The boy’s mother nods at him. Jae looks at him. And behind him, on one of the laptop screens, she sees an open Facebook page for The Independent City-State of Dharavi.
And she knows, before the words come out of his mouth, what is in the building at the end of the lane. What came here in a cargo container that the people of Dharavi crowded around to push inside and out of sight.
Little Shiva speaks.
“A seventy-five-megawatt Atomenergoproekt VVER-TOI liquid-lead-cooled fast-breeder reactor connected to a Hitachi steam turbine generator power plant.”
The Independent City-State of Dharavi. Its nuclear capacity. Power for its people.
Jae laughs, but has to stop because it hurts her leg so fucking much.
afraid to find out
SKINNER IS IN the box.
He had no choice but to put himself inside. It was almost too late. When he turned and looked at Jae on the floor, her blood. It was almost too late to get in the box and slam the door closed behind himself.
So simple, everyone thinks, to figure Skinner out. A kid raised in a box. Doesn’t know how people feel. Doesn’t even understand that people are real. Zero socialization. Ipso facto, the box made him a killer. He’s a weirdo, but there’s no big mystery.
So simple.
But they never saw his face. When the strangers came into his box, strangers, the first humans he’d ever seen other than his parents. Came in to take him out. And couldn’t see him at all at first. Invisible. Corner. Making them not look at him. Stiller than the air. Looked and looked. Then saw him. He knew it before they did, their eyes starting to focus, saw their pupils sharpen, and he went after their eyes with his nails and his teeth.
It’s really much simpler than anyone knows.
See that boy being dragged from the box. Taken from his home. Stolen from his parents. See that creature twisting and clawing and biting until they wrapped him in a wet sheet and put a needle in him and took him into the daylight for the first time to cringe away from the sun. See that terrified child being ripped from everything he knows and loves, and any mystery you think may hide the secret of his killing nature will be instantly solved.
Killing is hard. Until you find the part of you that wants to do it. That twelve-year-old boy would have dragged the sun from the sky and cracked it open with his hands to get what he wanted. To remain in his parents’ regard always. He never got it.
And the person who took his life away just shot Jae.
So back inside the box, little boy. Get in your corner. Be invisible. No sheet and no needle this time. Haven has a gun. And he’s still pointing it at Jae. And you don’t want to lose everything again. Break like that again.
Family, he thinks, is very complicated.
“Joel.”
Haven is talking to him. From inside the box, he can hear his brother’s voice. He doesn’t answer, staring at Jae’s blood on his fingers.
“They have a reactor, Joel.”
A helicopter circles, passes. The kids are still crying, but quieter. A two-way radio emits a burst of static from time to time. There’s a tapping noise, nervous, light, plastic on plastic.
“Kestrel is my asset.”
Skinner looks up. Nothing has changed. Kids are afraid. Mother is nursing next to him. Little Shiva is tapping the tip of a pen on the edge of his computer’s keyboard next to the two-way. Jae is on the floor, periodically easing the tension on the tourniquet made from his belt. Haven has a gun pointed at her. And Skinner is still in the box, looking at his brother from very far away.
“You’re carrying a gun this time.”
Haven lifts and drops his eyebrows.
“Yeah. Well. Time to get dirty. So. So they have a reactor. Terrence. That guy. I thought it would be Kestrel-specific. Something targeting the company and Cross. This is on an unexpected scale. I thought he was leaving a trail. Bunch of red herrings with a shaggy dog at the end. I thought he got you involved to make sure it would get messy. Draw a great deal of attention. Maybe let some anarchists get their hands on something non-weapons-grade. Scare everyone shitless and put Kestrel’s fingerprints all over the mess.”
“Terrence wasn’t petty.”
Haven thinks about that, nods.
“No. He wasn’t. But he was dangerous. I’d decided, before he even mentioned your name, I’d decided to kill him. But I wanted to know where you were. Loose end. So I followed him. Terrence in the field. Never a good thing. And watching you. Well. I won’t pretend it’s easy, but I manage.”
He smiles.
“You’re in there right now, aren’t you? Jesus, you are. You’re inside your goddamn box right now. You are so. Predictable.”
He stops smiling.
“A nuclear reactor. I have to.”
He stops talking. Shakes his head.
“Did Mom and Dad ever talk to you about free will?”
Skinner remembers humanism. Locke. Hume.
“No. I found it in books.”
Haven’s smile comes back.
“Is that where they keep it, free will? In books? They told me we were born with it. But. They were lying. They didn’t believe what they were telling me. Just part of the experiment. Trying to make me believe I could choose. And it worked. For a long time. But you can’t. Not really. Look at us. Used by a dead man. Terrence put us all here in this room. From Montmartre down the line.”
He bares his teeth, half smile, half grimace.
“I was so mad when I got back from Iraq. Sending Lentz to kill you. I was so mad.”
He looks at Jae.
“Sorry about shooting you, Jae. I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t plan Iraq. Terrence sent me to you. And I didn’t plan for anything to happen with you. But it did. I had to do something to make you safe before I got called back to the States. That’s all. But I didn’t plan it like that. Terrence, he was the planner.”
His teeth are all grimace now, looking at Skinner.
“Free will. Shit. Inside the mind, it’s just a hamster wheel going around and around. Same thoughts, ideas, memories. And now this. A nuclear reactor. And what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to not kill you, Joel? Suddenly decide it doesn’t matter what you do if you live? Who you kill? And her. She has it all in her head. Every little piece that Terrence used to make this happen. She can put it all together and write it up and show everyone how it connects to Kestrel.”
Skinner looks at his bloody fingers.
Haven outside the box watching him.
“Joel.”
Skinner is wondering, listening. Little Shiva has stopped tapping.
“Joel!”
Wondering, looking down, the nursing mother by his side. No more static from the radio.
“Joel, look at me.”
Does Haven see all of me?
“Come out of there and look at me.”
If I make my hand invisible, will he see it moving?
“Do you know why, Joel?”
And this woman with her baby.
“I just sat there.”
Did she mean for me to see?
“Why I never even tried.”
What is it like for that boy called Little Shiva, to be so smart?
“I watched you.”
And his mother so brave?
“In your box.”
To hold her baby so close.
“And I thought about it.”
So close to that gun inside her sari.
“Every time I went down to the basement to watch you, I thought about it. But I never did it.”
Time to come out now.
Skinner looks up and into his brother’s eyes.
“Why you never did what?”
Haven’s eyes look tired, like they’d just as soon shut and never open, but he keeps them open.
“Why I never let you out, brother?”
Skinner smiles, shakes his head.
“No. No, I never did.”
Haven smiles.
“Well, I wanted to let you out.”
“Okay.”
Haven raises his gun.
“But I was afraid to find out what would happen if I did.”
He aims at Jae.
“So there’s your free will.”
He doesn’t pull the trigger.
He points at Skinner’s hand, moving toward the nursing mother.
“Joel. What are you doing?”
Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens.
“Joel. I can see you moving.”
Until everything happens.
Haven blinks, looks at Little Shiva.
“Is that radio sending?”
Skinner, his hand not invisible at all, is reaching for the gun inside the woman’s sari. Shiva’s finger comes off the talk button on the side of the two-way and a blast of static squawks from the speaker as a jungle fighter with a potbelly rips the door from its fabric hinges and throws it into the muddy lane and Haven pulls the trigger of his gun as the bullet the nursing woman has just fired, blowing a hole through her sari, free hand covering the infant’s ears, hits Haven in the chin and knocks his jaw sideways on his face, the full metal jacket round from his pistol popping the screen of an already much-abused Gateway monitor, and Skinner is stepping across the tiny room and over Jae, the drying blood on his fingers smearing over what’s left of Haven’s face as he covers his brother’s eyes with his thumbs and forces them to stop looking at him and the children are screaming and the potbellied man is using the butt of his rifle to try to pry him off as he pounds Haven’s skull against the hard floor until he hears Jae talking to the wild boy inside him, the boy whose brother finally opened the door of the box and found out what would happen.
Joel, she’s saying to the boy, it’s not safe here, she’s saying to him, protect me.
When they leave Raj’s home Skinner is carrying Jae through the rain that has started to fall. All of them walking toward the shed, the helicopters and the Herons in the sky. Little Shiva is holding his mother’s hand, the one that shot the gun. And his friends are all around him and none of them have died.
very special education
THE BOY’S REAL name is Raj, and his father, some kind of insane fucking maniac genius, is wearing a very clean, dark blue engineer’s smock with pens sticking from the pockets, over a white collared shirt and dark tie. His thin hair is combed and his tape-repaired glasses polished, and he stands in front of the reactor containment vessel submerged in the deep pool behind him, a gantry of pipes filling the shed, his voice raised to a near shout to be heard over the high-pitched roar of the turbine.
“With the control rods at half throw we are currently producing over thirty megawatts. We have most gradually increased our production since our transformer was installed some twenty-four hours ago and we connected to the Bombay Municipal Corporation grid in order to balance our load. Engineers for the BMC will notice, I am certain, that current consumption via our transformer shows no more than two megawatts. Yet all of Dharavi is alight. This is with great thanks to many years of effort myself and my team have invested in improving infrastructure in the newly independent City-State of Dharavi in preparation for this great day.”
He pauses, looks down at the notes in his hand, walks a few feet so that a bank of computer monitors helmed by men and women in smocks that match his own are now behind him, and the man shooting him on a compact Canon 5D camera gives a thumbs-up.
Raj’s father clears his throat, glances again at his script.
“Our excellent DeltaV software by Emerson is the most up-to-date and ensures that our system runs evenly and without risk. Our Hitachi generator, while surplus indeed, is in top condition and operating well under spec. At three-quarters throw we will produce its full sixty-six megawatt output. Well beyond the needs of the ICSD. Allowing us to make our excess energy available to the citizens of the BMC. Beyond the industrious and varied people that live here, raw energy is our greatest resource.”
He shifts again, putting the reactor in the background once more, and the potbellied fighter, wearing something that looks like a police uniform, khaki shirt, epaulets, peaked cap, joins him.
“We will build no walls or fences to define our territory. Our desire is to exist as a civic sister to glorious Bombay. Our friends from the eastern forests have joined us as a peacekeeping force. Unrest is not our friend. Dharavi has long thrived on diversity and openness. The ICSD continues those traditions. Émigrés of all races and religions are welcome to visit and apply for citizenship.”
He and the Naxalite revolutionary dressed like a cop shake hands, and the Naxalite smiles at the camera and steps out of frame.
Raj’s father looks at his script, then assumes a somber countenance.
“For those of you who are thinking that we are idealists and fools, I say you are half right in this. Yes, we are idealists, but no, we are not fools.”
He folds his script away.
“We will not allow our rights as citizens of the world, our very humanity, the dreams we have for our children, to be contracted. We will not stand by, impotent, while great powers absolve themselves of great responsibility. We will not wait in blind faith for eyes and ears to be turned our way when we are in greatest distress. Silence and invisibility are the enemies of survival. If we are not known, we can be allowed to die.”
He tips his head toward the reactor.
“So we have made a great noise.”
He steps slightly closer to the camera.
“With our load balanced across the BMC grid, there is no danger of overload on our generator and no risk that our reactor can go critical. If we are disconnected from the grid, our load will unbalance and there will be unfortunate consequences. Likewise, as long as water pours from the water mains we have breached and into our cooling tank, we can safely maintain core temperature.”
He points west.
“In our next video I will take you on a tour of our Number Two Shed and show you the cooling towers. We will also soon publish online the full specifications for our equipment and infrastructure so that the people of the world can be certain that we are operating a first-class power plant. Once we are certain of our political stability, we will invite observers to inspect our facilities and confirm their operational capacity and fitness.”
He stops talking. The cameraman rolls a finger in the air.
Raj’s father takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts the glasses back on.
“This will be hard. We are not fools. This will be very hard. We have taken on a great responsibility. We will not abuse it. Peace is a treasure, and treasure is hard to find, always. We will dig for it. Hidden wherever it is. We have children, you see. So we must find whatever there is.”
He smiles.
“Jewels of the future, yes? Our children. All of our children. It will be hard. But we’ll sort it out. Okay. Bye-bye.”
He smiles. The cameraman turns off the camera. Thumbs-up.
Raj’s father brushes a hand at him.
“Go post it now. Quick, quick. And you kids, Twitter it everywhere. All our Facebook pages. Email to everyone. Hard copies. Everything.”
The cameraman and the kids who had been working in the media center are already trotting out the door into the rain, an escort of three fighters with them.
Raj’s father rubs his face, fingers under the lenses of his glasses.
“We must be quick.”
He walks over to them now, his wife and his baby and his son, raising his arms and wrapping them around his family. Too loud in the shed to hear what they are saying. Jae knows she wouldn’t understand anyway. Now that he is done giving his message to the world, Raj’s father can speak in his own language. He is asking questions. His wife and Raj explaining. There had been no time when they first arrived here. The video was about to be shot. No need more urgent. If they’re going to have a chance here, it will only be possible if their true nuclear capacity is known, understood, and believed.
He’s looking at them now, Skinner and Jae. He steps away from his family.
“You are hurt.”
Jae nods.
He looks at the scratched face of his watch.
“We have a doctor. And a little time.”
He leads them, Skinner, Jae, his family, out of #1 Shed. Yet another of Terrence’s oddities, this one bent on changing the world.
“He found me on the Internet. This is natural today, I think. Where we find everything. Lost toys. Education. Songs we hear. Guns. We found our generator on the Internet. So why not me?”
The doctor is very young. Jae doesn’t ask where he got his schooling or how in-depth it may have been. His office is a cinderblock cube, interior painted white, and it is very clean. His instruments and supplies are stored in small, brightly colored plastic tubs. Jae lies on a table, handmade, wood, sanded and painted white, a clean sheet beneath her. Raj’s father, his name is Aasif, sits on very small chair, something for a child, Skinner stands at the curtained doorway. Raj and his mother and the baby are on the other side of the curtain in the doctor’s home with his wife and children and in-laws. A TV is playing in there, a Hindi station. It was a soap opera when they came in, but now it has been changed to news. They are waiting.
The doctor prods her legs with his finger.
“Okay?”
She can feel the pain deep inside her leg, but not on the skin. She doubts it’s going to get any better so she nods yes.
He also nods, picks up scalpel.