Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  BUDUBUDUBUDUBUDUBUDU.

  Stone barrier is falling apart behind me. Before long, I am having no cover.

  Using helmet visor, I am seeing that EMP is halfway between me and alley that crabtank is guarding. Even though I am having gun in my hands, I am not knowing what to do because I am not moving fast enough to avoid big bullet from crabtank. Then I am seeing belt on dead soldier. Two grenades. Fast fast, I take them from the belt and activate them, then throw them over me. I hear BUDUBUDUBUDU then BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM and ground shaking and glass breaking, and then I am running and through the smoke, I am snatching EMP from the ground, but then I am hearing gun barrel rotating like crabtank is getting ready to fire, and time is slowing and smoke is clearing and gun barrel is pointing at me and I am thinking this is how I am going to be dying and, for some reason, I am closing my eyes, then I am hearing AIYEEEEEEEE.

  When I am opening my eyes again, I am seeing something so strange it is making me not to be moving.

  Oluwale has two metal poles stuck in the crabtank’s head and is steering it like it is shorthorn. And it is shooting all over the place while Oluwale is laughing and making battlecry with his throat, and it is strange to me that he is doing this when he is barely using his voice before. He shouts an Igbo war song as he steers the crabtank away, against its own commands so that it trips over its own legs.

  I run until I get to where I know I need to go. It is intersection of paths just like any other intersection, but I am knowing this one is special because Xifeng is marking it on map. Binyelum is waiting there for me and smiling, rifle resting against her shoulder.

  A skinny black obelisk stands in the center of the intersection. It glows like blue lightning is rippling under its skin. I stick EMP to it, and Binye and I run for cover behind a building. There is all the noise and katakata of warfare, then I feel the wave from all the EMPs we put on the obelisks in the facility all at once. Like when the water under Falomo Bridge is trying to be eating us. Then there is no sound at all.

  That is what Xifeng is telling us to wait for. “Wait for the silence,” she is telling us before we are starting our mission. The silence of all the enemy’s machines turning off at once. So when I am hearing the silence, I am taking off my signal dampener and suddenly my brain is open again and taking in all of the information and I am even hearing my brother and sister again and some of them is whooping and cheering, even as they are binding remaining guards. It is making me happy to be hearing the sound of my family again.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  In front of me and Xifeng is wall full of pods, and in each pod is being a human being. It is like this in almost all of the buildings. Their insides are being like greenhouse where sunlight and water is being made for plants.

  “This is where it happens,” Xifeng is telling me.

  While she is speaking, the other soldiers are going through the buildings and shutting off the pods and waking up the people that is being held in them.

  “Forced cyberization.” A snarl comes onto her face. “And then they wipe out the memories.”

  “Memories of the war,” I say, to myself more than to Xifeng.

  Something is stirring in me. Not a good feeling but a bad feeling like dizziness and nausea and then suddenly

  metal is cold and wrapping around my wrists and my feet is dangling in the air. My neck is being stiff like tree trunk or like tree branch that is skinny because it is feeling like my head is going to be falling off of it and landing on the floor. I am turning back and forth slow, but that is the only way that my body is moving. Everything is feeling dry and stiff, even the blood that is coming from my nose and gash on my head.

  It is feeling like I am waking up but I am not knowing if I am dreaming or not because when I am trying to be remembering what is happening before, I am just seeing black. Static is interrupting my seeing. It is just a moment and everything is gray and twisted and then I am seeing normal again, and I am thinking that something is broken. One of my eye is being swollen shut so even though my head is being bowed I am not really seeing what is happening to my leg that is just dangling like fruit from tree.

  Light is coming into room, spilling like water. And I am hearing door opening. But it is old door because it is creaking and it is squeaking and light is suddenly everywhere and I am having to be closing my eyes against it. I am waiting to be hearing hard footstep but instead it is soft like swish swish and I am knowing this is the sound of sand. There is being sand in this room where I am hanging. And I am hearing sizzling too and knowing that something is burning even if I am not smelling it, and I am knowing that I am not smelling thing because my nose is being broken. Many thing in me is broken but I am not feeling pain. And I am remembering now that the person who is walking into this room is wanting me to be feeling pain.

  That is why when he is walking in he is spitting on me and telling me I am not human and that I am rubbish to be thrown into ocean. I am wondering why he is keeping me here and as I am wondering this he is holding shockstick and he is hitting me in my stomach and chest and side with it and he is hitting me so hard on my back that he is breaking the shockstick.

  I am thinking that I am supposed to be feeling thing. Big man that is with the one who is hitting me is telling him is not working. And I am knowing now that I am being tortured and then I am remembering that I am what they are calling enemy combatant.

  Big man is telling boy that nothing is working because I am being made to not be feeling pain. He is saying that I am special soldier, I am synth, and I am not having pain receptor in my brain and it is this that is making me not to be feeling thing even though many thing inside me is broken. Boy is telling big man okay and big man is leaving, and I am thinking that boy is going to be leaving with big man but boy is staying and I am raising my head to be seeing his face and when he is looking at me he is smiling so his teeth are shining yellow like corn they are selling by the street, and I am seeing the way hair is over his face and the way the skin on his knuckles is broken, and I am seeing the vest he is wearing and the patches and I am knowing that he is soldier too and that he is with what I am knowing is a militia and they are small small army but they are killing just like soldier. And boy is looking at me like I am something to be eating, and then he is reaching behind him and pulling cord from his neck and he is walking close to me and he is putting cord in my neck and suddenly I am feeling everything. I am feeling the breaking in my ribs and in my back and in my crotch and in my arms and in my head, and he is smiling at me and saying now I will be feeling these thing and he is raising his stick and I

  am waking up in Xifeng’s arms, and she is whispering to me in Taishanese. It is taking me several second to be remembering where I am and what is happening, but then I am remembering raid and EMP and gunfight and red-bloods in pods, and I am relaxing in Xifeng’s arms. But part of me is still not wanting to see her, so I am pushing myself to my feet and walking fast away from her and not caring where I am going until I am seeing Uzodinma in other room staring at what is looking like empty hospital bed in room of hospital beds. Bed is half-covered by cylindrical device, and I am knowing that this is being use to scan brains and braincases, and all the bed here is being like this, except that Uzodinma is standing at one bed in particular.

  We are synths. He is telling me this and showing me hospital bed. Two bed. The one he is waking up in and the one he is looking at now, and he is showing me that they are the same. This is where they are making me.

  When he is turning to face me, he is limping because I am seeing that one leg is standing badly. He is not showing pain on his face, but he is moving slowly and I am seeing that this is making him to be angering. Is not good for child of war to be moving slowly. That is how child of war is getting bullet or getting chopped.

  I think I am expecting Uzodinma to be sadding, but his eye is not sadding. We were created. We were never born.


  “What color is this remembering?” I am asking him. I do not know why it is important for me to be using my red-blood voice, but I am wanting him to hear me like we are both being red-blood. “Is it blue? Red?” Maybe if he is having rememberings like I am having rememberings, he is knowing that some of them is belonging to someone else.

  You are wanting to tell me that you are having mother once and she is loving you. He does not sound like my friend when he is saying this. He is sounding like someone who is not caring if I am being happy or sad. But I watch you fumble through your mind, trying to hold the right rememberings in your hands. They are still a mess in your head, no matter how you are sorting them. Scattered like pieces of metal on the shoreline beneath a bridge. You are looking for a woman and calling her Mother and seeing woman after woman after woman, but none of them have a face like yours. None of the women in your rememberings have done for you what you expect mothers to do. Because we never had mothers.

  When he is saying we never had mothers, he is also saying we are never having mothers.

  But it is a lie, because when I am waking up from nightmare-remembering, Xifeng is holding me and talking to me softly and with love. And she is waiting for me in the other room. And I am calling her Mother.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  In the mech, on the way home, Xifeng looks out the window. And I sit across from her. The other synths downloaded the memories from the external hard drives at the facility, the ones the government and the Chinese were preparing to eliminate upon completion of the mass cyberization, but Xifeng says that I don’t have to. I think she is worried about me.

  “What am I?” I ask her.

  When she is looking at me, there is many thing in her eye and I am not wanting to sit in her silence, so I talk some more.

  “Uzodinma is telling me that all child of war are being made in factory all over Nigeria. That we are machine and that they give us false memories that are belonging to other people. But I do not feel like machine.” I am looking at my hands, because I am too scared and too angry to look at Xifeng’s face. “I want him to be lying. But I know he is not lying. I am wanting him to shake me and I am wanting him to tell me I am right too and I am wanting all of these thing because it is easier to be pushing against him than to be sitting inside the doubt that is squeezing the air out of my lungs. If I am being made in factory, then why am I feeling this way? I am not robot! I am not android like Enyemaka! I am not simple machine! I am not machine. I am not machine.” I’m crying.

  “You are not a machine.”

  I am looking up from my hands when I am hearing Xifeng’s voice. She is not smiling, but there are many thing happening on her face. Happiness, anger, sorrow, joy, regret. All of these thing is happening at once in her face.

  “You’re not a machine, but you’re not human.”

  “We are something between these thing?”

  For a long time, Xifeng is saying nothing, and I am only hearing the wind blowing by our mech as we fly over the forest trees. Then, she says, in Taishanese, “You are my daughter.”

  And it is calming the questions in my heart to be hearing this.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Ngozi keeps the maglev jeep close to the ground whenever they move. And there’s no rhyme or reason to their movements. Sometimes, Ngozi will bring Ify and Grace deep into forest, where they’ll share a clearing with a pack of wulfu or a lumbering Agba bear. Sometimes, they will move at night, hugging cliffside roads even as the sun rises to gild them and the red mountain beneath them. Sometimes, they’ll pull off the road in the middle of the day, lose themselves in off-road jungle, then Ngozi will vanish for hours on end, sometimes returning with food, sometimes returning with nothing. Then they will be off again.

  It isn’t until they find refuge on the ridge of a large, verdant bowl empty of people, of all sign of habitation, that Ify realizes where Ngozi’s been taking them. The van is parked a ways off. Ngozi has left her rifle in there but has a pistol tucked into her pants. Grace brings up the rear and hangs back while Ify stands at Ngozi’s side. Together, they survey the landscape: the rolling hillside, the mountains to either side of them, their clay sides red like open wounds. And Ify knows were she to dig deep enough into the ground here—anywhere here—she’d find Chukwu glowing blue right at her. The mineral over which a whole war was fought.

  “We’re in Biafra, aren’t we?”

  Ngozi sniffs and keeps playing with her chewing stick. “You didn’t get to know Onyii the way I did, so I figured I would show you what she lived for.”

  “And what she died for,” Ify says to herself, quietly. Then Ify looks back up at the land before her, and she recalls the winding journey they’ve taken, the forests they’ve passed through, the roads they’ve ridden down, the flightlines they’ve taken, the hillsides on which they’ve camped. This was her homeland. “I’ve never seen it like this.”

  “There used to be more people,” Ngozi says casually. Ify knows the callousness of the statement is a mask for very real hurt. She’s ridden enough with Ngozi to know that the war veteran still aches for the people she will never see again, for the life that once filled these places but that now leaves them desolate and too quiet. This land, not even the animals will touch.

  “Ify,” Grace says, insistent.

  Ify realizes that Grace must have been calling her name for some time. She turns, and together the two of them walk out of Ngozi’s earshot.

  “What are we doing?” Grace hisses. “We have a mission.”

  Ify looks around, searching for an answer. If she is honest with herself, she wants to stay because Onyii, somehow, is here, in this place beneath her feet, in the air around her, in the lowing and growling and buzzing of the winged and feathered world around her. Dying children wait for her high in space, but doesn’t she deserve her own brand of peace? “If we leave and are captured by the security services, what happens to us?” she asks Grace.

  Grace smolders but takes the point. “We can’t just do nothing. Are we going to sit in her van, driving around this country until she figures out what she wants to do with us?”

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” Ngozi’s heading toward them with a feline saunter. Her hand drifts behind her in case she needs to reach for her pistol. Ify knows now to keep her eye on it. “Come on, it’s time to go.”

  Grace steps between Ify and Ngozi. “Go where?”

  Ngozi looks Grace up and down, as though surprised by what she’s seeing, then smirks. “Somewhere safe.”

  “How do we know you’re not just going to drive us around until the end of time?”

  Ngozi frowns at Grace and takes a step toward her so that their noses are nearly touching. “And if that’s my plan, what will you do?”

  “Ngozi,” Ify calls out, warning. “Ngozi, please.”

  Grace backs away so that she can look at both Ify and Ngozi. “We have a job to do,” she tells Ngozi, while never taking her eyes off of Ify. “There are lives at stake.”

  Ngozi stares without saying a word, her expression one of immovable cliffside rock.

  “Ify, let’s go.”

  “Where would we go?” Ify asks.

  “She’s right, you know.” This from Ngozi, the pistol out from her waistband and firmly in her hand.

  Grace notices it and stays still. “Ify. Please. Those children are dying.” All the while, Grace has eyes for nothing but that gun. “Ify, what are you doing? Ify, please!” Her face changes, her spine straightens. “All right. Fine. I’ll do it myself.” She takes a step back, but that’s when Ngozi raises her gun arm.

  “What?” Grace asks, defiant but shaking. “Because I’ve seen your face I can’t leave alive? After you shoot me, are you going to stuff me in your trunk, find somewhere quiet, and set it all on fire?” She looks to Ify, the accusation thick and dark in her
eyes. “And you would let her?”

  “You don’t understand,” Ify says, hating the weakness in her voice. “You’ve never had a country like Biafra.”

  Grace looks at Ify like someone she no longer recognizes. For a long time, her mouth forms around words but refuses to speak them. Then, she appears to give up. Her arms fall to her sides. “You have no idea what I have or haven’t had.”

  Ngozi’s arm hasn’t wavered the whole time.

  Ify steps forward and puts her hand on Ngozi’s, pushing the gun to the floor. “Let her go. She can’t harm us.” The two Igbo women share a meaningful glance, then Ngozi relents and tucks the pistol back into her pants.

  Grace runs back in the direction of the forest and vanishes.

  “Think of the children, right?” Ngozi says, joking, as she and Ify head back into the van and set off.

  Staring out the window at the country she feels she’s seeing for the first time, Ify is surprised at how little guilt there is in her heart.

  CHAPTER

  32

  We are sitting in cave and laughing at hologram projection Oluwale is making of when he is kneeling on crabtank and steering it with poles he is jamming into its head and screaming war cry. I am telling to the others how I am feeling fear in my chest like THU-THUMP of my heart over and over and some of them are having expression of marvel in their eyes because they are never knowing what fear is until I am telling them. Uzodinma is not with us. He is in other room, but I am wanting him to be hearing this—hearing my story and hearing Oluwale’s story—because if he is seeing that we are feeling these thing and that we are telling story not like machine but like red-blood, then we are not being machine. We are being thing that is making family. I am wanting him to be seeing me and telling himself that we are being family. But he is in another room, and he is not seeing or hearing us.