Skinner (36 page)

Making it, improvised or not, a very good ambush indeed.

IT HURTS LIKE
hell.

The wound hurts in an otherworldly manner. Like something literally brought to her from another dimension. An alien sensation that it is not possible to comprehend until thrust upon you. Here now, occupying her body, colonizing it. Seed of future distress. And still, still she cannot let go of the configuration.

Stupid fucking brain!

She missed it. So lost in the configuration Terrence built, she missed how obviously backward and exposed their line of communication had been. A public message board? Skinner’s great fucking blind spot. His own brother. Heathrow. If Skinner saw Haven, then Haven most certainly saw Skinner using the public terminal to get online. Log on at the same terminal, the search registries are notoriously never erased. classicsteelbikes.com. Scanning over the most recent posts, how long would it take him to recognize his brother’s messages? Skinner trying to communicate with dead Terrence. Shit, imagine how he felt when he saw that the man he’d killed was messaging to Skinner from the grave. All Haven had to do was keep looking back at the board to see if there were any new messages. Supposed frame geometries that were GPS coordinates? How sly. Hack the account? Hack a message-board account and send your own private messages? Fucking who can’t do that? And Skinner. His password is probably something like skinner101. The elite protector. Fuck.

Fuck it hurts.

Haven is the smart brother. Clearly. Hacked the account.
He
contacted Little Shiva after he arrived at the original coordinates and saw the ambush waiting at the dump.
He
came here. He did everything they did, but
he
did it first. Then waited for Skinner to see the ambush and do the same thing. Already here, telling the kid how to respond.

Played by Haven again. Used to pull his real target into the open. And then the asshole goes and shoots
her.

Fuck! It hurts!

And that kid! Little Shiva the destroyer and bringer of light. Fucking kid. Terrence. Kill Terrence. If he was here, just fucking kill Terrence.

Fuck! It! Hurts!

Who knew a bullet could hurt so much.

She can smell the blood. Route Irish again, blood and burning in the air. There’s so much blood that she can smell it. Shit. The shack is so small they probably all smell it. Two of the kids are crying. The one with the cricket bat (cricket bat?) and the one with the lazy eye. The girl next to them is shushing. The tallest boy is putting an arm around the lazy eye kid, hugging him. Jae would like to cry. Shit, tears are all over her face, but it isn’t real crying, just pain and anger. But she’d like to cry. Dying like this, she really wants to cry.

Haven is still pointing his gun at her and she doesn’t know if she has time to cry.

He’s pointing the gun at her on the floor, but looking at Skinner a meter away.

“Do I have your attention, Joel?”

Skinner hasn’t moved. Still frozen, half turned toward Haven, as if the gunshot has disconnected some wire in his head, immobilizing him. He hasn’t turned to look at Jae on the floor, poised on an internal cusp. Still deciding, Jae thinks, whether to try to kill his brother.

Haven, pointing that tiny gun at her.

“It’s a good wound, Joel. Outside thigh, away from the femur, full metal jacket. Close range, small caliber. As long as you don’t move toward me, the only thing she has to worry about is bleeding to death. And you can stop that with a tourniquet. Look at it. I’m not lying. It’s a good wound. Trust me. I don’t want to kill Jae. I think you know that. Do something now. Give yourself a task. It will help you calm down. I know you don’t like being upset like this. I know how uncomfortable and confusing all those emotions must be. Focus. Just look at the wound. She’s not dead. Look at the wound and bind it.”

His voice soft, coaxing, but authoritative. Man to child. To dog.

Skinner looks at her.

When he kneels, unbuckling his belt to wrap it around her upper thigh, she almost writhes away. An animal instinct to distance herself from a touch that will cause pain. His hands are shaking as he cinches the belt tight a few inches above the wound, cutting off the flow of blood. He looks only at the wound.

The baby starts to cry. Haven looks up and the mother opens a gap in her sari, sticks the baby’s face inside and the crying stops as the tiny thing latches on and starts nursing. Still crouching by the stove, she lowers her bottom to the floor, leans against the side of the cot next to it. The boy, Little Shiva, is looking at her. The other kids look at him.

Skinner is done with the tourniquet. His hands no longer shaking.

Haven looks at the back of Skinner’s head.

“Do you have a gun?”

Skinner shakes his head.

Haven nods.

“On the cot.”

Skinner rises, takes a few steps, turns and sits on the cot, careful not to let his legs brush the arm of the nursing mother at his feet. Jae’s blood is on his fingers and he rests his wrists on his knees with his hands palm up. A man come inside with greasy fingers, unsure what he can touch.

Haven looks at Little Shiva and tilts his head in the direction of the guarded shed at the end of the lane.

“What is it?”

The boy looks from Haven to the woman with the baby. His mother, Jae now sees. Resemblance in the eyes and nose, point of delicate chin. A child in his home. Man with a gun. Bleeding woman on the floor. As scared as Jae is, the boy is far more scared.

Jae’s mind does something to her. The part of her that is uncontrollable, the part that
needs
the configurations, it tells her to stop hurting so much, and the pain goes far away, becomes small. In its place, the configuration, pushing up against the interior of her skull, filling it with those arcing international flights, cargo carriers, opium routes, ice flow retraction, free-trade agreements, oil pipelines, urban growth and rural shrinkage, IMF bailout terms, Chinese auto industry orders, Terrence’s file boxes, ash concentrations in the sky, Club-K carrier-killer promo video, contraction meme adoption cues, Naxalite, West-Tebrum peak consumption charts, load-balancing fluctuations, critical dependencies, energy dependencies.

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.

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.