The Offline Girls: Read the Opening
They promised no girl would ever disappear again.
My new short story, The Offline Girls, is now available to read free on Sona Books.
Set in Nigeria in 2059, the story follows a country where girls are fitted with government-issued safety implants designed to track their location and send an alert when they are in danger.
For seventeen years, parents have been told the system will keep their daughters safe.
Then Kulu goes to the market.
Here’s how the story begins.
The Offline Girls
Kulu should have been back home by now.
Her mother thinks, absently at first—the way parents do right before the thin, stringy fingers of fear start to show themselves and worry begins to creep in.
Kulu had left home cheerful and half-distracted, the way she always is when she’s running errands. She promised she’d be fast.
“Maybe she stopped to help somebody,” her mother says, rinsing her hands and pretending not to notice her voice has tightened.
It’s a small errand to the market to buy fresh plantains for dinner. Normally, it’s a thirty-minute walk there and back. But the market vendors tend to be chatty, especially with Kulu, who indulges them.
Her mother doesn’t worry the first time she calls Kulu’s phone.
It rings.
Kulu doesn’t answer.
She clicks her tongue and tries again.
Still nothing.
Thirty minutes pass.
Then another fifteen.
Still nothing.
She steps outside and looks up the street. A delivery drone zips past above her. In the distance, a group of children in rough uniforms walk together along the main road, laughing.
Nothing feels strange. Nothing looks out of place.
She doesn’t panic—children wander, children delay, children get held up. It’s a normal part of life.
She tells herself not to fuss. The network in this area lags all the time and even calls that ring out don’t always push through. And Kulu isn’t the type to wander or cause worry without reason.
But the longer the silence stretches, the heavier it sits.
There’s no alert notification from her implant—nothing to suggest she’s scared or in danger. When her body hits a certain panic threshold, the implant pushes out stress signals automatically.
There is no signal.
No distress.
Nothing.
Just the uncomfortable fact that she hasn’t returned.
Her mother stands by the doorway a little longer than she should, waiting for the sound of familiar footsteps, a quick apology, the breathless, “Mummy, sorry, somebody delayed me.”
But the door stays closed.
The evening continues.
And Kulu does not return.
Kulu’s disappearance is only the beginning.
When final-year data analyst Rakiya starts looking into what happened, she finds other girls whose implants went silent in the same way—and a pattern buried inside the system that was supposed to protect them.
Read the full story, The Offline Girls, free on Sona Books.
The Offline Girls is a near-future Nigerian speculative thriller by Lara T. Kareem.
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