am waking up in Xifeng’s arms, and she is whispering to me in Taishanese. It is taking me several second to be remembering where I am and what is happening, but then I am remembering raid and EMP and gunfight and red-bloods in pods, and I am relaxing in Xifeng’s arms. But part of me is still not wanting to see her, so I am pushing myself to my feet and walking fast away from her and not caring where I am going until I am seeing Uzodinma in other room staring at what is looking like empty hospital bed in room of hospital beds. Bed is half-covered by cylindrical device, and I am knowing that this is being use to scan brains and braincases, and all the bed here is being like this, except that Uzodinma is standing at one bed in particular.
We are synths. He is telling me this and showing me hospital bed. Two bed. The one he is waking up in and the one he is looking at now, and he is showing me that they are the same. This is where they are making me.
When he is turning to face me, he is limping because I am seeing that one leg is standing badly. He is not showing pain on his face, but he is moving slowly and I am seeing that this is making him to be angering. Is not good for child of war to be moving slowly. That is how child of war is getting bullet or getting chopped.
I think I am expecting Uzodinma to be sadding, but his eye is not sadding. We were created. We were never born.
“What color is this remembering?” I am asking him. I do not know why it is important for me to be using my red-blood voice, but I am wanting him to hear me like we are both being red-blood. “Is it blue? Red?” Maybe if he is having rememberings like I am having rememberings, he is knowing that some of them is belonging to someone else.
You are wanting to tell me that you are having mother once and she is loving you. He does not sound like my friend when he is saying this. He is sounding like someone who is not caring if I am being happy or sad. But I watch you fumble through your mind, trying to hold the right rememberings in your hands. They are still a mess in your head, no matter how you are sorting them. Scattered like pieces of metal on the shoreline beneath a bridge. You are looking for a woman and calling her Mother and seeing woman after woman after woman, but none of them have a face like yours. None of the women in your rememberings have done for you what you expect mothers to do. Because we never had mothers.
When he is saying we never had mothers, he is also saying we are never having mothers.
But it is a lie, because when I am waking up from nightmare-remembering, Xifeng is holding me and talking to me softly and with love. And she is waiting for me in the other room. And I am calling her Mother.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
In the mech, on the way home, Xifeng looks out the window. And I sit across from her. The other synths downloaded the memories from the external hard drives at the facility, the ones the government and the Chinese were preparing to eliminate upon completion of the mass cyberization, but Xifeng says that I don’t have to. I think she is worried about me.
“What am I?” I ask her.
When she is looking at me, there is many thing in her eye and I am not wanting to sit in her silence, so I talk some more.
“Uzodinma is telling me that all child of war are being made in factory all over Nigeria. That we are machine and that they give us false memories that are belonging to other people. But I do not feel like machine.” I am looking at my hands, because I am too scared and too angry to look at Xifeng’s face. “I want him to be lying. But I know he is not lying. I am wanting him to shake me and I am wanting him to tell me I am right too and I am wanting all of these thing because it is easier to be pushing against him than to be sitting inside the doubt that is squeezing the air out of my lungs. If I am being made in factory, then why am I feeling this way? I am not robot! I am not android like Enyemaka! I am not simple machine! I am not machine. I am not machine.” I’m crying.
“You are not a machine.”
I am looking up from my hands when I am hearing Xifeng’s voice. She is not smiling, but there are many thing happening on her face. Happiness, anger, sorrow, joy, regret. All of these thing is happening at once in her face.
“You’re not a machine, but you’re not human.”
“We are something between these thing?”
For a long time, Xifeng is saying nothing, and I am only hearing the wind blowing by our mech as we fly over the forest trees. Then, she says, in Taishanese, “You are my daughter.”
And it is calming the questions in my heart to be hearing this.
CHAPTER
31
Ngozi keeps the maglev jeep close to the ground whenever they move. And there’s no rhyme or reason to their movements. Sometimes, Ngozi will bring Ify and Grace deep into forest, where they’ll share a clearing with a pack of wulfu or a lumbering Agba bear. Sometimes, they will move at night, hugging cliffside roads even as the sun rises to gild them and the red mountain beneath them. Sometimes, they’ll pull off the road in the middle of the day, lose themselves in off-road jungle, then Ngozi will vanish for hours on end, sometimes returning with food, sometimes returning with nothing. Then they will be off again.
It isn’t until they find refuge on the ridge of a large, verdant bowl empty of people, of all sign of habitation, that Ify realizes where Ngozi’s been taking them. The van is parked a ways off. Ngozi has left her rifle in there but has a pistol tucked into her pants. Grace brings up the rear and hangs back while Ify stands at Ngozi’s side. Together, they survey the landscape: the rolling hillside, the mountains to either side of them, their clay sides red like open wounds. And Ify knows were she to dig deep enough into the ground here—anywhere here—she’d find Chukwu glowing blue right at her. The mineral over which a whole war was fought.
“We’re in Biafra, aren’t we?”
Ngozi sniffs and keeps playing with her chewing stick. “You didn’t get to know Onyii the way I did, so I figured I would show you what she lived for.”
“And what she died for,” Ify says to herself, quietly. Then Ify looks back up at the land before her, and she recalls the winding journey they’ve taken, the forests they’ve passed through, the roads they’ve ridden down, the flightlines they’ve taken, the hillsides on which they’ve camped. This was her homeland. “I’ve never seen it like this.”
“There used to be more people,” Ngozi says casually. Ify knows the callousness of the statement is a mask for very real hurt. She’s ridden enough with Ngozi to know that the war veteran still aches for the people she will never see again, for the life that once filled these places but that now leaves them desolate and too quiet. This land, not even the animals will touch.
“Ify,” Grace says, insistent.
Ify realizes that Grace must have been calling her name for some time. She turns, and together the two of them walk out of Ngozi’s earshot.