Rebel Sisters

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Ify heads over to the glitch. Every footprint she leaves in the dust, every indent she leaves in the grass, masks itself as soon as she’s passed, erasing any trace of her presence. It’s a constant effort on Ify’s part to control her involvement in the rememberings, to not alter too much, to adjust only what needs adjusting. To fix and not break. As code streams before her face in the hospital room, she sees what that coding describes in the memory.

  When Ify gets to the glitch, she sees, out of the corner of her eye, a shimmer in an alleyway between buildings. Is this what triggered the glitch? Ify heads to it and is bathed in shadows only a moment before she finds herself walking out onto shimmering green water. Beneath her appears a thin dinghy laden with armed soldiers who arrive out of thin air, constructed pixel by pixel. Turning left and right and behind herself to look at them, she sees that none of the soldiers appear older than her. Indeed, few of them even look older than Uzo. Ify faces forward again, but her gaze dips downward toward the water, frozen in its shimmer, and that’s when she sees the reflection. The features are distorted by the waves, but the metal is just as Ify remembers. Covering half her face, including one eye, its border drawing a line down to her chin. Ify can also see where the metal’s frontier vanishes into a forest of locs. The right eye—the mechanical one—is glowing a fiery yellow.

  It’s Onyii.

  When Ify freezes, she realizes too late that she’s off balance, and she pitches forward right into the petrified waves, which shatter like crystals and surround her, then melt away pixel by pixel until—

  Ify slams back into her body.

  At first, there’s only darkness, then Ify realizes it’s because she’s still wearing her helmet. From its top, thick cables extend and plug into her workspace as well as the MRI scanner holding Uzo’s body. The only sound she hears aside from the hammering of her own heart is the ever-present hum of Uzo’s body scanner and the readers, processors, and tablet computers neatly arrayed on Ify’s desk. That Ify can hear them at all speaks to how hard she’s been working them. The touchboards have been left on for far too long. Without warning, moisture pools in Ify’s eyes, the world dissolving into a blur of gray and black before she slides out of the helmet and wipes the tears away.

  Slowly, she sits up. The chair adjusts to her posture, and soon, she’s leaning forward, struggling for breath. She stares at her hands and her forearms. Smooth, unlined, and brown. Yet she can feel her veins pulsing beneath her flesh. Her bodysuit compresses her chest to prevent a cough.

  Reentry into the real world never seems to get easier. Sometimes, it feels as though it’s only growing more difficult. Each time, the feeling of being ripped from a reality so luscious and vivid as Uzo’s rememberings, being thrown back into this world of perpetual white, jars her bones a little harder. Sets her blood rushing a little faster. Pushes her heart just a little too close to the edge of what’s healthy.

  The MRI scanner hisses, then slowly ejects Uzo’s bed. The girl knows to remain still while the bed is moving and while she’s being scanned. As soon as the bed is fully removed from the circular container, Uzo rises, leaning back on her hands. In that pose she looks every inch the carefree, comfortable teenager, growing into her limbs, learning the limits of her body as well as what new things it can do at this age. Then Ify remembers the cord extended from the outlet at the base of her neck.

  “Are you okay?” Uzo asks her.

  Ify nods, then slides from her chair, landing softly on the ground. Without sparing Uzo another glance, she hurries into the next room, where wireless printers spill reams of paper onto the floor. Outdated technology, but Ify finds special comfort in feeling the data between her thumb and forefinger when she picks up a length of printout. The memories.

  The feel of Onyii still hangs like fog in her brain. She flexes her fingers to remind herself of who she is, then she takes the paper in her hands.

  On one side of the paper is binary code, and on its reverse is mIRC scripting. Gibberish to most people Ify knows, even much of the medical staff, but for Ify, her first language. She can see in a sequence of coding a computer’s attempt to describe a moment. A series of hashtags and backslashes attempting, like a camera figuring out how it works, to describe the angle of sunlight on a small field filled with dancing schoolchildren, or the taste of fried plantains mixed with a mouthful of jollof rice, or the feeling of something smooth and feathery and small held in the cup made of two hands joined together. This was what Xifeng’s hard drives held.

  It would be easy enough to look at these markings on a pair of screens. But this way makes it easier to see the coding. If she’s given image after image, sensation after sensation, immersive memory after immersive memory, she knows what will happen. It nearly happened just now.

  She will abandon everything else to look for Onyii.

  From time to time, she looks up from the printouts and into the room in which Uzo sits, and she wonders just how much of Onyii is there for the finding. What parts are there of her sister’s life that Ify had no idea about? Did she ever love anyone? What was she like as a child? What were her moments of grace? Of happiness? Were there smells that transported her? Food? The odor that hangs over certain cities? The sea?

  She lives, Xifeng had told her before plummeting to her death.

  Ify wishes she could download the memories onto an external drive and tinker with them from there, rummage through them looking for signs of Onyii, chase her sister through these acts of remembering. But as soon as the data leaves Uzo’s head, it will begin to deteriorate, perhaps falling prey to the same virus that is plaguing the children filling the ward.

  When Ify gets back to her office, a box of printouts in her arms, Céline is waiting for her.

  For a moment, they stand there, frozen, Ify with the box in her hands and Céline pitched nervously against the wall, trying to affect a pose of nonchalance. But an apology swims behind her lips. Ify can feel it.

  The whole journey through Centrafrique’s transport station, haggard and exhausted, she had looked for Céline, waited anxiously for her to show up and hold her, reassure her, bring her back to the life, the security, she’d felt in space. But Céline had never shown her face, and now here she stands.

  “Don’t you have a Colony to administrate?” Ify asks, the venom thick in her voice.

  “Is that even the word for what I do?” Céline replies, waving the question away with her smile. She walks over to Ify’s desk and shifts around some tablets and microprocessors. “Do you have a graph of her?”

  “Who?”

  “Your secret weapon. Your pièce de résistance.”

  Ify puts the box down and walks past Céline. “Where were you?”

  She can feel Céline move behind her, reach for her. “Ify, I—”

  “Where. Were you.”

  “Ify.” Céline’s voice softens. “What happened down there?”

  Ify wants to tell her friend that she was forced to confront her past. Memories rock Ify. An earthquake telling the story of war and betrayal and children held in cages and a riot in Abuja. She waits for it to pass. How does she tell Céline all of what happened? That she was responsible for the capture and torture of children, that she was the reason war continued for as long as it did, that people she thought would once help in peacetime turned out to be villains. That she had once been a villain herself. “I had a sister,” she says without warning.

  “What? You’ve never mentioned her before.”

  “We were from different tribes, but she raised me. It was several years into the war when she found me. My family had been murdered, and I was all alone. We lived in a camp in Delta State by the water. When I wasn’t in school, she would take me to the edge of this small cliff and we would watch the sun set, and then she would stay with me as I traced constellations in the stars and told her about how much I wanted to go to space. Because of a mistake I made one day,
our camp was raided and we were separated. She became a Biafran soldier, and I was brought to Abuja, where I was taught how glorious it was to be a Nigerian. Suddenly, Onyii and I were enemies. Just like that. Because people told us we were. I was told that we Nigerians were in the right and that we were doing what we had to do to bring about peace. I was told that the people we captured and the people we killed were beyond saving. Many of them could never be convinced that peace was the way. When I found my chance to see my sister again, Nigerian society rejected me and cast me out. So I went to find my sister and kill her. Because she was the one who had murdered my family.”

  When Céline says Ify’s name, her voice is thick with sorrow.

  “Because of me . . .” Ify’s throat closes up. She fights the tears. “There was peace for almost a year before I . . . before Enugu was bombed. The ceasefire had ended, because I had led a group of suicide bombers into a Biafran city.” Her fingers curl into fists at her side. She turns to face Céline. “You want to know what happened down there? Someone tried to make everyone remember what had happened. The government had pushed people to move on, to forget the war. And someone there, someone I had trusted, tried to remind them, tried to remind the whole country what had happened.” She clenches her jaw and takes a moment to fight the sobs. “I stopped them. I fought, and I killed, and I stopped them.”

  Céline is silent. The only thing Ify can read on her face is pity.

  “You knew, didn’t you? You knew what I’d done.”

  Céline opens her mouth to speak, then closes it. Her eyes scan the floor, looking for the words. “After you left, I . . . I looked into you. And I learned. It wasn’t easy, but I learned. After a while, you stopped trying to contact me, and I had no idea what was happening in your country, so I looked into it and . . .”

  “You knew? You knew about the lie? What the government had convinced everyone had happened instead of war?”

  Céline nods.

  “You knew and you didn’t tell me?” She realizes she’s roaring. She stops and takes a moment to collect herself. “You knew what was happening and you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “Ify, mon coeur, I . . .” Something hardens in Céline. “I knew horrible things had happened to you before you came here. That is war. But I did not know what you had done. And I couldn’t . . .”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “I couldn’t forgive you.”

  It staggers Ify to hear her say it. The thing she has most feared has come to life before her very eyes.

  “I figured you’d done quelques choses horribles, but this? A whole city, bombed? Ify, that is what a war criminal does.”

  Ify trembles. She feels as though the ground will swallow her up at any moment. Her bottom lip quivers. She grits her teeth and hisses, “So why did you come, then?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you here right now? Why did you come?” She can barely see for the tears in her eyes.

  Céline considers her hands, then the floor, then she looks at the ceiling before finally training her gaze on Ify. “I wanted to see you. One last time.”

  “Before you report me to the authorities?” Ify spits the words out at her. “Before you have me charged with war crimes and deported?”

  Céline straightens. “No,” she says, her voice neutral. “I will not report you. And I will destroy what records I did find. But this is goodbye. You are not . . .” She doesn’t finish. She lets whatever word she was about to say hang in the air between them before turning to leave.

  Rage wraps its claws around Ify’s lungs. She couldn’t scream even if she wanted to. All she can do is shake with it, every fiber of her body quivering feverishly with fury. She holds her head in her hands and clenches herself against the sobs that threaten. No. She won’t give Céline the satisfaction of hearing her grief, of knowing how deeply she’s wounded Ify.

  Ify staggers to a console by the far wall and leans over it, damming the tears clinging to her eyelashes. Then she looks up.

  The blinds over the windows of one wall open to reveal the room in which Uzo sits, her legs dangling over the edge of her bed. She demonstrates an otherworldly capacity for stillness. Uzo can spend hours completely unmoving, leaving Ify to wonder at just what is happening behind her eyes and between her ears.

  She stares at the girl, lets Uzo fill her entire vision, lets Uzo become all she can focus on. Slowly, purpose clears the fog from Ify’s brain. She has a mission. She has lives to save. She is not a criminal.

  When Ify returns to the printout, the letters and numbers and symbols are even more of a jumble. She scans them from left to right, down, left to right, down. But, even with renewed focus, none of it is making sense. Scanning the code, she will catch the beginnings of an image braiding itself together in her mind—a night sky, a hand and arm framed against a jungle backdrop, a city skyline—then it vanishes. She pinches the bridge of her nose, then walks to the window and looks down. Uzo still hasn’t moved.

  It takes Ify several moments to head to the elevator. And even as she stands in the contraption, nervousness makes her fingers twitch and she absentmindedly flicks her wrist to clank her thin bangles against each other. She has taken to wearing them since her return from Nigeria. A piece of home she brought back with her.

  She enters Uzo’s room, the whole place blanketed in false light. For a while, Ify looks around at the room’s smooth, rounded edges, its perfect symmetry, its spotlessness, its fluorescence. Then she goes to the console on the wall by the door and turns off the lighting, simultaneously flipping the blinds to reveal the refugee ward on the other side of the window. It’s not natural lighting that spills into their room in thin bars, but it’s closer, and this makes Ify feel as though she’s doing a right thing. She then moves her chair so that it faces Uzo, and they stare at each other, Uzo’s face impassive, Ify trying to school compassion onto hers.

  “I am thinking you are looking for Onyii in me,” Uzo says.

  Uzo’s bluntness still has a way of disarming Ify. Maybe her break with Céline is too recent.

  “Not just in my head but in the way I am moving. How I am walking and sitting and breathing. I am not Onyii. I am being called Uzo.”

  “You are right, Uzo.”

  This seems to quiet the synth.

  “I need your help. Your . . . your rememberings. I can’t find the order to them. I can’t find the right coding.”

  “I am organizing them. They are being connected, but I am sorting them so I am knowing which one I am being born with and which one I am collecting during my mission.”

  “How do you find what you’re looking for?” Ify hears the change in her own voice. She’s not asking as a scientist or as a doctor. She’s asking as a human. When she asks Uzo how she finds what she’s looking for, she knows she means it for herself as well. She’s lost. So lost, adrift in her own mission, helpless before what is killing these children, bereft after losing the anchor that has held her most steadily in her life in the Colonies, adrift in a sea whose waves threaten to take these pieces of Onyii further and further away from her.

  “I am using word with you now, but when I am talking to myself or to Enyemaka or to my brother and sister, it is coming out as many words put into one.” Her mouth works. “If I am wanting to be happy, I am not simply telling myself to find happy remembering. I am looking for being-held-in-arms-of-mother or I am looking for fixing-BoTa-for-my-grandfather-after-brother-is-breaking-it or I am looking for sitting-in-field-picking-flowers. And each of these thing is coming into my mind as one word. It is like . . .” Uzo looks around, as though searching the room for a word. Then she does a thing Ify has never seen before. “It is like a circle,” Uzo says, drawing one in the air with her index fingers.

  She’s speaking with her body, Ify realizes with a start. But she keeps the scientist part of her at bay. She’s not listening to a mechanical creati
on. She’s listening to a fifteen-year-old girl.

  “But when I am talking to Enyemaka or my brother and sister, it is like thing I am telling you, but it is not so specific. It is like I am telling them the center of the circle, the core of it. And this thing is being transferred. So they are understanding what I am telling them. It is like . . .”

  And Uzo continues talking. As she speaks, Ify listens. Listens to Uzo’s fingers in her hair and the occasional uptick in her voice and the way her eyes occasionally dart from one part of the ceiling to another part when she is trying to translate whatever language her brain speaks into words Ify will understand. Ify listens to Uzo shifting on the bed, listens to the way parts of her skin flush when she gets excited, listens to the sighs and their placements. Listens to the whole of her.

  Until her eyelids grow heavy and Uzo’s words gently rock her out of her loneliness and into dreaming.

  CHAPTER

  52

  After Ify is falling asleep, I am watching her for a long time. She is sometime looking like how my brother and sister are looking when they are sitting down and finding peace. Their eye is closed sometime and it is like their entire body is relaxing and being loose even though they are being completely still. When I am watching Ify for many minutes and seeing that she is not waking up, I am taking her gently in my arms and making sure her head is being balanced against my shoulder so it is not just falling to the side like some dangling thing. And I am walking to the door and then walking to the elevator. And I am knowing it is being late in the hospital because there is few people walking around and few people is noticing me who is wearing hospital gown and is carrying doctor all the way up to her office. When I am needing to open door or get into room, I am using her thumb and pressing it against pad by the handle. And door is swishing open.

  Then I am laying Ify down in her chair and making sure it is at proper angle for her to be relaxing. I am opening closet by a far wall and pulling out blanket and I am bringing it to her, and as I am unfolding it and draping it over her, I am being swept up into remembering of young woman who Ify is calling Onyii, and Onyii is doing the same thing but the blanket is coarse and being filled with stain that is rust from radiation and that is also being blood, and bed that Ify is sleeping on is army cot and it is being humid and moist and too hot and the air is clinging like slippery leech to the skin and sweat is beading Ify’s forehead but she is looking like she is finding peace in her sleep and I am draping blanket on her then I am getting up and walking through mosquito netting and leaving tent.