Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  A shadow passes by her door, then it slides open.

  Ify frowns at the nurse who walks in. The uniform doesn’t fit. The pantlegs are too long. The sleeves cling to muscled arms. Loose braids are poorly stuffed into the cap that sits on her head. And she moves too fast. The look she gives Grace is almost a glare.

  “You have to leave.”

  Ify raises a hand to the nurse. “No, she stays. She’s my—”

  “I don’t care if she is your shadow. She must leave. Now.”

  Ify rises on her elbows to protest further, but Grace stands to her full height and nods reassurance at Ify, a nod that tells her she’ll be back.

  “It’s okay,” Grace says before leaving. The door whispers shut behind her.

  Without a word, the nurse is behind Ify, out of her line of sight, and Ify can hear fingers fast at work, disconnecting the wires from her helmet.

  “Wait, what are you do—” The helmet comes loose. She tries to sit up, but dizziness pins her back into the mattress. “What’s going on?”

  The nurse has her head bowed as she works, first settling the helmet in place behind Ify, then pulling something out from under Ify’s bed that folds out into a hovering stretcher. “We don’t have much time. I need you to do exactly as I say.”

  “No. Tell me what’s happening.”

  The nurse looks Ify in the face, and that’s when Ify notices the scars. Tribal marks but also other brandings. There’s no order to them; those came at a later date. The doctor in Ify notes the way the tissue has reformed, the jagged edges. Their shapes speak to her. They tell her that these scars didn’t come from marking ceremonies. They came from bullets and knives and shrapnel. Ify realizes with a start that this is the very first face she’s seen since arriving that feels like it belongs to a previous time, a period in Nigeria when there was war, a period in time that holds the secrets she’s been looking for. This nurse is a veteran.

  “Who are you?”

  The nurse raises the stretcher. “My name is Ngozi. I don’t have time to tell you more. The secret police will be back, and when they return, there will be nothing I can do to save you.”

  “Save me? Save me from what?”

  “From having your memories erased.”

  Ify shakes her head and instantly regrets it. “What? Why? What are you talking about?”

  “Your name is Ifeoma Diallo. You served as an aide to mobile pilot Shehu Daren Suleiman Sékou Diallo of the Nigerian Armed Forces Mobile Defense Unit. Before that, you lived with the Biafrans in the secessionist republic. And after the ceasefire was broken, you were sent to the Space Colonies, where you were successfully granted asylum.”

  Shock paralyzes Ify. “How do you . . .”

  “I served in the war with your sister, Onyii. That is all I can say for now. And if you don’t get on this stretcher right this instant and let me get you out of here, the men who came here earlier will return and remove every single memory of Onyii that you possess.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  We are all of us sitting in semicircle while Xifeng is in front of us with large cave wall behind her. There are some of the girls who attacked the police station with us and they are sprinkling themself throughout us so that red-blood and Augment and child of war is all sitting together. And some of the red-blood is drinking palm wine to be staying warm but also because they are thinking it is tasting good. But we are all looking to Xifeng like she is leader of us all. Something inside me is wanting to be calling her Commandant, then I remember that Commandant is making me to be killing and maiming and shooting gun, and Xifeng is making me to be doing none of these thing. I am wanting to be calling her Father, but person I am calling Father is also making me to be killing and maiming and shooting gun. Xifeng is making me to be doing none of these thing. So I am searching in my rememberings and looking for someone who is doing what Xifeng is doing now, which is tell story in soft voice almost like she is singing. It is story of her family, and she is saying it with thing in her voice that I am knowing is love. And I am looking in my remembering for other person who is doing this thing, and people are calling her Mother, so when I am looking to Xifeng, I am calling her Mother too.

  “It started with an application on her phone,” Xifeng is saying. “Long ago, in ancient times, before mass net connectivity, people used their mobile phones to communicate. They were devices the size of my palm.” She holds up her left hand and points to her lined palm. “And everything that you can do”—she points to the children of war—“these phones could do. This woman’s name was Meryem. On her phone were a number of applications, and what they allowed her to do was share. She loved to take pictures of her children”—Xifeng mimes using an old digital camera—“to send to her friends and family. She would send a picture, and next to the picture—or beneath it, depending on the phone—she would attach an emoji.” Xifeng pushes a button on the Augment wrapped around her wrist and connected to the Bonder at her temples, and a blue hologram of a crude yellow face rises from her palm. First, it is smiling, then it is frowning, then it is winking, then it is winking and sticking its tongue out, then it is opening its mouth like it is scared, then it is sadding, and the face is changing and changing and Xifeng is showing us this thing, and some of the girl that is with us is laughing while other is having face like stone. Xifeng presses the button, and the hologram disappears. “She would send these pictures of her children most of all to her husband, who often traveled for work. They lived in Xinjiang, an oasis in the northwest of Earthland China, and theirs was a lovely and simple life.

  “Then Meryem downloaded WeChat. It allowed her to send these pictures to even more people using her phone. Now she could show pictures of her children to all those relatives scattered across the globe.

  “What people like Meryem all over the world did not realize was that these applications—these things on your phone— were watching you. So when Meryem downloaded WeChat, rumors began to circulate that the Earthland Chinese government was using the application to watch its citizens, specifically Uyghur Muslims like Meryem.

  “Then the police began to visit the office of Meryem’s husband. Then they began to visit the schools of her children and her friends’ children. Then they came to visit Meryem’s house. Her husband shaved his beard. Meryem stopped wearing her hijab when outside.”

  I am seeing among the girls that some of them are Hausa. None of them are hijabi, but I am seeing from the way their body is changing when Xifeng is telling this story that they are hearing a familiar story here.

  “Their friends stopped communicating with them. She had no one to share pictures of her children with. Her children had grown withdrawn. They no longer wanted to leave the house, because police were always waiting for them outside their school. It continued like this until Meryem’s husband decided to move the family to Turkey, where others like them, Uyghur Muslims, had made lives for themselves. He decided to send her first while he waited for their children’s passports to be approved. On the day she left, he was arrested. When she arrived in Turkey, her phone stopped working.” The hologram of a phone reappears, and the once-glowing screen snaps to black. Dead. “By the time she had the phone repaired, everyone had deleted her from their WeChat contacts. They feared she was contagious. Like a disease. If the government could do this to her, maybe it would punish them for communicating with her.”

  I am knowing that some of the girls here are red-bloods, but none of them is making to go to the bathroom or to eat something. All of their attention is focused on Xifeng and her story.

  “Others like Meryem arrived in Turkey. Women who had escaped while their husbands were trapped in Xinjiang. They were called the Widows because they did not know if their husbands were dead, alive, still in prison. They had no way of knowing. So they banded together, to protect themselves.” Xifeng is looking at all of us—child of war and red-blood—and smiling like sh
e is talking about the women in her story but all of us too, and I am beginning to lose myself in the story, looking for pieces of myself in it. I am thinking this is how Xifeng is having power over us, how she is being able to tell us to do things. She is giving us purpose, but she is also showing how we are being connected. Not connected like knowing what the other person is thinking or being able to hack into satellite but connected like sharing heart. Like how I am feeling with other child of war. “The Widows shared apartments. They helped each other attain jobs as seamstresses and tailors, making clothes for other people.

  “Some of the women still spoke with their families, but the messages became shorter and shorter. A brother would say, ‘We’re okay. Safe,’ then the Widow would hear nothing for months. Others spoke in code. If someone was arrested, the other person would say that they had been ‘admitted to the hospital.’ Then they only spoke in emojis.” And here, Xifeng presses a button on her wrist again, but instead of seeing changing faces, we are seeing rose. “A half-fallen rose for when someone was arrested. A dark moon to say that someone had been sent to the camps. A sun emoji meant ‘I am alive.’ A flower: ‘I have been released.’

  “The Widows used another app to stay in touch—WhatsApp—and they would share whatever information came through. One day, someone shared video of a group of children running around in a room and shouting, Bizi! Bizi! Bizi!” She is saying it like she is one of the children, and it is making some of us to be smiling. “Meryem’s breath stopped in her chest. In the video, among the children, was her daughter, Nur. That video was the last time Meryem would hear her daughter’s laugh. They never saw each other again.”

  For a long time, Xifeng is saying nothing. And we are stirring and wanting her to be continuing, and that is when I am seeing that she is shaking small small. She is keeping herself from crying. When she raises her head, there is being metal in her voice again.

  “Nur and her siblings were scattered all over Earthland China. Nur was brought to the other end of her country: from the northwest to the southeast. She no longer spoke her native language. She no longer identified as Muslim. All of her past was stripped away. She began speaking Cantonese and Taishanese. And before long, she forgot her family altogether.”

  My heart is speeding up because I am suddenly knowing what Xifeng is going to be saying and it is like light is shining in my head. Xifeng is revealing herself to me. She is no longer being mystery. Xifeng stands, and now she is looking like leader. Now she is looking like commander of army. Looking at her, I know I will be doing everything I can for her.

  “That girl grew up to be my grandmother. And what the Chinese government did to her and her family all those years ago, the Nigerian government is doing to families all over Nigeria right now.” She is pointing into the distance, past the walls that are surrounding us. “In the north, in Borno State, is a facility where the government is forcing cyberization on its citizens. And it is using this process to erase all memory of the war. The war that each one of you”—now she is pointing at us, at me—“fought and bled in. The government is trying to erase all memory of you. But we cannot allow that to happen. We are going to take that facility. And we are going to spread this truth. This country will know who you are. They will remember us.”

  Xifeng is looking at me when she is saying this last thing. I am not understanding everything she is saying, but I am wanting to be following her everywhere and doing what she is telling me to do. Even hurting and killing.

  CHAPTER

  29

  Ngozi is in the middle of helping Ify out of bed and into a hovering stretcher when the door slides open and Grace, face buried in her tablet, walks back in. She breaks off mid-sentence when she sees what’s happening. But an instant later, Ngozi flicks a shockstick from out of the sleeve of her hospital blouse and cracks Grace across the face, knocking her unconscious.

  Even though vertigo threatens to pitch her over, Ify is on her feet. “What did you do?” she shouts. It occurs to Ify that this woman is trying to kidnap her, not help her. She fishes around for anything she can use as a weapon. Finding nothing, she backs away. “Get out or I’ll shout.”

  Suddenly, too fast for Ify to see, the woman is on her, hand clasped over Ify’s nose and mouth, shockstick sizzling perilously close to Ify’s eye. “Scream and I will blind you. I’m supposed to keep you alive, not in one piece. You are coming with me one way or another. You will not want to find out what happens when they come for you here.” A pause. “I’m going to lift my hand now. Make a sound, and I will knock you out and haul you out of here on my shoulder. Understood?”

  Ify manages a nod.

  Slowly, Ngozi pulls her hand away. Ify exhales. The sight of Grace’s prone form, with the wound on her head leaking onto the floor, pulls at Ify.

  “We can’t leave her.”

  “Why not.” It is a statement, not a question.

  “Don’t leave her. Please.”

  Ngozi glares at Ify, then peeks her head out into the hallway and says something Ify can’t hear. Another woman—this one dressed as some sort of lab technician in a blue jumpsuit—comes in and tosses Grace’s body over her shoulder, then vanishes. Ngozi looks back to Ify as if to say, Happy? Then she gestures at the stretcher. “Get on.”

  Ify does as ordered, and a moment later, they’re out in the hallway, Grace in a hoverchair behind them, pushed forward by an attendant.

  As soon as they leave the room, Ify notices the differences in the atmosphere. She notices which nurses and hospital personnel only try to look the part, those who don’t fit all the way into their disguises. She notices how they position themselves in the hallway, some of them ready to run interference should the need arise, some of them making sure every available entrance and exit is within their sightlines to take on enemies. There’s an operation under way, and she’s at the center of it.

  Outside a back entrance, she and Grace are loaded into a MedTransport that only goes a short distance before, suddenly, the van stops and masked people with pistols at their hips snatch Ify from the stretcher. One of them fits cloth tightly around her eyes, then seals it with a tinted visor. Someone else attaches beads to her temple that instantly block out all sound. Another binds her wrists in front of her with zip ties that automatically slam her fists together. Then she’s bundled into what she thinks is the back of another van. Though she can see and hear nothing, she feels every bump in the road, every sharp turn, every time something thwacks against the vehicle’s frame. Unable to perceive her surroundings, she has no idea how much time has passed. A familiar feeling creeps into her, the claustrophobia that suffocated her when she was once a prisoner of war held in a cell she could walk across in three steps. She fights the feeling. These people aren’t going to kill her. They’ve rescued her. There’s the possibility that she’s been lied to, that the men in the black kaftans and with the false faces were there to protect her from exactly the kind of people that have Ify trussed up in the back of a van. But Ify has no choice now. She’s in the hands of this Ngozi. Who invoked Onyii’s name. A name Ify hasn’t heard in nearly five years. Once she’d adjusted and began her new life, Ify had hoped never to hear that name again. She realizes she still hasn’t forgiven Onyii for abandoning her all those years ago. She’s gone through every possible scenario in her head, tried to reason through every possible rationale that Onyii could have had for leaving her like that. And they’ve all failed in the face of Ify’s logic. Back then, she’d wanted nothing more than to see her sister again, to hear her voice, to be held in her arms. When it became clear to Ify that Onyii was never going to come, Ify had done everything in her power to purge Onyii from her mind, to leave her behind, to craft a new self that would never need someone as desperately as she had once needed Onyii.

  Is this what Céline had meant? Are you avoiding a solution because you have to walk through some pain to get there? Céline had asked.

  That’s whe
n Ify determines that she will follow this path wherever it leads. If it means a cure for the refugee children in Alabast, then she will do this. Enough resisting. The detention center, that girl who had embraced her, Onyii. So far, Ify has been pushing all of these things apart in her mind, only willing to deal with each thing as it arose. But maybe they’re all connected.

  The van stops. No one removes the sound blockers or the glasses or the bag from Ify. Instead, they pull her out of the vehicle. She stumbles over roots and giant leaves and nearly runs into the person leading her when they stop.

  Through the bag, a breeze brushes Ify’s cheeks. Then, her wrists are freed. Bit by bit, her makeshift cage is dismantled. The sound blockers, the glasses, the bag.

  When Ify’s eyes adjust, she finds herself near a cliff’s edge. Scrub dots the outcropping, which looks like a giant beak. Ngozi puts the retractable restraints in her knapsack, then turns to head toward the outcropping. Even from this distance, Ify can see a sniper rifle positioned near the cliff’s edge, along with padding to provide comfort for someone who expects to occupy that post for a very long time. If Ify squints, she thinks she even spots the leftover wrappers of used steroid packets. She’s about to ask where Grace is when her assistant emerges from the forest behind her.

  “Bathroom,” Grace says before gingerly touching the sealed forehead wound. It looks like someone applied defective MeTro sealant, because a trace of the wound still remains, and it’s clear to Ify that the pain lingers too. “Where are we?”

  Ify looks around, squinting. She feels her temple, but her Whistle isn’t there. And she has no way of connecting to her bodysuit to activate any of its functionality. It’s as though everything that allowed her contact with the outside world has been turned off. “I don’t know.”