“Help!” Amaka’s voice bursts through Onyii’s screen. “I got one on my back. I can’t shake it.”
Onyii sees them high above. Amaka’s mech with its Gatling gun arms hanging at its sides spirals through the sky. A Green-and-White follows Amaka’s every move. Onyii flies higher to meet them. They circle, blasting right past Onyii. She gives chase. Rising into the clouds, then diving toward the camp. Spinning and twirling to avoid the missile detonations. Onyii tries to get the enemy mech between her and Amaka in her sights, but it’s too fast. Just when the reticle centers on it, the mech shifts or dips or finds cover. Then Onyii sees where Amaka is heading.
“No, Amaka! Don’t go into the forest!”
The trees are bunched too close together. Amaka would get caught in the branches. She’d be a fish flopping on dry land.
Onyii pushes her thrusters to go faster and hears something come loose inside her mech. It’s starting to fall apart. But she has to get closer. Her cockpit rattles and rattles, but she’s able to detach another spear from her back. She brings it forward. And aims.
The enemy mech is getting farther and farther away as both it and Amaka gun it to the trees. Onyii wills her mech to stop shaking. Everything goes quiet. All that exists is what’s on her screen. Her target.
She hoists the spear. Ready.
The target reticle goes red.
“Amaka! Dive!”
Onyii hurls her spear as hard as she can.
It moves so fast, it whistles through the air.
They’re all heading for the treeline, but at the last moment, Amaka drops out of the sky. The spear flies right into the core processing unit of the enemy mech, sending it crashing straight into the trees.
Chinelo’s mech appears next to Onyii’s. Finally, a moment to catch their breath. Onyii’s body feels like electric currents are running through it. Fire in her veins. Her mind is clearer than it’s been in years. The world comes to her in sharper colors. She can practically smell it all through her cockpit.
“How did they find us?” Chinelo asks through her comms.
Onyii hasn’t had time to ask herself that question. Too caught up in the thrill of battle. But now that she thinks about it, very little makes sense. The attack didn’t begin until the suicide bomber detonated herself. The crabtanks and the mechs appeared almost right after. They must have been close. Onyii remembers the supplies run she and Chinelo had gone on earlier that day. Were they being watched by Green-and-Whites the whole time? But they had been using an isolated wireless connection and had masked it so that it seemed like no one was here. This wasn’t a major mineral deposit. There was no reason for enemy forces to have stumbled onto this place. Their home.
Below them, fire takes almost everything.
Girls, suited and armed with their rifles, make ad hoc formations, firing at the crabtanks that stalk toward them. Aerial mechs duel the camp’s pilots in the sky above. Others light up the ground surrounding the camp with the bombs they drop. There are too many of them.
Above them, the drone of an aircraft carrier.
Onyii and Chinelo look skyward. The aircraft is so big it blocks the moon. Its back door opens, and out spill row after row after row of enemy mechs. They darken the sky.
“There are too many of them,” Chinelo says, breathless.
Onyii trembles in her cockpit. They’re going to destroy her home. They’re going to take away the only place where she has ever known peace.
They’re going to win.
“Onyii, we have to evacuate the camp. They’re going to take it.”
Onyii grits her teeth and bows her head. Her gearshift and joystick tremble in her hands. When she finally looks up, her cheeks are wet with tears. “They’re going to have to kill me first.”
As she launches herself at the phalanx of enemy mechs, she lets out an animal cry that fills her cockpit. Her mech’s arms unfold to reveal their Gatling guns, and she fires and fires and fires.
Until explosions are all she sees.
CHAPTER
6
The first boom sends dirt and twigs falling onto Ify’s head. She coughs and barely has enough time to clear her eyes before another peal of thunder shakes the hole so much it might fall in on her. Through the walls and the ground above her, she hears screaming. People—grown-ups or kids her age—shouting commands. Others crying out in pain or fear or both. It sounds like war. She has her head in her hands and her eyes closed, and as much as she tries to fight it, she’s thrust back into that memory. That vision of her as an even younger child in the darkness of her home, holding that dying dog in her lap as screaming and shouting and gunfire surround her.
“No, no, no,” she whispers. Her mind jumps to the future waiting for her if she’s kidnapped. She has heard stories. Stories about how the Fulani in the North captured girls just like her, how they raided schools and how they burned those buildings to the ground and forced the girls into long-back maglev trucks to be married to the boys they had turned into killers. Stories about what those boys would be made to do to her, what some of them would do on their own. A life in a mud hut where she will be turned into nothing but a machine for making their children. The thought paralyzes her. It drowns out all the noise from above, turns her world into silence.
Ify isn’t sure how much time has passed when she hears scratching at the entrance. Something is scraping against the metal and debris covering the entrance to the tunnel. She scrambles backward and paws through the dirt for something, anything, to hit whatever comes through. Once it pokes its hand or foot or head in, she’ll get one good shot. Her hand closes around the bladed staff Onyii gave her. Her fingers can barely wrap all the way around it, but she gets into a crouch and hoists it behind her.
The scratching turns to banging.
Boom, boom, boom.
Dents bloom in the metal.
Boom. Boom.
It comes loose. BOOM.
The metal door flies inward with a shower of dirt and brush and elephant grass. First the paws. Metal tearing at dirt and stone as the beast scrambles for purchase. Then its head comes through. It looks like a horse’s head, but it’s attached to the frame of a sleek tiger or leopard. Wires and cables run like veins through it. Its core glows green. Ify can’t stop gawking. When it finally lands, it fills the whole space. It stands on four legs and lowers its head. Red light washes over Ify. She can’t move. She wants to move. Needs to move. Her fingers shake around the staff. Her arms burn with the effort of holding it up. The beast backs up, arches it back, then gallops toward her. It’ll reach her in two strides.
The smell of burning metal fills the air. She screams, drops the staff. It leaps, but sails over her as she crawls for the opening. The gunfire is clearer now. She recognizes the voices screaming. The others are out there.