The question stops whatever words Ify had left in her throat.
“Everyone who remembers Onyii is in these caves. You can count them on one hand. And two of those people are standing here right now. Think about that, Ify. The only people who ever knew Onyii existed. After all she did for her people. We are all that’s left of her. You would have us lose that.”
Ngozi enters the room and hurries to Xifeng. She puts a hand to her arm to turn her, and whispers briefly to her. The two exchange a meaningful look. Then Ngozi leaves.
Rage floods through Ify, but she holds it in her shaking fists. “You’re not doing this for Onyii. You’re doing this for you. And I won’t let you.”
Xifeng smirks. “You’re too late.” She crosses her arms. “It has already started.”
“No.” Whatever hard drives Xifeng and her group have already distributed, whatever memories have already been reawakened, it’s reached a critical mass. Enough people know of enough carnage that the reprisal attacks have begun.
“Yes, Ify. It’s begun.” Xifeng looks to two guards standing by one of the walls, and they reach Ify in three long strides.
Before Ify can fight back, they have her in restraints. “Stop this!”
Xifeng spreads her arms, as though to indicate the whole world and its burning. “This is the reckoning. This is how the healing happens.” Then she turns and leaves. The little girl Xifeng had held close to her side earlier has taken her place.
Ify lets out a wordless roar at Xifeng’s back. Words fail her. Sentences fall apart on her tongue. And all she has to contain the emotions roiling inside her, the feelings and thoughts storming through every fiber of her being, is that roar. Long and loud until all breath has left her lungs.
CHAPTER
36
I am smiling at the Chinese man who is calling me Onyii, then I am hearing, Get up! Get up! and it is snatching me out of the remembering, the first remembering I am ever having that is feeling like it is mine and like it is before Enyemaka are finding me under pile of corpses. But I am not having time to be thinking about this because I am hearing rumbling overhead and, in storage closet, Binye is pulling me to my feet and we are both rushing to the entrance, where we are seeing girl and synth run in all directions to assume battle formations.
I am running in direction of where I know Xifeng and Ify are, and my heart is thrilling because I am knowing that I can be protecting Xifeng in way that Ify cannot, and I am not caring that I am feeling this way toward Ify, even though when I am younger and it is just me and Xifeng and Enyemakas, I am loving Ify with all of my heart and wanting her to love me too.
I arrive at the room where Ify is being held. I am standing by the room’s only entrance and only moving so that some of the girls who remain can be bringing in Grace, who they are also binding to chair. That way, I am looking at the two of them. The swelling and bleeding is gone from Grace’s face, but the fear is remaining. And I am seeing how Ify is noticing how her friend is changed, how she shrinks when she is touched, how it is like her entire body is being exposed nerve endings, how she is looking no one—not even Ify—in the eye.
“What’d you do to her?” Ify growls at me.
But I am saying nothing in reply. Now that I am knowing what I am and where I am coming from, I am not needing her. I am already having answer to the questions that is making storm inside me, and I am getting them when I am being with Xifeng.
Being connected with my siblings, I am seeing what is going on outside. I am seeing the synths and the girls guarding Xifeng as they are heading to their destination. And I am seeing some of the others fanning out into the city in battle formation to deal with the police and the army when they are coming. I think some are expecting me to be jealousing them because they are outside with Xifeng and I am here guarding prisoners, but I am knowing that this is important work and if Xifeng is entrusting me with important work, then that is meaning that I am special.
“What is your name?” Ify is asking me, and I am realizing that in the whole time we are seeing each other, this is the first time she is asking my name.
“Uzoamaka.”
Ify is smiling. “That is a beautiful name.”
“You are thinking that if you are flattering me and saying good thing about me, I am letting you go. Is this correct?” It is not like me to be asking rhetorical question, but I am angering a little bit still, and I am thinking it is because of remembering that is mine of hanging from ceiling while boy is beating me and delighting in it.
Ify’s next words come out as a breath: “You speak like him too.”
This time Grace looks at Ify and so do I. “Speak like who?” we both ask at the same time.
“A boy I knew.” Ify bows her head. “He was a synth. His name was Agu. He had been militia before the ceasefire. Xifeng had rescued him. We met on a caravan heading toward a refugee intake station just outside of Enugu.” Her voice chokes on the city name. Then a slow smile spreads across her lips. “He was kind to me. I didn’t think a synth could be kind. But then . . . I’m sure many people said the same thing about Onyii. I’m sure there were people who didn’t think my sister could ever be kind.” She is talking to herself more than to me or Grace. “And I think you have her inside you.” Then she is raising her head to be looking at me and maybe she is seeing what Chinese doctor is seeing when he is looking at me. “That’s why we were drawn together.”
“My name is not Onyii,” I am telling her and trying to make my voice as hard as I can.
“I . . . I know. I just wonder.” She squints at me. “You don’t forget anything, do you?”
The question is surprising to me, and I am realizing I am never asking myself this question. “No,” I say back.
“So many memories. And they are all just as vivid and immediate to you as if they had happened yesterday. Even if they never happened to you.”
I am tensing, because she is speaking differently than before. She is speaking like doctor or scientist and not like prisoner.
“Your finger touches the floor and feels it. And it tells your brain that it is like that time your finger touched another surface, some experience your finger stores, then sends to your brain, and it gets tied up and cross-referenced to other experiences that you could have—holding a shovel or a gun or maybe the trunk of a tree—and that memory of the floor, of concrete, gets embedded there, so the two become linked. And there must be so much disorder. Without that human capacity for apophenia. For ordering these things, imposing a pattern on your memories, telling a story of self. I can’t imagine what that must feel like.”
“Is not your problem,” I am telling Ify in a low voice. I am angering because I am knowing that she is trying to confuse me and this is somehow supposed to be resulting in me letting her go and disobeying Xifeng.