Enitan

"Red alert! Red alert! Mid safe zone, Kwara district, is under attack from an injured C-rank Shadow Wraith. All mana weavers, please make your way to the district’s command center. All humans, please make your way to safety in the district's Bunker Street, following the red-painted signs along the street. Human women and children are to be secured in the lowest bunker floors first, while human men are to stay in the first few bunker floors. I repeat, red alert…"

The loud siren and the voice of the woman reading out instructions woke me up from my slight doze. However, I and the other occupants of my bus didn’t move until the instructions coming through the speakers embedded on every street our bus drove past stopped.

The driver immediately shouted in a loud voice so that we could all hear him before the alarm and instructions started playing again. “Sit tight everybody! We’re going to Bunker Street at full speed.”

Without waiting for us to respond, he took off, racing at speeds that would have definitely earned him a punishment on a normal day.

Everyone on my bus was quiet. I looked around and saw that most of us were women other than a few men who, by the way they were trembling, had to be human men. Since all the women I could see from where I was sitting were wearing veils over their heads, we were all human women, too.

Seeing this made me clasp my hands together in prayer. I didn’t believe in any gods, but I still prayed. I prayed that hiding in the bunkers would be trouble-free, none of us would come to any harm, and the authorities in the Kwara district would get rid of the shadow wraith quickly.

When we arrived at Kwara District’s Bunker Street—a street filled with underground bunkers which all districts in Nigeria had—there were already several men dressed in black uniforms with one or two stripes on the shoulder of their uniforms waiting to lead the arriving humans into the bunkers.

The men in black uniforms were E and F-rank district soldiers as well as members of Kwara district’s security agency, and they would be coordinating us to hide out in the bunkers. After all, C and D-rank soldiers were fewer and would surely be too busy searching for and fighting the C-rank wraith to babysit us, regular humans.

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The only C-rank soldier I identified in the bunker area swarming with E and F-rank district soldiers was the man with three stripes on the shoulder of his uniform, issuing instructions to us via a portable speaker. “Okay, everyone, as you get down from your buses, line up in two lines. One for women and children and one for men. Don’t push, don’t fight, and don’t panic. Just follow the soldiers’ instructions and we promise to keep you safe.”

As if he could see how much several of the women were trembling as they got out of the bus, the elderly man’s voice became less stern. “Don’t worry. Kwara District’s C-rank soldiers are hunting down the Shadow Wraith and I can guarantee that you will all return to your homes safe and sound after this incident.”

Well, I hope so. The cynical part of me that never kept quiet whispered as I joined the line with women that was way longer than the line with men.

Within minutes, they led us down to the last floor of a bunker at the edge of Kwara District’s Bunker Street, where we, as foreigners, probably had to stay because the real citizens of Kwara District had occupied all the inner bunkers.

We filed into the bunker, taking the worn-out stairs down to a room on the lowest floor through a creepy-looking rusted metal door. Once we walked in, we huddled together, bowing our heads and fixing our gazes on the floor as the three F-rank soldiers that had followed us down to the bunker ignored us and started playing card games.

Even though we didn’t collectively heave a loud sigh of relief, we all felt relieved when the F-rank soldiers ignored us and got engrossed in their game.

We had all heard of and even knew women whom bad things had happened to during bunker rescue missions like this and part of the reason several of us were trembling was the fear of what the soldiers would do to us once they were locked down in a bunker with us.

We were mere human women, and they were mana weavers, albeit the lowest rank of the weavers in our world, with a ranking from F, E, D, C, B, A to S-rank. Even if they were the lowest-ranking weavers, they had all the rights to do whatever they wanted to us.

After our world fell to chaos under the attack of Shadow Wraiths, humans who didn’t awaken mana weaving abilities were delegated to second-class status and human women had endured the worst of it.

Not only were we sold out like cattle to men of status in an auction ceremony that was masked as a girl’s coming of age debut ceremony by the Human Protection Association, soldiers, ‘worn down by the weight of their responsibilities’ also sometimes picked the women they ‘liked’ on the streets or in bunkers during rescue missions to ‘relax’. Of course, once a woman had been used for ‘relaxation’ by soldiers, they became abandoned women that no man wanted to make his wife or one of his wives because they’d been ‘soiled’.

Once we were sure the soldiers weren’t going to need any ‘relaxation’, we all sat on the dirty cemented floors, still huddled together like chickens on a cold evening.