Other than the Nigerian mechs that streak overhead from time to time, the derricks provide Onyii’s only glimpse of the outside world. There are more people out there than us and our enemies. Every time she sees the derricks, she aims an invisible gun at them with her still-human hand.
She doubles back and passes the hangar where the mobile suits are stored. They’re smaller than the Nigerian mechs that screech through the sky overhead and closer to the shape of actual humans. Rust spots their armor, and Onyii knows there isn’t enough lubricant around for all the gears that need it. But the beat-up suits—stocked with ammo for their guns and equipped with night vision and a neural adapting system—are enough to get by. Then there are the skinsuits. Depending on how old or how big you are, they either fit tightly enough to suffocate or they hang off you like hand-me-downs, even after you press the button on your wrist to compress them. The skinsuits are supposed to collapse to fit like a second layer of flesh for journeys out past the camp, where the radiation gets so thick that skin peels almost instantly.
The ammo crates all have Mandarin characters written on their sides in fluorescent blue ink. But the girls know by looking which containers hold the 7.62 mm bullets and which hold the ammo for the shoulder cannons on the mobile suit mechs. They know which hold the bullets for their assault rifles and which hold the knives for when the bullets run out.
It never seems like enough, the smuggled arms. But orphans never steal enough bread for a feast, only enough to last the day.
Onyii continues towards the Obelisk. But even before she gets to it, she can see sparks arcing out of its base. It looks like a mini mineral derrick, microscopic by comparison, driven into the ground. Beneath Onyii’s feet, fiber-optic cables run throughout the camp and beyond, buzzing the earth constantly with charges, zapping the soil over and over to release the water soaked into it. The water is then purified and made available for washing and cooking and cleaning. It also collects the minerals that power nearly every electronic device in the camp.
Today, it’s somehow busted.
Onyii crouches at the base and sees a blackened stretch of tech running along one of the cables, ending right before it pierces the grass patch. She didn’t build this, so she doesn’t know it as intimately as others in the camp do, but she’s fixed things before.
She takes a long time squinting at the mechanical carnage before a flash of movement changes the air around her. Suddenly, Chinelo’s at her side, all long, gangly limbs. Still, somehow, she manages not to make a sound. The opposite of clumsy. In fact, Onyii remembers the first time she saw Chinelo—tall even as a child—move with a grace she’d never seen before. Covered in ash and soot and blood, Chinelo had moved with the confidence of a general.
Now Chinelo wears a jungle-colored compression bra over her small chest and pants with many deep pockets. A green, patterned bandana holds back her locs. Ancient, obsolete “cell phones”—relics of a different era—hang from her necklace, clacking together to make some weird music Onyii doesn’t particularly like.
“You want to break our water, is that it?” Chinelo jokes.
She jokes like that from time to time. Dark jokes about how all the girls here are, for some reason, not made of the type of material to create children. Onyii heard one time that when your water breaks, you are near to birthing a child.
But looking at Chinelo now, the sheen on her skin a glowing mix of night sweat and morning dew, Onyii sees a girl who only knows how to laugh.
“Hurry up now, before we are all stinking, and the Green-and-Whites smell us,” Onyii shoots back, smiling.
Chinelo smirks, then her bees buzz out from her hair. Tiny robotic insects that tell Chinelo the temperature and the water density in the air and the amount of radiation in each drop of rain that lands on them from the tree leaves overhead. They tell her how warm Onyii is next to her, and they tell her the state of Onyii’s prosthetic arm. As Onyii watches, the bees descend onto the well to tell Chinelo what needs to be repaired. Then they go to work.
Onyii remains crouched on her haunches, a position of battle-readiness. Chinelo sits back in the grass while the robotic bees do their job.
“We need to make a run,” Chinelo says like she is telling Onyii to bathe more often. Her Augments are more internal. A braincase for her brain, ways of having data transmitted directly to her, even some metal where bones should be. On the outside, she is as human as anyone. But finely tuned machinery ticks and hums inside her. Still, even with a body that can connect on its own to the camp’s network, she is more human than machine. Cyberized, but still, she bleeds red blood.
“And what will we find in the forest that we can’t find here?” Onyii stares at the well as light spreads along the once-blackened portion of circuitry.
“That’s the thing. You never know. Our tools are rusted, and our guns need ammunition, and just the other day, one of the lights in the greenhouse went out. The nights are getting longer, and our generators won’t last.”
Onyii wants to tell Chinelo that they’ve lasted at this outpost for years, that they’ve made more with less, but it’s a conversation they’ve had a million times before. “And what if there are Green-and-Whites on patrol?”
Chinelo elbows Onyii. “They have not found us yet. Why would they find us now?”
“Because neither of us has bathed in a week.” Onyii tries to say it with a straight face, but a smile curls her lips, and she can’t hold back anymore, and their laughter echoes into the trees.
Chinelo rolls around in the wet grass, clutching her stomach, as the bees fly back into her hair. Onyii wants to tell her to be quiet, to stop laughing before they alert whatever Nigerian patrols may be nearby. But the sound of Chinelo’s laugh warms her too much.
“Let me say goodbye to the little one at least,” Onyii says. She pushes herself upright and hauls Chinelo to her feet.
“And maybe we can find some napkins too,” Chinelo says, looking at the repaired well to see if it’s properly working again. “Some of the girls have begun to bleed.”
* * *
How many years has it been? Even after all this time, it still moves Onyii to see Ify sleep so peacefully. The ratty, coarse blanket rises and falls, rises and falls. Sometimes, Onyii wishes the two of them had ports, rounded outlets at the backs of their necks that some half-limbs have, so that she could plug a wire in and connect it to Ify and see what the little girl dreamed. Maybe dancing and a cool breeze and a pretty dress. No mosquitoes.
Onyii shuffles to Ify’s side. The inside of the tent is still awash in blue from a morning that has not yet fully arrived. And she knows Ify will try to resist being woken up so early before her classes, but the girl can stand to learn a little industriousness. So, Onyii sits on a crate by Ify’s bed and gently shakes her awake.
The girl’s eyes open a little, then grow wide for a second before settling. Even in the darkness, Onyii can see the purple of her irises, flecked with jagged shards of gold, and her breath catches in her throat at the beauty of it.