Her mind explodes with sensation. All the noise and smell and texture of the world hitting her at once. Blood spills from her nose. But then everything powers up. Her console comes to life, and she pulls at her joystick and gearshift. Pulls and pulls until she’s about to dislocate her shoulders. Her windshield display powers on to show her the fast-moving ground. She pulls and pulls and pulls, tries to get her mech to move against the wind.
One last jerk and she’s upright. Her fingers blaze over her touchboard, and thrusters open on her legs to slow her until she comes to a shuddering stop. A hundred feet above the remains of the school building.
Through all the noise in her head—the amplified buzzing of cicadas, the whimper of wounded girls, the hiss of emptying gas tanks—Onyii searches for the sound of gunfire. Nothing. She turns her mech to the sky. The enemy mechs fly in an arc toward the massive aircraft carriers floating at the camp’s edge.
“Where are they going?” Without warning, she pitches forward in her seat and vomits. Her belt still holds her back, so it all ends up in her lap. Dizziness slams into her like a missile. “The forest,” she murmurs.
Her mech first leans, then floats slowly into the trees. The sound of elephant grass whispering against the mobile suit’s flanks settles the beating of her heart. A few minutes later, she finds a charred clearing, shattered tree trunks forming a blackened circle around the space. She tries to land but can’t get her thrusters to do what they’re supposed to, and the mech collapses into a heap, its legs bent beneath it.
Onyii lets herself hang sideways in her seat for several seconds. Blood drips from her cheek. She tries to reach and wipe away the vomit on her pants, but her arms refuse to move. Strength leaks out of her. But she fumbles for her belt. A click.
She falls onto her human arm and yelps. For a few moments, she lets herself lie there, curled in a ball, shivering. Her teeth chatter. The forest is quiet around her. And for that small bit of time that she has to herself—that she doesn’t have to share with anyone—she can hide and feel her pain. Where no one can see.
She does not know how much time has passed, but the cold slowly lifts from her. She struggles to sit upright, but when she twists, she sees her legs: a mangled mess behind her. Useless. Strangely, there’s no pain.
Ify. She has to get to Ify.
Gritting her teeth, she pulls herself to her disabled console, fishes under the board for the latch, then nearly collapses with relief when the hatch hisses open.
Outside, the mist makes a wall of gray she can barely see through. She blinks. Something’s wrong. She crawls through the open space and falls onto the grass, and that’s when she finally puts her hand to her face. Her right eye is gone.
Panic tightens its grip on her lungs. She knows things have happened to her body that should bring pain, but she feels none. Only numbness. She remembers Ify, and all thoughts about herself vanish, like mist evaporating. She has to find Ify.
Leaves whisper around her. Movement. She stills.
Shapes form in the fog. Black silhouettes. Shorthorns? No, people. Soldiers. It does not matter to Onyii that she has no gun, that she has only one arm, that her legs are broken beneath her. That her right eye is gone. She will fight with whatever she has to get Ify back.
The shapes break apart. Three of them. And something behind them. Being dragged.
Onyii grits her teeth. With her good arm, Onyii tries to push herself up but fails and falls into the mud. They’re heading straight for her. The world blurs. She’s dying. Onyii knows it the way she knows the direction of gravity. But she must save Ify.
They stop. Their shadows darken her ruined body.
She tries to push herself up, fails, and tries again, each time splashing into the mud until it has gotten into her nose. The Nigerian soldiers standing over her talk in hushed whispers to each other. One of them chuckles.
Then one of them kicks Onyii onto her back, flips her over like she’s just a piece of brush. But now she can see their faces. They hide behind masks that cover everything but eyes that glow green from their night-vision lenses.
But one of them, when it sees Onyii’s face, squints. Its whole body tenses, then it leans in while another has its gun trained on her. The first one’s face draws close to Onyii’s. So close the puffs of air that filter through its mask with each clean breath brush radiation-thick frost onto her bloodstained cheeks.
Onyii strains to see the bundle they had been carrying behind them. Enough of the mist has thinned for her to see that it’s a body wrapped in a net. Metal binds the body’s ankles together, another collar closed around its neck. It must be a trick of the light, or Onyii’s missing eye playing with her mind. But she sees the bundle stir. Sees it come to life in its restraints. That brown cloth isn’t a bag. It’s a mud-splotched shirt. A shirt so big it nearly reaches the bundle’s ankles. The only size of shirt Onyii could ever find for Ify.
With her good hand, Onyii reaches out.
A boot presses onto her chest. The one that had been examining her before steps hard on her and points its gun at her forehead. This is how it’s going to end.
“I know this one,” it says in a voice Onyii recognizes as human. “We’ve met before.”
“How do you know?” asks one of the others, annoyed.
“I’ve killed many udene, but only one have I maimed.” With its rifle, it gestures to Onyii’s crushed metal arm. “I took its arm.” It cocks its gun, ready to fire.
The other one puts its hand to the first one’s rifle barrel and pushes away. “Let me. You, take her to the ship.” The figure nods back at the bundle, attended to by another Nigerian. The bundle twists and writhes. Ify. “I will be with you shortly.”
Their eyes catch. And that’s when Onyii knows in her heart that Ify sees her. That Ify knows she tried. She tried so hard to save her. Onyii won’t let herself cry. She can’t give the Nigerians the satisfaction of seeing her weak. So, even as the one who’d called her udene goes back to Ify and drags her away, even as Onyii is left alone with her executioner, even as her vision blurs and the world fades away, she doesn’t let herself cry. She allows herself one last thought. A word. A name.
Ify.
Her dear sister’s face is the last thought in Onyii’s head before she hears the gunshot ring out.
Onyii opens her eyes.
The soldier is still standing over her. But its gun is aimed into the tree branches. Smoke twists from its barrel. The soldier lowers its rifle, never taking its eyes off of Onyii. It taps the side of its head, then Onyii hears words buzz into her brain.
“Do not thank me for sparing your life.” A woman’s voice. More Nigerian mimicry. It only sounds like a woman. “You will not live much longer anyway. But know that I am not like him,” she says, gesturing in the direction of the Nigerian soldier who left. “Daren and I share blood and a mission, and that is it.” Then, for a long time, silence. “I will not apologize for what he did to you the last time you two met. You must have been children, but this is war. And we will win it.”