Then, like a crow taking flight, she vanishes into the forest.
CHAPTER
8
Ify wakes as they are dragging her through forestland. Pebbles and twigs catch under her. Scratches bloom on her cheeks. All is darkness around her. Her eyes eventually adjust to make out the shapes of trees and the silhouettes of some of the soldiers, who are careful to stay out of the moonlight. She can’t hear war sounds anymore and wonders how far from the camp they’ve dragged her.
A dream. It must have been a dream. Onyii on her back with soldiers standing over her. Onyii slowly getting smaller and smaller as Ify was dragged away. Smaller and smaller until the fog swallowed her up. Then the gunshot. No. It must have been a dream. Onyii is still alive. Ify has to get back to her.
That’s when she remembers she’s trapped.
Her hands are pressed against her chest, her ankles clasped together. She can only wiggle and barely that. Whenever she tries to move her head, to shift her gaze so that she sees something other than ground, pain pinches the back of her neck.
The world is so black without her Accent. She tries to shift her jaw and get it working again, but the forest remains dark. There’s none of the telltale hum of life.
The soldiers dragging her stop. The one holding up her legs lets go of the net’s end. Ify’s ankles smack the ground, and she yelps. The collar around her throat burns her. She grits her teeth and tries not to make another noise, tries not to anger the thing they’ve clipped around her neck. She just lies there, trying to slow-breathe her way through the pain.
For some time, no one moves. Ify tries to raise herself. Wherever the soldiers are, they must be standing as still as the trees—stiller, even. A slight wind knocks leaves from tree branches overhead. Ify wants to call out, to curse them, to shout for help, to proclaim the greatness of Biafra, anything, just to make a defiant noise, to show them she won’t go quietly. But without her Accent, she feels defenseless. Powerless. She’s just a little girl.
She smells morning before she sees it. A sweetness in the dewy grass beneath her head. Then warmth. Through the trees, along the horizon, blue begins.
They arrive at a clearing, and the air seems to shimmer. She gasps as the distortion morphs into an aircraft.
Its silver wings stretch out from its top and then bend to dig into the ground like anchors. It has a sleek oblong body, large enough to fit at least a half dozen land mechs. The back door unfurls itself like an elephant’s trunk, revealing a yawning emptiness.
The Green-and-White that had been dragging Ify reaches down, then stops. The soldiers freeze. Then they all look to each other, and one of them darts off into the forest. Ify tries to focus her hearing, tries to remember if she’d heard anything or imagined it. But it’s not long before the soldier returns, holding a War Girl by her hair, so high that her feet dangle and swing above the ground.
Ify’s eyes widen. The girl she saved. What is she doing here?
Metal bands hold the girl’s wrists together behind her back. The soldier who caught her looks to the one who had been dragging Ify, then at the others. Ify realizes there are now five of them. They all trade looks, and Ify realizes they’re all talking, only not out loud. Like she does with Enyemaka. Did with Enyemaka.
The girl catches Ify’s eye, and they stare at each other. The girl’s lips are pursed shut. She can scream, Ify realizes, but she won’t. She won’t give the enemy the satisfaction of hearing her scream. Blood streams from a wound on her head, runs over one eye, but she manages a defiant look, every so often squirming in her captor’s grip.
The soldiers look at each other, one shakes their head, another nods insistently, and their silent argument continues. All the while, Ify and the girl hold each other’s gazes, and Ify tries to squint her forgiveness at her. Tries to tell her without moving her mouth that she’s sorry for the anger she felt and that she’s glad the girl is still alive and that maybe now she will make an effort to learn her name and maybe they can grow close and even in the northern bush they can—
The girl is dropped to the floor, and the soldier holding her pulls a pistol from their waist and shoots her once. In the head.
“No!” Ify screams through the pain lancing her neck. “No!” Tears blur her vision and slide down her cheeks. This feeling of fire burns up to her face and through her head, so that it feels like she will burst any moment. When she opens her eyes again, even though the world is hazy with pain and tears, she can see that the girl is gone. Likely dragged into the forest and not even given a burial.
They’re going to kill her too, Ify realizes. When one of the soldiers stands over her, she glares at them and lets herself be filled with rage and hate. Her chest heaves with each breath she takes.
The soldier takes off their mask to reveal a face like Ify has never seen before. Hair in silver locs comes down to the soldier’s shoulders. Their eyes are many-colored, irises cut through with gold and brown and green. Like hers. And their skin. The soldier’s skin is brown. Sand-colored. Light. Like hers.
“It’s all right, Kadan. Little one.” The soldier squints, then reaches through the netting to wipe tears from Ify’s cheeks with rough, gloved fingers. “Soon, you will be home.” The soldier speaks with a type of voice Ify has never heard before. Deeper. Lower. And the soldier’s face is shaped weirdly. No oval, but a flat chin and a sharp jawline. She’d seen boys in holos from her tablet. In movies always getting into trouble and being saved. They looked like this. But those were humans. These are Fulani or Hausa.
The soldier squats all the way down to Ify’s level, rifle slung across its back, then reaches for her collar. “You have to promise me,” it says in its weird voice. “You have to promise me that when I take this collar off, you will not scream.”
Ify wants to ask if the soldier will kill her. She can’t believe it speaks like her. But she manages a nod.
The soldier touches the collar, then taps a sequence into a keypad on its wrist. The collar lets out a puff of air, then falls into the soldier’s hand.
Her throat still feels raw, and she can’t move any of her limbs, but she asks, “What are you?”
The soldier looks up at the others, then lets out a chuckle.
Ify’s eyes go wide with bewilderment. This isn’t a beast, not some type of hairy animal. Not like what she was taught Nigerians looked and sounded and smelled like. But it’s clearly an enemy. “What kind of animal are you?” Maybe if she can get its name, she can study it, learn it, find its weakness.
The soldier smiles at Ify. It looks like a version of what Onyii might have looked like had Onyii been born the enemy. But then again, these things aren’t born. They’re made out of evil and metal.
Lights come on in the aircraft, and gusts of wind begin to blow as its engines power on. The soldier swings Ify onto its shoulder and walks lightly to the opening. She wants to fight, to bite and kick and scratch, but the energy has left her. She can’t stop thinking of the girl they murdered, the girl whose name she’ll never know. The girl who has left her to this future she must bear all alone.