Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

“We think that is what is tying your memories together, those you have accumulated over the course of your life and those you were . . . given upon your creation. Your brain has immense computing power. Indeed, the brain of a synth may be the most powerful computer ever created. And there is an incredible amount of heterogenous data in there. It shouldn’t be able to hold itself together. The incomplete nature of the memories would suggest natural deterioration, but there is something in your coding that is fighting that process.”

  She pauses. I am wondering why she is telling me about khipu and what it is having to do with saving me from Enyemaka and burning forest and the arguing that I am hearing earlier about going to space.

  Then, after a long silence, Ify is saying, “Right now, there are hundreds of children in the hospital where I work, maybe a thousand, who, I believe, are suffering from identical illnesses. They have each fallen into comas.” She is getting up from where she is sitting and walking back and forth and I am wanting to tell her not to be nervous, but words is not coming from my mouth so all I am doing is following her with my eyes. “In one building, refugees are being kept and taken care of. There is a ward for them. I was supposed to be helping them. But they became sick. And their condition has been worsening. Since the epidemic began, not a single one of these children has emerged from their coma.” Another pause. “This is why I came back to Nigeria.”

  “What is my brain having to do with this?”

  “The children . . . they’re losing their memories. We think that you have developed an antibody to the virus that is making them sick.” There is light shining in her eyes, and I am thinking that she is looking at me like I am something special. Not because I am carrying Onyii inside me, but because of something else. Xifeng is sometimes looking at me like this. “You . . . you somehow found a way to organize your data.”

  “My rememberings?”

  “Yes. Your rememberings.” She is moving closer to me, close enough to touch, but she is not reaching out to touch me.

  At first, I am thinking it is because she is looking at my woundings and finding me disgusting. But then I am seeing the look in her eyes and I am seeing that she is scared that if she is touching me, she is wounding me further. I am wanting to reach out and touch her or tell her it is okay, but my body is still not moving. I am feeling nanobots inside me, repairing me, but I am still too weak for my arms and legs and fingers to listen to what my brain is telling them.

  “When you did this, you rearranged your own genetic coding. You figured out a way to hold your data together and make a whole identity out of it. Imagine if a computer were alive.”

  I am not liking that she is calling me computer, and she is seeing the changing look in my face.

  “Of course, you’re more than a computer. It’s just that . . . you’re the cure. Somehow, you’re the cure.”

  I am wanting to be telling her that all of my brother and sister is doing this thing. It is thing we are learning to do from each other, and I am wanting to show her Oluwale teaching me and I am wanting to show her Uzodinma doing it too and finding certain memory that is granting him peace and accessing it on purpose and not accident. I am wanting to tell her we are all doing this thing and she is not needing me. But then I am trying to send out signal to find my family. And I am sending and sending and sending and all that is coming back is silence. All I am hearing is the ringing in my own head.

  “You are the only one left,” Ify is telling me like she is reading my mind. Like we are being plugged into each other. “You are the last synth.” She is looking at her hands and playing with them again. Then she is stopping, then she is gathering breath inside her and letting out a soft and slow sigh. When she is looking at me again, tears are shimmering in her eyes like wind brushing on the surface of the sea. “Will you come to space with me? I . . . I can’t guarantee that you will be safe or that you will even like it, but you can help many, many people who desperately need it. I don’t know what is waiting for you there, but I will care for you, and you will be loved. Yes. You will be loved. So will you do it? Will you come with me? To space?”

  CHAPTER

  49

  Ify finds Grace and Ngozi sitting on the hunched shoulders of Ngozi’s mech, eating out of what look like military ready-to-eat packets. Ngozi munches absentmindedly while Grace’s face twists around the tastes. When Ify looks up at them, Grace swallows her mouthful loudly and says, “Burrito bowl.” Her face makes Ify chuckle.

  “And?” Ngozi asks, nodding to the aircraft where Ify has left Uzo to rest. “What is the plan?”

  “We need to give her a new identity. For her visa application.”

  Light blossoms to life in Grace’s face so that, when the light from the setting sun hits, it looks like she’s made of gold.

  “We can’t bring her to Alabast directly. We’ll have to go to Centrafrique. I’ve already notified my friend there.”

  Ngozi puts down her half-eaten MRE. “And who is this friend that can swoop down and get you out of the country and into space?”

  “She’s a Colonial administrator,” Ify says with a proud smirk. She’d kept the details sparse during their conversation, knowing that while they were still in Nigerian airspace, there was a chance the call might be monitored. All Céline knew was that Ify was safe and that she needed to arrange transport for a sick child who needed medical attention. She had left Céline wondering what could be wrong with the child that couldn’t be fixed in one of Earthland’s most advanced hospitals. Explaining Uzo’s significance might have jeopardized their plans and implicated Céline in knowingly breaking the law. But Céline had revealed the tightening of Alabast’s immigration controls, the dire state of the Jungle, and that Centrafrique was beginning to accept a greater influx of refugees now that they knew they could no longer find a home among the whites. Céline had also informed her that none of the patients had so far been deported, which calmed Ify’s heart. And all the while, they had been forced to talk like professional acquaintances and not like friends, one of whom had worried desperately about the other upon hearing rumors and vague reports of an outbreak of violence in Nigeria’s capital city. Ify had spoken in calm, measured tones, firmly enough to show that she was unharmed and not being held hostage, but evasive enough in her answers to coach her friend toward discretion. They knew each other well enough that Céline could read, in Ify’s pauses and word choice, the specifics of their dilemma. So all that remained was to fashion Uzo’s immigration materials and wait for transport.

  Ngozi hops off her mech, landing smoothly from the dangerous height. Grace is slower to climb down. When they draw near, the fatigue on their faces becomes clear, even as night begins to descend and gray-black clouds roam across the sky.

  “She’s healing just fine,” Ify tells them. “Thank you, Ngozi.” Then she turns to Grace. “Come with me.”

  Grace follows her back to the aircraft, and on the way, Ify speaks in low tones. “She will need her biometrics to read as her new identity. Fingerprints and retina are the important bits. If they scan her, we’ll need to be ready. Our passage will be secure, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be at least one scan during the trip.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  Ify stops, and Grace stops with her. “You’ve performed surgeries before, yes?”

  Grace nods. Then it dawns on her what Ify is asking. “Wait, but why don’t you do it? You’re far more experienced than—”

  Ify holds up a hand to stop her. “The materials also need to read in Chinese. With my Augment, I can read it and I can decipher it, but I can’t write it.”

  “But why Chinese?”

  “Because this is going to be Uzo’s country of origin. And her documents need to read in all of its official languages. Otherwise, authorities will know that they’ve been forged. Ngozi will take point on preparing the documents, and you will perform the surgery to inscribe that identity o
nto Uzo’s body.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not asking you.”

  The moon peeks through cloud cover, lighting the anger that shows through the tiredness on Grace’s face. How to tell her that Ify doesn’t trust her own hands? That she’s not refusing because she hasn’t performed a surgery in over a year but because memory of one done to her is still too vivid in her brain. Ify wonders what Grace would say if Ify told her the story, told her of how she and Onyii had been on the run, fleeing a Nigerian government and a rebel Biafran movement, both of which wanted them dead. Told her of how they’d found refuge in a submersible with Xifeng but that their pursuers were tracking them through a device implanted just below Ify’s heart. She wonders what Grace would say if she told Grace about how Onyii had had to cut her open without anesthetic and reach into her chest with her metal fingers to pull out the tracking device. She wonders what Grace would say if she were to show her the spot just beneath her left breast where Onyii’s bionic hand had entered.

  Instead, she stiffens and says, “Ngozi can show you where to find the surgical tools.” Then she walks past Ngozi to her mech, climbs onto its lowered shoulders, and lies on her back, staring at the stars and wondering if this is what Onyii saw after she’d put Ify on the shuttle that spirited her into space.

  A voice in the back of her mind recalls the exchange with Grace and asks Ify, What about the surgery you performed on yourself?

  Looking at the stars, Ify tells this voice, “I can’t be as reckless with the lives of others as I have been with my own.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Night deepens. But it doesn’t bring with it the serenity that can whisk Ify into sleep. Here, this close to the radiation, crickets don’t chirp, large animals don’t low or growl or whine at the moon. The ambient buzz she hears isn’t the telltale sound of insect life happening around her but rather the sizzle of the earth damaging things, killing flora and fauna. Making monsters.

  Thoughts of Céline and their impending reunion always come with thoughts of what Ify had wanted to say to her best friend after so long apart. But is there any way to tell her of the transformation she has undergone since arriving here? Is there any way to tell her, over the course of a single conversation, the multiple reckonings she’s had to face—for her role in the breaking of the ceasefire, for her feelings of abandonment brought about by the sister who saved her life, for her coming to terms with the people she’d thought of before as nothing but killing machines? How to tell Céline that she still feels guilt for what she did, trying to seek revenge against that sister and prolonging a war that killed and maimed and devastated so many people? Even now, were Céline to magically appear before her, she doesn’t know how she would say all those things. The words and their formulation into sentences escape her.

  So she climbs down from the mech and alights onto the patch of grass with a whoosh. The breeze quickens. She hugs herself as she walks toward the jet aircraft, her ratty braids whipping about her face. If she were to catch a cold after everything she’s been through . . . She’ll just tell the others she’s come for a blanket and not because she’s lonely and insomniac on the mech.

  The cockpit opens at her touch, and she sneaks through. It hisses shut behind her. She switches from her boots to a pair of slippers by the copilot’s seat, then moves to the divider that separates the cockpit from what Grace and Ngozi have turned into a makeshift operating theater.

  She is about to press the sequence on the keypad to get the doors to swish open, but she stops when she hears singing.

  The words, sung at a high tenor but with the rolling softness of a sea at rest, rise to just above a murmur. But somehow, even with the poor acoustics of the cabin, Ify can make them out.

  Yuet gwōng gwōng ziu dei tòng

  Hāa zái néi gwāai gwāai fan lok còng

  Tēng cìu ah māa yiu gón caap yēong lō

  Ah yè tái ngàu hoei séong sāan gōng

  Āh . . . āh . . . āh āh āh āh

  Hāa zái néi faai gōu zéong daai lō

  Bōng sáu ah yè hoei tái ngàu yèong

  Āh . . . āh . . . āh āh āh āh

  Grace. Singing in Cantonese. Out of instinct, Ify almost gets her Accent to auto-translate the lyrics, but she stops herself just in time. Instead, she leans against the partition and listens.

  Yuet gwōng gwōng ziu dei tòng

  Hāa zái néi gwāai gwāai fan lok còng

  Tēng cìu ah māa yiu bou yù hāa lō

  Ah ma zīk móng yiu zīk dou tīn gwōng

  Āh . . . āh . . . āh āh āh āh

  Hāa zái néi faai gōu zéong daai lō

  Waa téng saat móng zau gang zoi hòng āh

  A small window by her head affords Ify a view of the operating theater. Through the flexiglas, Ify watches sparks jump to life as Grace and Ngozi, tools in hand, inscribe the superficial DNA evidence of Uzo’s new identity onto her skin. Ify stands on her tiptoes to get a better angle and sees Grace’s mouth move while her head sways. Uzo’s eyes are closed. She has the same look on her face that Ify has seen on the faces of those patients of hers caught in the midst of a kind dream.

  For several minutes, Ify leans against the partition, eyes closed, listening to Grace sing her lullaby to a sleeping Uzo.

  It is not long before Ify, having found her way to the cockpit and the blanket stuffed in a duffel bag with their guns, drifts into slumber herself.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Ify wakes to knocking on the cockpit window.

  She stirs herself to half-wakefulness and squints at Ngozi, silhouetted against the midday sun. Ngozi points with her thumb back in the direction of her mech, then disappears. Ify’s eyes go wide. Céline. Scrambling, she kicks off the blanket, pops open the cockpit, and leaps onto the ground, running to just past Ngozi’s mech, where Ngozi and Grace stand. Ahead of them, shapes move along the horizon, a shimmering black mass rumbling toward them. As they get closer, the shapes break apart to reveal an array of black maglev jeeps, raising clouds of dust in their wake.

  Uzo stands between Ngozi and Grace and gives Ify only the briefest of glances before staring ahead.

  Worry runs up Ify’s spine that she has made a mistake, that it’s not Céline arriving from over the horizon to rescue them but rather the Nigerian authorities come to detain them, erase their memories of everything they’ve gone through, and destroy any hope Ify has of saving the children. She wonders how fast she’ll be able to run, how quickly she’ll die once they make it to the Redlands, whether they will mistakenly trip land mines buried underground.

  But before she can journey too far into her anxieties, the vehicles come to a stop before them, then lower themselves onto the grass.

  No. It’s too late to run.

  The door to the lead vehicle—a bulky, black jeep with windows tinted black and no markings—creaks open and out steps a man very much like the vehicle. Thick-chested and dressed in a deep black suit with a dark visor over his eyes. His hands look like they could crush Ify’s head. She can tell from their solidity that they’re made out of metal, just like the rest of him. He too closely resembles the kaftan-wearing security service members who’d once cornered Ify in a hospital bed.

  The cars are probably filled with men like him, men made to look like pillars so that their very presence demands compliance. Maybe some of them bear shocksticks or lightknives or small-caliber pistols. Maybe they need none of these things.

  The man takes a moment to survey the four of them before his gaze settles on Uzo.

  Without a word, he takes three too-fast steps to her, and Ify’s body tenses for action. Uzo doesn’t resist when the man takes her wrist and holds her palm up. He puts his palm to hers, and light flares behind his visor, a red ball blazing a comet trail back and forth. Like thi
s, they stand for several long seconds before the man releases Uzo.

  “Uzoamaka Diallo.” Then he turns to Ify. “Your sister has been cleared for transport to Centrafrique. Our brief indicated that you will be accompanying her.”

  Ify stutters through her relief. “Y-yes. Me and”—she looks around for Grace—“me and my assistant. We were here for a medical mission, and we need to return to the Colonies and—”

  Grace steps forward, interrupting Ify, and sticks out her own palm. “Grace Leung,” she says and allows herself to be scanned.

  Ify chastises herself, and it isn’t until then that she realizes how nervous she is.

  The man returns to his vehicle and opens the back door. “Ms. Leung? Dr. and Ms. Diallo?” He inclines his head to the back seat. “Our brief indicated that your travel request be accommodated immediately. And that your matter is urgent.”

  “It is,” Ify says softly.

  Grace and Uzo walk ahead, but Ify is rooted where she stands. The two are climbing into the back of the vehicle when Ify feels a hand on her shoulder and turns to find Ngozi staring at her, a new compassion in her eyes.

  “Go,” she tells Ify. When Ify doesn’t move, Ngozi leans in close and whispers. “Onyii will be remembered. I will make sure of it.” She pats Ify roughly on the shoulder, then heads to her mech.

  She pushes herself forward, one step, then another, until she’s in the back seat with Grace and Uzo, and it isn’t until she sits that she lets herself believe that they’ve been rescued, that this isn’t a trap. That these people are not preparing to betray her.

  “Thank you, Céline,” she whispers, trying her best to keep from weeping.

  CHAPTER

  50

  I am knowing what space is looking like, but in my rememberings I am often seeing it from cockpit of flying mech. And always there is being noise of war, much katakata and booming and screaming. But when I am watching stars fly past the window of our cabin so fast they are turning from points to lines, I am seeing also that the blackness is moving but not moving at the same time. It is looking like we are being frozen but I am hearing in my ear all the engine of the shuttle working and I am hearing even the small small part that is moving this spaceship and I am knowing that we are moving because of science and the way engine is working. But then I am also thinking something else is different between now and the space that I am remembering.