The lobby of the Grand Californian Hotel soared to unimaginable heights, giant beams criss-crossing through the cavernous space. Wei-Dong had always liked this place. It always seemed so rendered, like an imaginary place, with the intricate marble inlays on the floor, the ten-foot-high stained-glass panels set into the sliding doors, the embroidered upholstery on the sofas. Now, though, he just wanted to get through it and onto a bus to—
Where?
Anywhere.
He didn’t know what he was going to do next, but one thing he did know: he wasn’t going to be sent away to some school for screw ups, kicked off the internet, kicked off the games. His father wouldn’t have allowed anyone to do this to him, no matter what problems he was having. The old man would never let himself be pushed around and shaken up like this.
His mother would worry—but she always worried, didn’t she? He’d send her an email once he got somewhere, an email every day, let her know that he was okay. She was good to him. Hell, the old man was good to him, come to that. Mostly. But he was sixteen now, he wasn’t a kid, he wasn’t a broken toy to be shipped back to the manufacturer.
The man behind the concierge desk didn’t bat an eye when Wei-Dong asked for the schedule for the airport shuttles, just handed it over. Wei-Dong sat down in the darkest corner by the stone fireplace, the most inconspicuous place in the whole hotel. He was starting to get paranoid now, he could recognize the feeling, but that didn’t help soothe him as he jumped and stared at every Disney cop who strolled through the lobby, doubtless he was looking as guilty as a mass-murderer.
The next bus was headed for LAX, and the one after, to the Santa Monica airport. Wei-Dong decided that LAX was the right place to go. Not so he could get on a plane—if his dad had called the cops, he was sure they’d have some kind of trace on at the ticket-sales windows. He didn’t know exactly how that worked, but he understood how bottlenecks worked, thanks to gaming. Right now, he could be anywhere in LA, which meant that they’d have to expend a gigantic amount of effort in order to find him. But if he tried to leave by airplane, there’d be a much smaller number of places they’d have to check to catch him—the airline counters at four or five airports in town—and that was a lot more practical.
But LAX also had cheap buses to everywhere in LA, buses that went to every hotel and neighborhood. It would take a long time, sure—an hour and a half from Disneyland to LAX, another hour or two to get back to LA, but that was fine. He needed time—time to figure out what he was going to do next.
Because when he was totally honest with himself, he had to admit that he had no freaking idea.
Mala woke early after a troubled sleep. In the village, she’d often risen early, and listened to the birds. But there was no birdsong when her eyes fluttered open, only the susurration of Dharavi—cars, rats, people, distant factory noises, goats. A rooster. Well, that was a kind of bird. A little smile touched her lips, and she felt slightly better.
Not much, though. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, stretched her arms. Gopal still slept, snoring softly, lying on his stomach the way he had when he was a baby. She needed the toilet, and, as it was light out, she decided that she would go out to the communal one a little ways away rather than use the covered bucket in the room. In the village, they’d had a proper latrine, deep dug, with a pot of clean water outside of it that the women kept filled all the time. Here in Dharavi, the communal toilet was a much more closed-in, reeking place, never very clean. The established families in Dharavi had their own private toilets, so the public ones were only used by newcomers.
It wasn’t so bad this morning. There were ladies who got up even earlier than her to slosh it out with water hauled from the nearby communal tap. By nightfall, the reek would be eye-watering.
She loitered in the street in front of the house. It wasn’t too hot yet, or too crowded, or too noisy. She wished it were. Maybe the noise and the crowds would drown out the worry racing through her mind. Maybe the heat would bake it out.
She’d brought her mobile out with her. It danced with notifiers about new things she could pay to see—shows and cartoons and political messages, sent in the night. She flicked them away impatiently and scrolled through her address-book, stopping at Mr. Banerjee’s name and staring at it. Her finger poised over the send button.
It was too early, she thought. He’d be asleep. But he never was, was he? Mr. Banerjee seemed to be awake at all hours, messaging her with new targets to take her army to. He’d be awake. He’d have been up all night, talking to Mrs. Dotta.
Her finger hovered over the send button.
The phone rang.
She nearly dropped it in surprise, but she managed to settle it in her hand and switch off the ringer, peer at the face. Mr. Banerjee, of course, as though he’d been conjured into her phone by her thoughts and her staring anxiety.
“Hello?” she said.
“Mala,” he said. He sounded grave.
“Mr. Banerjee.” It came out in a squeak.
He didn’t say anything else. She knew this trick. She used it with her army, especially on the boys. Saying nothing made a balloon of silence in your opponent’s head, one that swelled to fill it, until it began to echo with their anxieties and doubts. It worked very well. It worked very well, even if you knew how it worked. It was working well on her.
She bit her lip. Otherwise she would have blurted something, maybe He was going to hurt me or He had it coming or I did nothing wrong.
Or, I am a warrior and I am not ashamed.
There. There was the thought, though it wanted to slip away and hide behind He was going to hurt me, that was the thought she needed, the platoon she needed to bring to the fore. She marshaled the thought, chivvied it, turned it into an orderly skirmish line and marched it forward.
“Mrs. Dotta’s idiot nephew tried to assault me last night, in case you haven’t heard.” She waited a beat. “I didn’t let him do it. I don’t think he’ll try it again.”
There was a snort, very faint, down the phone line. A suppressed laugh? Barely contained anger? “I heard about it, Mala. The boy is in the hospital.”
“Good,” she said, before she could stop herself.
“Several of his ribs were broken. One punctured his lung. But they say he’ll live. Still, it was quite bad.”
She felt sick. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn’t he have left her alone? “I’m glad he’ll live.”
“Mrs. Dotta called me in the night to tell me that her sister’s only son had been attacked. That he’d been attacked by a vicious gang of your friends. Your ‘army.’”
Now she snorted. “He says it because he’s embarrassed to have been so badly beaten by me, just me, just a girl.”
Again, the silence ballooned in the conversation. He’s waiting for me to say I’m sorry, that I’ll make it up somehow, that he can take it from my wages. She swallowed. I won’t do it. The idiot made me attack him, and he deserved what he got.
“Mrs. Dotta,” he began, then stopped. “There are expenses that come from something like this, Mala. Everything has a cost. You know that. It costs you to play at Mrs. Dotta’s cafe. It costs me to have you do it. Well, this has a cost, too. Mrs. Dotta is very upset. Very upset. Smoothing things over with her…It will have a cost.” He heaved a dramatic sigh.
Now it was her turn to be quiet, and to think at him, as hard as she can, Oh yes, well, I think I already exacted payment from her idiot nephew. I think he’s paid the cost.
“Are you listening to me?”
She made a grunt of assent, not trusting herself to open her mouth.
“Good. Listen carefully. The next month, you work for me. Every rupee is mine, and I make this bad thing that you’ve brought down on yourself go away.”
She pulled the phone away from her head as if it had gone red-hot and burned her. She stared at the faceplate. From very far away, Mr. Banerjee said, “Mala? Mala?” She put the phone back to her head.
She was breathing hard
now. “It’s impossible,” she said, trying to stay calm. “The army won’t fight without pay. My mother can’t live without my pay. We’ll lose our home. No,” she repeated, “it’s not possible.”
“Not possible? Mala, it had better be possible. Whether or not you work for me, I will have to make this right with Mrs. Dotta. It’s my duty, as your employer, to do this. And that will cost money. You have incurred a debt that I must settle for you, and that means that you have to be prepared to settle with me.”
“Then don’t settle it,” she said. “Don’t give her one rupee. There are other places we can play. Her nephew brought it on himself. We can play somewhere else.”
“Mala, did anyone see this boy lay his hands on you?”
“No,” she said. “He waited until we were alone.”
“And why were you alone with him? Where was your army?”
“They’d already gone home. I’d stayed late.” She thought of Big Sister Nor and her megamecha, of the union. Mr. Banerjee would be even angrier if she told him about Big Sister Nor. “I was studying tactics,” she said. “Practicing on my own.”
“You stayed alone with this boy, in the middle of the night. What happened, really, Mala? Did you want to see what it was like to kiss him like a fillum star, and then it got out of control? Is that how it happened?”
“No!” She shouted it so loud that she heard people groaning in their beds, calling sleepily out from behind their open windows. “I stayed late to practice, he tried to stop me. I knocked him down and he chased me. I knocked him down and then I taught him why he shouldn’t have chased me.”
“Mala,” he said, and she thought he was trying to sound fatherly now, stern and old and masculine. “You should have known better than to put yourself in that position. A general knows that you win some fights by not getting into them at all. Now, I’m not an unreasonable man. Of course, you and your mother and your army all need my money if you’re going to keep fighting. You can borrow a wage-packet from me this month, something to pay everyone with, and then you can pay it back, little by little, over the next year or so. I’ll take five in twenty rupees for twelve months, and we’ll call it even.”
It was hope, terrible, awful hope. A chance to keep her army, her flat, her respect. All it would cost her was one quarter of her earnings. She’d have three quarters left. Three quarters was better than nothing. It was better than telling Mamaji that it was all over.
“Yes,” she said. “All right, fine. But we don’t play at Mrs. Dotta’s cafe anymore.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I won’t hear of it. Mrs. Dotta will be glad to have you back. You’ll have to apologize to her, of course. You can bring her the money for her nephew. That will make her feel better, I’m sure, and heal any wounds in your friendship.”
“Why?” There were tears on her cheeks now. “Why not let us go somewhere else? Why does it matter?”
“Because, Mala, I am the boss and you are the worker and that is the factory you work in. That’s why.” His voice was hard now, all the lilt of false concern gone away, leaving behind a grinding like rock on rock.
She wanted to hang up on him, the way they did in the movies when they had their giant screaming rows, and threw their phones into the well or smashed them on the wall. But she couldn’t afford to destroy her phone and she couldn’t afford to make Mr. Banerjee angry.
So she said, “All right,” in a quiet little voice that sounded like a mouse trying not to be noticed.
“Good girl, Mala. Smart girl. Now, I’ve got your next mission for you. Are you ready?”
Numbly, she memorized the details of the mission, who she was going to kill and where. She thought that if she did this job quickly, she could ask him for another one, and then another—work longer hours, pay off the debt more quickly.
“Smart girl, good girl,” he said again, once she’d repeated the details back to him, and then he hung up.
She pocketed her phone. Around her, Dharavi had woken, passing by her like she was a rock in a river, pressing past her on either side. Men with shovels and wheelbarrows, boys with enormous rice sacks on each shoulder, filled with grimy plastic bottles on their way to some sorting house, a man with a long beard and kufi skullcap and kurta shirt hanging down to his knees, leading a goat with a piece of rope. A trio of women in saris, their midriffs stretched and striated with the marks of the babies they’d borne, carrying heavy buckets of water from the communal tap. There were cooking smells in the air, a sizzle of dhal on the grill and the fragrant smell of chai. A boy passed by her, younger than Gopal, wearing flapping sandals and short pants, and he spat a stream of sickly sweet betel at her feet.
The smell made her remember where she was and what had happened and what she had to do now.
She went past the Das family on the ground floor and trudged up the stairs to their flat. Mamaji and Gopal were awake and bustling. Mamaji had fetched the water and was making the breakfast over the propane burner, and Gopal had his school uniform shirt and knee-trousers on. The Dharavi school he attended lasted for half the day, which gave him a little time to play and do homework and then a few more hours to work alongside of Mamaji in the factory.
“Where have you been?” Mamaji said.
“On the phone,” she said, patting the little pocket sewn on her tunic. “With Mr. Banerjee.” She waggled her chin from side to side, saying I’ve had business.
“What did he say?” Mamaji’s voice was quiet and full of false nonchalance.
Mamaji didn’t need to know what transpired between Mr. Banerjee and her. Mala was the general and she could manage her own affairs.
“He said that all was forgiven. The boy deserved it. He’ll make it fine with Mrs. Dotta, and it will be fine.” She waggled her chin from side to side again—It’s all fine. I’ve taken care of it.
Mamaji stared into the pan and the food sizzling in it and nodded to herself. Though she couldn’t see, Mala nodded back. She was General Robotwallah and she could make it all good.
Wei-Dong had driven through downtown LA a few times, and once gone there, on a class trip to the Disney Concert Hall, but then they’d driven in, parked, and marched like ducklings into the hall and then out again, without spending any time actually wandering around. He remembered watching the streets go by from the bus window, faded store windows and slow-moving people, check-cashing places and liquor stores. And internet cafes. Lots and lots of internet cafes, especially in Koreatown, where every strip mall had a garish sign advertising “PC Baang”—Korean for net cafe.
But he didn’t know exactly where Koreatown was, and without a working phone he’d need an internet cafe to google it, so he caught the LAX bus to the Disney Concert Hall, thinking he could retrace the bus route and find his way to those shops, get online, talk to his homies in Shenzhen, figure out the next thing.
But Koreatown turned out to be harder to find and farther than he’d thought. The bus-driver he asked for directions looked at him like he was crazy, and pointed downhill. And so he started walking, and walking, and walking, for block after dusty block.
From the window of the school bus, downtown LA had looked slow-moving and faded, like a photo left too long in a window. On foot, it was frenetic—the movement of the buses, the homeless people walking or wheeling or hobbling past him, asking him for money. He had a thousand dollars in his front jeans pocket, and it seemed to him that the bulge must be as obvious as a boner at the blackboard in class. He was sweating, and not just from the heat, which seemed ten degrees hotter than it had been in Disneyland.
And now he wasn’t anywhere near Koreatown, but had rather found his way to Santee Alley, the huge, open-air pirate market in the middle of LA. He’d heard about the place before. You saw it all the time in news-specials about counterfeit-goods busts, pictures of Mexican guys being led away while grimly satisfied cops in suits or uniform baled up mountains of fake shirts, fake DVDs, fake jean, fake games.
Santee Alley was a welcome relief from the str
eets around it. He wandered deep into the market, the storefronts all blaring their technobrega and reggaton at him, the hawkers calling out their wares. It was like the real market all the hundreds of in-game markets he’d visited had been based on, and he found himself slowing down and looking in at the gangster clothes and bad souvenir junk and fake electronics. He bought a big cup of watermelon drink and a couple of empanadas from a stall, carefully drawing a single twenty from his pocket without bringing out the whole thing.
Then he’d found an internet cafe, filled with Guatemalans chatting with their families back home, wearing slick and tiny earwigs. The girl behind the counter—barely older than him—sold him one that claimed to be a Samsung for $18, and then rented him a PC to use it with. The fake earwig fit as well as his real one had, though it had a rough seam of plastic running around its length while his had been as smooth as beach glass.
But it didn’t matter. He had his network connection, he had his earwig, and he had his game. What more could he need?
Well, his posse, for starters. They were nowhere to be found. He checked his watch and pressed the button that flipped it to the Chinese time zone. Five in the morning. Well, that explained it.
He checked his inventory, checked the guild bank. He hadn’t been able to do the corpse run after he’d been snatched out of the game by his father and the Ronald Reagan Secondary School Thought Police, so he didn’t expect to still have his vorpal blade, but he did, which meant that one of the gang had rescued it for him, which was awfully thoughtful. But that was just what guildies did for each other, after all.
It was coming up to dinner time on the east coast, which meant that Savage Wonderland was starting to fill up with people getting home from work. He thought about the black riders who slaughtered them that morning, and wondered who they’d been. There were plenty of people who hunted gold farmers, either because they worked for the game or for a rival gold-farm clan, or because they were bored rich players who hated the idea of poor people invading “their” space and working where they played.