Zaria, Northern Nigeria — May 1966

The smell of smoke reached our dorm before the screams did.

At first, I thought someone was burning jollof in the kitchen again. But then came the crack—sharp, brutal, like something splitting in half. Then running feet. Shouting. A window shattered downstairs.

I sat frozen, my biology textbook slipping off my lap. My throat went dry.

Then the door burst open.

Adaugo.

Her wrapper was twisted around her waist, her feet bare, and her eyes—God, I’ll never forget those eyes. Wide like they’d seen something too big to be believed.

> “They’re coming,” she whispered. “They’re killing people… Igbo people.”

“What?”

> “They have knives. Guns. I saw them—some girls in the dorm next to ours… they—”
She choked. Her lips quivered. “We have to run.”

I didn’t argue. I grabbed her hand, and we ran.

But we didn’t make it far.

Halfway down the stairwell, they were already there—men, not soldiers, but familiar faces. People from the town. People who sold us fruit or greeted us after mass. Now they held machetes and axes. Shirts streaked with blood.

One of them grinned when he saw us.

> “Sisters,” he said in Hausa, stepping forward. “Where do you think you’re going?”

We turned. But they closed in from above, too. Adaugo clutched my arm. I felt her trembling, the panic rising through her skin into mine.

> “Please,” I said. “Please, we didn’t do anything—”

The grin twisted.

> “Your people have done enough.”

I pulled Adaugo back. Too late.

Hands grabbed her. She screamed. I kicked at them, bit one of their arms until I tasted blood, but it didn’t matter.

I saw the machete lift.

> “NO—!”

It came down.

The sound… it wasn’t like in the movies. It was wet. Real.

Adaugo jerked violently, then collapsed. Blood sprayed across the wall.

I screamed and dove over her, shielding her with my body. Another blow landed—this time on my leg. I felt it tear through skin and something deeper.

Pain like I’d never known.

Then silence.

---

When I woke, it was night.

The air smelled of burning flesh and soaked cloth. The dorm was a tomb — girls slumped over beds, pooled on the floor, some missing limbs, others with blank eyes staring at nothing. My leg was on fire. I couldn’t move it.

Beneath me, Adaugo’s body was cold.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t scream.

I think a part of me died right there with her.

A sound—footsteps. I didn’t even try to hide.

But it wasn’t them.

It was her. Mama Safina. The orange seller from the bus stop.

> “Oh my God… oh my child…”

She knelt, touched my face with shaking fingers. She covered her mouth, like she wanted to scream but couldn’t.

> “Don’t speak,” she whispered. “Don’t let them hear you. I’ll get you out.”

She wrapped me in a frayed sheet. My blood seeped through it, but she didn’t flinch. She tucked me inside a grain sack and dragged me through the back alley.

> “He's just a boy I’m delivering to a farm,” she muttered to every soldier. “A sick one.”

For two days, she passed me from hand to hand — market women, quiet strangers, an old driver who kept chewing kola as he prayed over my sack. Once, I heard gunfire right next to the cart I was hidden in.

I didn’t breathe.

---

By the time I reached Kaduna, I was unconscious.

By the time I reached Aba, I was barely alive.

A nurse at a Catholic clinic found the disguise odd. She unwrapped the cloth, found the blood, the wound, the infection.

She saved my life. But not the leg.

---

I woke up with a fever, a limp, and a jagged scar from thigh to shin. I looked down and didn’t recognize my own body.

I couldn’t stop shaking.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Adaugo—screaming, dying, her blood soaking into my skirt.

---

A week later, I reached home.

Mama collapsed when she saw me. Fell to her knees in the dust and raised her hands to heaven.

> “Chineke dalu o!” she wept. “Thank You for bringing my child home!”

But Papa…

He didn’t smile.

He rose slowly from his chair, the pipe still between his lips.

He didn’t run to me. Didn’t ask if I was hungry or in pain.

He stood in front of me, eyes sharp, and asked:

> “Where is your sister?”

My throat closed.

> “Where is your sister?” he said again, louder.

When I didn’t answer, his hand moved.

He slapped me so hard, I saw stars.

> “You left her! You let her die!”

I staggered back, nearly falling. The pain in my leg roared. I bit my lip to stop myself from crying.

He didn’t ask how I survived.

Didn’t bury her.

Didn’t mourn.

Adaugo was more than a daughter to him—she was a bridge to power. She’d been engaged to Ojukwu’s nephew. It was all arranged. She was going to marry into prestige, into politics, into Biafra.

But now she was gone.

And all he saw when he looked at me was failure.

---

But I saw something else.

I saw rage.

I saw the way they came for us, how easily they turned into murderers. I saw how my sister’s death didn’t even make the news. I saw my father’s indifference.

When Biafra declared independence in July, the air around me changed.

They wanted war?

They’d get one.

---

I found others like me — girls who had lost sisters, boys who’d watched their mothers hacked to pieces, students who had limped their way across state lines.

We were tired of hiding.

We trained in secret. We learned to shoot, to set traps, to vanish. We gave ourselves a name:

Umu-anya Nta. The Small Eyes.

Because we watched everything.

We were the shadows in the bush. The whisper in the dark.

And when the Hausa soldiers crept near our village,

We struck first.