exploding with light. Something shining from above us. Then grass is being whipped around me. It is blinding my regular eye, but I am seeing with my other eye helicopter and drone, and my heart is thump-thumping in my chest because I am not needing to strain my ear to hear stomp-stomp of juggernaut. And I am turning back to Ify and I am wanting to scream at her to get away and I am running fast fast.

  My brother and sister are running out of the way, and some are being captured in electrified net that is short-circuiting them and making them to lie still, and some of them is vanishing back into the forest. But I am the only one running to Ify because she is real and I must tell her that I have been looking for her all my life. And I am thinking that she is in danger and I am coming here just in time to save her.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Everything happens at once.

  A series of small shapes breaks free of the forest behind them. Then helicopters and large drones burst out from over the tops of the trees. Police vehicles zoom into view out of nowhere. And lights shine from the aerial assault vehicles to show that the moving shapes on the ground aren’t animals at all but children. Ch
ildren moving unnaturally fast.

  Ify’s minders grab her and Grace by the arms and try to hustle them into the back seat of their jeep. Grace, too stunned to resist, is swept into the vehicle, but Ify breaks free and stares at one of the children, who bounds straight for her, heedless of the bullets that have started zipping around her, heedless of the way the earth explodes into columns around her with each detonation. Slipping through the legs of the police that try to capture her, vaulting over another officer, wrapping her legs around its neck, and twisting on the way down. Rolling into a sprint. Flicking a knife from out of nowhere into her palm and slicing and stabbing at whatever comes for her, never once taking her eyes off of Ify.

  Ify should be scared, should be terrified that this is coming for her, this thing so efficient at killing, but it is a child. A girl no older than fourteen or fifteen. And there is something about her that compels Ify to stand still.

  “Madame!” one of her guards is screaming. One of the guards she’d insisted on having at her side at almost all times. One of the guards she’d hoped would keep her safe. Whom she’s now refusing. “Madame! We must go! This is a police operation.”

  But Ify is entranced. “The children,” she murmurs to herself. Time has slowed down for her, so she can watch it all unfold like paint splashed onto a canvas: the aerial vehicles spilling over the treeline, the children scattering, some of them being caught by ground forces, the one girl charging, barreling, like a faultline in the earth, straight for her.

  The child is close enough for Ify to see her face, then the girl leaps from an impossibly far distance. Arms outstretched, as though there are claws on her fingers. One of Ify’s minders sticks his arm out to bat the child away, but Ify, acting before thinking, pushes the man aside and walks straight into the child’s embrace.