“And the older ones?”
Chinelo shrugs. “If they are women, we send them to Enugu. Maybe Umuhaia. They find some use in the Republic. Maybe they make more children.”
“And if they are men?”
Chinelo smirks. “We shoot them.”
They both giggle. It feels good to go on a run with a friend. Most runs pass in silence. They’re quick things. Run out, find supplies, run back. Or, more often: run out, find nothing, run back. But when Onyii’s out with Chinelo, she lets herself move slower. The more time she can spend with her, the better.
“I would like to see Port Harcourt one day,” Onyii says, surprising herself. “I hear it’s beautiful. And it’s right on the water, and you can’t see any of the derricks blocking the way, making all that awful jagga-jagga noise.” A smile crosses Onyii’s face. “And there are proper hospitals and a women’s clinic.”
“What would we do in Port Harcourt?” Chinelo jokes. “What is there to build there?”
“Biafra.” Onyii knows she sounds dreamy when she says it. And normally she would call this stupid. To believe in something as lofty and invisible as the Republic of Biafra. But when she thinks of Biafra, she thinks of buildings of glass and stone and steel that scrape the sky and paved streets and clean fruit that you can eat straight off the trees. She thinks of a place where there is no rust. Anywhere. Where the radiation-poisoned air doesn’t scrape against your lungs as you breathe. In this dream, her arm has a proper skin attached to it instead of the black band she always wears, and every time she looks at it, she doesn’t have to be reminded that it is metal and gears and circuitry and maybe she can convince herself that it’s proper flesh and blood and bone. In this dream of Biafra, she’s fully human.
“Wait.”
Chinelo sticks her arm out just in time to stop Onyii from stepping on a mine. Onyii can’t see the red light blinking under the mud, but Chinelo probably can. If it’s not from the Green-and-Whites, it might be from some other rebel group.
Onyii curses herself. This is what happens when you lose concentration. Likely a sign that they should head back.
“Come on,” Onyii says, turning. “There’s nothing out here. Not today.”
But Chinelo doesn’t move. She crouches until she’s nearly sitting on the ground and peers into the distance. Then she points. “There.”
Onyii tries to follow her gaze.
“There.”
Onyii squints. Then she sees a small cloud of mosquitoes.
“What is it?”
Onyii riffles through her rucksack and pulls out a small mound of clay. An eto-eto. “Whatever it is, it’s still warm. I’ll look.”
She sits, careful to avoid the mine, and molds the white clay into a something with arms and legs. Then, with a small pin, she pokes two holes in what has become the eto-eto’s face. She twists the limbs out a little more until it looks like more of a starfish than anything human.
“This’ll do.” Then she spits a glob of mucus over the eyeholes on its face. The nanobots in her mucus burrow into the eto-eto’s skin. Like Onyii’s DNA, biomech colonizing the clay, putting pieces of Onyii into it, animating it so that it becomes a thing she can see through. An extension of herself. Like a mobile device connected to Onyii’s neural network by wireless internet.
Its arms and legs wiggle. Then it squirms in her palm like a little baby. It glows blue at its core.
She sets it on the ground, then pats it on its backside, and it waddles forward. What it feels and what it sees and what it hears echo in Onyii’s brain like a whisper. A voice underneath her own.
The eto-eto heads toward the mound, then stops and tilts its head, looking it over. At first, it’s just leather and torn cloth, but then the eto-eto sees hair. It runs an arm through it, and the hair curls around its white limb. It scurries around and sees that it’s a person. A human. And it’s breathing.
“She’s alive,” Onyii says. Before Chinelo can stop her, she’s up and racing toward the body. She comes to a stop, drops her pack, and fishes out her aluminum pole stretcher. When she’s got it out of the pack on her back, she takes her eto-eto and squeezes it. It makes a soft whirring sound, almost like an exhale, as it powers down. Then she stuffs it back into her rucksack.
Chinelo hesitates for only a moment before helping to lift the woman. Onyii starts, raises her rifle, and peers down her scope into the forest. Something had moved. She spends several moments scanning, though she can barely see through the fog.
“We’re safe.” Chinelo puts a hand to Onyii’s shoulder, and Onyii relaxes. “Help me carry her.”
Onyii shoulders her rifle, and the two of them lift the woman and head back to camp.
“You are getting soft, you know. In your old age.”
Onyii’s in front, but she can feel Chinelo’s smirk at her back. “Oh?”
“A year or two ago, you would have left this woman to die.”
CHAPTER
4
When Enyemaka and Ify get to the line of stones painted blue in the forest, Ify realizes just how far away from camp she’d run. If she flicks on her Accent, she can easily see the mines buried beneath the ground and covered by brush. She can track the paths and where she’s free to walk, but she has already spent so much time online that any more would surely give her away to Onyii. It will take too long to go around the mines. By the time they complete the circuit and get back to camp, there’ll be no food left, and the rumbling in Ify’s stomach tells her she can’t afford to miss this meal.
Mist thickens, and what little Ify could see of the ground vanishes. Her heart sinks. Her stomach twists and turns.
“Come on, little one,” Enyemaka says, and holds her hand out. Her eyes are growing faint, and Ify can tell it’s because her battery life is running out. But Ify takes the droid’s hand, and Enyemaka hoists the child onto her back. Ify drapes her arms around Enyemaka’s neck and squeezes.
Step by assured step, Enyemaka makes her way through, walking what feels like a straight line but what Ify knows to be a complicated back-and-forth dance to avoid the traps the War Girls have laid for intruders.
Toward the edge of the forest, where it opens out onto the camp, mosquitoes buzz over something lying still among the leaves. Enyemaka stops, and Ify moves to slip off her back, but Enyemaka grips the child behind her and holds her fast.
“Enyemaka, what is it?”
For several seconds Enyemaka doesn’t move, and Ify wonders if the droid has powered off completely, which would be a problem because then Ify would be stuck in her grip, practically glued to her back.