“Ow!”
“You should not have been moving,” Enyemaka says in her half-robotic voice. “My reflexes are not fast enough to account for your constant shifting.”
Always my fault, Ify thinks to herself. “Ugh, I’m finished,” she says, without even having Enyemaka inspect her. “You wait outside the classroom this time when we get to school, okay?” There’s an extra bite in her voice today, and all that good cheer she felt upon finding her Accent has left her.
By the time she gathers her tablet and her rucksack, daylight shines through the slit in the tent’s opening. She’s going to be late for school. Again.
* * *
The cooling unit must be broken, because they’ve retracted the roof on the warehouse where the teachers hold their classes. Ify sneaks in through the back, but sees that the only free seat, of course, is in the front row. The thought runs through her head to turn back and just skip class for the day, but Enyemaka is blocking her path through the side entrance, so she has no choice but to duck her head and hurry to her seat.
Everyone has their tablets out in front of them with holos displayed, but Ify can’t tell what page of the downloaded lesson they’re on and so has to stumble through image after image after image of nonsense until her holo matches the others. Some of the girls around her snicker, which makes Ify duck her head even more. She’s tempted to turn on her Accent and have the secrets of each of these girls revealed to her. The Augmented ones with their stored search histories not yet deleted, showing the sites they visit to look at barely dressed men and boys. Ify can see all of that and expose them with just a turn of her jaw, but Enyemaka’s still in the doorway, and there’s no doubt that Onyii would find out. And it’s not even the beating that Ify fears so much as the look of disappointment in her big sister’s eyes. So Ify focuses on the holo, which is a 3-D projection of a parabolic curve on a graph.
The teacher is explaining basic algebra, not even anything useful. Not like the orbital physics in the ancient textbooks and archived sites Ify studies on her own.
She grits her teeth, and suddenly the world explodes with blue. For a panicked moment, Ify sees the gears and wires inside her teacher and can feel the information from other people’s tablets run through her head. She senses Enyemaka’s distress, and far into the distance, on the periphery of her vision, a familiar signal: Onyii. So fast she hurts herself, she clicks her jaw and shuts off her Accent. She looks around to see if anyone noticed the shadow signal in their devices, the little blip or moment of static in their tablets or in their teched-up bodies. But no one seems to have noticed. She lets out a sigh and listens to the teacher drone on about how algebra originated in Biafra among the Igbo peoples. How the knowledge was stolen by the Fulani tribe when they invaded from the North centuries ago. Ify wonders what it must have been like to live in a time when Nigeria was newly independent and no longer a British colony, when the Igbo lived alongside the Fulani monsters the teacher is talking about. But before she can follow the thought, everyone’s tablets buzz, and the lesson’s over for today.
The girls stream out already giggling, some of them playing with their tablets and turning them into music boards to play songs they made and recorded. Ify slips her tablet into her sack and shuffles toward Enyemaka. She reaches up to scratch the top of her head when something slams into her from behind, and she topples forward. Enyemaka’s gears groan as she moves to try to catch her, but Ify tastes dirt and turns to find several girls standing over her.
“Eh-heh,” says one of the girls, with her hair braided in two dark pigtails coming out the side of her head. The ridges of the tribal scars on her cheeks glisten. “Without her big sista around, she is just a skinny oyinbo.” The others snicker and point at Ify’s skin, lighter than theirs, so that mosquito bites show up redder and her bruises take longer to fade. She tries to hide her bare arms in her shirt. Her skin the color of sand, theirs the color of firm ground. She grits her teeth. Turn on your Accent, she tells herself. Hack them. Mess up their systems. And she could do it. She gives herself a moment to imagine the girls screeching as their tablets explode in their hands or the tech in their braincases short-circuits, making them go blind. Then she pushes herself up to her feet. Whatever she would do to them would get Onyii’s attention and, worse, her anger. So she lets it go, just like she does every time.
“She looks like jollof rice gone bad,” another of the girls sings. And that gets the others going. “Maybe she thinks just because she has no real family, we are supposed to pity her.”
The girl with the pigtails sucks her teeth. “Just some skinny goat Onyii found in the bush all alone.”
Ify’s cheeks burn. Tears spring to her eyes. The anger is right there, close enough to touch, and she has to fight against it. But if one of them pushes her, if they even touch her, then Ify will give herself permission to lash out. She will tell Onyii afterward that she had no choice, that she had to defend herself, that she had to be strong like her. And that’s why the girls will be squirming on the ground wondering why they suddenly can’t see or hear or walk.
But the girls relent.
They turn to go, and one of them picks up a stone and flicks it at Ify’s head as their group walks away.
Enyemaka stands before Ify, and that’s when she realizes she’s shaking. Rooted where she stands, hands balled into fists, brow knit into a frown, a soft growl growing in her throat. But the shadow Enyemaka casts over her brings her back to herself, and she takes in a ragged breath.
The android kneels down and raises a hand to Ify’s face. The palm opens up and sprays alcohol on the cut above Ify’s eye.
“Ack!” Ify slaps Enyemaka’s hand away. “Get away from me!” And that’s when the tears come. Suddenly, she’s running and doesn’t care what direction she heads in, as long as it’s away from school, away from camp, away from Enyemaka always hovering over her, away from the girls who keep pointing out how different she is.
She stops when the hum of camp activity grows quiet. The small patch of forest she ran into opens out onto an outcropping, and, below it, a beach. Waves of blue-green water whisper against the shoreline. A few heavy breaths later, Ify has calmed down. The noise and fog in her head dissipate. She sits in the grass, hugging her knees to her chest, and stares off into the distance. The mineral derricks are black silhouettes on the horizon. With her Accent on again, their shapes glow bright against a darkened blood-red sky. Even the enemy Nigerian mechs that hover over the derricks shine with pulsing blue light. They swim through the sky in widening oval patterns and leave trails of what looks to Ify like blue stardust in their wake, but Ify knows it is the pathway that’s been programmed into them. She can tell the reach of their comms too, and she knows that she and the camp are just outside their grasp. Invisible.
She fishes her tablet out of her sack and programs her Accent to pirate an enemy connection so that she can access the lessons she’s been sneaking in outside of school. The headline reads: ORBITAL PHYSICS. And springing out of the text are holographs of parabolic curves and Space Colonies spinning slowly on their axes. She picks up where she left off: Lagrange points and the spaces between planets and moons where the gravity from both bodies can hold a colony in place. Then there are the mechs and the small, nimble jets that fly through asteroid belts, dipping and rising and twirling. But no matter how hard she zooms in, she can’t see the pilots. The resolution gets too bad. She knows they’re there. She knows there are people in those cockpits, maybe women like the type she’ll grow up to be. And her heart thrills at the idea.