And while she is doing this thing, I am looking at my brother whose body I am just finished breaking and my shoulder is heaving and I am breathing so loud and hard I am hearing myself and I am seeing red everywhere, everything red.
Then I am hearing engine in the distance and I am thinking that it is bandit or militia or someone else, but I am not caring because it is human and I am needing to be breaking it and I am leaving to join the group and kill these thing that is needing killing, and I am not even caring that I am leaving my brother to be small mountain made out of metal that is being covered by red dust.
CHAPTER
45
“You’re looking for the synth, aren’t you?”
Ngozi is out ahead in her mech. They’d emerged from Xifeng’s underground base in the forests outside Abuja and cut a path straight for the countryside, where government forces would be sparsest, but not before activating the cloaking tech both craft had enabled. It worked much the same way the face-scrambling cream did, disrupting surveillance signals so that when they entered Nigerian airspace, they didn’t look like a jet and an aerial mech but rather like two giant radiation-infected birds. Their westward flight toward Kwara State would make sense on government radars. They would look like two misplaced creatures, denizens of the Redlands who had gotten lost and were heading back home. That’s where Ngozi was leading them. The Redlands.
“I overheard you while you were gathering supplies,” Ngozi says through the comms system that connects them. Her face appears before Ify as though she were calling through Ify’s Whistle.
“Yes,” Ify says. “How do you know she’s still alive?” Ify can explain her own feelings, that knowing Uzo’s still alive is more a matter of intuition and wishing than anything else, that she has no hard proof Uzo has survived the chaos, especially when so many synths have died already, but that she has felt somewhere deep in her body that this synth that has pieces of her warrior sister in her would somehow find a way to make it out. When she was with Xifeng, Ngozi must have spent time with the synths, seen what they were capable of, what they were growing into. Maybe she’s felt the same way.
“Xifeng had all of the synths implanted with tracking devices,” Ngozi says as the country beneath them grows more and more overgrown with jungle. Even though they’re cloaked, they fly low to avoid the mechs and ships sitting at higher altitudes among the clouds. “She had plans to distribute them throughout Nigeria, spreading the forbidden memories while her antivirus worked to cure the cyberized.” Her mouth stumbles around the word distribute. That tells Ify, more than anything else, that Ngozi has come to regard the synths as people. Or much closer to people than to machines. Something about that heartens Ify and brings a smile to her face.
But then Ify thinks about the implications of Xifeng’s actions. Tracking devices. More surveillance. The more she ponders Xifeng’s plan and the lengths she had gone to in order to bring about her reckoning, the more she realizes that Xifeng was turning into the very surveillance state she had hated.
“She knew the government was hunting them. Trying to eliminate any relics of the war.” The sky begins to change colors with the setting of the sun so that gold dapples the wings of Ify’s craft and the red and blue light glows softly off the edges of Ngozi’s mech in front of her and Grace. “Xifeng had called them the Ceasefire Children—born and bred for war, but when the ceasefire was declared, that’s all they were. Children.”
Ify is silent as they fly and the land begins to turn red with sand dunes.
“Onyii thought she would have to go on trial.”
The sentence startles Ify.
“We’d all done horrible things, but Onyii carried everyone else’s guilt for them. And she was willing to let the courts make an example of her if it meant lasting peace. She never said it, but she was always trying to take credit for everything.” Ngozi’s chuckle is soft and static-y over the comms. “She was very uncomfortable with peace. Just like the synths. We’re all trying to find our place in the world as it changes around us. When you’re defined by war, what’s left for you when the war ends?”
Ify is glad for the autopilot function, because tears blur her vision. She takes a moment to wipe them away, grateful that Grace is asleep beside her and can’t overhear. So many of Ify’s memories of Onyii are memories that bring her peace. Onyii and Chinelo pounding yams to make food for the rest of the camp’s girls, Onyii building the greenhouse so that the girls could garden and take their minds off of the conflict raging around them, Onyii counting the stars with Ify at night, tracing constellations in the sky above them, letting Ify dream up her own stories with the pictures they saw. And the thing that had brought them together was murder.
The memory intrudes. Crashes through the walls of Ify’s mind to bring her back to that mud-and-stone building in a village she no longer remembers but has pieced together through what others have told and shown her. The night is so deep that everyone has turned into shapes moving in the dark, passing beneath the occasional moonbeam, sometimes with a face so stained with ink and gore that they look less like a person and more like a creature from nightmare. Ify with a pet dog clutched to her chest as it bleeds over her dress. The village’s adults gathered outside while a rebel commander proclaims that everyone is to die because they belong to an enemy tribe. Ify shivering alone in her room as the gunshots ring out and her mother and father are dumped into shallow graves. Ify unable to move, hoping that if she remains still enough she can simply vanish, fade away and turn into smoke and never come back. Then a young girl painted black with mud and blood, holding a rifle across her skinny body, walks into the house. Slow, sure steps. She doesn’t hesitate until she gets to Ify. No matter how much she tries, Ify can’t render herself invisible to this specter, this ghost. This creature that pries the dead dog from her arms and takes it away and buries it, then returns for her. To bring her to a place that will eventually become the camp where she raises the girl and carries her like she is her little sister and loves her and makes sure she wakes up in time for school and makes sure their droid closely shaves Ify’s head during the summers so that the heat won’t get trapped on her scalp by her hair and scavenges to find pads for the girls when they start to bleed and braids hair and cooks food and teaches them to fight and to read and to know what the earth looks like when a landmine is buried beneath it and how to tell what type of mech is flying overhead by its sound, and it all overwhelms Ify so that sobs struggle inside her chest for release.
“I’m sorry,” Ify says softly. For wanting revenge. For leading the suicide bombers to Enugu to break the ceasefire. For trying to forget Onyii and everything Onyii had done for her. For trying to forget how Onyii had saved her life. And given her a new one. “I’m sorry.”
Someone’s hand closes over her own, and Ify looks to her right to see Grace looking at her and smiling, her fingers tightening over Ify’s.
Through her tears, Ify smiles back. And they ride like that in silence until Ngozi’s mech pulls off to the side and lowers onto a hill overlooking desert patched with islands of green.
“Do you see that?” Ngozi asks.
Ify follows, alighting gently on the grassy knoll, and zooms in with her Accent-powered camera.
“That forest.”
And there it is along the horizon. The beginnings of a forest, above which rises several columns of smoke.
“The signal stops there.”
Ify’s heart drops. Uzo.
CHAPTER
46
I am not cleaning the blood off of my skin. I am not wiping it from my mouth. I am not scraping it off of my tongue. I am not liking the taste but it is tasting like metal and so it is feeling like it is already part of me. It is drying in my hair and it is crusting on my arms and my legs, and it is the same color as the radiation spots that is making holes in my shirt. Before too long, my shirt is just strips of cloth hanging from my body and more and mo
re of my skin is peeling away and revealing the metal that is lying beneath like bone of animal, and this is happening to all of us.
When the other synths are expiring, we are uploading their data into the remaining Enyemakas, but it is happening so much now that I am not having time to bury them, so they are just falling down into the red dust and breaking down. Some of them are being eaten so much by the air that when they are falling, they are coming apart in pieces. Their arm is falling away and their leg is snapping and they are having no hair. Sometime it is like all of them is just crumbling, and I am sadding each time it is happening because it is feeling like I am losing an important piece of myself every time it is happening. Enyemaka is always telling me that they are still being alive, but I am not seeing them breathing or laughing or running in circles with their arms spread out like airplanes. So how can they be still alive?
There are being no more humans now for long time, but I am being fine with this because I am not angering so much anymore. It is not anger like hot thing under my skin that is eating me from inside. It is cold anger, like something hard that is making my step heavy and is making it hard sometime to lift my shoulder, like I am being stuck with my arms hanging at my side or my neck turned a certain way and it is taking much effort and cracking to be fixing myself and still walking. But the cold anger is also pushing me forward. It is what Xifeng is once telling me is called determination.
I am wondering if I am having more determination than my other synth brother and sister, because I am walking and I am passing by their body that is lying in the red dust in pieces and I am asking myself how I am still walking and they are not if we are being the same. I am puzzling this inside my brain when I am realizing that I am walking past an Enyemaka.
She is frozen where she is standing and her arm is stuck like she is still being in the middle of walking. She is like someone is pressing pause on a recording and never pressing play. I am seeing rusting on her body like rash that is spreading over her chest and her legs and part of her face and I am looking in her face and I am seeing no light in her eyes. I am standing in front of her and hunching my back over even if it is paining me so I can look at her face more fully, and I am waving my hand in front of her face and trying to speak words from inside my brain but she is saying nothing. I am feeling no reaction from her. Then I am taking cord from the back of my neck and I am plugging it into Enyemaka and at first I am not knowing why I am doing this. Maybe I am thinking that she is not all the way expired, and I am hoping to give her some of me to be having in her last moments. Maybe I am not wanting to be so alone so I am simply spending time talking to someone who is not here like I am seeing other synths doing before they are expiring. Maybe I am soon expiring and my body is knowing this before my brain is knowing this.
But I am sitting with Enyemaka and I am thinking and I am seeing huts and tents that are being made and there is a Terminal that is creating network for the camp that is having shower and pulling energy from ground to be watering plants in greenhouse and giving power to tablets and devices for children that are being in school and I am knowing that I am in a camp and that the people in this camp are being called War Girls and I am standing by one of the tents and I am watching a little girl facing bigger girls and they are pushing her shoulders and I am feeling in my body that I am wanting to run and protect this little girl because I am knowing her and I am loving her and even now I am wanting to make sure she is shaving her head properly because it is getting hot and I am not wanting the heat to be trapped on her scalp and paining her. But I am watching the bigger girls pushing the little girl and I am not doing anything and I am wondering why I am not doing anything and then the little girl pushes the biggest girl and is throwing her onto the ground and stuffing dirt in her mouth and the other girls are running away but the little girl is doing revenge and then, when she is running out of breath, she is standing up again while the girl that is bullying her is coughing dirt from her mouth and crying and the little girl is saying nothing but I am feeling warmness in my heart and I am walking to her and I am asking her, What did I miss? even though I am seeing the whole thing and then I am telling Ify, I have some time before my next run. Do you want to see the water again? And she is nodding her head yes and grabbing my pant leg and burying her face in its dirty cloth and I am putting my hand to her head and massaging calmness into her.
Moving thing is taking me out of my remembering, and when I am looking up, I am seeing light that is moving back and forth in Enyemaka’s eyes.
I am smiling but I am not knowing if I am smiling at the remembering or if I am smiling at Enyemaka, who is not expiring yet.
I am still connected to Enyemaka so I am not using words but I am showing her that I am scared. It is feeling like I am telling her color and picture and feeling rather than saying I am scared because saying I am scared is not feeling like I am telling her the whole truth. I am waiting for Enyemaka to tell me that I am to be doing my duty, that this is yet another thing I am soldier in, that I am to be serving memory and thinking of everyone—my brother and sister synth and also the Enyemaka, who are creating library of memory for everyone so they are not forgetting what is happening.
But Enyemaka is not saying anything to me. She is sending me color and image and feeling that is telling me I know. And at the same time, she is telling me that it is okay for me to be scared. Because I am not seeing where we are going. And it is being normal to be scared of the unknown.
And part of me is wondering what is happening to Enyemaka to be talking like this. Is not normal.
We are the same, but we are different, Enyemaka is telling me and I am knowing that she is telling me this about all her sisters. The Enyemaka are all Enyemaka but they are also different Enyemaka, and I am seeing that they are like synth because they are all being connected and feeling what the other is feeling and sometime even thinking what the other is thinking, but they are speaking to my brain with different voice, different collection of image and feeling and color.
Are you scared too?
I don’t know fear. But I am learning what creates it. And I understand that telling falsehoods is part of the equation. Sometimes, when faced with fear, we lie to ourselves and to others to lessen that fear or to erase it completely.
Lying? Who is lying?
They are. And she is pointing to the Enyemaka ahead of us. There is no oasis.
Fear is making me feel like I am at the bottom of the ocean.
They will keep walking until no one is left. And all the Enyemaka hold the memories of Biafra inside them.
Why are you telling me this?
But Enyemaka is not answering. When I am getting hold of myself again and able to move, I am disconnecting my cord from Enyemaka and coming to my feet, but before I am leaving, Enyemaka is grabbing my wrist tight, so tight it is breaking the gears and the plates, and pieces of me are falling into the red dirt. Then Enyemaka is using her other hand to reach into my outlet and she is using drill and she is paining me.
“What are you doing?” I am screaming at her with my voice that is breaking because I am not using it often and because it is dry and because I am not normally needing to use word when talking to Enyemaka, but I am screaming because I am wanting to know why she is doing this thing but also because scream is feeling like the only thing I can do.
You have data that we need. I can’t let you leave. Enyemaka’s eye is glowing red, and it is like she is losing who she is being just now. And I am turning and I am seeing silhouette of other Enyemaka coming near, and Enyemaka is breaking my outlet and pulling my cord out and I am fighting and screaming, but she is grabbing my cord and jamming it into her outlet and I am seizing and I am knowing that she is taking my data so she can be leaving me to be expiring in the dirt and I am not wanting to expire, I don’t want to die, please don’t let me die, but Enyemaka is not listening to me, then
metal is cold and wrapping around my
wrists and my feet is dangling in the air. 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.
Static.
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. Static. 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. Static. 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.
Static.
Man is walking into the room and he is spitting on me and telling me I am not human and that I am rubbish to be thrown into ocean. Static. 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.
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