Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  While there is laughing and chat-chatting in the caves, I hear scuffling and someone trying to scream but hand is covering their mouth. I am telling from the sound that this person is being prisoner, then the sound is drifting away and Xifeng is coming to us. Some of the synths are standing at attention like little war child. Other is sitting down and smiling at her like she is big sister and not commander of army they are belonging to. And some of them are looking at her with love in their eyes and I am recognizing this as look that child is giving their mother when they are loving each other.

  “Uzo, come with me?” Xifeng is asking me in English.

  “Yes, Mother,” I am saying in Taishanese, because, for some reason, I am wanting the others to know that I am special to Xifeng, that I am different. Favored.

  We are walking down cave pathway, and orb is floating over our head all along the pathway, lighting our way. Xifeng is leading me past room filled with girls who are cleaning their guns and checking their ammo and other room where synth is connecting to external hard drives that Xifeng is collecting before we are being reunited, and synth is downloading rememberings onto hard drives, and I am thinking about how things used to be with me and Xifeng. I am thinking of how it was just us and the Enyemakas, and I am thinking of riding in a boat with Xifeng and how quiet the night is being in Lagos Lagoon when we are arriving in Makoko neighborhood to be delivering remembering. And I am remembering that we are small small group and even though there is no blue or red or other color shading the remembering like there is being with the ones that is not belonging to me, it is feeling like a different lifetime ago when I am doing these thing with Xifeng. Even though we are walking past that room fast fast, I am seeing that already external hard drive is filling entire walls.

  “It makes me happy to see you with the children like this,” Xifeng is saying suddenly.

  My heart is heating when I am hearing her call us children.

  “You are becoming your own people.” Smile is spreading on her lips. “Growing from your memories.”

  “We are organizing them,” I am telling her with excitement in my voice. I am truly feeling like child because word is moving from my mouth faster than I can think it. “Oluwale and Uzodinma are teaching me how to be organizing my memories based on what color they are being shaded in and who is appearing in them. And like this we are knowing which memories belong to us and which are being implanted and belonging first to others. And I am thinking that this is what is making us to be our own people.”

  Smile has faded from Xifeng’s face, but I am telling from how she is walking that it is not because she is sadding or angering but that she is simply thinking.

  “You’re so special” is all she is saying to me as she puts her hand to the back of my head and draws me close to her.

  As we are walking, I am hearing muffled sound even more, then we are getting to small small room branching off of hallway where girl I am not recognizing is bound to a chair with her arms being restrained behind her, so that I am knowing it is paining her. She is having plastic band over her mouth to be keeping her from shouting, and there is still marking on her face from where eye blanket is being stripped off. But I am also seeing cream that is smeared on her face, and it is the same cream that we are using when we are raiding the cyberization facility. The cream that is keeping camera and machine from recognizing our faces.

  “Her name is Grace Leung,” Xifeng is telling me, and when I am looking at the prisoner’s face like a red-blood and not using the technology in my braincase, I am seeing that she is looking like Xifeng.

  “She is Chinese,” I tell Xifeng, like this is a thing we are both discovering at the same time. And I say it in Taishanese, because I am wanting even this person to know that Xifeng is treating me special. “Like you.”

  Xifeng smirks. “She’s nothing like me.” Then she steps closer to the prisoner who is having dried blood under her nose. Fear is shining in Grace’s eyes, but there is also being defiance there like she is being ready to fight everyone she is seeing, especially Xifeng, who is walking close to her and is taking off plastic band that is covering her mouth and using her thumb to wipe off face-scrambling cream. “Are you?”

  “Who are you?” Grace is asking through gritted teeth.

  Xifeng rises to her full height, and it is looking like she is casting shadow over the prisoner. “I am your guardian,” Xifeng is saying in Mandarin.

  “Talk to me in Taishanese,” Grace hisses in language I am understanding as language me and Xifeng are speaking when we are being proper mother and daughter.

  Xifeng crouches on her haunches, so she is looking Grace in the face. “You grew up in the Colonies, didn’t you? That’s what you look like.” She wrinkles her face. “That’s what you smell like too. You smell like gweilo.”

  Grace is trying not to be crying, and it is making her to be shaking in her chair.

  “Now, my children are telling me you are here from the Colonies on a medical mission. Is that correct?”

  Grace is struggling not to be saying anything.

  “That there is some epidemic sweeping through the refugee population and it has something to do with their memories. My children have also told me that the Nigerian Security Service is looking for you. Which means you’ve already broken the law.”

  Grace spits blood onto the floor next to her chair. “That’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? Breaking the law?”

  Xifeng is looking at Grace with disappointment in her eyes, then she is standing to her feet. “You’re all the same. You think the answer to your problems is here, so you come and you take what you want and then you leave. I have seen it with our people over and over and over again. But imperialism without yáng guǐzi is still imperialism.” Xifeng is calming down. “I am here to actually help these people, and that’s what I’m going to do. If you don’t get in my way, you stay alive. It’s as simple as that.” Xifeng is then looking to me and nodding, then she is walking out of the room and it is being just me and Grace.

  Then something is happening. Her eye is growing wide. She gasps. “You . . .” she says.

  With less face-scrambling cream all over her features, I am seeing it too. I am knowing her. And I am knowing instantly from where I am knowing her. An open field. Leaving the forest. Police and army mech and helicopter and Augment that is chasing me and my family. Holding Ify’s face in my hands. This girl, Grace, looking at me with wide eyes and not saying anything, just like she is doing now.

  Without thinking, I am on top of her. I have knocked over her chair and I straddle her and my fingers are over her throat, squeezing, and I am angering and saying through my teeth, “Where is she?” When Grace is not saying a thing, I am slapping Grace hard across the face, and instantly it is beginning to swell and tears spring to her eyes. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace is saying in soft soft voice.

  But I am not liking what I am hearing, so I am slapping her again and wound on her forehead is reopening.

  “Please, stop,” she is saying as I am hitting and hitting and hitting her. And when I am doing this, she is vanishing and room is vanishing and I am suddenly hanging from chains over my head and evil boy is plugging into me and grinning and my body is feeling like someone is lighting it on fire and he is taking shockstick and beating me and beating me and beating me while I am hanging and beating me and beating me and . . . “Please.” Then I am stopping and looking at Grace and glaring, and she is gritting her teeth and one eye is being swollen shut and she is telling me, “I’m never going to let you have her.” Even though she is saying this, I am not angering. Instead, tear is coming to my eye, and I am not liking what I am doing. I am seeing her face and I am knowing it is like that because of me, then shame is washing over me like water under Falomo Bridge that is trying to be eating us.

  Grace’s eye moves from my face to room’s entrance out i
nto hallway, and she tries to push herself up but I am on top of her and she is still bound to chair, so she is only coming up halfway but she is shouting, “Ify? Ify! IFY!”

  And I am turning around, and it is Ify with one of the girl that is rescuing us from police station. And Ify is seeing Grace’s face and horror is coming to her eyes and she is saying, “Grace?” Then girl who is rescuing synths from police station is grabbing Ify and dragging her away. I run into the hallway and watch as more and more girl come to hold Ify while she tries to fight them and her shouting gets farther and farther away until I am no longer hearing her voice.

  Xifeng is appearing in the hallway and she is looking at me, then she is walking away from me and Grace and in direction of Ify.

  CHAPTER

  33

  They force Ify into a metal chair. She thrashes and struggles against them, but some of the people restraining her have the vitiligo and superhuman strength of synths, and it isn’t long before her wrists are bound behind her, her ankles magnetized to the chair’s metal legs. The sight of Grace’s face, swollen and bleeding, fills Ify with a rage she can’t remember ever feeling. But on the heels of that rage is desperation and an acknowledgment of her own powerlessness. But even as she knows she’s only wearying herself with each jerk against her restraints, with each thrash, she cannot stop.

  “Grace!” Ify calls out. “Grace! Grace, it’s okay!” Someone smacks her hard across her face, and Ify looks up to see Ngozi staring back at her. “What is this, Ngozi? What’s going on?” She jerks herself against her restraints. “What are you doing? Let me go. Let. Me. Go.”

  But Ngozi just walks away.

  “Come back here!” Ify shouts. She’s screaming more than she needs to, but it will do Grace some good to hear her voice, to know that she’s still alive and kicking. Ify raises her voice as much for Grace as she does herself. She spaces out her movements and her shouting to conserve energy. Things had morphed so quickly. One minute Ngozi was leading her to a safe haven after all those days on the run from the Nigerian Security Service. Then Ify was manacled to a chair. A different Ify would have had her guard up, would have known how to read a body, would have detected the lie in how Ngozi walked and talked. “Grace?” Ify calls out, hoping Grace will hear her and, in hearing her, be put at peace.

  Her captors spread out toward the wall of this room under orbs of light. Behind them sit shelves containing all sorts of foodstuffs and mechanical equipment. Bonders, Augments, EMPs. More synths start to file into the room. Ify recognizes them from that episode at Kufena Hills when the lot of them burst from the forest with half the Nigerian military chasing after them. That’s when everything changed, Ify realizes. When that synth saw her face and gave her a glimpse of the sister who had abandoned her.

  So lost in thought is Ify that it takes her a moment to register the new quiet. When she comes to and her vision focuses, she finds she can’t breathe. How . . .

  “Hello, Ify,” says Xifeng, sitting in a chair right across from Ify.

  Grace. “Let my friend go,” Ify hisses after a moment’s shock. “She can’t hurt you.”

  Xifeng feigns surprise, then demurs, smiling. Her dark, gray-threaded hair comes down in waves to her shoulders. When she leans forward in her chair, forearms on her knees, her hair, coarse and thick, casts malicious shadows across her face. “I’m not worried about that, child,” Xifeng says. Then she reaches out her hand, pulls back, then reaches out again to hold Ify’s cheek in her hand. “I know she can’t hurt us. I had her brought here for her own protection.”

  Ify grits her teeth. “She didn’t look very protected.”

  Xifeng’s hand falls away. She reclines in her chair. “You’ve grown.” The smile that crosses her face chills Ify. “It feels like so long ago. When we first met, you were a little girl alone in the jungle. You’d been fending for yourself for I don’t know how long. All alone. No family, no one to watch over you. And me, a simple VR filmmaker ferrying refugees to safety during the ceasefire.” She pauses, takes Ify in with her gaze. “How much of that time do you remember? Do you remember our conversations? Do you remember the little boy named Agu? The child soldier who could play a touchboard like a master? Absolutely gifted. How much of that do you remember?”

  Ify realizes her whole body has been coiled this entire time. “Xifeng, what are you doing here?”

  “The same thing I was doing when we first met, Ify. I’m preserving memory.”

  “But . . .” Her throat has dried up. Words scratch against it. “But it’s against the law.”

  The others watch in silence, but Ify finds herself wishing they’d intervene, wishing they’d take either her or Xifeng to another room, wishing they’d say something, do something, to put a stop to this. But Xifeng holds her gaze. So much of that face is as Ify remembers, but the hair has thinned a little, and gray threads through it. There are new wrinkles around her eyes and a new hardness in her cheeks and jawline. It is odd to Ify, seeing someone age, seeing someone who refuses to be frozen in amber, whose face isn’t just the same cyberized snapshot for the rest of their lives. Everything about Xifeng—her posture, her naturally aging face, the look in her eyes—suggests rebellion.

  “Let me go,” Ify says.

  “No one’s keeping you here.” Xifeng looks around at the young women standing guard. “You are absolutely free to leave on your own. But should you make it out of here, know that the security services will chase you.” She pulls a small tablet the size of her palm out of her breast pocket and swipes a few times before holding the screen out to Ify. “You are a known fugitive.”

  Ify’s fists clench against the chairback.

  Xifeng puts the device back in her pocket. “You were asking the wrong questions. Or, rather, the right ones. In these times, that is enough to get you reprogrammed. We saved you, Ify. If they find you, they will forcefully cyberize you and invade your mind and rip your memories right out.” She speaks with her hands, and with each word, it’s as though she loses more control over herself until she takes a moment to breathe and straighten herself.

  “But I’m a Colonial official. They wouldn’t . . .” The rest dies in her throat.

  A sigh escapes Xifeng. “Your country has changed so much since you’ve last been here.”

  “I know my country,” Ify growls. The sound surprises her. Then she realizes how clenched her fists have been, how tight her jaw feels. There’s anger in her. “What do you know of Nigeria?”

  “You left and I stayed.”

  Ify lunges forward, hauling her chair off the ground. Instantly, two guards are on her, twisting her arms behind her and holding her in place. Despite her best efforts, they force her back down. “How dare you! You know nothing of this country!”

  Xifeng considers her nails while Ify thrashes in the grip of her captors. “You’re breaking the law! You’re a criminal! Nothing more! When they catch you, they will bury you under the jail. You have no right to meddle in our affairs.”

  “Our?” The look she gives Ify fills Ify’s stomach with fear. “Our affairs?” Xifeng rises from her chair and walks to Ify so their faces are inches apart. “I know what you did in Enugu.”

  Ify grows slack. “What?” It comes out as little more than a whisper.

  Xifeng walks away, hands clasped behind her back, then makes a slow circuit of the room, as though to acknowledge every one of her soldiers. At the entrance to the room, that girl appears. That synth who moved so much like Onyii. Xifeng pauses in front of her, then, palming the back of her head, draws her near so that they both face Ify. The girl’s expression is inscrutable.

  “What are you talking about?” But Ify knows. Even as she can’t bear to hear it, she knows.

  “During the ceasefire. When you joined my caravan of refugees, you told me you were looking for a young woman and you showed me her face. I didn’t know who she was at the time. Even when she brought
you back to me, I didn’t know quite what she had done. I hadn’t known that this Onyii you were looking for was the so-called Demon of Biafra, that she was the most skilled mech pilot on both sides of the war, that she had killed hundreds, possibly thousands over the course of her service, and that she had raised you in a little camp in southeastern Nigeria when you were a child.” Xifeng pauses to look lovingly at the synth clutching her leg, then continues. “You were going to Enugu to kill her because she had murdered your family. And in the process, Enugu was bombed. Hundreds wounded, dozens dead. Those were the initial tolls. Many more people would die by the time the rubble was cleared away. That is what you did. You led a group of suicide bombers into a civilian city where they proceeded to detonate themselves and kill as many people as possible.” Around the room, several people—none of them synths—audibly gasp. The air thickens. Some of the girls clench their fists. Others shift their feet in the dirt like they’re preparing to leap. Others tense, struggling to maintain composure in the face of the emotions roiling inside them. And at the center of this maelstrom sits Ify. And Xifeng. “There had been peace, but your quest for vengeance broke that peace. I remember, Ify, because I was there. I saw the waves of hatred you unleashed with that attack. But you left.”

  Ify starts when she realizes tears are running from her eyes. “It was a mistake,” she says, but all she hears is a whimper. “It was a mistake.”

  Xifeng stops and steps forward, leaving behind the little synth girl. “What was the mistake?”

  “I . . . I didn’t know about the bombers. I . . .” She sags in the arms of her captors, her legs going limp beneath her. “I just wanted to kill Onyii.” She has her head bowed and tears blur her vision, but she can feel the disdain Xifeng is staring at her. “I just wanted revenge.” She lets herself go, and the sobs come rushing over her in waves. Her body convulses with each one. It feels as though she is being choked. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” She says this over and over and over again, and she realizes this is the first time she’s admitted this to herself. For so long, she has carried those two events—shooting Onyii and the bombing of Enugu—together in her mind, one single tragic episode, and it has been so much easier to believe she was responsible for both, that her thirst for vengeance had cost so many lives. She had even been prepared to die, to be executed by Biafran authorities after her capture. But Onyii had rescued her. Even as war was starting back up around them, Onyii had rescued her.